"Harm reduction" is the public health philosophy that brought you syringe exchange, condoms in schools, sex education, and legalized prostitution. Founded in the 1970s, harm reduction readily admits that people will engage in risky behaviors like taking intravenous (IV) drugs and having sex. Rather than taking the paternalistic attitude of punishment -- "See, I told you so" -- that characterizes more conservative public health philosophies (such as abstinence-only sex education), harm reduction understands that adults who want to do things to their bodies, with no other people involved (or in the case of sex, two consenting adults), should be allowed to do so, and they should be provided with ways to engage in those behaviors that reduce the risk. At Berkeley NEED, we give out syringes to IV drug users in the hope that they will not re-use or share old syringes, which can cause infections, destroy their veins, and spread disease, all of three of which can result in death. From the economic point of view, it costs far less money to distribute syringes to drug users (NEED's annual budget is about $160,000, the vast majority of which gets spent on syringes) than to care for them once they get infections or other diseases, to say nothing of the cost of managing an outbreak of HIV, Hepatitis C, or staphylococcus in a given population.

But this piece is not about harm reduction as it applies to health care; much has already been written about that. No, my aim is to discuss a harm reduction approach to the current mortgage crisis, which has a lot to do with, say, IV drug use.

The current mortgage crisis exists because of risky behaviors. Mortgage lenders sold loans to people who couldn't pay them back, but figured there was nothing wrong because, hey, the housing market is doing great and those people will sell their homes before their interest rates increase. Their debts were then carved up and sold to other investment firms throughout the world. This entire model rested on the assumption that housing prices would increase for the foreseeable future. This assumption turned sour a few years ago, when housing prices plateaued and then began to fall. The "housing bubble" had burst, and as a result, home owners couldn't sell. Since they couldn't sell before their interest rates increased, the "variable" part of their variable-rate mortgages kicked in. Home owners defaulted, sending a jolt to everyone who had bought a piece of their mortgages – which, it turns out, was everyone in the world.

Last week, the Federal Reserve Bank – in conjunction with JP Morgan – bailed out investment firm Bear Stearns. The Washington Post observed that bailing out a bank could create a "moral hazard" that would "simply encourage more of the same bad behavior." This "bad behavior" is ostensibly the risky investment practices -- selling loans to people that couldn't pay them back -- that got Bear Stearns into this problem in the first place. This is a very paternalistic attitude to take toward a worldwide investment bank, and investors in general. Strangely, adults seem to act toward other adults like they would with children, believing that the act of punishment – of making the adult learn from his or her mistake – is more important than the consequences of engaging in "enabling."

What should be important is making sure Bear Stearns doesn't default on its loans. Imagine for a second that a drunk driver gets into an accident and the paramedics are called. What if the paramedics, instead of immediately attempting to save the driver, gave him a stern lecture about drunk driving first? Imagine further that, instead of even helping the drunk driver, the paramedics left him to die, since he needed to "learn his lesson" about drunk driving. In medicine, we engage in enabling all the time because human life is valuable, period. The first order of business upon finding someone in need of medical help is to give them medical help! Once their condition is stabilized, then they will be of course subject to the full brunt of the law.

And what about Bear Stearns? The fall of a major investment bank could be the economic equivalent of internal bleeding. The Wall Street Journal had it right when it suggested that Bear Stearns should be bailed out because of the damage that $30 billion in un-repayable mortgage debt could do. And yes, Bear Stearns will be admonished -- in fact, it's already been punished by being sold to JP Morgan. Already, executives at places like Citigroup have been replaced for their roles in creating this mess. There will undoubtedly be investigations in the future, and the SEC will create new regulations to prevent the kind of junk debt trading that has been happening for the last ten years.

The presumption that this kind of behavior will happen again is similarly paternalistic. Different kinds of risky trading will happen again, regardless of what the Fed does or does not do. If the risky trading impacts one or a few companies, then those companies will bear the consequences. But if the trading impacts the world economy, then the Fed will once again have to step in and perform surgery. And it's not like Bear Stearns is laughing all the way to the bank that their devious scheme worked: they were bought out by JP Morgan for $2 a share. Bear Stearns had its limbs amputated, and it will never walk again, but it's still alive, at least. The Federal Reserve Bank gave JP Morgan the money to facilitate the buyout -- your taxpayer money. And well it should. $30 billion is enough to pay to make sure the economy doesn't tank. But, of course, the investment companies that created this situation should be punished, admonished, investigated, and fined for their practices. But let's worry about that later. Right now, the value of the dollar is plummeting and consumer confidence is dwindling.

