08 January 23
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
Assuming they can get their house in order in the first place.
On Friday, he gave us confirmation that his tenure leading that committee will be a two-year session of the Airing Of Grievances (at the 2 hour, 2 minute mark at that link). To wit:
They deserve answers to what really happened in that lab in Wuhan, China. Those of us who have kids in the public school system can testify that our kids have lost a year of their education because of the forced virtual learning that so many of our schools put our children through during the Covid pandemic. Congress ran the debt up at least $3 trillion in the name of Covid-19. Yet as I mentioned earlier, there has not been a single hearing in the Oversight Committee to deal with potential waste, fraud, or abuse of the Covid funds. Not a single hearing. And we all know, despite what Dr. Fauci said, American tax dollars were sent through EcoHealth Alliance to the Wuhan lab in China for gain-of-function research, but yet Dr. Fauci hasn't come before Congress and the House of Representatives[...]Now let me say this loud and clear: The Republicans will also investigate a president for potential wrongdoing in Ukraine and Russia, as well as China. The American people have a lot of questions for Dr. Fauci, Christopher Wray, Merrick Garland, and Secretary Mayorkas. We can't have those questions, we can't ask those questions until we get organized and elect our speaker. The role of the Oversight Committee under Speaker Pelosi was a full-time committee to harass the previous president, a committee to advocate for woke social issues, which the Oversight Committee has absolutely no jurisdiction over.
Comer reassured the House that he will investigate everything that ever pissed off a drive-time talk show host in Kentucky. He will also investigate other investigations, including I suspect that of the January 6 select committee. The Vindication Of The Former President* will also be a priority. There will be more smoke blown than a five-alarm warehouse fire. That's what will begin as soon as they get settled in under Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the invisible man.
The firm of Clouseau and Javert, Investigators, is on the case.
On January 15, 1919, a storage tank in Boston containing 2.3 million gallons of molasses burst. The flood of molasses poured through the streets of Boston at 35 mph, killing 21 people and injuring 150.
This week, something similar—if far less destructive—happened in Portage, Wisconsin. From Today:
On Jan. 2, a fire broke out at Associated Milk Producers Inc. dairy plant in Portage, Wisconsin in a part of the building that was storing butter. The fire caused so much butter to melt that a molten river flowed from the factory into the Portage Canal that runs beside the factory[...]“The fire started in a room where butter was being stored and as it was heated it began to flow throughout the structure,” reads a Facebook post from Portage Fire Department posted the following morning on Jan. 3, adding that the butter runoff and heavy smoke slowed access to the structure. “After multiple hours with many crews the fire was contained and extinguished before it could spread past the firewalls and throughout the building."
“When we first tried to go up the stairs to that part that collapsed, this stuff, the butter was running down like three inches thick on the steps,” Portage Fire Department chief Troy Haase told WMTV. “So our guys were up to their knees trying to go up the steps to get to the top and they’re trying to drag the hose line, the hose line got so full of butter they couldn’t hang onto it anymore."
I can't believe it's all butter.
“We hold that our state constitutional right to privacy extends to a woman's decision to have an abortion. The State unquestionably has the authority to limit the right of privacy that protects women from state interference with her decision, but any such limitation must be reasonable and it must be meaningful in that the time frames imposed must afford a woman sufficient time to determine she is pregnant and to take reasonable steps to terminate that pregnancy. Six weeks is, quite simply, not a reasonable period of time for these two things to occur, and therefore the Act violates our state Constitution's prohibition against unreasonable invasions of privacy."
That's some good stuff right there, dealt out this week by Justice Kaye Hearn of the South Carolina Supreme Court, which threw out South Carolina's post-Dobbs anti-choice law that would have banned abortion after six weeks. The court's decision was based on the fact that, unlike the U.S. Constitution, the South Carolina state constitution has an explicit guarantee of a right to privacy. No penumbras, no implicit rights.
Eleven states have a right to privacy written into their state constitutions. These may be the last bulwark against the anti-choice frenzy.
If it can work in South Carolina...
Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Waltz For All Souls" (Tom McDermottt): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.
Weekly Visit To The Pathé Archive: Here, from 1958, is the funeral of Pope Pius XII. His papacy was lengthy, and there are very large brown spots on the apple. And his funeral rites were interrupted when Pius XII imploded.
