London, England, United Kingdom (AHN) –
A study of maternal mortality in 181 countries showed that the number women in Britain who died during pregnancy or childbirth remained the same the past two decades. In contrast, pregnant women in some poorer and wealthier nations that U.K. had improved rates of survival for the same time frame, while pregnant or giving birth.
The study compared death rates for women during their pregnancy or childbirth from 1980 to 2008. Globally, deaths related to pregnancy and childbirth went down to 343,000 annually in 2008, from 500,000 in 1980. The rate of decline was 1.4 percent yearly.
The maternal death rate for British women remained at 8.2 per 100,000 live birth, placing U.K. on the 23rd spot only. Poorer European nations such as Hungary, Poland and Albania had better rates of 7.1, 7.4 and 8.1 per 100,000 live births. On top of the list is Italy with just 3.9 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live birth.
Among the reasons why maternal death rates among British women did not change were a growing number of late pregnancies and obesity – which increase pregnancy complications.
The U.S. was even lower than the U.K. at 39th place, with a maternal death rate of 16.7 for every 100,000 live birth.
Dr. Christopher Murray, one of the authors of the study, said he was encouraged and surprised by the result of the study. Murray said that while the maternal death rate is still quite high, the numbers indicate improvement better than expectations.
The study was published in the Lancet Journal of Medicine.
Wednesday, 14 April 2010
Tuesday, 13 April 2010
Fox and Drudge Sucker Tea Partiers with a Big Lie About Taxes « SpeakEasy
Fox and Drudge Sucker Tea Partiers with a Big Lie About Taxes « SpeakEasy
Fox and Drudge Sucker Tea Partiers with a Big Lie About Taxes
Posted By Joshua Holland On April 13, 2010 @ 10:00 am In Uncategorized | 9 Comments
Here’s how Fox Nation and the Drudge Report were fanning the flames of their readers’ simmering tribalism last week, courtesy of Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog:
Here are Drudge and Fox Nation right now:
Those banner headlines led to an AP story that might make wingnut blood boil, but was in reality about a rather irrelevant bit of Tax Day trivia:
Tax Day is a dreaded deadline for millions, but for nearly half of U.S. households it’s simply somebody else’s problem.
About 47 percent will pay no federal income taxes at all for 2009. Either their incomes were too low, or they qualified for enough credits, deductions and exemptions to eliminate their liability….
Many people continue to labor under the false belief that the United States has a progressive tax system.
Here’s the reality: after decades of assault on the taxes that fall disproportionately on the wealthy, we now have an effective flat tax.
Poor people in this country pay around 40 percent of their incomes in taxes, give or take 5 percent.
Rich people in this country also pay around 40 percent of their incomes in taxes, give or take 5 percent.
And folks in between pay around 40 percent of their incomes in taxes, give or take 5 percent.
The idea that most working people don’t pay taxes — an incredibly popular talking-point on the right — is the product of a rather easy-to-understand Big Lie.
You simply pretend that the most progressive tax in the United States, the federal income tax, is the only tax that Americans pay. You move the goal-posts, beginning the discussion with a statement of fact — ‘many people pay no federal income taxes’ — and then shifting to an egregious falsehood: ‘many people pay no taxes.’ It’s a simple but incredibly effective lie of omission.
Here are the facts (as I lay ‘em out in my upcoming book, The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy (And Everything Else the Right Doesn’t Want You to Know about Taxes, Jobs, and Corporate America)).
According to a Congressional Budget Office analysis conducted in 2007, it’s true that the wealthiest one percent paid more in Federal income taxes than the bottom 90 percent kicked in.
But what else did the CBO find? Drudge won’t tell you, but the CBO also said that the top one percent paid 5 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes, while the bottom 50 percent — many of whom pay nothing in federal taxes — paid 10 percent of their take, twice as much proportionately.
It also found that those in the bottom 80 percent of the earnings ladder paid around 9 percent of their incomes in Social Security taxes; the top one percent paid just 1.6 percent of theirs. After the income tax, payroll taxes represent the largest share of the federal take — those dollars represent a much bigger piece of the pie than corporate income taxes or taxes on capital gains.
A 2009 study by the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy looked at state and local taxes in greater detail. It concluded, “nearly every state and local tax system takes a much greater share of income from middle- and low-income families than from the wealthy. That is, when all state and local income, sales, excise and property taxes are added up, most state tax systems are regressive [emphasis theirs].”
The researchers found that those in the top 1 percent of the heap paid around 5 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes; the next 4 percent paid about 7 percent of theirs; the middle 5th paid just over 9 percent and those at the bottom of the ladder, the poorest 20 percent of the population, forked over almost 11 percent of their incomes on average to state and local governments.
They also looked at excise taxes — taxes on gas, cigarettes, alcohol and other goodies. They found that the “average state’s consumption tax structure is equivalent to an income tax with a 7.1 percent rate for the poor, a 4.7 percent rate for the middle class, and a 0.9 percent rate for the wealthiest taxpayers.”
So, as I said up top, we really have a flat tax. That’s the conclusion of a 2007 study by Boston University economists Laurence J. Kotlikoff and David Rapson, who found that when you add it all up — state and local taxes, federal taxes and excise fees – “The average marginal tax rate on incomes between $20,000 and $500,000 is 40.3%, the median tax rate is 41.8%, and the standard deviation of all of those rates is 5.3 percentage points. Basically, most of us pay about 40%, plus or minus 5.3 percentage points.”
The thing is, this isn’t just a Big Lie, but a beautiful example of right-populism. This is how you shift the focus of people who are rightly angry about their loss of economic security from those above them on the social hierarchy — the elites who in fact can influence their own outcomes — to those who are poorer (and/or darker) than them.
Is it effective? Steve M. sampled some of the responses from Fox Nation commenters:
I believe the half that don’t pay taxes are the ones working for this administration, the average American would go to jail if they don’t pay their taxes!
****
What percentage are elected officials and federal workers?
****
47% of households will pay no income taxes.
I want to know what percentage of households actually get a check from the govt. ie bought votes
****
If they dont pay then why should we?
BOYCOTT ALL UNION GROCERY STORES!
Obama and the Democrats (commies) have committed treason
www.impeachobamacampaign.com
ITS TIME TO IMPEACH THE IDIOT OBAMA
It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. As vile as they may appear at times, at the end of the day the tea-party types are just suckers. Easy marks.
Fox and Drudge Sucker Tea Partiers with a Big Lie About Taxes
Posted By Joshua Holland On April 13, 2010 @ 10:00 am In Uncategorized | 9 Comments
Here’s how Fox Nation and the Drudge Report were fanning the flames of their readers’ simmering tribalism last week, courtesy of Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog:
Here are Drudge and Fox Nation right now:
Those banner headlines led to an AP story that might make wingnut blood boil, but was in reality about a rather irrelevant bit of Tax Day trivia:
Tax Day is a dreaded deadline for millions, but for nearly half of U.S. households it’s simply somebody else’s problem.
About 47 percent will pay no federal income taxes at all for 2009. Either their incomes were too low, or they qualified for enough credits, deductions and exemptions to eliminate their liability….
Many people continue to labor under the false belief that the United States has a progressive tax system.
Here’s the reality: after decades of assault on the taxes that fall disproportionately on the wealthy, we now have an effective flat tax.
Poor people in this country pay around 40 percent of their incomes in taxes, give or take 5 percent.
Rich people in this country also pay around 40 percent of their incomes in taxes, give or take 5 percent.
And folks in between pay around 40 percent of their incomes in taxes, give or take 5 percent.
The idea that most working people don’t pay taxes — an incredibly popular talking-point on the right — is the product of a rather easy-to-understand Big Lie.
You simply pretend that the most progressive tax in the United States, the federal income tax, is the only tax that Americans pay. You move the goal-posts, beginning the discussion with a statement of fact — ‘many people pay no federal income taxes’ — and then shifting to an egregious falsehood: ‘many people pay no taxes.’ It’s a simple but incredibly effective lie of omission.
Here are the facts (as I lay ‘em out in my upcoming book, The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy (And Everything Else the Right Doesn’t Want You to Know about Taxes, Jobs, and Corporate America)).
According to a Congressional Budget Office analysis conducted in 2007, it’s true that the wealthiest one percent paid more in Federal income taxes than the bottom 90 percent kicked in.
But what else did the CBO find? Drudge won’t tell you, but the CBO also said that the top one percent paid 5 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes, while the bottom 50 percent — many of whom pay nothing in federal taxes — paid 10 percent of their take, twice as much proportionately.
It also found that those in the bottom 80 percent of the earnings ladder paid around 9 percent of their incomes in Social Security taxes; the top one percent paid just 1.6 percent of theirs. After the income tax, payroll taxes represent the largest share of the federal take — those dollars represent a much bigger piece of the pie than corporate income taxes or taxes on capital gains.
A 2009 study by the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy looked at state and local taxes in greater detail. It concluded, “nearly every state and local tax system takes a much greater share of income from middle- and low-income families than from the wealthy. That is, when all state and local income, sales, excise and property taxes are added up, most state tax systems are regressive [emphasis theirs].”
The researchers found that those in the top 1 percent of the heap paid around 5 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes; the next 4 percent paid about 7 percent of theirs; the middle 5th paid just over 9 percent and those at the bottom of the ladder, the poorest 20 percent of the population, forked over almost 11 percent of their incomes on average to state and local governments.
They also looked at excise taxes — taxes on gas, cigarettes, alcohol and other goodies. They found that the “average state’s consumption tax structure is equivalent to an income tax with a 7.1 percent rate for the poor, a 4.7 percent rate for the middle class, and a 0.9 percent rate for the wealthiest taxpayers.”
So, as I said up top, we really have a flat tax. That’s the conclusion of a 2007 study by Boston University economists Laurence J. Kotlikoff and David Rapson, who found that when you add it all up — state and local taxes, federal taxes and excise fees – “The average marginal tax rate on incomes between $20,000 and $500,000 is 40.3%, the median tax rate is 41.8%, and the standard deviation of all of those rates is 5.3 percentage points. Basically, most of us pay about 40%, plus or minus 5.3 percentage points.”
The thing is, this isn’t just a Big Lie, but a beautiful example of right-populism. This is how you shift the focus of people who are rightly angry about their loss of economic security from those above them on the social hierarchy — the elites who in fact can influence their own outcomes — to those who are poorer (and/or darker) than them.
Is it effective? Steve M. sampled some of the responses from Fox Nation commenters:
I believe the half that don’t pay taxes are the ones working for this administration, the average American would go to jail if they don’t pay their taxes!
****
What percentage are elected officials and federal workers?
****
47% of households will pay no income taxes.
I want to know what percentage of households actually get a check from the govt. ie bought votes
****
If they dont pay then why should we?
BOYCOTT ALL UNION GROCERY STORES!
Obama and the Democrats (commies) have committed treason
www.impeachobamacampaign.com
ITS TIME TO IMPEACH THE IDIOT OBAMA
It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. As vile as they may appear at times, at the end of the day the tea-party types are just suckers. Easy marks.
Small-City Mayor Takes on the Pentagon -- War Spending Should Be Spent on Americans, Not on Killing Afghans | | AlterNet
Small-City Mayor Takes on the Pentagon -- War Spending Should Be Spent on Americans, Not on Killing Afghans | | AlterNet
Small-City Mayor Takes on the Pentagon -- War Spending Should Be Spent on Americans, Not on Killing Afghans
By Jo Comerford, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on April 12, 2010, Printed on April 13, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/146408/
To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates fromTomDispatch.com here.]
Matt Ryan, the mayor of Binghamton, New York, is sick and tired of watching people in local communities “squabble over crumbs,” as he puts it, while so much local money pours into the Pentagon’s coffers and into America’s wars. He’s so sick and tired of it, in fact, that, urged on by local residents, he’s decided to do something about it. He’s planning to be the first mayor in the United States to decorate the façade of City Hall with a large, digital “cost of war” counter, funded entirely by private contributions.
That counter will offer a constantly changing estimate of the total price Binghamton’s taxpayers have been paying for our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since October 2001. By September 30, 2010, the city’s “war tax” will reach $138.6 million -- or even more if, as expected, Congress passes an Obama administration request for supplemental funds to cover the president’s “surge” in Afghanistan. Mayor Ryan wants, he says, to put the counter “where everyone can see it, so that my constituents are urged to have a much-needed conversation.”
In doing so, he’s joining a growing chorus of mayors, including Chicago's Richard Daley and Boston's Thomas Menino, who are ever more insistently drawing attention to what Ryan calls the country’s “skewed national priorities,” especially the local impact of military and war spending. With more than three years left in his current term, Ryan has decided to pull out all the stops to reach his neighbors and constituents, all 47,000 of them, especially the near quarter of the city’s inhabitants who currently live below the poverty line and the 9% who are officially unemployed.
A Hard Hit Rust-Belt City
Like so many post-industrial rust-belt communities, Binghamton was hard hit by the financial meltdown of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed, though it faired better than a number of similar cities, in part because Ryan, his administration, and the Binghamton City Council are a smart and scrappy crew. No doubt that’s why he earned the New York State Conference of Mayors Public Administration and Management award two years running.
These days, however, even the smartest and scrappiest of mayors still has to face grim reality. In July 2009, as the city began developing the 2010 budget, Ryan projected a $7 million shortfall. Contributing factors included a likely $700,000 decline in sales tax revenue, ever rising healthcare costs, increased pension contributions to replace funds lost in the market during the collapse of 2008-09, and a $500,000 drop in the return on the city's investment portfolio.
With worse times ahead, thanks in part to the projected end of federal stimulus money and a city drained dry of reserves, Ryan has had to face a classically unpalatable choice: raise city sales taxes from 7% to an unheard of 24% or cut city jobs. He chose jobs, as have the vast majority of mayors and governors across the country, eliminating 39 of them. In the process, he sought greater program efficiencies and wrestled with ways to increase city revenues while cutting ever closer to Binghamton’s proverbial bone.
It was in the context of this kind of local pain that Ryan was stunned to discover just how much of Binghamton’s taxes were going to the military and to our distant wars, and how little was coming back to Binghamton in the form of aid and services. “When I first saw the cost of war numbers and made the connections,” Ryan remarks, “I had to wonder if we're ever going to get our priorities straight as a nation. It's like we're facing an attack on government. As a mayor, I can see so clearly what increased federal spending could do for the people of my city.”
Ryan's message doesn't resonate with all of his constituents -- some have walked out on his public appearances -- but he's used to controversy and convinced that Americans had better get their heads straight soon. “People are hurting so bad,” he insists, “that, like it or not, we're all going to have to look at things seriously if we want our situation to change.”
Heads should swivel, he thinks, when faced with the $138.6 million Binghamton’s taxpayers are out of pocket since 2001 for the Iraq and Afghan wars. And that’s not even counting the city's share of the supplemental funds Congress will undoubtedly agree to this spring to cover the Afghan “surge” or the city's portion of the basic Pentagon budget for the same period.
For a small city with an annual budget of $81.1 million, $138.6 million would be a hefty sum, even in non-recessionary times. For the same amount of money, Ryan could fund the Binghamton city library for the next 60 years, or pay for a four-year education for 95% of the incoming freshman class at the State University of New York at Binghamton, or offer four years of quality health coverage for everyone in Binghamton 19 or younger, or secure renewable electricity for every home in the city for the next 11 years. If he was feeling really flush, he could fully fund one-third of New York State's Head Start slots for one year.
For the same sum, Ryan could also authorize a $2,900 tax refund for every woman, man, and child in Binghamton or pay the salaries of all of Binghamton's hard-hit public school teachers and staff for about two years.
For $138.6 million, Mayor Ryan could hire 2,765 public safety officers for a year, or simply refund the 12 police positions cut in the latest budget contraction and guarantee those salaries for the next 230 years. Ridiculous? These days, no one is laughing in Binghamton or other cities like it.
A Community Starved by War
As tax day looms on April 15th, Ryan increasingly thinks about where Binghamton’s tax dollars will be heading and dreams about a government system that would have the potential to raise and spend tax revenue in the service of social benefits like affordable healthcare.
He’s disturbed by how Binghamton’s tax dollars will be distributed and what they will -- and won't -- buy for his city. Consider, for instance, where the 2009 taxes paid by a median income Binghamton household actually went. That year, such a household's income hovered around $30,000 annually, while its members paid approximately $738 in federal income taxes.
According to the tax-day analysis of the National Priorities Project (NPP), an overwhelming 218 of those dollars went to pay for military expenditures and interest on military-related debt (generated, in part, by current war spending). The next highest amount -- $137 -- went to healthcare, including Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children's Health Insurance Program.
In 2009, $67, nearly 10 cents on every tax dollar, went to an aggregated category of spending NPP has titled “government,” tripling it in a single year, largely thanks to the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), otherwise known as the bank bailout, whose cost every community in America has had to shoulder. Fifty-eight dollars (8.5 cents on every income-tax dollar) went to increased unemployment insurance payments and job-training initiatives, also a rise from the previous year.
Not surprisingly, the $15 that went to elementary, secondary, higher, and vocational education in 2009 represented a drop from 2008, a loss of a penny on every tax dollar. There’s no way, of course, that Mayor Ryan's dream of free, quality education from kindergarten to college is likely to happen on but 2% of every individual federal income tax dollar. Nor will we usher in the green techno-revolution that he and President Obama both support, by spending 2.5 cents on every dollar for the combined categories of the environment, energy, and science, and another 1.3 cents of every dollar on transportation.