I hate to use cliches, but it's putting the cart before the horse to care about the behavioral implications of bailing out major investment banks. What we should care about first is making sure these banks don't take out the rest of the economy with them. After that, there will be plenty of time to worry about who should be blamed, who should have fingers waved at them sternly, and what should be done to keep this from happening. First, let's stop the bleeding so that there's still a patient when this is all done.

Posted by Mark at 5:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Once again, Glenn Greenwald is my hero. Greenwald writes in Salon about the notion that "centrism" and "balance" make an opinion good or correct. He argues that the tendency in the so-called mainstream media (The New York Times, CNN, et al.) to demand what they deem objectivity is detrimental to the debate going on:

When there is grave imbalance in political power, corruption or extremism -- as there has been for the last eight years, at least -- then those who preach balance and demand a centrist critique of everything are the ones who are mindless, misleading partisans. They demand centrist equivalencies as an ideology, regardless of whether those equivalencies are real.

He then offers several examples of book reviews in which the authors are criticized not for being wrong, but for being too one-sided. As Greenwald notes, none of these critics ever addresses the issue of the authors' facts.

The street goes both ways. President Bush insisted that the the other side of the story needs to be addressed when it comes to global warming, even though no credible scientific sources suggest that humans are not causing global climate change. State governments that want students to hear both sides of the story when it comes to evolution insist that evolution and intelligent design (or its parent, creationism) don't understand -- or refuse to admit, or wish to be intentionally deceptive regarding the fact -- that there is no scientist who does not believe in evolution.

Greenwald is right: there are times when the "there are two sides to the story" trope is wrong. The Bush administration has consistently broken the law. Period. There is no way to give them the benefit of the doubt. There is no way to come at the adminstration from the other side. They are unilaterally wrong. The notion that humans are not causing climate change is wrong. The notion that evolution is not real is wrong. And, says Greenwald, people shouldn't be afraid to say that.

Posted by Mark at 8:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Richard D. Erlich

US politics are getting explicitly generational again, so US media need to take much more care in how they discuss age groups; how the media frame the image of different groups is politically significant.

Case very much in point -- for over a century, people who should know better have established adolescence, and more recently, "late adolescence," as definite stages of human development, and then have generalized about the pathology of adolescence as a time of Sturm und Drang, impulsive violence, still-forming brains, raging hormones, and unique ignorance and stupidity.
In this context, consider two basically innocuous, useful, and well-written recent stories from The New York Times News Service.

An article by Sam Dillon tells us, as headlined in my local newspaper, that a "Survey finds teens are ignorant of history," and "On literature, the teenagers fared even worse. About half knew that in the Bible Job is known for his patience in suffering."

Uh, Job has become a by-word for patience amidst suffering because there have been some powerful adults with agendas and a whole lot more adults who have never read the Book of Job.

In the poem of Job, Job fairly spectacularly loses his patience and accuses God of injustice: "I am blameless; I regard not myself; / I loathe my life. / It is all one; therefore I say, / 'He [God] destroys both the blameless and the wicked'" (9.21-22, RSV, slightly re-punctuated).

Michael Males has suggested at some length that older U.S. teens are in most ways a normal adult U.S. population. I'll suggest that if older U.S. teens are more ignorant of history than their elders, it may be because a bit more of history is history for them, and not remembered current events. If they are ignorant in many areas of history and literature -- and they are -- it may be because they are indeed a normal adult U.S. population.

If they have forgotten or haven't read the Book of Job, they may be in company with a well-educated journalist, his editors, and the writers of a survey important enough to be reported by The New York Times News Service.

Unless they do something major about it, ignorant teens become ignorant grownups, and the ignorance or knowledgeability of American teenagers needs to be put into the context of Americans generally.

Context is also important in teen automobile driving, the background subject of a very interesting piece by Mary M. Chapman and Micheline Maynard on U.S. teens' delaying getting drivers licenses.

Chapman and Maynard remind us that "Overall, teenage drivers have the highest crash risk of any group. Car accidents account for one-third of all deaths of 16- to 18-year-olds. Also, more 16-year-old drivers die because of driver error than those from the ages 17 to 49."