“It's a double whammy," Ryan says. "We have a revenue problem and a values and priorities problem in this nation.”
Some desperate city leaders have suggested that the Mayor cut workers' pensions to help close the city’s budget gap. Matt Ryan doesn't see that as a solution to anything. “I have secretaries making $25,000 or $30,000. I'm not about to cut their net, such as it is. We have to think long haul. We have to look at fundamental changes if we're going to make it as a country. We should all be talking about this -- all the time.”
A construction crew will soon arrive to install Binghamton's “cost of war” counter which will overlook the city's busiest intersection and spur conversation around tax day. During the three minutes local motorists wait at the nearby traffic light, they can join Mayor Ryan in waving good-bye to $100. And Binghamton as a whole can grapple with spending $49,650 in war costs every day of 2010.
Jo Comerford is the executive director of the National Priorities Project. Previously, she served as director of programs at the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts and directed the American Friends Service Committee's justice and peace-related community organizing efforts in western Massachusetts.
Copyright 2010 Jo Comerford
Small-City Mayor Takes on the Pentagon -- War Spending Should Be Spent on Americans, Not on Killing Afghans
By Jo Comerford, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on April 12, 2010, Printed on April 13, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/146408/
To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates fromTomDispatch.com here.]
Matt Ryan, the mayor of Binghamton, New York, is sick and tired of watching people in local communities “squabble over crumbs,” as he puts it, while so much local money pours into the Pentagon’s coffers and into America’s wars. He’s so sick and tired of it, in fact, that, urged on by local residents, he’s decided to do something about it. He’s planning to be the first mayor in the United States to decorate the façade of City Hall with a large, digital “cost of war” counter, funded entirely by private contributions.
That counter will offer a constantly changing estimate of the total price Binghamton’s taxpayers have been paying for our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since October 2001. By September 30, 2010, the city’s “war tax” will reach $138.6 million -- or even more if, as expected, Congress passes an Obama administration request for supplemental funds to cover the president’s “surge” in Afghanistan. Mayor Ryan wants, he says, to put the counter “where everyone can see it, so that my constituents are urged to have a much-needed conversation.”
In doing so, he’s joining a growing chorus of mayors, including Chicago's Richard Daley and Boston's Thomas Menino, who are ever more insistently drawing attention to what Ryan calls the country’s “skewed national priorities,” especially the local impact of military and war spending. With more than three years left in his current term, Ryan has decided to pull out all the stops to reach his neighbors and constituents, all 47,000 of them, especially the near quarter of the city’s inhabitants who currently live below the poverty line and the 9% who are officially unemployed.
A Hard Hit Rust-Belt City
Like so many post-industrial rust-belt communities, Binghamton was hard hit by the financial meltdown of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed, though it faired better than a number of similar cities, in part because Ryan, his administration, and the Binghamton City Council are a smart and scrappy crew. No doubt that’s why he earned the New York State Conference of Mayors Public Administration and Management award two years running.
These days, however, even the smartest and scrappiest of mayors still has to face grim reality. In July 2009, as the city began developing the 2010 budget, Ryan projected a $7 million shortfall. Contributing factors included a likely $700,000 decline in sales tax revenue, ever rising healthcare costs, increased pension contributions to replace funds lost in the market during the collapse of 2008-09, and a $500,000 drop in the return on the city's investment portfolio.
With worse times ahead, thanks in part to the projected end of federal stimulus money and a city drained dry of reserves, Ryan has had to face a classically unpalatable choice: raise city sales taxes from 7% to an unheard of 24% or cut city jobs. He chose jobs, as have the vast majority of mayors and governors across the country, eliminating 39 of them. In the process, he sought greater program efficiencies and wrestled with ways to increase city revenues while cutting ever closer to Binghamton’s proverbial bone.
It was in the context of this kind of local pain that Ryan was stunned to discover just how much of Binghamton’s taxes were going to the military and to our distant wars, and how little was coming back to Binghamton in the form of aid and services. “When I first saw the cost of war numbers and made the connections,” Ryan remarks, “I had to wonder if we're ever going to get our priorities straight as a nation. It's like we're facing an attack on government. As a mayor, I can see so clearly what increased federal spending could do for the people of my city.”
Ryan's message doesn't resonate with all of his constituents -- some have walked out on his public appearances -- but he's used to controversy and convinced that Americans had better get their heads straight soon. “People are hurting so bad,” he insists, “that, like it or not, we're all going to have to look at things seriously if we want our situation to change.”
Heads should swivel, he thinks, when faced with the $138.6 million Binghamton’s taxpayers are out of pocket since 2001 for the Iraq and Afghan wars. And that’s not even counting the city's share of the supplemental funds Congress will undoubtedly agree to this spring to cover the Afghan “surge” or the city's portion of the basic Pentagon budget for the same period.
For a small city with an annual budget of $81.1 million, $138.6 million would be a hefty sum, even in non-recessionary times. For the same amount of money, Ryan could fund the Binghamton city library for the next 60 years, or pay for a four-year education for 95% of the incoming freshman class at the State University of New York at Binghamton, or offer four years of quality health coverage for everyone in Binghamton 19 or younger, or secure renewable electricity for every home in the city for the next 11 years. If he was feeling really flush, he could fully fund one-third of New York State's Head Start slots for one year.
For the same sum, Ryan could also authorize a $2,900 tax refund for every woman, man, and child in Binghamton or pay the salaries of all of Binghamton's hard-hit public school teachers and staff for about two years.
For $138.6 million, Mayor Ryan could hire 2,765 public safety officers for a year, or simply refund the 12 police positions cut in the latest budget contraction and guarantee those salaries for the next 230 years. Ridiculous? These days, no one is laughing in Binghamton or other cities like it.
A Community Starved by War
As tax day looms on April 15th, Ryan increasingly thinks about where Binghamton’s tax dollars will be heading and dreams about a government system that would have the potential to raise and spend tax revenue in the service of social benefits like affordable healthcare.
He’s disturbed by how Binghamton’s tax dollars will be distributed and what they will -- and won't -- buy for his city. Consider, for instance, where the 2009 taxes paid by a median income Binghamton household actually went. That year, such a household's income hovered around $30,000 annually, while its members paid approximately $738 in federal income taxes.
According to the tax-day analysis of the National Priorities Project (NPP), an overwhelming 218 of those dollars went to pay for military expenditures and interest on military-related debt (generated, in part, by current war spending). The next highest amount -- $137 -- went to healthcare, including Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children's Health Insurance Program.
In 2009, $67, nearly 10 cents on every tax dollar, went to an aggregated category of spending NPP has titled “government,” tripling it in a single year, largely thanks to the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), otherwise known as the bank bailout, whose cost every community in America has had to shoulder. Fifty-eight dollars (8.5 cents on every income-tax dollar) went to increased unemployment insurance payments and job-training initiatives, also a rise from the previous year.
Not surprisingly, the $15 that went to elementary, secondary, higher, and vocational education in 2009 represented a drop from 2008, a loss of a penny on every tax dollar. There’s no way, of course, that Mayor Ryan's dream of free, quality education from kindergarten to college is likely to happen on but 2% of every individual federal income tax dollar. Nor will we usher in the green techno-revolution that he and President Obama both support, by spending 2.5 cents on every dollar for the combined categories of the environment, energy, and science, and another 1.3 cents of every dollar on transportation.
“It's a double whammy," Ryan says. "We have a revenue problem and a values and priorities problem in this nation.”
Some desperate city leaders have suggested that the Mayor cut workers' pensions to help close the city’s budget gap. Matt Ryan doesn't see that as a solution to anything. “I have secretaries making $25,000 or $30,000. I'm not about to cut their net, such as it is. We have to think long haul. We have to look at fundamental changes if we're going to make it as a country. We should all be talking about this -- all the time.”
A construction crew will soon arrive to install Binghamton's “cost of war” counter which will overlook the city's busiest intersection and spur conversation around tax day. During the three minutes local motorists wait at the nearby traffic light, they can join Mayor Ryan in waving good-bye to $100. And Binghamton as a whole can grapple with spending $49,650 in war costs every day of 2010.
Jo Comerford is the executive director of the National Priorities Project. Previously, she served as director of programs at the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts and directed the American Friends Service Committee's justice and peace-related community organizing efforts in western Massachusetts.
Copyright 2010 Jo Comerford
The Preposterous Reality: 25 Hedge Fund Managers Are Worth 680,000 Teachers (Who Teach 13 Million Students) | | AlterNet
The Preposterous Reality: 25 Hedge Fund Managers Are Worth 680,000 Teachers (Who Teach 13 Million Students) | | AlterNet: "The Preposterous Reality: 25 Hedge Fund Managers Are Worth 680,000 Teachers (Who Teach 13 Million Students)"
The Massey disaster: Is 'Coal Baron' Don Blankenship to blame? - The Week
The Massey disaster: Is 'Coal Baron' Don Blankenship to blame? - The Week
The Massey disaster: Is 'Coal Baron' Don Blankenship to blame?
The CEO of Massey Energy is emerging as a villain in the tragedy of the Upper Big Branch mine disaster. Why?
posted on April 9, 2010, at 6:00 PM
Don Blankenship. Photo: Corbis
Don Blankenship, the 60-year-old chief executive of Massey Energy, is rapidly becoming the perceived villain in the West Virginia coal mining disaster that killed at least 25 people this week. Massey's 42 coal mines — including Upper Big Branch, where the deadly explosion occured — have received more than 2,000 safety violations this year. An unapologetic free marketeer, Blankenship has been accused by critics of putting the company's bottom line ahead of worker safety. Some commentators are even calling for him to be charged with murder. (Watch the Massey CEO talk about "nonsensical" safety rules.) Here's a look at the "Coal Baron" of Appalachia — and why everyone is blaming him for the disaster:
Who is Don Blankenship?
Donald L. Blankenship is the chief executive of Massey Energy Company, owner of the Upper Big Branch mine, which exploded this week. He joined the firm as a manager in 1982, and worked his way to the top. Including stock options, he was paid more than $19 million by Massey in 2008.
Why are people blaming him for the disaster?
The Upper Big Branch mine has received 124 safety violations this year, and Massey's 41 other coal mines in the area have racked up more than 2,000 violations this year between them. Critics say Blankenship's anti-union, anti-regulatory stance contributed to a culture of poor safety and health at the company.
What are his political views?
Considered the "ultimate free marketeer," Blankenship is vigorously opposed to government regulation of his industry. "Washington and state politicians have no idea how to improve miners' safety," he said at an anti-regulatory rally last September. "The very idea that they care more about coal miner safety than we do is as silly as global warming."
How does he treat workers?
The company tries to cultivate "camaraderie," according to Ian Urbina and John Leland in The New York Times. Massey miners are called "members," not employees. Some even fly the Massey flag in front of their homes. Blankenship rewards his workers, too: Last year he hosted a July 4 party on the grounds of his home, with entertainment from rocker Ted Nugent. Massey reportedly pays better than mines owed by other companies, but their benefits packages are smaller.
Is Blankenship a political contributor?
Yes. He contributed more than $30,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee last year, has supported Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), and controversially donated $3 million to the campaign of a West Virginia judge who later helped overturn a $50 million judgement against Massey. The episode apparently formed the basis of John Grisham's 2008 legal thriller The Appeal.
Who does he think is to blame for the tragedy?
No one. In an interview with ABC, he said that life is inherently risky. "There's 42,000 people a year killed on the highways," he said. "So there's dangers in everything, and we're trying to minimize that danger as best we can." The numerous safety violations, he told other reporters, are "unfortunately a normal part of the mining process."
What does he think of the media coverage?
On his Twitter feed, which is "basically a string of zingers aimed at environmentalists, Democrats, and green-thinking Republicans," he has accused the media of "indignity" in its coverage of the disaster. Blankenship has had run-ins with the media before. In 2008, he warned an ABC cameraman that he would be shot for taking photos. (see video here)
What are his defenders saying?
Brian Glasser, a lawyer in Charleston who has brought suits against Massey, told The New York Times: "He honestly believes what he is doing is materially benefiting the lives of the people who work for him... To make him an enemy of the people is not fair to him."
The Massey disaster: Is 'Coal Baron' Don Blankenship to blame?
The CEO of Massey Energy is emerging as a villain in the tragedy of the Upper Big Branch mine disaster. Why?
posted on April 9, 2010, at 6:00 PM
Don Blankenship. Photo: Corbis
Don Blankenship, the 60-year-old chief executive of Massey Energy, is rapidly becoming the perceived villain in the West Virginia coal mining disaster that killed at least 25 people this week. Massey's 42 coal mines — including Upper Big Branch, where the deadly explosion occured — have received more than 2,000 safety violations this year. An unapologetic free marketeer, Blankenship has been accused by critics of putting the company's bottom line ahead of worker safety. Some commentators are even calling for him to be charged with murder. (Watch the Massey CEO talk about "nonsensical" safety rules.) Here's a look at the "Coal Baron" of Appalachia — and why everyone is blaming him for the disaster:
Who is Don Blankenship?
Donald L. Blankenship is the chief executive of Massey Energy Company, owner of the Upper Big Branch mine, which exploded this week. He joined the firm as a manager in 1982, and worked his way to the top. Including stock options, he was paid more than $19 million by Massey in 2008.
Why are people blaming him for the disaster?
The Upper Big Branch mine has received 124 safety violations this year, and Massey's 41 other coal mines in the area have racked up more than 2,000 violations this year between them. Critics say Blankenship's anti-union, anti-regulatory stance contributed to a culture of poor safety and health at the company.
What are his political views?
Considered the "ultimate free marketeer," Blankenship is vigorously opposed to government regulation of his industry. "Washington and state politicians have no idea how to improve miners' safety," he said at an anti-regulatory rally last September. "The very idea that they care more about coal miner safety than we do is as silly as global warming."
How does he treat workers?
The company tries to cultivate "camaraderie," according to Ian Urbina and John Leland in The New York Times. Massey miners are called "members," not employees. Some even fly the Massey flag in front of their homes. Blankenship rewards his workers, too: Last year he hosted a July 4 party on the grounds of his home, with entertainment from rocker Ted Nugent. Massey reportedly pays better than mines owed by other companies, but their benefits packages are smaller.
Is Blankenship a political contributor?
Yes. He contributed more than $30,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee last year, has supported Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), and controversially donated $3 million to the campaign of a West Virginia judge who later helped overturn a $50 million judgement against Massey. The episode apparently formed the basis of John Grisham's 2008 legal thriller The Appeal.
Who does he think is to blame for the tragedy?
No one. In an interview with ABC, he said that life is inherently risky. "There's 42,000 people a year killed on the highways," he said. "So there's dangers in everything, and we're trying to minimize that danger as best we can." The numerous safety violations, he told other reporters, are "unfortunately a normal part of the mining process."
What does he think of the media coverage?
On his Twitter feed, which is "basically a string of zingers aimed at environmentalists, Democrats, and green-thinking Republicans," he has accused the media of "indignity" in its coverage of the disaster. Blankenship has had run-ins with the media before. In 2008, he warned an ABC cameraman that he would be shot for taking photos. (see video here)
What are his defenders saying?
Brian Glasser, a lawyer in Charleston who has brought suits against Massey, told The New York Times: "He honestly believes what he is doing is materially benefiting the lives of the people who work for him... To make him an enemy of the people is not fair to him."
Coal baron Don Blankenship respects money, but safety not so much | Midwest Voices
Coal baron Don Blankenship respects money, but safety not so much | Midwest Voices
Coal baron Don Blankenship respects money, but safety not so much
Don Blankenship
By Barb Shelly, Kansas City Star Editorial Page columnist
Coal baron Don Blankenship is the ultimate free marketeer, a trendy niche in this day of seething resentment against government big and small.
He has clever names for environmentalists (greeniacs) and brainless congressmen (scarecrows).
His outspoken hatred of taxes and regulations won him a seat on the board of directors of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
He has no use for unions and he abhors “nuisance” lawsuits, though he’s filed a few. A few years ago, he spent millions to run a judge out of office.
Last year, Blankenship forked over $1 million to help sponsor the huge “Friends of America” rally, which brought 70,000 people to a reclaimed mountaintop removal mine in West Virginia to watch big-time entertainers and listen to rants about environmentalists and government regulators.
“Washington and state politicians have no idea how to improve miner safety,” Blankenship told a cheering crowd at that rally. “The very idea that they care more about coal miner safety than we do is as silly as global warming.”
He should have given government more credit.
Its regulators have fined Blankenship’s companies repeatedly over the years. They know a few things about safety, and they knew there were problems in Blankenship’s mines.
This week, an explosion in the Upper Big Branch coal mine in Montcoal, W. Va., killed 25 workers. Four more men are missing. It’s the worst mining disaster in 25 years.
The cause so far is unknown. But Kevin Stricklin, an administrator with the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, stated the obvious when he told news organizations: “Something went very wrong here.”
Blankenship has invested heavily in defiance over the years.
His companies paid $4.2 million in fines and penalties after two workers died in a fire in a Blankenship mine in 2006. His primary company, Massey Energy, paid a $20 million fine in 2008 for clean water violations found by the Environmental Protection Agency.
In 2004, Blankenship contributed $3 million to fund a deceptive advertising campaign that unseated a West Virginia state Supreme Court judge. The benefactor of that largess responded by tipping the court balance in a decision that threw out a $50 million jury verdict against Massey Energy.
Fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the “bought” judge should have disqualified himself from the case.
These examples represent just a sliver of the money Blankenship has spent over the years paying fines, fighting unions and contributing to candidates and political groups nationwide that share his disdain for taxes, regulations and environmental concerns.
Better that he would have invested those dollars in safety precautions and worker training at his mines. Twenty-nine men might be safe if he had.
Blankenship is a brazen member of a club that promotes its own interests by tearing down any individual or institution that might stand in its way.
The spin is working. Americans have heard so much about “corrupt” unions, “greedy” trial lawyers, “activist” judges and “job-killing” regulators that a good percentage of us think we’d be better off without any of them.
We wouldn’t. In fact, safety inspectors and regulators need more clout to protect workers in dangerous jobs. Judges need a separation from big money and electoral politics. Unions need more authority to insist on safe conditions for workers.
No one was cheering Don Blankenship’s blustery, free-market principles this week. According to The New York Times, he prepared to address a crowd outside his mangled mine but was shouted down.
People accused him of putting profit ahead of workers’ lives. Someone threw a chair. Police officers escorted the coal executive from the scene.
Blankenship should have heeded the judges, unions and regulators whom he so reviled. Turns out they could have protected him.
Editorial board member Barbara Shelly can be reached at bshelly@kcstar.com or 816-234-4594. She blogs at voices.kansascity.com
Submitted by barbshelly on April 8, 2010 - 1:51pm.
Barb Shelly| Login or register to post comments1333 reads Delicious Digg
Blankenship-GOP Collusion Should Be Investigated,
Submitted by Truthfairy on April 9, 2010 - 4:37pm.
Great article.
This tragic event has lifted the veil on GOP corruption and hypocrisy with big free marketeer donors. Blankenship-Bush-GOP repeatedly violated the Constitution by robbing mine workers and their families, and state agencies, of their right to justice.
This must be investigated. What we now know is the tip of the iceberg:
In October 2000, a Massey Energy subsidiary was responsible for the largest man-made environmental disaster east of the Mississippi (until 2008), when a coal slurry impoundment broke and spilled 245 million gallons of toxic sludge in the headwaters of two creeks in Kentucky. MSHA of federal Office of Surface Mining said Massey ignored warning signs of the breakthrough...MASSEY AGREED TO $3.25 MILION IN FINES & DAMAGES. Massey's insurance paid $58.8 million in clean up costs. (industry.BNET.com 4.7.2010).
BUT U.S. Sec of Labor Elaine Chao, wife of Sen. McConnell (R-KY), “put on the brakes” on the MSHA investigation into the spill by placing a McConnell staffer in charge. In 2002 a $5,600 fine was levied to replace the $3.25 mil. That September Massey gave $100,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, chaired by McConnell. [Lexington Herald-Leader, 10/2/06, OpenSecrets]
In 2006 Massey’s Aracoma Coal Co. agreed to “plead guilty to 10 criminal charges, including one felony, and pay $4.5 million in criminal and civil fines” after two workers were burned alive in a fire at the Aracoma Mine. The mine “had 25 violations of mandatory health and safety laws” before the fire on January 19, 2006, but Massey CEO Don Blankenship passed the deaths off as “statistically insignificant.” [Logan Banner, 9/1/06; Charleston Gazette, 12/24/08]
In 2006 Blankenship spent between $2 & $3 million backing 41 GOP mid-term candidates - $50k each according to the WVa Record.
On 10/22/2006, NY Times' Ian Urbina wrote in his article, Wealthy Coal Executive Hopes to Turn Democratic West Virginia Republican, "In a state where candidates who win typically spend less than $20,000, Mr. Blankenship has poured more than $6 million into political initiatives."
In 2007, President Bush appointed a senior Massey executive to DOE!!
Massey Energy was cited for 1300 safety violations since 2005. Fifty of those violations are said to be 'unwarrantable failure", violations involving life and death failures over ventilation and other issues. Don Blankenship said the violations are "just a part of running a mine". (Democracy Now)
For six years, under Bush administration, most of Massey's amassed fines were cancelled or reduced.
Ken Cuccinelli and others in Virginia government - overwhelmingly Republican – are/were deeply in the pocket of Massey Energy and Don Blankenship, far more concerned with doing their bidding than in protecting workers, the environment, etc. It's also worth noting that Virginia's two previous AG's, Jerry Kilgore (2002-2005) and Bob McDonnell (2006-2009), apparently did nothing to rein in out-of-control Massey Energy on worker safety, the environment, or anything else. Neither did Mark Earley (1998-2001) or Jim Gilmore (1994-1997). (Blue Virginia)
One could go on for ever with specific examples. Suffice it to say that this Don Blankenship ran his mines with criminal reckless disregard for the lives of his miners and unlawful reckless disregard for federal and state safety regulations, as well as utter disrespect for the constiutional right to justice and impartiality. Throughout, it appears he was aided and abetted by Republican lawmakers, probably some Democrats too, and his ties to the Bush administration.
Now that this has become public, it would be an additional crime of omission not to conduct an investigation and restore justice to those hurt.
.
Read more: http://voices.kansascity.com/node/8539#ixzz0l0daCI9D
Coal baron Don Blankenship respects money, but safety not so much
Don Blankenship
By Barb Shelly, Kansas City Star Editorial Page columnist
Coal baron Don Blankenship is the ultimate free marketeer, a trendy niche in this day of seething resentment against government big and small.
He has clever names for environmentalists (greeniacs) and brainless congressmen (scarecrows).
His outspoken hatred of taxes and regulations won him a seat on the board of directors of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
He has no use for unions and he abhors “nuisance” lawsuits, though he’s filed a few. A few years ago, he spent millions to run a judge out of office.
Last year, Blankenship forked over $1 million to help sponsor the huge “Friends of America” rally, which brought 70,000 people to a reclaimed mountaintop removal mine in West Virginia to watch big-time entertainers and listen to rants about environmentalists and government regulators.
“Washington and state politicians have no idea how to improve miner safety,” Blankenship told a cheering crowd at that rally. “The very idea that they care more about coal miner safety than we do is as silly as global warming.”
He should have given government more credit.
Its regulators have fined Blankenship’s companies repeatedly over the years. They know a few things about safety, and they knew there were problems in Blankenship’s mines.
This week, an explosion in the Upper Big Branch coal mine in Montcoal, W. Va., killed 25 workers. Four more men are missing. It’s the worst mining disaster in 25 years.
The cause so far is unknown. But Kevin Stricklin, an administrator with the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, stated the obvious when he told news organizations: “Something went very wrong here.”
Blankenship has invested heavily in defiance over the years.
His companies paid $4.2 million in fines and penalties after two workers died in a fire in a Blankenship mine in 2006. His primary company, Massey Energy, paid a $20 million fine in 2008 for clean water violations found by the Environmental Protection Agency.
In 2004, Blankenship contributed $3 million to fund a deceptive advertising campaign that unseated a West Virginia state Supreme Court judge. The benefactor of that largess responded by tipping the court balance in a decision that threw out a $50 million jury verdict against Massey Energy.
Fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the “bought” judge should have disqualified himself from the case.
These examples represent just a sliver of the money Blankenship has spent over the years paying fines, fighting unions and contributing to candidates and political groups nationwide that share his disdain for taxes, regulations and environmental concerns.
Better that he would have invested those dollars in safety precautions and worker training at his mines. Twenty-nine men might be safe if he had.
Blankenship is a brazen member of a club that promotes its own interests by tearing down any individual or institution that might stand in its way.
The spin is working. Americans have heard so much about “corrupt” unions, “greedy” trial lawyers, “activist” judges and “job-killing” regulators that a good percentage of us think we’d be better off without any of them.
We wouldn’t. In fact, safety inspectors and regulators need more clout to protect workers in dangerous jobs. Judges need a separation from big money and electoral politics. Unions need more authority to insist on safe conditions for workers.
No one was cheering Don Blankenship’s blustery, free-market principles this week. According to The New York Times, he prepared to address a crowd outside his mangled mine but was shouted down.
People accused him of putting profit ahead of workers’ lives. Someone threw a chair. Police officers escorted the coal executive from the scene.
Blankenship should have heeded the judges, unions and regulators whom he so reviled. Turns out they could have protected him.
Editorial board member Barbara Shelly can be reached at bshelly@kcstar.com or 816-234-4594. She blogs at voices.kansascity.com
Submitted by barbshelly on April 8, 2010 - 1:51pm.
Barb Shelly| Login or register to post comments1333 reads Delicious Digg
Blankenship-GOP Collusion Should Be Investigated,
Submitted by Truthfairy on April 9, 2010 - 4:37pm.
Great article.
This tragic event has lifted the veil on GOP corruption and hypocrisy with big free marketeer donors. Blankenship-Bush-GOP repeatedly violated the Constitution by robbing mine workers and their families, and state agencies, of their right to justice.
This must be investigated. What we now know is the tip of the iceberg:
In October 2000, a Massey Energy subsidiary was responsible for the largest man-made environmental disaster east of the Mississippi (until 2008), when a coal slurry impoundment broke and spilled 245 million gallons of toxic sludge in the headwaters of two creeks in Kentucky. MSHA of federal Office of Surface Mining said Massey ignored warning signs of the breakthrough...MASSEY AGREED TO $3.25 MILION IN FINES & DAMAGES. Massey's insurance paid $58.8 million in clean up costs. (industry.BNET.com 4.7.2010).
BUT U.S. Sec of Labor Elaine Chao, wife of Sen. McConnell (R-KY), “put on the brakes” on the MSHA investigation into the spill by placing a McConnell staffer in charge. In 2002 a $5,600 fine was levied to replace the $3.25 mil. That September Massey gave $100,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, chaired by McConnell. [Lexington Herald-Leader, 10/2/06, OpenSecrets]
In 2006 Massey’s Aracoma Coal Co. agreed to “plead guilty to 10 criminal charges, including one felony, and pay $4.5 million in criminal and civil fines” after two workers were burned alive in a fire at the Aracoma Mine. The mine “had 25 violations of mandatory health and safety laws” before the fire on January 19, 2006, but Massey CEO Don Blankenship passed the deaths off as “statistically insignificant.” [Logan Banner, 9/1/06; Charleston Gazette, 12/24/08]
In 2006 Blankenship spent between $2 & $3 million backing 41 GOP mid-term candidates - $50k each according to the WVa Record.
On 10/22/2006, NY Times' Ian Urbina wrote in his article, Wealthy Coal Executive Hopes to Turn Democratic West Virginia Republican, "In a state where candidates who win typically spend less than $20,000, Mr. Blankenship has poured more than $6 million into political initiatives."
In 2007, President Bush appointed a senior Massey executive to DOE!!
Massey Energy was cited for 1300 safety violations since 2005. Fifty of those violations are said to be 'unwarrantable failure", violations involving life and death failures over ventilation and other issues. Don Blankenship said the violations are "just a part of running a mine". (Democracy Now)
For six years, under Bush administration, most of Massey's amassed fines were cancelled or reduced.
Ken Cuccinelli and others in Virginia government - overwhelmingly Republican – are/were deeply in the pocket of Massey Energy and Don Blankenship, far more concerned with doing their bidding than in protecting workers, the environment, etc. It's also worth noting that Virginia's two previous AG's, Jerry Kilgore (2002-2005) and Bob McDonnell (2006-2009), apparently did nothing to rein in out-of-control Massey Energy on worker safety, the environment, or anything else. Neither did Mark Earley (1998-2001) or Jim Gilmore (1994-1997). (Blue Virginia)
One could go on for ever with specific examples. Suffice it to say that this Don Blankenship ran his mines with criminal reckless disregard for the lives of his miners and unlawful reckless disregard for federal and state safety regulations, as well as utter disrespect for the constiutional right to justice and impartiality. Throughout, it appears he was aided and abetted by Republican lawmakers, probably some Democrats too, and his ties to the Bush administration.
Now that this has become public, it would be an additional crime of omission not to conduct an investigation and restore justice to those hurt.
.
Read more: http://voices.kansascity.com/node/8539#ixzz0l0daCI9D
This week in comically evil corporate behavior | Grist
This week in comically evil corporate behavior | Grist
Snidely Q. Blankenship
This week in comically evil corporate behavior 4
by Jonathan Hiskes
7 Apr 2010 10:43 AM
Read More About
Australia, Big Oil, Business, China, Climate & Energy, coal, Don Blankenship, Exxon Mobil, jackassery, news, oceans, West Virginia «less
Share Print
Updated
It’s only Wednesday and we've already got way more than a week's worth of comically evil behavior from the fossil-fuel sector.
Item the first:
A Chinese coal freighter tried to take a shortcut through Australia's Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and rammed into the world-reknowned ecological treasure. The stranded ship remains in danger of breaking apart and spilling its 1,075 tons of heavy engine fuel into the marine park (2.5 tons have already leaked).
Captain Wang Jichan, of the Chinese state-controlled conglomerate Cosco, doesn’t get it. He told authorities the leak is “not serious” and that he’s more worried about pesky rescuers consuming his crew’s food and water: "They need some more water because the rescue team is consuming the water and food. They need that. That is a problem at the moment."
Item the second:
In response to the tragic coal-mine explosion that killed at least 25 of his workers, notorious coal baron Don Blankenship shrugged off his company’s history of safety. “Violations are unfortunately a normal part of the mining process,” said the Massey Energy CEO.
This from a businessman who wrote a 2005 memo instructing supervisors not to waste time on safety precautions and whose company was called “one of the worst in the industry” by a government safety regulator.
Item the third:
ExxonMobil paid no U.S. income taxes last year, despite reaping a record $45 billion profit, Forbes reports. By using legal accounting methods and Caribbean tax shelters, the energy giant was able to avoid paying a cent to the IRS. At the same time, it complains about its tax “burden.”
Update: Exxon clarifies that it did pay U.S. taxes last year (it won't say how much). It continues to use offshore tax shelters and moan about its tax burden.
Update: Item the fourth:
A Chevron pipeline spilled 18,000 gallons of crude oil into a canal in the Delta National Wildlife Refuge southeast of New Orleans. These accidents are tough to keep up with.
Remember, these are the captains of industry who tell us we can’t afford to change our current way of doing things. This is the status quo they’re working frantically to defend. Good times.
Snidely Q. Blankenship
This week in comically evil corporate behavior 4
by Jonathan Hiskes
7 Apr 2010 10:43 AM
Read More About
Australia, Big Oil, Business, China, Climate & Energy, coal, Don Blankenship, Exxon Mobil, jackassery, news, oceans, West Virginia «less
Share Print
Updated
It’s only Wednesday and we've already got way more than a week's worth of comically evil behavior from the fossil-fuel sector.
Item the first:
A Chinese coal freighter tried to take a shortcut through Australia's Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and rammed into the world-reknowned ecological treasure. The stranded ship remains in danger of breaking apart and spilling its 1,075 tons of heavy engine fuel into the marine park (2.5 tons have already leaked).
Captain Wang Jichan, of the Chinese state-controlled conglomerate Cosco, doesn’t get it. He told authorities the leak is “not serious” and that he’s more worried about pesky rescuers consuming his crew’s food and water: "They need some more water because the rescue team is consuming the water and food. They need that. That is a problem at the moment."
Item the second:
In response to the tragic coal-mine explosion that killed at least 25 of his workers, notorious coal baron Don Blankenship shrugged off his company’s history of safety. “Violations are unfortunately a normal part of the mining process,” said the Massey Energy CEO.
This from a businessman who wrote a 2005 memo instructing supervisors not to waste time on safety precautions and whose company was called “one of the worst in the industry” by a government safety regulator.
Item the third:
ExxonMobil paid no U.S. income taxes last year, despite reaping a record $45 billion profit, Forbes reports. By using legal accounting methods and Caribbean tax shelters, the energy giant was able to avoid paying a cent to the IRS. At the same time, it complains about its tax “burden.”
Update: Exxon clarifies that it did pay U.S. taxes last year (it won't say how much). It continues to use offshore tax shelters and moan about its tax burden.
Update: Item the fourth:
A Chevron pipeline spilled 18,000 gallons of crude oil into a canal in the Delta National Wildlife Refuge southeast of New Orleans. These accidents are tough to keep up with.
Remember, these are the captains of industry who tell us we can’t afford to change our current way of doing things. This is the status quo they’re working frantically to defend. Good times.
Forbes.com - What The Top U.S. Companies Pay In Taxes
Forbes.com - Magazine Article
http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/01/ge-exxon-walmart-business-washington-corporate-taxes_print.html
What The Top U.S. Companies Pay In Taxes
Christopher Helman, 04.01.10, 3:00 PM ET
HOUSTON -
As you work on your taxes this month, here's something to raise your hackles: Some of the world's biggest, most profitable corporations enjoy a far lower tax rate than you do--that is, if they pay taxes at all.
The most egregious example is General Electric. Last year the conglomerate generated $10.3 billion in pretax income, but ended up owing nothing to Uncle Sam. In fact, it recorded a tax benefit of $1.1 billion.
Avoiding taxes is nothing new for General Electric. In 2008 its effective tax rate was 5.3%; in 2007 it was 15%. The marginal U.S. corporate rate is 35%.
In Pictures: What The 25 Top U.S. Companies Pay In Taxes
How did this happen? It's complicated. GE's tax return is the largest the IRS deals with each year--some 24,000 pages if printed out. Its annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission weighs in at more than 700 pages.
Inside you'll find that GE in effect consists of two divisions: General Electric Capital and everything else. The everything else--maker of engines, power plants, TV shows and the like--would have paid a 22% tax rate if it was a standalone company.