Is the problem that teenagers have the highest number of new drivers of any age group, or is the problem that teenagers are teenagers? We get no information on how older new drivers do. Nor do we get any information about driver error among drivers 50-years old and up.

And the high percentage of deaths from car accidents for teens may be the downside of something very good: that teens don't often die any more from infectious diseases and are not prone to dropping dead from heart attacks or strokes.

The more interesting statistics on U.S. teens' delaying getting drivers licenses may be any that reflect U.S. teens' more generally delaying adulthood. And those statistics might be most useful if we asked if U.S. teens might make a rational choice in delaying adulthood.

Look, I spent thirty-five years teaching undergraduates and living in a neighborhood both rich in college students and an easy walk to a consolidated high school. I'm well aware that U.S. teens can be ignorant, stupid, loud, drunkenly obnoxious, rude, and/or ill-mannered.

Still, moving into an era of increased generational competition for resources, it would be best to assume that older US teenagers are young adults and deserve a fair share. Evidence to the contrary needs to be presented carefully as contextualized, comparative evidence.

Posted by Mark at 7:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Susan Gregory Thomas, Buy, Buy, Baby: How Consumer Culture Manipulates Parents and Harms Young Minds, Houghton Mifflin: 2007. $25 in hardback.

There's a tremendous amount of "educational" toys on the market for children today. But recently, author Susan Gregory Thomas noticed that the age range for these toys has been getting younger and younger. Now, toys are marketed to children as young as 6 months. And why? Because parents believe the marketing copy that tells them these toys will make their kid learn better and faster. Everyone wants their kid to have a leg up; if the kid is behind everyone else, she won't get into a good preschool, which means she won't get into a good Montessori school, which means she won't get into that private high school, she won't go to Stanford, and she'll never become the president. Damn, better buy this kid a LeapPad!

But the marketing copy is based on nebulous or non-existent research. What more research shows is that children under 1 year don't learn anything from "educational" toys or television shows. What they do learn are characters and brand names that will become familiar to them later in life. Introducing children early on to LeapFrog products or Elmo insures that they will continue to spend money on those products and, when they have their own children, will buy the Elmo-branded toys instead of the Thomas the Tank Engines.

Through 200 disturbing pages, Thomas shows us how marketing companies see the word "educational" as nothing more than another technique to get parents to purchase their products. "Educational" is in as parents try to make Baby learn fourteen languages not by speaking them in the home but by showing them psychedelic patterns through Baby Einstein. Thomas concludes that most of the products don't work, that the science behind them is flawed or missing, and that Baby will grow up just fine without listening to Mozart. If anything, she learns that introducing children to television at a young age can be harmful, as infants learn language best by being spoken to by living humans, not TV shows.

Posted by Mark at 4:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Bush administration's public defense of its warrantless wiretapping program, called the Terrorist Surveillance Program, rests on myths, half-truths, deceptions, and outright lies. The administration hopes that the American people won't investigate its arguments for themselves. It's a good gamble, because if the people found out the truth behind what the administration claims about the TSP, they would unilaterally condemn it and demand to know the truth about it. When conservative Uncle George visits this weekend, let him know why he's wrong to support spying on people "who have something to hide."

The president has the power to guarantee that warrantless surveillance is legal

Under the Constitution, only the judiciary branch has the power to say what is and is not legal. The president’s claims of legality were based not on a judge's opinion, but the opinion of the Justice Department. While the Justice Department may provide support for the president’s belief that the TSP was legal, Justice’s opinions are by no means binding, nor do they carry any weight as anything more than advice. When the president claims that he assured telecommunications companies that the program was legal, keep in mind that his assurance was not legally binding.

FISA is too out of date to be useful

Even though the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was signed into law in 1978, it has been amended as technology has progressed, including in the USA PATRIOT Act.

FISA takes too long to work and is too cumbersome in this post-9/11 world

Actually, FISA currently permits the government to engage in foreign intelligence surveillance for up to three days before requiring a warrant. The Bush administration would like to paint a picture of FISA as requiring that mountains of paperwork be tackled before surveillance can begin, resulting in the loss of valuable intelligence due to bureaucracy. This simply isn’t true. The authors of FISA understood that some surveillance would need to be immediate, and they inserted provisions for such surveillance. The administration can begin the process of surveillance first and then begin the process of obtaining a warrant.