It's GE Capital that keeps the overall tax bill so low. Over the last two years, GE Capital has displayed an uncanny ability to lose lots of money in the U.S. (posting a $6.5 billion loss in 2009), and make lots of money overseas (a $4.3 billion gain). Not only do the U.S. losses balance out the overseas gains, but GE can defer taxes on that overseas income indefinitely. The timing of big deductions for depreciation in GE Capital's equipment leasing business also provides a tax benefit, as will loan losses left over from the credit crunch.
But it's the tax benefit of overseas operations that is the biggest reason why multinationals end up with lower tax rates than the rest of us. It only makes sense that multinationals "put costs in high-tax countries and profits in low-tax countries," says Scott Hodge, president of the Tax Foundation. Those low-tax countries are almost anywhere but the U.S. "When you add in state taxes, the U.S. has the highest tax burden among industrialized countries," says Hodge. In contrast, China's rate is just 25%; Ireland's is 12.5%.
Corporations are getting smarter, not just about doing more business in low-tax countries, but in moving their more valuable assets there as well. That means setting up overseas subsidiaries, then transferring to them ownership of long-lived, often intangible but highly profitable assets, like patents and software.
As a result, figures tax economist Martin Sullivan, companies are keeping some $28 billion a year out of the clutches of the U.S. Treasury by engaging in so-called transfer pricing arrangements, where, say, Microsoft's overseas subsidiaries license software to its U.S. parent company in return for handsome royalties (that get taxed at those lower overseas rates).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Corporations are paying lower amounts of their profits in taxes now than in the past," says Douglas Shackelford, who teaches tax law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "Other countries have been lowering their rates, but not the U.S."
Mind you, not all global megacorps enjoy such low tax rates. Try to muster some pity for Big Oil. ExxonMobil in its 2009 annual report to the SEC, recorded a larger income tax expense than any other U.S. company last year, some $17.6 billion, or 47% of pretax earnings. Exxon's peers Chevron and ConocoPhillips likewise recorded similarly high effective tax rates. The oil companies are oddities among the multinationals because many of the oil-rich countries where they do business levy even higher taxes than the U.S.
Exxon tries to limit the tax pain with the help of 20 wholly owned subsidiaries domiciled in the Bahamas, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands that (legally) shelter the cash flow from operations in the likes of Angola, Azerbaijan and Abu Dhabi. Exxon has tens of billions in earnings permanently reinvested overseas. Likewise, GE has $84 billion in overseas income parked indefinitely outside the U.S.
Though Exxon's financial statement's don't show any net income tax liability owed to Uncle Sam, a company spokesman insists that once its final tax bill is figured, Exxon will owe a "substantial 2009 tax liability." How substantial? "That's not something we're required to disclose, nor do we."
Naturally the Obama administration wants to put an end to this. It has proposed doing away with tax deferrals on overseas income. If the plan passes, a U.S. company that pays a 25% tax on profits in China would have to pay an additional 10% income tax to Uncle Sam to bring it up to the 35% corporate rate. "Eliminating deferrals would put U.S. companies on an unlevel playing field," says the Tax Foundation's Hodge, "especially if competing with the likes of Germany, which only taxes companies on domestic operations."
Hewlett-Packard and others among the top 25 state in their annual reports that if Obama's tax measures pass it would mean a certain tax hike, probably amounting to billions of dollars.
Would no more tax holiday for GE really end up helping Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer? Doubtful. "The average Joe should be in favor of lower corporate taxes," says Hodge, "because ultimately they are paying the corporate income tax. Either as workers, getting lower wages and fewer jobs, or as consumers, paying higher prices, or as retirees, getting lower dividends and earnings on their investments."
In the same vein, JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive Jamie Dimon has spoken out against an Obama proposal to levy a special tax on banks to recoup bailout costs. "Using tax policy to punish people is a bad idea," said Dimon. "All businesses tend to pass costs on to customers."
In Pictures: What The 25 Top U.S. Companies Pay In Taxes
http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/01/ge-exxon-walmart-business-washington-corporate-taxes_print.html
What The Top U.S. Companies Pay In Taxes
Christopher Helman, 04.01.10, 3:00 PM ET
HOUSTON -
As you work on your taxes this month, here's something to raise your hackles: Some of the world's biggest, most profitable corporations enjoy a far lower tax rate than you do--that is, if they pay taxes at all.
The most egregious example is General Electric. Last year the conglomerate generated $10.3 billion in pretax income, but ended up owing nothing to Uncle Sam. In fact, it recorded a tax benefit of $1.1 billion.
Avoiding taxes is nothing new for General Electric. In 2008 its effective tax rate was 5.3%; in 2007 it was 15%. The marginal U.S. corporate rate is 35%.
In Pictures: What The 25 Top U.S. Companies Pay In Taxes
How did this happen? It's complicated. GE's tax return is the largest the IRS deals with each year--some 24,000 pages if printed out. Its annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission weighs in at more than 700 pages.
Inside you'll find that GE in effect consists of two divisions: General Electric Capital and everything else. The everything else--maker of engines, power plants, TV shows and the like--would have paid a 22% tax rate if it was a standalone company.
It's GE Capital that keeps the overall tax bill so low. Over the last two years, GE Capital has displayed an uncanny ability to lose lots of money in the U.S. (posting a $6.5 billion loss in 2009), and make lots of money overseas (a $4.3 billion gain). Not only do the U.S. losses balance out the overseas gains, but GE can defer taxes on that overseas income indefinitely. The timing of big deductions for depreciation in GE Capital's equipment leasing business also provides a tax benefit, as will loan losses left over from the credit crunch.
But it's the tax benefit of overseas operations that is the biggest reason why multinationals end up with lower tax rates than the rest of us. It only makes sense that multinationals "put costs in high-tax countries and profits in low-tax countries," says Scott Hodge, president of the Tax Foundation. Those low-tax countries are almost anywhere but the U.S. "When you add in state taxes, the U.S. has the highest tax burden among industrialized countries," says Hodge. In contrast, China's rate is just 25%; Ireland's is 12.5%.
Corporations are getting smarter, not just about doing more business in low-tax countries, but in moving their more valuable assets there as well. That means setting up overseas subsidiaries, then transferring to them ownership of long-lived, often intangible but highly profitable assets, like patents and software.
As a result, figures tax economist Martin Sullivan, companies are keeping some $28 billion a year out of the clutches of the U.S. Treasury by engaging in so-called transfer pricing arrangements, where, say, Microsoft's overseas subsidiaries license software to its U.S. parent company in return for handsome royalties (that get taxed at those lower overseas rates).
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"Corporations are paying lower amounts of their profits in taxes now than in the past," says Douglas Shackelford, who teaches tax law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "Other countries have been lowering their rates, but not the U.S."
Mind you, not all global megacorps enjoy such low tax rates. Try to muster some pity for Big Oil. ExxonMobil in its 2009 annual report to the SEC, recorded a larger income tax expense than any other U.S. company last year, some $17.6 billion, or 47% of pretax earnings. Exxon's peers Chevron and ConocoPhillips likewise recorded similarly high effective tax rates. The oil companies are oddities among the multinationals because many of the oil-rich countries where they do business levy even higher taxes than the U.S.
Exxon tries to limit the tax pain with the help of 20 wholly owned subsidiaries domiciled in the Bahamas, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands that (legally) shelter the cash flow from operations in the likes of Angola, Azerbaijan and Abu Dhabi. Exxon has tens of billions in earnings permanently reinvested overseas. Likewise, GE has $84 billion in overseas income parked indefinitely outside the U.S.
Though Exxon's financial statement's don't show any net income tax liability owed to Uncle Sam, a company spokesman insists that once its final tax bill is figured, Exxon will owe a "substantial 2009 tax liability." How substantial? "That's not something we're required to disclose, nor do we."
Naturally the Obama administration wants to put an end to this. It has proposed doing away with tax deferrals on overseas income. If the plan passes, a U.S. company that pays a 25% tax on profits in China would have to pay an additional 10% income tax to Uncle Sam to bring it up to the 35% corporate rate. "Eliminating deferrals would put U.S. companies on an unlevel playing field," says the Tax Foundation's Hodge, "especially if competing with the likes of Germany, which only taxes companies on domestic operations."
Hewlett-Packard and others among the top 25 state in their annual reports that if Obama's tax measures pass it would mean a certain tax hike, probably amounting to billions of dollars.
Would no more tax holiday for GE really end up helping Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer? Doubtful. "The average Joe should be in favor of lower corporate taxes," says Hodge, "because ultimately they are paying the corporate income tax. Either as workers, getting lower wages and fewer jobs, or as consumers, paying higher prices, or as retirees, getting lower dividends and earnings on their investments."
In the same vein, JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive Jamie Dimon has spoken out against an Obama proposal to levy a special tax on banks to recoup bailout costs. "Using tax policy to punish people is a bad idea," said Dimon. "All businesses tend to pass costs on to customers."
In Pictures: What The 25 Top U.S. Companies Pay In Taxes
Gary Greenberg : The New Yorker: Can psychiatry be a science? by Louis Menard
Gary Greenberg : The New Yorker
Head Case
Can psychiatry be a science?
by Louis Menand
March 1, 2010 Text Size:Small TextMedium TextLarge TextPrint E-Mail Feeds
The psychiatric literature is so confusing that even the dissidents disagree. Photograph by Dan Winters.
Related LinksAudio: Louis Menand looks at the contradictory ways we understand and treat depression.
KeywordsDepression;Antidepressants;Drugs;Gary Greenberg;“Manufacturing Depression” (Simon & Schuster; $27);Irving Kirsch;“The Emperor’s New Drugs” (Basic; $23.95)You arrive for work and someone informs you that you have until five o’clock to clean out your office. You have been laid off. At first, your family is brave and supportive, and although you’re in shock, you convince yourself that you were ready for something new. Then you start waking up at 3 A.M., apparently in order to stare at the ceiling. You can’t stop picturing the face of the employee who was deputized to give you the bad news. He does not look like George Clooney. You have fantasies of terrible things happening to him, to your boss, to George Clooney. You find—a novel recognition—not only that you have no sex drive but that you don’t care. You react irritably when friends advise you to let go and move on. After a week, you have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. After two weeks, you have a hard time getting out of the house. You go see a doctor. The doctor hears your story and prescribes an antidepressant. Do you take it?
However you go about making this decision, do not read the psychiatric literature. Everything in it, from the science (do the meds really work?) to the metaphysics (is depression really a disease?), will confuse you. There is little agreement about what causes depression and no consensus about what cures it. Virtually no scientist subscribes to the man-in-the-waiting-room theory, which is that depression is caused by a lack of serotonin, but many people report that they feel better when they take drugs that affect serotonin and other brain chemicals.
There is suspicion that the pharmaceutical industry is cooking the studies that prove that antidepressant drugs are safe and effective, and that the industry’s direct-to-consumer advertising is encouraging people to demand pills to cure conditions that are not diseases (like shyness) or to get through ordinary life problems (like being laid off). The Food and Drug Administration has been accused of setting the bar too low for the approval of brand-name drugs. Critics claim that health-care organizations are corrupted by industry largesse, and that conflict-of-interest rules are lax or nonexistent. Within the profession, the manual that prescribes the criteria for official diagnoses, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the D.S.M., has been under criticism for decades. And doctors prescribe antidepressants for patients who are not suffering from depression. People take antidepressants for eating disorders, panic attacks, premature ejaculation, and alcoholism.
These complaints are not coming just from sociologists, English professors, and other troublemakers; they are being made by people within the field of psychiatry itself. As a branch of medicine, depression seems to be a mess. Business, however, is extremely good. Between 1988, the year after Prozac was approved by the F.D.A., and 2000, adult use of antidepressants almost tripled. By 2005, one out of every ten Americans had a prescription for an antidepressant. IMS Health, a company that gathers data on health care, reports that in the United States in 2008 a hundred and sixty-four million prescriptions were written for antidepressants, and sales totalled $9.6 billion. As a depressed person might ask, What does it all mean?
Two new books, Gary Greenberg’s “Manufacturing Depression” (Simon & Schuster; $27) and Irving Kirsch’s “The Emperor’s New Drugs” (Basic; $23.95), suggest that dissensus prevails even among the dissidents. Both authors are hostile to the current psychotherapeutic regime, but for reasons that are incompatible. Greenberg is a psychologist who has a practice in Connecticut. He is an unusually eloquent writer, and his book offers a grand tour of the history of modern medicine, as well as an up-close look at contemporary practices, including clinical drug trials, cognitive-behavioral therapy, and brain imaging. The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that more than fourteen million Americans suffer from major depression every year, and more than three million suffer from minor depression (whose symptoms are milder but last longer than two years). Greenberg thinks that numbers like these are ridiculous—not because people aren’t depressed but because, in most cases, their depression is not a mental illness. It’s a sane response to a crazy world.
Greenberg basically regards the pathologizing of melancholy and despair, and the invention of pills designed to relieve people of those feelings, as a vast capitalist conspiracy to paste a big smiley face over a world that we have good reason to feel sick about. The aim of the conspiracy is to convince us that it’s all in our heads, or, specifically, in our brains—that our unhappiness is a chemical problem, not an existential one. Greenberg is critical of psychopharmacology, but he is even more critical of cognitive-behavioral therapy, or C.B.T., a form of talk therapy that helps patients build coping strategies, and does not rely on medication. He calls C.B.T. “a method of indoctrination into the pieties of American optimism, an ideology as much as a medical treatment.”
In fact, Greenberg seems to believe that contemporary psychiatry in most of its forms except existential-humanistic talk therapy, which is an actual school of psychotherapy, and which appears to be what he practices, is mainly about getting people to accept current arrangements. And it’s not even that drug companies and the psychiatric establishment have some kind of moral or political stake in these arrangements—that they’re in the game in order to protect the status quo. They just see, in the world’s unhappiness, a chance to make money. They invented a disease so that they could sell the cure.
Greenberg is repeating a common criticism of contemporary psychiatry, which is that the profession is creating ever more expansive criteria for mental illness that end up labelling as sick people who are just different—a phenomenon that has consequences for the insurance system, the justice system, the administration of social welfare, and the cost of health care.
Jerome Wakefield, a professor of social work at New York University, has been calling out the D.S.M. on this issue for a number of years. In “The Loss of Sadness” (2007), Wakefield and Allan Horwitz, a sociologist at Rutgers, argue that the increase in the number of people who are given a diagnosis of depression suggests that what has changed is not the number of people who are clinically depressed but the definition of depression, which has been defined in a way that includes normal sadness. In the case of a patient who exhibits the required number of symptoms, the D.S.M. specifies only one exception to a diagnosis of depression: bereavement. But, Wakefield and Horwitz point out, there are many other life problems for which intense sadness is a natural response—being laid off, for example. There is nothing in the D.S.M. to prevent a physician from labelling someone who is living through one of these problems mentally disordered.
The conversion of stuff that people used to live with into disorders that physicians can treat is not limited to psychiatry, of course. Once, people had heartburn (“I can’t believe I ate the whole thing”) and bought Alka-Seltzer over the counter; now they are given a diagnosis of gastroesophageal reflux disease (“Ask your doctor whether you might be suffering from GERD”) and are written a prescription for Zantac. But people tend to find the medicalization of mood and personality more distressing. It has been claimed, for example, that up to 18.7 per cent of Americans suffer from social-anxiety disorder. In “Shyness” (2007), Christopher Lane, a professor of English at Northwestern, argues that this is a blatant pathologization of a common personality trait for the financial benefit of the psychiatric profession and the pharmaceutical industry. It’s a case of what David Healy, in his invaluable history “The Antidepressant Era” (1997), calls “the pharmacological scalpel”: if a drug (in this case, Paxil) proves to change something in patients (shyness), then that something becomes a disorder to be treated (social anxiety). The discovery of the remedy creates the disease.
Turning shyness into a mental disorder has many downstream consequences. As Steven Hyman, a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, argues in a recent article, once a diagnosis is ensconced in the manual, it is legitimatized as a subject of scientific research. Centers are established (there is now a Shyness Research Institute, at Indiana University Southeast) and scientists get funding to, for example, find “the gene for shyness”—even though there was never any evidence that the condition has an organic basis. A juggernaut effect is built into the system.
Irving Kirsch is an American psychologist who now works in the United Kingdom. Fifteen years ago, he began conducting meta-analyses of antidepressant drug trials. A meta-analysis is a statistical abstract of many individual drug trials, and the method is controversial. Drug trials are designed for different reasons—some are done to secure government approval for a new drug, and some are done to compare treatments—and they have different processes for everything from selecting participants to measuring outcomes. Adjusting for these differences is complicated, and Kirsch’s early work was roundly criticized on methodological grounds by Donald Klein, of Columbia University, who was one of the key figures in the transformation of psychiatry to a biologically based practice. But, as Kirsch points out, meta-analyses have since become more commonly used and accepted.
Kirsch’s conclusion is that antidepressants are just fancy placebos. Obviously, this is not what the individual tests showed. If they had, then none of the drugs tested would have received approval. Drug trials normally test medications against placebos—sugar pills—which are given to a control group. What a successful test typically shows is a small but statistically significant superiority (that is, greater than could be due to chance) of the drug to the placebo. So how can Kirsch claim that the drugs have zero medicinal value?
His answer is that the statistical edge, when it turns up, is a placebo effect. Drug trials are double-blind: neither the patients (paid volunteers) nor the doctors (also paid) are told which group is getting the drug and which is getting the placebo. But antidepressants have side effects, and sugar pills don’t. Commonly, side effects of antidepressants are tolerable things like nausea, restlessness, dry mouth, and so on. (Uncommonly, there is, for example, hepatitis; but patients who develop hepatitis don’t complete the trial.) This means that a patient who experiences minor side effects can conclude that he is taking the drug, and start to feel better, and a patient who doesn’t experience side effects can conclude that she’s taking the placebo, and feel worse. On Kirsch’s calculation, the placebo effect—you believe that you are taking a pill that will make you feel better; therefore, you feel better—wipes out the statistical difference.
One objection to Kirsch’s argument is that response to antidepressants is extremely variable. It can take several different prescriptions to find a medication that works. Measuring a single antidepressant against a placebo is not a test of the effectiveness of antidepressants as a category. And there is a well-known study, called the Sequenced Treatment Alternatives to Relieve Depression, or STAR*D trial, in which patients were given a series of different antidepressants. Though only thirty-seven per cent recovered on the first drug, another nineteen per cent recovered on the second drug, six per cent on the third, and five per cent after the fourth—a sixty-seven-per-cent effectiveness rate for antidepressant medication, far better than the rate achieved by a placebo.
Kirsch suggests that the result in STAR*D may be one big placebo effect. He cites a 1957 study at the University of Oklahoma in which subjects were given a drug that induced nausea and vomiting, and then another drug, which they were told prevents nausea and vomiting. After the first anti-nausea drug, the subjects were switched to a different anti-nausea drug, then a third, and so on. By the sixth switch, a hundred per cent of the subjects reported that they no longer felt nauseous—even though every one of the anti-nausea drugs was a placebo.
Kirsch concludes that since antidepressants have no more effectiveness than sugar pills, the brain-chemistry theory of depression is “a myth.” But, if this is so, how should we treat depression? Kirsch has an answer: C.B.T. He says it really works.
Kirsch’s claims appeared to receive a big boost from a meta-analysis published in January in the Journal of the American Medical Association and widely reported. The study concludes that “there is little evidence” that antidepressants are more effective than a placebo for minor to moderate depression. But, as a Cornell psychiatrist, Richard Friedman, noted in a column in the Times, the meta-analysis was based on just six trials, with a total of seven hundred and eighteen subjects; three of those trials tested Paxil, and three tested imipramine, one of the earliest antidepressants, first used in 1956. Since there have been hundreds of antidepressant drug trials and there are around twenty-five antidepressants on the market, this is not a large sample. The authors of the meta-analysis also assert that “for patients with very severe depression, the benefit of medications over placebo is substantial”—which suggests that antidepressants do affect mood through brain chemistry. The mystery remains unsolved.
Apart from separating us unnecessarily from our money, it’s hard to see how a pill that does nothing can also be bad for us. If Kirsch is right and antidepressant drugs aren’t doing anything consequential to our brains, then it can’t also be the case that they are turning us into Stepford wives or Nietzsche’s “last men,” the sort of thing that worries Greenberg. By Kirsch’s account, we are in danger of bankrupting our health-care system by spending nearly ten billion dollars a year on worthless pills. But if Greenberg is right we’re in danger of losing our ability to care. Is psychopharmacology evil, or is it useless?
The question has been around since the time of Freud. The profession has been the perennial target of critics who, like Greenberg, accuse it of turning deviance into a disorder, and of confusing health with conformity. And it has also been rocked many times by studies that, like Kirsch’s, cast doubt on the scientific validity of the entire enterprise.
One of the oldest complaints is that the diagnostic categories psychiatrists use don’t match up with the conditions patients have. In 1949, Philip Ash, an American psychologist, published a study in which he had fifty-two mental patients examined by three psychiatrists, two of them, according to Ash, nationally known. All the psychiatrists reached the same diagnosis only twenty per cent of the time, and two were in agreement less than half the time. Ash concluded that there was a severe lack of fit between diagnostic labels and, as he put it, “the complexities of the biodynamics of mental structure”—that is, what actually goes on in people’s minds.
In 1952, a British psychologist, Hans Eysenck, published a summary of several studies assessing the effectiveness of psychotherapy. “There . . . appears to be an inverse correlation between recovery and psychotherapy,” Eysenck dryly noted. “The more psychotherapy, the smaller the recovery rate.”
Later studies have shown that patients suffering from depression and anxiety do equally well when treated by psychoanalysts and by behavioral therapists; that there is no difference in effectiveness between C.B.T., which focusses on the way patients reason, and interpersonal therapy, which focusses on their relations with other people; and that patients who are treated by psychotherapists do no better than patients who meet with sympathetic professors with no psychiatric training. Depressed patients in psychotherapy do no better or worse than depressed patients on medication. There is little evidence to support the assumption that supplementing antidepressant medication with talk therapy improves outcomes. What a load of evidence does seem to suggest is that care works for some of the people some of the time, and it doesn’t much matter what sort of care it is. Patients believe that they are being cared for by someone who will make them feel better; therefore, they feel better. It makes no difference whether they’re lying on a couch interpreting dreams or sitting in a Starbucks discussing the concept of “flow.”
Psychiatry has also been damaged by some embarrassing exposés, such as David Rosenhan’s famous article “On Being Sane in Insane Places” (1973), which described the inability of hospital psychiatrists to distinguish mentally ill patients from impostors. The procedure used to determine the inclusion or exclusion of diagnoses in the D.S.M. has looked somewhat unseemly from a scientific point of view. Homosexuality, originally labelled a sociopathic personality disorder, was eliminated from the D.S.M. in 1973, partly in response to lobbying by gay-rights groups. The manual then inserted the category “ego-dystonic homosexuality”—distress because of the presence of homosexual arousal or the absence of heterosexual arousal. Further lobbying eliminated this category as well. Post-traumatic stress disorder was lobbied for by veterans’ organizations and resisted by the Veterans Administration, and got in, while self-defeating personality disorder was lobbied against by women’s groups, and was deleted.
And there was the rapid collapse of Freudianism. The first two editions of the D.S.M. (the first was published in 1952, the second in 1968) reflected the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and of the Swiss émigré Adolf Meyer, who emphasized the importance of patients’ life histories and everyday problems. But the third edition, published in 1980, began a process of scrubbing Freudianism out of the manual, and giving mental health a new language. As Healy puts it, “Where once lay people had gone to psychiatrists expecting to hear about sexual repression, they now came knowing that something might be wrong with their amines or with some brain chemical.” A vocabulary that had sunk deep into the popular culture—neurotic, anal, Oedipal—was wiped out of the discipline.
Finally, there has been a blare of criticism surrounding the role of the pharmaceutical industry in research and testing. The industry funds much of the testing done for the F.D.A. Drug companies donate money to hospitals, sponsor posh conferences in exotic locations, provide inducements to physicians to prescribe their drugs, lobby the F.D.A. and Congress—for example, successfully to prevent Medicare from using its bargaining leverage to reduce the price of medications—and generally use their profits to keep a seat at every table.
So the antidepressant business looks like a demolition derby—a collision of negative research results, questionable research and regulatory practices, and popular disenchantment with the whole pharmacological regime. And it may soon turn into something bigger, something more like a train wreck. If it does, it’s worth remembering that we have seen this movie before.
The early history of psychopharmacology is characterized by serendipitous discoveries, and mephenesin was one of them. A Czech émigré named Frank Berger, working in England in the nineteen-forties, was looking for a preservative for penicillin, a drug much in demand by the military. He found that mephenesin had a tranquillizing effect on mice, and published a paper announcing this result in 1946. After the war, Berger moved to the United States and eventually took a job with the drug company that became Carter-Wallace, where he synthesized a compound related to mephenesin called meprobamate. In 1955, Carter-Wallace launched meprobamate as a drug to relieve anxiety. The brand name it invented was Miltown.
Miltown, Andrea Tone says in her cultural history of tranquillizers, “The Age of Anxiety” (2009), was “the first psychotropic blockbuster and the fastest-selling drug in U.S. history.” Within a year, one out of every twenty Americans had taken Miltown; within two years, a billion tablets had been manufactured. By the end of the decade, Miltown and Equanil (the same chemical, licensed from Carter-Wallace by a bigger drug company, Wyeth) accounted for a third of all prescriptions written by American physicians. These drugs were eclipsed in the nineteen-sixties by two other wildly popular anxiolytics (anti-anxiety drugs): Librium and Valium, introduced in 1960 and 1963. Between 1968 and 1981, Valium was the most frequently prescribed medication in the Western world. In 1972, stock in its manufacturer, Hoffmann-La Roche, traded at seventy-three thousand dollars a share.
As Tone and David Herzberg, in his cultural history of psychiatric drugs, “Happy Pills in America” (2008)—the books actually complement each other nicely—both point out, the anxiolytics were enmeshed in exactly the same scientific, financial, and ethical confusion as antidepressants today. The F.D.A. did not permit direct-to-consumer—“Ask your doctor”—advertising until 1985, but the tranquillizer manufacturers invested heavily in promotion. They sent “detail men”—that is, salesmen—to teach physicians about the wonders of their medications. Carter-Wallace was an exception to this, because Berger disliked the idea of salesmanship, but the company took out the front-cover advertisement in the American Journal of Psychiatry every month for ten years.
Tranquillizers later became associated with the subjugation of women—“mother’s little helpers”—but Miltown was marketed to men, and male celebrities were enlisted to promote the drug. It was particularly popular in Hollywood. Anxiety was pitched as the disorder of high-functioning people, the cost of success in a competitive world. Advertisements for Equanil explained that “anxiety and tension are the commonplace of the age.” People on anxiolytics reported that they had never felt this well before—much like the patients Peter Kramer describes in “Listening to Prozac” (1993) who told him that they were “better than well.”
Miltown seemed to fit perfectly with the state of psychiatry in the nineteen-fifties. Freud himself had called anxiety “a riddle whose solution would be bound to throw a flood of light on our whole mental existence,” and the first edition of the D.S.M. identified anxiety as the “chief characteristic” of all neuroses. The D.S.M. was not widely used in the nineteen-fifties (the situation changed dramatically after 1980), but the idea that anxiety is central to the modern psyche was the subject of two popular books by mental-health professionals, Rollo May’s “The Meaning of Anxiety” (1950) and Hans Selye’s “The Stress of Life” (1956). (Selye was the person who coined the term “stressor.”)
There was a cultural backlash as well. People worried that tranquillizers would blunt America’s competitive edge. Business Week wrote about the possibility of “tranquil extinction.” The Nation suggested that tranquillizers might be more destructive than the bomb: “As we watch over the decline of the West, we see the beams—the bombs and the missiles; but perhaps we miss the motes—the pretty little pills.”
The weird part of it all was that, for a long time, no one was listening to Miltown. Meprobamate carved out an area of mental functioning and fired a chemical at it, a magic bullet, and the bullet made the condition disappear. What Miltown was saying, therefore, was that the Freudian theory that neuroses are caused by conflicts between psychic drives was no longer relevant. If you can cure your anxiety with a pill, there is no point spending six years on the couch. And yet, in the nineteen-fifties, references to Freud appeared alongside references to tranquillizers with no suggestion of a contradiction. It took landmark articles by Joseph Schildkraut, in 1965, proposing the amine theory of depression (the theory that Kirsch thinks is a myth), and by Klein (Kirsch’s early critic), called “Anxiety Reconceptualized,” in 1980, to expose the disjunction within the profession.
The train wreck for tranquillizers arrived in two installments. The first was the discovery that thalidomide, which was prescribed as a sedative, caused birth defects. This led to legislation giving the F.D.A. power to monitor the accuracy of drug-company promotional claims, which slowed down the marketing juggernaut. The second event was the revelation that Valium and Librium can be addictive. In 1980, the F.D.A. required that anxiety medications carry a warning stating that “anxiety or tension associated with the stress of everyday life usually does not require treatment with an anxiolytic.” The anxiety era was over. This is one of the reasons that when the SSRIs, such as Prozac, came on the market they were promoted as antidepressants—even though they are commonly prescribed for anxiety. Anxiety drugs had acquired a bad name.
The position behind much of the skepticism about the state of psychiatry is that it’s not really science. “Cultural, political, and economic factors, not scientific progress, underlie the triumph of diagnostic psychiatry and the current ‘scientific’ classification of mental illness entities,” Horwitz complained in an earlier book, “Creating Mental Illness” (2002), and many people echo his charge. But is this in fact the problem? The critics who say that psychiatry is not really science are not anti-science themselves. On the contrary: they hold an exaggerated view of what science, certainly medical science, and especially the science of mental health, can be.
Progress in medical science is made by lurching around. The best that can be hoped is that we are lurching in an over-all good direction. One common criticism of contemporary psychiatry has to do with the multiplication of mental disorders. D.S.M.-II listed a hundred and eighty-two diagnoses; the current edition, D.S.M.-IV-T.R., lists three hundred and sixty-five. There is a reason for this. The goal of biological psychiatry is to identify the organic conditions underlying the symptoms of mental distress that patients complain of. (This was Freud’s goal, too, though he had a completely different idea of what the mental events were to which the organic conditions corresponded.) The hope is to establish psychiatry firmly on the disease model of medical practice. In most cases, though, the underlying conditions are either imperfectly known or not known at all. So the D.S.M. lists only disorders—clusters of symptoms, drawn from clinical experience—not diseases. Since people manifest symptoms in an enormous variety of combinations, we get a large number of disorders for what may be a single disease.
Depression is a good example of the problem this makes. A fever is not a disease; it’s a symptom of disease, and the disease, not the symptom, is what medicine seeks to cure. Is depression—insomnia, irritability, lack of energy, loss of libido, and so on—like a fever or like a disease? Do patients complain of these symptoms because they have contracted the neurological equivalent of an infection? Or do the accompanying mental states (thoughts that my existence is pointless, nobody loves me, etc.) have real meaning? If people feel depressed because they have a disease in their brains, then there is no reason to pay much attention to their tales of woe, and medication is the most sensible way to cure them. Peter Kramer, in “Against Depression” (2005), describes a patient who, after she recovered from depression, accused him of taking what she had said in therapy too seriously. It was the depression talking, she told him, not her.
Depression often remits spontaneously, perhaps in as many as fifty per cent of cases; but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t something wrong in the brain of depressed people. Kramer claims that there is a demonstrated link between depression and ill health. Even minor depression raises the risk of death from cardiac disease by half, he says, and contracting depression once increases a patient’s susceptibility later in life. Kramer thinks that the notion that depression affords us, as Greenberg puts it, “some glimpse of the way things are” is a myth standing in the way of treating a potentially dangerous disease of the brain. He compares it to the association of tuberculosis with refinement in the nineteenth century, an association that today seems the opposite of enlightened. “Against Depression” is a plea to attack a biochemical illness with chemicals.
Is depression overdiagnosed? The disease model is no help here. If you have a fever, the doctor runs some tests in order to find out what your problem is. The tests, not the fever, identify the disease. The tests determine, in fact, that there is a disease. In the case of mood disorders, it is difficult to find a test to distinguish mental illness from normal mood changes. The brains of people who are suffering from mild depression look the same on a scan as the brains of people whose football team has just lost the Super Bowl. They even look the same as the brains of people who have been asked to think sad thoughts. As Freud pointed out, you can’t distinguish mourning from melancholy just by looking. So a psychiatrist who diagnoses simply by checking off the symptoms listed in the D.S.M. will, as Wakefield and others complain, end up with a lot of false positives. The anti-Freudian bias against the relevance of life histories leaves a lot of holes. But bringing life histories back into the picture isn’t going to make diagnoses any more scientific.
Science, particularly medical science, is not a skyscraper made of Lucite. It is a field strewn with black boxes. There have been many medical treatments that worked even though, for a long time, we didn’t know why they worked—aspirin, for example. And drugs have often been used to carve out diseases. Malaria was “discovered” when it was learned that it responded to quinine. Someone was listening to quinine. As Nicholas Christakis, a medical sociologist, has pointed out, many commonly used remedies, such as Viagra, work less than half the time, and there are conditions, such as cardiovascular disease, that respond to placebos for which we would never contemplate not using medication, even though it proves only marginally more effective in trials. Some patients with Parkinson’s respond to sham surgery. The ostensibly shaky track record of antidepressants does not place them outside the pharmacological pale.
The assumption of many critics of contemporary psychiatry seems to be that if the D.S.M. “carved nature at the joints,” if its diagnoses corresponded to discrete diseases, then all those categories would be acceptable. But, as Elliot Valenstein (no friend of biochemical psychiatry) points out in “Blaming the Brain” (1998), “at some period in history the cause of every ‘legitimate’ disease was unknown, and they all were at one time ‘syndromes’ or ‘disorders’ characterized by common signs and symptoms.”
D.S.M.-III was created to address a problem. The problem was reliability, and the manual was an attempt to get the profession on the same page so that every psychiatrist would make the same diagnosis for a given set of symptoms. The manual did not address a different problem, which is validity—the correspondence of symptoms to organic conditions. But if we couldn’t treat psychiatric patients until we were certain what the underlying pathology was, we would not be treating most patients. For some disorders, such as depression, we may never know, in any useful way, what the underlying pathology is, since we can’t distinguish biologically patients who are suffering from depression from patients who are enduring a depressing life problem.
For many people, this is the most troubling aspect of contemporary psychiatry. These people worry that an easy way is now available to jump the emotional queue, that people can now receive medical enhancements who do not “deserve” them. For example, would you take an antidepressant to get over the pain of being laid off? You might, if you reasoned that since your goal is to get over it and move on, there is no point in prolonging the agony. But you might also reason that learning how to cope with difficulty without a therapeutic crutch is something that it would be good to take away from this disaster. This is not a problem we should expect science to solve for us someday. It’s not even a problem that we should want science to solve for us.