Fat-cat class-action lawyers stand to benefit from lawsuits against telecom companies, so lawsuits against telecom companies are morally unjustified

Giant private law firms and not involved in these cases, in which some 40 Americans have sued AT&T, Verizon, and others based on their belief that those companies gave their private information to the government without a court order. It is civil liberties groups like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation that are filing these suits on behalf of petitioners who believe they were illegally wiretapped. The ACLU and EFF do not bill their clients $500 an hour; indeed, they don’t bill them at all. The organizations filing these suits may recover court costs, but those reflect only the cost of going through court proceedings. These companies will not make a profit off of these cases. There is no money to be made here; if there were, then you can believe giant private law firms would be involved.

Telecom companies were acting in “good faith,” so the lawsuits are morally unjustified

Whether or not telecom companies acted in good faith is irrelevant. They broke the law. And they didn’t do it unwittingly. The administration approached several telecom companies about voluntarily wiretapping, including AT&T, Verizon, and Qwest. Only Qwest declined to assist the government, since it thought the program was illegal and might open the company up to lawsuits. It doesn’t make sense that AT&T’s and Verizon’s lawyers didn’t think the same thing. The telecom companies knew that the legality of the program was questionable, so they must have been offered something by the administration that outweighed the damage that could be caused by lawsuits.

If we don’t grant immunity to telecom companies, they’ll never help the government again

A FISA warrant compels a telecom company to assist the government in foreign intelligence surveillance, if requested. Moreover, if the TSP had occurred under the auspices of FISA, we wouldn’t be arguing about immunity; FISA grants immunity to those who assist the government under a FISA warrant. There are protections within the U.S. Code that prevent a telecommunications provider from voluntarily surrendering subscriber information to the government. If the issue is, "They'll never voluntarily surrender information ever again," then all the better! They shouldn't have been doing that in the first place; the government should have obtained a FISA warrant.

We need the Terrorist Surveillance Program to fight terrorism

We have no idea whether or not we need the TSP, as we do not know what its efficacy is beyond the protestations of the Bush administration that it has averted terrorist attacks. Additionally, there are documents that suggest that the administration wanted to begin warrantless surveillance of Americans well before the September 11 attacks. The only reason that surveillance didn't proceed was because there was no reason important enough to justify it. With the September 11 attacks, the administration could justify warrantless wiretapping on national security grounds, as it has done repeatedly since we found out about the TSP.

We’re dealing with a different enemy, here, and we need different tools

FISA allows surveillance of any foreign agent, regardless of whether or not he is associated with a country's government. Terrorists still use phones as they always did. Not requiring a warrant for surveillance does not make us better at intercepting terrorists’ calls. The terrorists who plotted to blow up a plane in the U.K. using liquid explosives were discovered through old-fashioned, non-warrantless police-work.

Democrats are “playing politics” with the nation’s national security

Back in February, Senate Democrats wanted more time to deal with the Protect America Act, a temporary enlargement of surveillance powers that were set to expire soon. In press conferences, President Bush said that Democrats had had ample time to review all the paperwork surrounding the PAA, and that they should stop dragging their feet and make the law permanent. In fact, Democrats had been requesting key documents for months, and the administration saw fit to give them the documents about a week before PAA was set to expire. It could be that the administration intentionally didn’t want to give the Senate enough time to evaluate the program, and then go on TV and suggest that they had been lazy for six months. Democrats were also haranguing about a provision that would grant retroactive immunity to telecom companies that had aided in the TSP.

In response to Bush's insistence that the law not be allowed to expire, since it was so important for national security, Democrats offered to extend PAA for another thirty days. If Bush thought that the PAA was so important to protecting American security, it stands to reason that he would want it to be in force and would sign such an extension to the law. In fact, Bush threatened to veto any temporary extension that crossed his desk, insisting that the Senate’s time was up and it had to make the law permanent. A White House insider said that this was a calculated political move, designed to make the Democrats appear soft on national security and force their hand in the way the president wanted. While the Democrats were willing to extend PAA, it was President Bush who refused such an extension so he could go back later and say that the Democrats weren’t serious about national security. It sounds more like President Bush was, in his own words, “playing politics.”

Posted by Mark at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the interest of using this blog for intellectual pursuits, I present the Gallery of Hotty McHottersons:

Posted by Mark at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)