Mental disorders sit at the intersection of three distinct fields. They are biological conditions, since they correspond to changes in the body. They are also psychological conditions, since they are experienced cognitively and emotionally—they are part of our conscious life. And they have moral significance, since they involve us in matters such as personal agency and responsibility, social norms and values, and character, and these all vary as cultures vary.
Many people today are infatuated with the biological determinants of things. They find compelling the idea that moods, tastes, preferences, and behaviors can be explained by genes, or by natural selection, or by brain amines (even though these explanations are almost always circular: if we do x, it must be because we have been selected to do x). People like to be able to say, I’m just an organism, and my depression is just a chemical thing, so, of the three ways of considering my condition, I choose the biological. People do say this. The question to ask them is, Who is the “I” that is making this choice? Is that your biology talking, too?
The decision to handle mental conditions biologically is as moral a decision as any other. It is a time-honored one, too. Human beings have always tried to cure psychological disorders through the body. In the Hippocratic tradition, melancholics were advised to drink white wine, in order to counteract the black bile. (This remains an option.) Some people feel an instinctive aversion to treating psychological states with pills, but no one would think it inappropriate to advise a depressed or anxious person to try exercise or meditation.
The recommendation from people who have written about their own depression is, overwhelmingly, Take the meds! It’s the position of Andrew Solomon, in “The Noonday Demon” (2001), a wise and humane book. It’s the position of many of the contributors to “Unholy Ghost” (2001) and “Poets on Prozac” (2008), anthologies of essays by writers about depression. The ones who took medication say that they write much better than they did when they were depressed. William Styron, in his widely read memoir “Darkness Visible” (1990), says that his experience in talk therapy was a damaging waste of time, and that he wishes he had gone straight to the hospital when his depression became severe.
What if your sadness was grief, though? And what if there were a pill that relieved you of the physical pain of bereavement—sleeplessness, weeping, loss of appetite—without diluting your love for or memory of the dead? Assuming that bereavement “naturally” remits after six months, would you take a pill today that will allow you to feel the way you will be feeling six months from now anyway? Probably most people would say no.
Is this because of what the psychiatrist Gerald Klerman once called “pharmacological Calvinism”? Klerman was describing the view, which he thought many Americans hold, that shortcuts to happiness are sinful, that happiness is not worth anything unless you have worked for it. (Klerman misunderstood Calvinist theology, but never mind.) We are proud of our children when they learn to manage their fears and perform in public, and we feel that we would not be so proud of them if they took a pill instead, even though the desired outcome is the same. We think that sucking it up, mastering our fears, is a sign of character. But do we think that people who are naturally fearless lack character? We usually think the opposite. Yet those people are just born lucky. Why should the rest of us have to pay a price in dread, shame, and stomach aches to achieve a state of being that they enjoy for nothing?
Or do we resist the grief pill because we believe that bereavement is doing some work for us? Maybe we think that since we appear to have been naturally selected as creatures that mourn, we shouldn’t short-circuit the process. Or is it that we don’t want to be the kind of person who does not experience profound sorrow when someone we love dies? Questions like these are the reason we have literature and philosophy. No science will ever answer them. ♦
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/03/01/100301crat_atlarge_menand?printable=true#ixzz0l0Fi6Alu
Head Case
Can psychiatry be a science?
by Louis Menand
March 1, 2010 Text Size:Small TextMedium TextLarge TextPrint E-Mail Feeds
The psychiatric literature is so confusing that even the dissidents disagree. Photograph by Dan Winters.
Related LinksAudio: Louis Menand looks at the contradictory ways we understand and treat depression.
KeywordsDepression;Antidepressants;Drugs;Gary Greenberg;“Manufacturing Depression” (Simon & Schuster; $27);Irving Kirsch;“The Emperor’s New Drugs” (Basic; $23.95)You arrive for work and someone informs you that you have until five o’clock to clean out your office. You have been laid off. At first, your family is brave and supportive, and although you’re in shock, you convince yourself that you were ready for something new. Then you start waking up at 3 A.M., apparently in order to stare at the ceiling. You can’t stop picturing the face of the employee who was deputized to give you the bad news. He does not look like George Clooney. You have fantasies of terrible things happening to him, to your boss, to George Clooney. You find—a novel recognition—not only that you have no sex drive but that you don’t care. You react irritably when friends advise you to let go and move on. After a week, you have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. After two weeks, you have a hard time getting out of the house. You go see a doctor. The doctor hears your story and prescribes an antidepressant. Do you take it?
However you go about making this decision, do not read the psychiatric literature. Everything in it, from the science (do the meds really work?) to the metaphysics (is depression really a disease?), will confuse you. There is little agreement about what causes depression and no consensus about what cures it. Virtually no scientist subscribes to the man-in-the-waiting-room theory, which is that depression is caused by a lack of serotonin, but many people report that they feel better when they take drugs that affect serotonin and other brain chemicals.
There is suspicion that the pharmaceutical industry is cooking the studies that prove that antidepressant drugs are safe and effective, and that the industry’s direct-to-consumer advertising is encouraging people to demand pills to cure conditions that are not diseases (like shyness) or to get through ordinary life problems (like being laid off). The Food and Drug Administration has been accused of setting the bar too low for the approval of brand-name drugs. Critics claim that health-care organizations are corrupted by industry largesse, and that conflict-of-interest rules are lax or nonexistent. Within the profession, the manual that prescribes the criteria for official diagnoses, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the D.S.M., has been under criticism for decades. And doctors prescribe antidepressants for patients who are not suffering from depression. People take antidepressants for eating disorders, panic attacks, premature ejaculation, and alcoholism.
These complaints are not coming just from sociologists, English professors, and other troublemakers; they are being made by people within the field of psychiatry itself. As a branch of medicine, depression seems to be a mess. Business, however, is extremely good. Between 1988, the year after Prozac was approved by the F.D.A., and 2000, adult use of antidepressants almost tripled. By 2005, one out of every ten Americans had a prescription for an antidepressant. IMS Health, a company that gathers data on health care, reports that in the United States in 2008 a hundred and sixty-four million prescriptions were written for antidepressants, and sales totalled $9.6 billion. As a depressed person might ask, What does it all mean?
Two new books, Gary Greenberg’s “Manufacturing Depression” (Simon & Schuster; $27) and Irving Kirsch’s “The Emperor’s New Drugs” (Basic; $23.95), suggest that dissensus prevails even among the dissidents. Both authors are hostile to the current psychotherapeutic regime, but for reasons that are incompatible. Greenberg is a psychologist who has a practice in Connecticut. He is an unusually eloquent writer, and his book offers a grand tour of the history of modern medicine, as well as an up-close look at contemporary practices, including clinical drug trials, cognitive-behavioral therapy, and brain imaging. The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that more than fourteen million Americans suffer from major depression every year, and more than three million suffer from minor depression (whose symptoms are milder but last longer than two years). Greenberg thinks that numbers like these are ridiculous—not because people aren’t depressed but because, in most cases, their depression is not a mental illness. It’s a sane response to a crazy world.
Greenberg basically regards the pathologizing of melancholy and despair, and the invention of pills designed to relieve people of those feelings, as a vast capitalist conspiracy to paste a big smiley face over a world that we have good reason to feel sick about. The aim of the conspiracy is to convince us that it’s all in our heads, or, specifically, in our brains—that our unhappiness is a chemical problem, not an existential one. Greenberg is critical of psychopharmacology, but he is even more critical of cognitive-behavioral therapy, or C.B.T., a form of talk therapy that helps patients build coping strategies, and does not rely on medication. He calls C.B.T. “a method of indoctrination into the pieties of American optimism, an ideology as much as a medical treatment.”
In fact, Greenberg seems to believe that contemporary psychiatry in most of its forms except existential-humanistic talk therapy, which is an actual school of psychotherapy, and which appears to be what he practices, is mainly about getting people to accept current arrangements. And it’s not even that drug companies and the psychiatric establishment have some kind of moral or political stake in these arrangements—that they’re in the game in order to protect the status quo. They just see, in the world’s unhappiness, a chance to make money. They invented a disease so that they could sell the cure.
Greenberg is repeating a common criticism of contemporary psychiatry, which is that the profession is creating ever more expansive criteria for mental illness that end up labelling as sick people who are just different—a phenomenon that has consequences for the insurance system, the justice system, the administration of social welfare, and the cost of health care.
Jerome Wakefield, a professor of social work at New York University, has been calling out the D.S.M. on this issue for a number of years. In “The Loss of Sadness” (2007), Wakefield and Allan Horwitz, a sociologist at Rutgers, argue that the increase in the number of people who are given a diagnosis of depression suggests that what has changed is not the number of people who are clinically depressed but the definition of depression, which has been defined in a way that includes normal sadness. In the case of a patient who exhibits the required number of symptoms, the D.S.M. specifies only one exception to a diagnosis of depression: bereavement. But, Wakefield and Horwitz point out, there are many other life problems for which intense sadness is a natural response—being laid off, for example. There is nothing in the D.S.M. to prevent a physician from labelling someone who is living through one of these problems mentally disordered.
The conversion of stuff that people used to live with into disorders that physicians can treat is not limited to psychiatry, of course. Once, people had heartburn (“I can’t believe I ate the whole thing”) and bought Alka-Seltzer over the counter; now they are given a diagnosis of gastroesophageal reflux disease (“Ask your doctor whether you might be suffering from GERD”) and are written a prescription for Zantac. But people tend to find the medicalization of mood and personality more distressing. It has been claimed, for example, that up to 18.7 per cent of Americans suffer from social-anxiety disorder. In “Shyness” (2007), Christopher Lane, a professor of English at Northwestern, argues that this is a blatant pathologization of a common personality trait for the financial benefit of the psychiatric profession and the pharmaceutical industry. It’s a case of what David Healy, in his invaluable history “The Antidepressant Era” (1997), calls “the pharmacological scalpel”: if a drug (in this case, Paxil) proves to change something in patients (shyness), then that something becomes a disorder to be treated (social anxiety). The discovery of the remedy creates the disease.
Turning shyness into a mental disorder has many downstream consequences. As Steven Hyman, a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, argues in a recent article, once a diagnosis is ensconced in the manual, it is legitimatized as a subject of scientific research. Centers are established (there is now a Shyness Research Institute, at Indiana University Southeast) and scientists get funding to, for example, find “the gene for shyness”—even though there was never any evidence that the condition has an organic basis. A juggernaut effect is built into the system.
Irving Kirsch is an American psychologist who now works in the United Kingdom. Fifteen years ago, he began conducting meta-analyses of antidepressant drug trials. A meta-analysis is a statistical abstract of many individual drug trials, and the method is controversial. Drug trials are designed for different reasons—some are done to secure government approval for a new drug, and some are done to compare treatments—and they have different processes for everything from selecting participants to measuring outcomes. Adjusting for these differences is complicated, and Kirsch’s early work was roundly criticized on methodological grounds by Donald Klein, of Columbia University, who was one of the key figures in the transformation of psychiatry to a biologically based practice. But, as Kirsch points out, meta-analyses have since become more commonly used and accepted.
Kirsch’s conclusion is that antidepressants are just fancy placebos. Obviously, this is not what the individual tests showed. If they had, then none of the drugs tested would have received approval. Drug trials normally test medications against placebos—sugar pills—which are given to a control group. What a successful test typically shows is a small but statistically significant superiority (that is, greater than could be due to chance) of the drug to the placebo. So how can Kirsch claim that the drugs have zero medicinal value?
His answer is that the statistical edge, when it turns up, is a placebo effect. Drug trials are double-blind: neither the patients (paid volunteers) nor the doctors (also paid) are told which group is getting the drug and which is getting the placebo. But antidepressants have side effects, and sugar pills don’t. Commonly, side effects of antidepressants are tolerable things like nausea, restlessness, dry mouth, and so on. (Uncommonly, there is, for example, hepatitis; but patients who develop hepatitis don’t complete the trial.) This means that a patient who experiences minor side effects can conclude that he is taking the drug, and start to feel better, and a patient who doesn’t experience side effects can conclude that she’s taking the placebo, and feel worse. On Kirsch’s calculation, the placebo effect—you believe that you are taking a pill that will make you feel better; therefore, you feel better—wipes out the statistical difference.
One objection to Kirsch’s argument is that response to antidepressants is extremely variable. It can take several different prescriptions to find a medication that works. Measuring a single antidepressant against a placebo is not a test of the effectiveness of antidepressants as a category. And there is a well-known study, called the Sequenced Treatment Alternatives to Relieve Depression, or STAR*D trial, in which patients were given a series of different antidepressants. Though only thirty-seven per cent recovered on the first drug, another nineteen per cent recovered on the second drug, six per cent on the third, and five per cent after the fourth—a sixty-seven-per-cent effectiveness rate for antidepressant medication, far better than the rate achieved by a placebo.
Kirsch suggests that the result in STAR*D may be one big placebo effect. He cites a 1957 study at the University of Oklahoma in which subjects were given a drug that induced nausea and vomiting, and then another drug, which they were told prevents nausea and vomiting. After the first anti-nausea drug, the subjects were switched to a different anti-nausea drug, then a third, and so on. By the sixth switch, a hundred per cent of the subjects reported that they no longer felt nauseous—even though every one of the anti-nausea drugs was a placebo.
Kirsch concludes that since antidepressants have no more effectiveness than sugar pills, the brain-chemistry theory of depression is “a myth.” But, if this is so, how should we treat depression? Kirsch has an answer: C.B.T. He says it really works.
Kirsch’s claims appeared to receive a big boost from a meta-analysis published in January in the Journal of the American Medical Association and widely reported. The study concludes that “there is little evidence” that antidepressants are more effective than a placebo for minor to moderate depression. But, as a Cornell psychiatrist, Richard Friedman, noted in a column in the Times, the meta-analysis was based on just six trials, with a total of seven hundred and eighteen subjects; three of those trials tested Paxil, and three tested imipramine, one of the earliest antidepressants, first used in 1956. Since there have been hundreds of antidepressant drug trials and there are around twenty-five antidepressants on the market, this is not a large sample. The authors of the meta-analysis also assert that “for patients with very severe depression, the benefit of medications over placebo is substantial”—which suggests that antidepressants do affect mood through brain chemistry. The mystery remains unsolved.
Apart from separating us unnecessarily from our money, it’s hard to see how a pill that does nothing can also be bad for us. If Kirsch is right and antidepressant drugs aren’t doing anything consequential to our brains, then it can’t also be the case that they are turning us into Stepford wives or Nietzsche’s “last men,” the sort of thing that worries Greenberg. By Kirsch’s account, we are in danger of bankrupting our health-care system by spending nearly ten billion dollars a year on worthless pills. But if Greenberg is right we’re in danger of losing our ability to care. Is psychopharmacology evil, or is it useless?
The question has been around since the time of Freud. The profession has been the perennial target of critics who, like Greenberg, accuse it of turning deviance into a disorder, and of confusing health with conformity. And it has also been rocked many times by studies that, like Kirsch’s, cast doubt on the scientific validity of the entire enterprise.
One of the oldest complaints is that the diagnostic categories psychiatrists use don’t match up with the conditions patients have. In 1949, Philip Ash, an American psychologist, published a study in which he had fifty-two mental patients examined by three psychiatrists, two of them, according to Ash, nationally known. All the psychiatrists reached the same diagnosis only twenty per cent of the time, and two were in agreement less than half the time. Ash concluded that there was a severe lack of fit between diagnostic labels and, as he put it, “the complexities of the biodynamics of mental structure”—that is, what actually goes on in people’s minds.
In 1952, a British psychologist, Hans Eysenck, published a summary of several studies assessing the effectiveness of psychotherapy. “There . . . appears to be an inverse correlation between recovery and psychotherapy,” Eysenck dryly noted. “The more psychotherapy, the smaller the recovery rate.”
Later studies have shown that patients suffering from depression and anxiety do equally well when treated by psychoanalysts and by behavioral therapists; that there is no difference in effectiveness between C.B.T., which focusses on the way patients reason, and interpersonal therapy, which focusses on their relations with other people; and that patients who are treated by psychotherapists do no better than patients who meet with sympathetic professors with no psychiatric training. Depressed patients in psychotherapy do no better or worse than depressed patients on medication. There is little evidence to support the assumption that supplementing antidepressant medication with talk therapy improves outcomes. What a load of evidence does seem to suggest is that care works for some of the people some of the time, and it doesn’t much matter what sort of care it is. Patients believe that they are being cared for by someone who will make them feel better; therefore, they feel better. It makes no difference whether they’re lying on a couch interpreting dreams or sitting in a Starbucks discussing the concept of “flow.”
Psychiatry has also been damaged by some embarrassing exposés, such as David Rosenhan’s famous article “On Being Sane in Insane Places” (1973), which described the inability of hospital psychiatrists to distinguish mentally ill patients from impostors. The procedure used to determine the inclusion or exclusion of diagnoses in the D.S.M. has looked somewhat unseemly from a scientific point of view. Homosexuality, originally labelled a sociopathic personality disorder, was eliminated from the D.S.M. in 1973, partly in response to lobbying by gay-rights groups. The manual then inserted the category “ego-dystonic homosexuality”—distress because of the presence of homosexual arousal or the absence of heterosexual arousal. Further lobbying eliminated this category as well. Post-traumatic stress disorder was lobbied for by veterans’ organizations and resisted by the Veterans Administration, and got in, while self-defeating personality disorder was lobbied against by women’s groups, and was deleted.
And there was the rapid collapse of Freudianism. The first two editions of the D.S.M. (the first was published in 1952, the second in 1968) reflected the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and of the Swiss émigré Adolf Meyer, who emphasized the importance of patients’ life histories and everyday problems. But the third edition, published in 1980, began a process of scrubbing Freudianism out of the manual, and giving mental health a new language. As Healy puts it, “Where once lay people had gone to psychiatrists expecting to hear about sexual repression, they now came knowing that something might be wrong with their amines or with some brain chemical.” A vocabulary that had sunk deep into the popular culture—neurotic, anal, Oedipal—was wiped out of the discipline.
Finally, there has been a blare of criticism surrounding the role of the pharmaceutical industry in research and testing. The industry funds much of the testing done for the F.D.A. Drug companies donate money to hospitals, sponsor posh conferences in exotic locations, provide inducements to physicians to prescribe their drugs, lobby the F.D.A. and Congress—for example, successfully to prevent Medicare from using its bargaining leverage to reduce the price of medications—and generally use their profits to keep a seat at every table.
So the antidepressant business looks like a demolition derby—a collision of negative research results, questionable research and regulatory practices, and popular disenchantment with the whole pharmacological regime. And it may soon turn into something bigger, something more like a train wreck. If it does, it’s worth remembering that we have seen this movie before.
The early history of psychopharmacology is characterized by serendipitous discoveries, and mephenesin was one of them. A Czech émigré named Frank Berger, working in England in the nineteen-forties, was looking for a preservative for penicillin, a drug much in demand by the military. He found that mephenesin had a tranquillizing effect on mice, and published a paper announcing this result in 1946. After the war, Berger moved to the United States and eventually took a job with the drug company that became Carter-Wallace, where he synthesized a compound related to mephenesin called meprobamate. In 1955, Carter-Wallace launched meprobamate as a drug to relieve anxiety. The brand name it invented was Miltown.
Miltown, Andrea Tone says in her cultural history of tranquillizers, “The Age of Anxiety” (2009), was “the first psychotropic blockbuster and the fastest-selling drug in U.S. history.” Within a year, one out of every twenty Americans had taken Miltown; within two years, a billion tablets had been manufactured. By the end of the decade, Miltown and Equanil (the same chemical, licensed from Carter-Wallace by a bigger drug company, Wyeth) accounted for a third of all prescriptions written by American physicians. These drugs were eclipsed in the nineteen-sixties by two other wildly popular anxiolytics (anti-anxiety drugs): Librium and Valium, introduced in 1960 and 1963. Between 1968 and 1981, Valium was the most frequently prescribed medication in the Western world. In 1972, stock in its manufacturer, Hoffmann-La Roche, traded at seventy-three thousand dollars a share.
As Tone and David Herzberg, in his cultural history of psychiatric drugs, “Happy Pills in America” (2008)—the books actually complement each other nicely—both point out, the anxiolytics were enmeshed in exactly the same scientific, financial, and ethical confusion as antidepressants today. The F.D.A. did not permit direct-to-consumer—“Ask your doctor”—advertising until 1985, but the tranquillizer manufacturers invested heavily in promotion. They sent “detail men”—that is, salesmen—to teach physicians about the wonders of their medications. Carter-Wallace was an exception to this, because Berger disliked the idea of salesmanship, but the company took out the front-cover advertisement in the American Journal of Psychiatry every month for ten years.
Tranquillizers later became associated with the subjugation of women—“mother’s little helpers”—but Miltown was marketed to men, and male celebrities were enlisted to promote the drug. It was particularly popular in Hollywood. Anxiety was pitched as the disorder of high-functioning people, the cost of success in a competitive world. Advertisements for Equanil explained that “anxiety and tension are the commonplace of the age.” People on anxiolytics reported that they had never felt this well before—much like the patients Peter Kramer describes in “Listening to Prozac” (1993) who told him that they were “better than well.”
Miltown seemed to fit perfectly with the state of psychiatry in the nineteen-fifties. Freud himself had called anxiety “a riddle whose solution would be bound to throw a flood of light on our whole mental existence,” and the first edition of the D.S.M. identified anxiety as the “chief characteristic” of all neuroses. The D.S.M. was not widely used in the nineteen-fifties (the situation changed dramatically after 1980), but the idea that anxiety is central to the modern psyche was the subject of two popular books by mental-health professionals, Rollo May’s “The Meaning of Anxiety” (1950) and Hans Selye’s “The Stress of Life” (1956). (Selye was the person who coined the term “stressor.”)
There was a cultural backlash as well. People worried that tranquillizers would blunt America’s competitive edge. Business Week wrote about the possibility of “tranquil extinction.” The Nation suggested that tranquillizers might be more destructive than the bomb: “As we watch over the decline of the West, we see the beams—the bombs and the missiles; but perhaps we miss the motes—the pretty little pills.”
The weird part of it all was that, for a long time, no one was listening to Miltown. Meprobamate carved out an area of mental functioning and fired a chemical at it, a magic bullet, and the bullet made the condition disappear. What Miltown was saying, therefore, was that the Freudian theory that neuroses are caused by conflicts between psychic drives was no longer relevant. If you can cure your anxiety with a pill, there is no point spending six years on the couch. And yet, in the nineteen-fifties, references to Freud appeared alongside references to tranquillizers with no suggestion of a contradiction. It took landmark articles by Joseph Schildkraut, in 1965, proposing the amine theory of depression (the theory that Kirsch thinks is a myth), and by Klein (Kirsch’s early critic), called “Anxiety Reconceptualized,” in 1980, to expose the disjunction within the profession.
The train wreck for tranquillizers arrived in two installments. The first was the discovery that thalidomide, which was prescribed as a sedative, caused birth defects. This led to legislation giving the F.D.A. power to monitor the accuracy of drug-company promotional claims, which slowed down the marketing juggernaut. The second event was the revelation that Valium and Librium can be addictive. In 1980, the F.D.A. required that anxiety medications carry a warning stating that “anxiety or tension associated with the stress of everyday life usually does not require treatment with an anxiolytic.” The anxiety era was over. This is one of the reasons that when the SSRIs, such as Prozac, came on the market they were promoted as antidepressants—even though they are commonly prescribed for anxiety. Anxiety drugs had acquired a bad name.
The position behind much of the skepticism about the state of psychiatry is that it’s not really science. “Cultural, political, and economic factors, not scientific progress, underlie the triumph of diagnostic psychiatry and the current ‘scientific’ classification of mental illness entities,” Horwitz complained in an earlier book, “Creating Mental Illness” (2002), and many people echo his charge. But is this in fact the problem? The critics who say that psychiatry is not really science are not anti-science themselves. On the contrary: they hold an exaggerated view of what science, certainly medical science, and especially the science of mental health, can be.
Progress in medical science is made by lurching around. The best that can be hoped is that we are lurching in an over-all good direction. One common criticism of contemporary psychiatry has to do with the multiplication of mental disorders. D.S.M.-II listed a hundred and eighty-two diagnoses; the current edition, D.S.M.-IV-T.R., lists three hundred and sixty-five. There is a reason for this. The goal of biological psychiatry is to identify the organic conditions underlying the symptoms of mental distress that patients complain of. (This was Freud’s goal, too, though he had a completely different idea of what the mental events were to which the organic conditions corresponded.) The hope is to establish psychiatry firmly on the disease model of medical practice. In most cases, though, the underlying conditions are either imperfectly known or not known at all. So the D.S.M. lists only disorders—clusters of symptoms, drawn from clinical experience—not diseases. Since people manifest symptoms in an enormous variety of combinations, we get a large number of disorders for what may be a single disease.
Depression is a good example of the problem this makes. A fever is not a disease; it’s a symptom of disease, and the disease, not the symptom, is what medicine seeks to cure. Is depression—insomnia, irritability, lack of energy, loss of libido, and so on—like a fever or like a disease? Do patients complain of these symptoms because they have contracted the neurological equivalent of an infection? Or do the accompanying mental states (thoughts that my existence is pointless, nobody loves me, etc.) have real meaning? If people feel depressed because they have a disease in their brains, then there is no reason to pay much attention to their tales of woe, and medication is the most sensible way to cure them. Peter Kramer, in “Against Depression” (2005), describes a patient who, after she recovered from depression, accused him of taking what she had said in therapy too seriously. It was the depression talking, she told him, not her.
Depression often remits spontaneously, perhaps in as many as fifty per cent of cases; but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t something wrong in the brain of depressed people. Kramer claims that there is a demonstrated link between depression and ill health. Even minor depression raises the risk of death from cardiac disease by half, he says, and contracting depression once increases a patient’s susceptibility later in life. Kramer thinks that the notion that depression affords us, as Greenberg puts it, “some glimpse of the way things are” is a myth standing in the way of treating a potentially dangerous disease of the brain. He compares it to the association of tuberculosis with refinement in the nineteenth century, an association that today seems the opposite of enlightened. “Against Depression” is a plea to attack a biochemical illness with chemicals.
Is depression overdiagnosed? The disease model is no help here. If you have a fever, the doctor runs some tests in order to find out what your problem is. The tests, not the fever, identify the disease. The tests determine, in fact, that there is a disease. In the case of mood disorders, it is difficult to find a test to distinguish mental illness from normal mood changes. The brains of people who are suffering from mild depression look the same on a scan as the brains of people whose football team has just lost the Super Bowl. They even look the same as the brains of people who have been asked to think sad thoughts. As Freud pointed out, you can’t distinguish mourning from melancholy just by looking. So a psychiatrist who diagnoses simply by checking off the symptoms listed in the D.S.M. will, as Wakefield and others complain, end up with a lot of false positives. The anti-Freudian bias against the relevance of life histories leaves a lot of holes. But bringing life histories back into the picture isn’t going to make diagnoses any more scientific.
Science, particularly medical science, is not a skyscraper made of Lucite. It is a field strewn with black boxes. There have been many medical treatments that worked even though, for a long time, we didn’t know why they worked—aspirin, for example. And drugs have often been used to carve out diseases. Malaria was “discovered” when it was learned that it responded to quinine. Someone was listening to quinine. As Nicholas Christakis, a medical sociologist, has pointed out, many commonly used remedies, such as Viagra, work less than half the time, and there are conditions, such as cardiovascular disease, that respond to placebos for which we would never contemplate not using medication, even though it proves only marginally more effective in trials. Some patients with Parkinson’s respond to sham surgery. The ostensibly shaky track record of antidepressants does not place them outside the pharmacological pale.
The assumption of many critics of contemporary psychiatry seems to be that if the D.S.M. “carved nature at the joints,” if its diagnoses corresponded to discrete diseases, then all those categories would be acceptable. But, as Elliot Valenstein (no friend of biochemical psychiatry) points out in “Blaming the Brain” (1998), “at some period in history the cause of every ‘legitimate’ disease was unknown, and they all were at one time ‘syndromes’ or ‘disorders’ characterized by common signs and symptoms.”
D.S.M.-III was created to address a problem. The problem was reliability, and the manual was an attempt to get the profession on the same page so that every psychiatrist would make the same diagnosis for a given set of symptoms. The manual did not address a different problem, which is validity—the correspondence of symptoms to organic conditions. But if we couldn’t treat psychiatric patients until we were certain what the underlying pathology was, we would not be treating most patients. For some disorders, such as depression, we may never know, in any useful way, what the underlying pathology is, since we can’t distinguish biologically patients who are suffering from depression from patients who are enduring a depressing life problem.
For many people, this is the most troubling aspect of contemporary psychiatry. These people worry that an easy way is now available to jump the emotional queue, that people can now receive medical enhancements who do not “deserve” them. For example, would you take an antidepressant to get over the pain of being laid off? You might, if you reasoned that since your goal is to get over it and move on, there is no point in prolonging the agony. But you might also reason that learning how to cope with difficulty without a therapeutic crutch is something that it would be good to take away from this disaster. This is not a problem we should expect science to solve for us someday. It’s not even a problem that we should want science to solve for us.
Mental disorders sit at the intersection of three distinct fields. They are biological conditions, since they correspond to changes in the body. They are also psychological conditions, since they are experienced cognitively and emotionally—they are part of our conscious life. And they have moral significance, since they involve us in matters such as personal agency and responsibility, social norms and values, and character, and these all vary as cultures vary.
Many people today are infatuated with the biological determinants of things. They find compelling the idea that moods, tastes, preferences, and behaviors can be explained by genes, or by natural selection, or by brain amines (even though these explanations are almost always circular: if we do x, it must be because we have been selected to do x). People like to be able to say, I’m just an organism, and my depression is just a chemical thing, so, of the three ways of considering my condition, I choose the biological. People do say this. The question to ask them is, Who is the “I” that is making this choice? Is that your biology talking, too?
The decision to handle mental conditions biologically is as moral a decision as any other. It is a time-honored one, too. Human beings have always tried to cure psychological disorders through the body. In the Hippocratic tradition, melancholics were advised to drink white wine, in order to counteract the black bile. (This remains an option.) Some people feel an instinctive aversion to treating psychological states with pills, but no one would think it inappropriate to advise a depressed or anxious person to try exercise or meditation.
The recommendation from people who have written about their own depression is, overwhelmingly, Take the meds! It’s the position of Andrew Solomon, in “The Noonday Demon” (2001), a wise and humane book. It’s the position of many of the contributors to “Unholy Ghost” (2001) and “Poets on Prozac” (2008), anthologies of essays by writers about depression. The ones who took medication say that they write much better than they did when they were depressed. William Styron, in his widely read memoir “Darkness Visible” (1990), says that his experience in talk therapy was a damaging waste of time, and that he wishes he had gone straight to the hospital when his depression became severe.
What if your sadness was grief, though? And what if there were a pill that relieved you of the physical pain of bereavement—sleeplessness, weeping, loss of appetite—without diluting your love for or memory of the dead? Assuming that bereavement “naturally” remits after six months, would you take a pill today that will allow you to feel the way you will be feeling six months from now anyway? Probably most people would say no.
Is this because of what the psychiatrist Gerald Klerman once called “pharmacological Calvinism”? Klerman was describing the view, which he thought many Americans hold, that shortcuts to happiness are sinful, that happiness is not worth anything unless you have worked for it. (Klerman misunderstood Calvinist theology, but never mind.) We are proud of our children when they learn to manage their fears and perform in public, and we feel that we would not be so proud of them if they took a pill instead, even though the desired outcome is the same. We think that sucking it up, mastering our fears, is a sign of character. But do we think that people who are naturally fearless lack character? We usually think the opposite. Yet those people are just born lucky. Why should the rest of us have to pay a price in dread, shame, and stomach aches to achieve a state of being that they enjoy for nothing?
Or do we resist the grief pill because we believe that bereavement is doing some work for us? Maybe we think that since we appear to have been naturally selected as creatures that mourn, we shouldn’t short-circuit the process. Or is it that we don’t want to be the kind of person who does not experience profound sorrow when someone we love dies? Questions like these are the reason we have literature and philosophy. No science will ever answer them. ♦
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/03/01/100301crat_atlarge_menand?printable=true#ixzz0l0Fi6Alu
Monday, 12 April 2010
Friday, 9 April 2010
Mining disaster raises questions about effectiveness of safety laws - CNN.com
Mining disaster raises questions about effectiveness of safety laws - CNN.com: "However, mine experts interviewed by CNN said the MINER Act and the MSHA regulations have proven insufficient to crack down on chronic offenders.
One reason is an apparent loophole in MSHA policy that allows mining companies cited for violations to avoid being designated as multiple offenders facing a government-ordered shutdown.
MSHA looks at citations over the previous two years to determine whether a pattern of safety violations exists. If it determines such a pattern, MSHA can then begin steps to shut down a mine or a particular part of a mine where the violations have occurred.
The problem, experts say, is that MSHA only considers final citations -- those that have completed the potentially lengthy administrative and legal process.
While mine operators are compelled to quickly abate any safety violations, they can appeal particularly troublesome citations and subsequent fines to delay final resolution of them until after the expiration of MSHA's two-year window for consideration."
One reason is an apparent loophole in MSHA policy that allows mining companies cited for violations to avoid being designated as multiple offenders facing a government-ordered shutdown.
MSHA looks at citations over the previous two years to determine whether a pattern of safety violations exists. If it determines such a pattern, MSHA can then begin steps to shut down a mine or a particular part of a mine where the violations have occurred.
The problem, experts say, is that MSHA only considers final citations -- those that have completed the potentially lengthy administrative and legal process.
While mine operators are compelled to quickly abate any safety violations, they can appeal particularly troublesome citations and subsequent fines to delay final resolution of them until after the expiration of MSHA's two-year window for consideration."
Kyrgyzstan capital bloodied, looted and chaotic after overthrow of Bakiyev | World news | The Guardian
Kyrgyzstan capital bloodied, looted and chaotic after overthrow of Bakiyev | World news | The Guardian
A woman walks by the burned out offices of the general prosecutor in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Photograph: Vyacheslav Oseledko/AFP/Getty Images
The looters had already taken the lampshades, the fridge, and the DVD player. Today they began on the shrubbery – digging up the dwarf fir trees from the front garden of Kyrgyzstan's president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev. The air resounded with crashing. One ambitious looter even stole the drainpipes.
The popular revolt in Kyrgyzstan that toppled Bakiyev two days ago was so sudden and ferocious that nobody has had a chance to give it a name yet. But it would be plausible to dub it the fir tree revolution – after the presidential shrubs taken and loaded into taxis.
Kyrgyzstan's opposition parties declared they had formed a new interim government, after a day of mayhem on yesterday when security force snipers and riot police opened fire on unarmed demonstrators as they tried to storm the main government building in the capital, Bishkek. At least 75 people were killed and 300 more injured.
Speaking in Bishkek's ransacked parliament building today, the opposition leader Roza Otunbayeva said: "You can call what happened here a popular uprising or a revolution. In essence people were simply fed up with the regime, and with its repressive, tyrannical and abusive ways."
Otunbayeva said her temporary government had taken control – with security headquarters, state TV and various government building now in opposition hands. She added that she planned to hold elections in six months after a new constitution had been drafted.
Out on the streets, however, there were few signs that the new regime was in control of anything. The police and security forces appeared to be hiding. Large crowds milled around the Soviet-era fir-tree-lined boulevards, forming and reforming revolutionary huddles. Dozens of shops had been looted. Burned out cars littered the pavements.
The main government building was on fire, with thick, black smoke pouring out of its upper floors. Hundreds of looters gathered near the White House presidential building. The shells of trucks and a tractor lay next to destroyed railings. Youths perched on an armoured personnel carrier, seized yesterday from government troops.
By late afternoon the general prosecutor's office was gutted, with gangs roaming around inside, smashing windows with broken-off table legs. Sheets of paper – followed by a fig plant – fell from a balcony. At the parliament building opposition workers were tossing posters of Bakiyev into the street.
Otunbayeva, a former foreign minister, said Bakiyev had fled the capital after yesterday's revolution and had taken refuge in the southern town of Jalal-Abad, on the Tajik border. Asked whether the new administration planned to arrest him, following yesterday's massacre, she replied: "He should resign. His business is finished in Kyrgyzstan."
But the prospect of prolonged instability was raised when Bakiyev later told a Russian radio station that he refused to stand down. Speaking to Ekho Moskvy from an undisclosed location, he said: "I don't admit defeat in any way … Even though I am president, I don't have any real levers of power."
Protesters said they had been driven to revolt by the decision to raise communal charges for water and electricity. The hikes had been the last straw in the country of five million people already wrestling with mass unemployment and widespread poverty. The unrest began in provincial cities on Tuesday, with locals seizing regional government buildings, before riots erupted in Bishkek.
Opposite the White House, Melis Deripasov was still incredulous at the security forces' reaction. "So many boys died. Two of my friends died. A young girl died just over there. The government used snipers against us," he said. "I'm unemployed. There is no work and no factories. Bakiyev stole everything. All that was left was the air we breathe."
This was the second revolution in five years Deripasov had taken part in. In 2005 pro-democracy demonstrators propelled Bakiyev into power, in the so-called tulip revolution.
But despite hopes that he would be a progressive ruler, critics say that Bakiyev turned out to be as greedy and illiberal as all other leaders in Central Asia. "This revolt was a cry from the soul. But I can't help feeling we deserved this president," Gulnura Bepeera said.
Kyrgyzstan is now at the centre of an geopolitical tussle between Moscow, Washington and Beijing. Russia's prime minister, Vladimir Putin, today phoned Otunbayeva and offered his support. She in turn thanked Russia for its "significant support" in exposing what she described as a "nepotistic, criminal regime".
The Kremlin was fed up with the Bakiyev regime, which it believed had fallen under US control. At issue is the US air base at Manas, near Bishkek, a key supply post for the US military and for Barack Obama's efforts to win the war in nearby Afghanistan. The Russians have been trying to turf the Americans out of the base. The opposition, now in power, had promised to do just that. Today, however, Otunbayeva said there would be no quick decisions: "Its status quo will remain in place. We still have some questions on it. Give us time."
But another former opposition leader now in a senior government role said there was a "high probability" that the US lease would be curtailed.
Much of the frustration directed at the ousted government has stemmed from Bakiyev's appointment of many of his family members to key government positions. In particular, his younger son, Maxim, was widely detested. Inside Maxim Bakiyev's wrecked and burned mansion a stream of looters and the merely curious trampled over beds of broken glass. On the wall someone had written: "Fuck you". Nearby, they had added: "Death to Maxim!" A couple of fir trees were still left in the beds. But the others had all gone, transplanted – like the rest of Kyrgyzstan – to a new and uncertain future.
A woman walks by the burned out offices of the general prosecutor in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Photograph: Vyacheslav Oseledko/AFP/Getty Images
The looters had already taken the lampshades, the fridge, and the DVD player. Today they began on the shrubbery – digging up the dwarf fir trees from the front garden of Kyrgyzstan's president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev. The air resounded with crashing. One ambitious looter even stole the drainpipes.
The popular revolt in Kyrgyzstan that toppled Bakiyev two days ago was so sudden and ferocious that nobody has had a chance to give it a name yet. But it would be plausible to dub it the fir tree revolution – after the presidential shrubs taken and loaded into taxis.
Kyrgyzstan's opposition parties declared they had formed a new interim government, after a day of mayhem on yesterday when security force snipers and riot police opened fire on unarmed demonstrators as they tried to storm the main government building in the capital, Bishkek. At least 75 people were killed and 300 more injured.
Speaking in Bishkek's ransacked parliament building today, the opposition leader Roza Otunbayeva said: "You can call what happened here a popular uprising or a revolution. In essence people were simply fed up with the regime, and with its repressive, tyrannical and abusive ways."
Otunbayeva said her temporary government had taken control – with security headquarters, state TV and various government building now in opposition hands. She added that she planned to hold elections in six months after a new constitution had been drafted.
Out on the streets, however, there were few signs that the new regime was in control of anything. The police and security forces appeared to be hiding. Large crowds milled around the Soviet-era fir-tree-lined boulevards, forming and reforming revolutionary huddles. Dozens of shops had been looted. Burned out cars littered the pavements.
The main government building was on fire, with thick, black smoke pouring out of its upper floors. Hundreds of looters gathered near the White House presidential building. The shells of trucks and a tractor lay next to destroyed railings. Youths perched on an armoured personnel carrier, seized yesterday from government troops.
By late afternoon the general prosecutor's office was gutted, with gangs roaming around inside, smashing windows with broken-off table legs. Sheets of paper – followed by a fig plant – fell from a balcony. At the parliament building opposition workers were tossing posters of Bakiyev into the street.
Otunbayeva, a former foreign minister, said Bakiyev had fled the capital after yesterday's revolution and had taken refuge in the southern town of Jalal-Abad, on the Tajik border. Asked whether the new administration planned to arrest him, following yesterday's massacre, she replied: "He should resign. His business is finished in Kyrgyzstan."
But the prospect of prolonged instability was raised when Bakiyev later told a Russian radio station that he refused to stand down. Speaking to Ekho Moskvy from an undisclosed location, he said: "I don't admit defeat in any way … Even though I am president, I don't have any real levers of power."
Protesters said they had been driven to revolt by the decision to raise communal charges for water and electricity. The hikes had been the last straw in the country of five million people already wrestling with mass unemployment and widespread poverty. The unrest began in provincial cities on Tuesday, with locals seizing regional government buildings, before riots erupted in Bishkek.
Opposite the White House, Melis Deripasov was still incredulous at the security forces' reaction. "So many boys died. Two of my friends died. A young girl died just over there. The government used snipers against us," he said. "I'm unemployed. There is no work and no factories. Bakiyev stole everything. All that was left was the air we breathe."
This was the second revolution in five years Deripasov had taken part in. In 2005 pro-democracy demonstrators propelled Bakiyev into power, in the so-called tulip revolution.
But despite hopes that he would be a progressive ruler, critics say that Bakiyev turned out to be as greedy and illiberal as all other leaders in Central Asia. "This revolt was a cry from the soul. But I can't help feeling we deserved this president," Gulnura Bepeera said.
Kyrgyzstan is now at the centre of an geopolitical tussle between Moscow, Washington and Beijing. Russia's prime minister, Vladimir Putin, today phoned Otunbayeva and offered his support. She in turn thanked Russia for its "significant support" in exposing what she described as a "nepotistic, criminal regime".
The Kremlin was fed up with the Bakiyev regime, which it believed had fallen under US control. At issue is the US air base at Manas, near Bishkek, a key supply post for the US military and for Barack Obama's efforts to win the war in nearby Afghanistan. The Russians have been trying to turf the Americans out of the base. The opposition, now in power, had promised to do just that. Today, however, Otunbayeva said there would be no quick decisions: "Its status quo will remain in place. We still have some questions on it. Give us time."
But another former opposition leader now in a senior government role said there was a "high probability" that the US lease would be curtailed.
Much of the frustration directed at the ousted government has stemmed from Bakiyev's appointment of many of his family members to key government positions. In particular, his younger son, Maxim, was widely detested. Inside Maxim Bakiyev's wrecked and burned mansion a stream of looters and the merely curious trampled over beds of broken glass. On the wall someone had written: "Fuck you". Nearby, they had added: "Death to Maxim!" A couple of fir trees were still left in the beds. But the others had all gone, transplanted – like the rest of Kyrgyzstan – to a new and uncertain future.
Thursday, 8 April 2010
Associated Baptist Press - Study links religion to racial prejudice
Associated Baptist Press - Study links religion to racial prejudice
Study links religion to racial prejudice
By Bob Allen
Wednesday, April 07, 2010
More than 50 years after Martin Luther King Jr. lamented that 11 o'clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America, a Baylor University study suggests that religion itself may be a contributing factor in racial prejudice.
The study, published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, found that people subliminally "primed" with Christian words reported more negative attitudes about African-Americans than those primed with neutral words.
Wade Rowatt
"What's interesting about this study is that it shows some component of religion does lead to some negative evaluations of people based on race," said Wade Rowatt, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor, who led the study. "We just don't know why."
Priming is a process by which exposure to one word or concept influences an individual's future response to something else. Studies show that people asked to choose between a string of letters on a computer screen that forms a word -- "banner," for example -- and one that does not -- like "banack" -- respond more quickly the next time they see a similar word. After being primed with "water," for example, subjects will more quickly identify the string "drink" as a word. Psychologists call it "cognitive priming," and it has long been thought to play a role in prejudice.
Priming is why supermarkets stock items in bins marked with signs like "10 for $10" or "limit 12 to customer." Because it's subconscious, shoppers don't think they are influenced to buy larger quantities, but it must work. Otherwise businesses wouldn't continue to do it. It has also been observed that people whose polling place is a school building are more likely to support a school-funding project than those who cast their votes elsewhere.
In the Baylor study, college students recruited from introductory psychology classes were primed with either religious-word letter strings like "Bible," "faith," "Christ" and "church" or neutral words like "shirt," "butter," "switch" and "hammer." Researchers found that religiously primed students demonstrated "a slight but significant" increase in racial prejudice.
Previous studies show a complex relationship between religiosity and racial prejudice. Some dimensions of religion have been shown to increase levels of prejudice, while others reduce it. Those studies all rely on self-reporting, however, and are therefore skewed by the phenomenon of "social desirability," meaning that some people report more positive racial attitudes than they actually hold.
The Baylor study is thought to be the first to test whether exposure to religious concepts may contribute to racial prejudice.
Rowatt, along with fellow researchers Megan Johnson, a graduate student in social psychology, and Jordan LaBouff, a Ph.D. candidate in social psychology, speculated about possible explanations for what they call the "Christian-racial-prejudice hypothesis."
One is that because America's religious tradition is so influenced by Puritanism, people responding to religious terms may be drawing on ideals like the "Protestant work ethic," which has been shown to activate anti-black attitudes.
Another possibility is that Christian words might evoke feelings of fundamentalism -- with has previously been found correlated with prejudice -- or political conservatism, which tends to justify existing inequalities between blacks and whites.
Another is that religious terms trigger positive feelings toward "in-group" members while denigrating "out-group" members perceived as violating a particular core value.
Groups in the study were ethnically diverse but predominantly white. They were also predominantly Protestant or Catholic.
Researchers said they chose Christianity for the study because it is the most prominent religion in America. African Americans were selected because they are historically a disadvantaged social group in the United States. They suggested that future studies could explore whether a similar effect occurs in other cultures and religions other than Christianity.
Students primed with religious terms scored higher both in terms of "covert" racism -- where individuals evaluated whether conclusions were supported by certain arguments rather than whether they agreed with those arguments or conclusions themselves -- and "overt" racism -- negative attitudes expressed in responses to questions like how afraid they are of African Americans as a group or whether or not they like them.
"These experiments are the first to document that activation of Christian concepts by priming affects racial attitudes and provide some insight into the 'paradoxical' relationship between religion and prejudice," the study concludes. "What now remains to be demonstrated is what mechanisms underlie this relationship between religion and racial prejudice."
Rowatt said he doesn't know if the study helps explain why despite progress in race relations since the 1950s, black and white Americans still overwhelmingly worship in separate churches.
Kevin Dougherty, assistant professor of sociology at Baylor, says people tend to be attracted to churches by a "shared culture" that include things like agreement about what defines sound doctrine, worship style and the presence of family and friends. He warns, however, that cultural divisions also promote social divisions, which are part of what the Bible says Christ came to redeem.
Dougherty says factors like race, social class and gender should not divide the nation's 350,000-plus congregations. While not every church can be multi-racial, he says, every church should be a part of "God's redemptive work of reconciling societal divisions."
Study links religion to racial prejudice
By Bob Allen
Wednesday, April 07, 2010
More than 50 years after Martin Luther King Jr. lamented that 11 o'clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America, a Baylor University study suggests that religion itself may be a contributing factor in racial prejudice.
The study, published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, found that people subliminally "primed" with Christian words reported more negative attitudes about African-Americans than those primed with neutral words.
Wade Rowatt
"What's interesting about this study is that it shows some component of religion does lead to some negative evaluations of people based on race," said Wade Rowatt, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor, who led the study. "We just don't know why."
Priming is a process by which exposure to one word or concept influences an individual's future response to something else. Studies show that people asked to choose between a string of letters on a computer screen that forms a word -- "banner," for example -- and one that does not -- like "banack" -- respond more quickly the next time they see a similar word. After being primed with "water," for example, subjects will more quickly identify the string "drink" as a word. Psychologists call it "cognitive priming," and it has long been thought to play a role in prejudice.
Priming is why supermarkets stock items in bins marked with signs like "10 for $10" or "limit 12 to customer." Because it's subconscious, shoppers don't think they are influenced to buy larger quantities, but it must work. Otherwise businesses wouldn't continue to do it. It has also been observed that people whose polling place is a school building are more likely to support a school-funding project than those who cast their votes elsewhere.
In the Baylor study, college students recruited from introductory psychology classes were primed with either religious-word letter strings like "Bible," "faith," "Christ" and "church" or neutral words like "shirt," "butter," "switch" and "hammer." Researchers found that religiously primed students demonstrated "a slight but significant" increase in racial prejudice.
Previous studies show a complex relationship between religiosity and racial prejudice. Some dimensions of religion have been shown to increase levels of prejudice, while others reduce it. Those studies all rely on self-reporting, however, and are therefore skewed by the phenomenon of "social desirability," meaning that some people report more positive racial attitudes than they actually hold.
The Baylor study is thought to be the first to test whether exposure to religious concepts may contribute to racial prejudice.
Rowatt, along with fellow researchers Megan Johnson, a graduate student in social psychology, and Jordan LaBouff, a Ph.D. candidate in social psychology, speculated about possible explanations for what they call the "Christian-racial-prejudice hypothesis."
One is that because America's religious tradition is so influenced by Puritanism, people responding to religious terms may be drawing on ideals like the "Protestant work ethic," which has been shown to activate anti-black attitudes.
Another possibility is that Christian words might evoke feelings of fundamentalism -- with has previously been found correlated with prejudice -- or political conservatism, which tends to justify existing inequalities between blacks and whites.
Another is that religious terms trigger positive feelings toward "in-group" members while denigrating "out-group" members perceived as violating a particular core value.
Groups in the study were ethnically diverse but predominantly white. They were also predominantly Protestant or Catholic.
Researchers said they chose Christianity for the study because it is the most prominent religion in America. African Americans were selected because they are historically a disadvantaged social group in the United States. They suggested that future studies could explore whether a similar effect occurs in other cultures and religions other than Christianity.
Students primed with religious terms scored higher both in terms of "covert" racism -- where individuals evaluated whether conclusions were supported by certain arguments rather than whether they agreed with those arguments or conclusions themselves -- and "overt" racism -- negative attitudes expressed in responses to questions like how afraid they are of African Americans as a group or whether or not they like them.
"These experiments are the first to document that activation of Christian concepts by priming affects racial attitudes and provide some insight into the 'paradoxical' relationship between religion and prejudice," the study concludes. "What now remains to be demonstrated is what mechanisms underlie this relationship between religion and racial prejudice."
Rowatt said he doesn't know if the study helps explain why despite progress in race relations since the 1950s, black and white Americans still overwhelmingly worship in separate churches.
Kevin Dougherty, assistant professor of sociology at Baylor, says people tend to be attracted to churches by a "shared culture" that include things like agreement about what defines sound doctrine, worship style and the presence of family and friends. He warns, however, that cultural divisions also promote social divisions, which are part of what the Bible says Christ came to redeem.
Dougherty says factors like race, social class and gender should not divide the nation's 350,000-plus congregations. While not every church can be multi-racial, he says, every church should be a part of "God's redemptive work of reconciling societal divisions."
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