So [Italian physician] Riccardo [Galeazzi-Lisi] came up with this fabulous method of preservation (with essential oils and resins) that, he claimed, was used to preserve Jesus Christ. He, with a Naples embalmer, Professor Oreste Nuzzi, coated the Pontiff with the oils and wrapped him up tightly with cellophane tape. He assumed that, by the end, the body would be properly preserved and sweet-smelling. What happened was the exact opposite! Due to the blockage of air by the cellophane, the chemical reactions in the body started to build-up, causing anaerobic decomposition. Riccardo tried embalming it the second time but in vain. The body, during the procession from Castel Gandolfo to Rome, started decomposing right in front of the audience. Pope’s chest imploded, his nose and fingers fell off, and his body turned “emerald green." The stench was so putrid that few of the stoic Swiss Guards fainted, and they had to be on rotation to evade the smell.
Presumably, this exercise in postmortem SFX occurred before the Pathé cameras were on the scene. (This also gives me a chance to link to the famous video of the exploding whale.) History is so cool.
Discovery Corner: Archaeologists working the site of the Jamestown colony in Virginia have discovered the bones of ancient, indigenous dogs. From USA Today:
A team of archaeologists at the University of Iowa were able to extract DNA from remains found at Jamestown and confirm that they belonged to ancient dogs that were likely wolf or coyote-sized. It's the first time proof has ever been found that Indigenous dogs were at Jamestown in the 17th century. "They have lineages reaching back to some of the earliest introduction of dogs to North America, so around ... 13,000 years ago," said Ariane Thomas, a PhD student at the University of Iowa.
Alas for these ancient pooches, when the hard winter came, the colonists looked at them and saw food.
Indigenous dogs roamed Jamestown in the early 17th century and out of desperation during harsh winter months, some colonists ate them, researchers have proven.
Look at what we found, anyway!
Hey, ScienceAlert, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!!
Today's ABC AfterSchool Special: “The Bird with the Dinosaur Head.”
The result shows that the shape of the Cratonavis skull is almost the same as that of dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex, and not like a bird's. "The primitive cranial features speak to the fact that most Cretaceous birds such as Cratonavis could not move their upper bill independently with respect to the braincase and lower jaw, a functional innovation widely distributed among living birds that contributes to their enormous ecological diversity," says CAS paleontologist Zhiheng Li. The unusual combination of a dinosaur's akinetic skull with a bird's skeleton adds to previous studies on the importance of evolutionary mosaicism in the early diversification of birds.
Sometimes, I seriously believe that evolution was drunk a lot, which would explain why they lived then to make us happy now.
I'll be back on Monday and maybe we'll have a speaker and maybe we won't, but straitjackets will be at a premium in the House. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, wear the damn masks, take the damn shots—especially the damn boosters—and spare a thought for the people of Ukraine and for Damar Hamlin.
READ MORE 
The FDA has moved to allow mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in medication abortions, to be distributed at retail pharmacies rather than exclusively from doctors.' (photo: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)
The Biden administration made two moves to protect medication abortion
The first, from the Department of Justice (DoJ), was a statement meant to push back against a legal absurdity that is gaining popularity on the anti-choice right: the idea that the 1873 Comstock Act, an archaic anti-obscenity law, prohibits the sending of abortion medication through the mail. The second was a move by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to allow mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in medication abortions, to be distributed at retail pharmacies, rather than exclusively from doctors.
Neither move by the Biden administration is likely to significantly improve abortion access, especially not for the millions of women living in the 13 states that have banned abortion outright, or the five that have severely limited the procedure, since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade last summer in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health. But the rule changes show a new willingness by the Biden administration to make at least some tepid and belated efforts to expand women’s rights as the crises created by Dobbs continue to worsen.
The FDA’s move, frankly, is especially overdue. Since mifepristone, a medication that blocks the pregnancy hormone progesterone, was finally approved by the agency for use in America in 2000 (it had been in use in Europe since the 1980s), the drug has been subject to intense, labyrinthine and medically unnecessary bureaucratic restrictions.
For years, doctors who want to provide abortions have had to stock mifepristone themselves. Unlike other drugs – including misoprostol, the other medication used in abortions – it had to be given out directly by the prescribing physician. Until the pandemic, the pill had to be administered by abortion providers in person, and could not be distributed remotely – a rule that was temporarily suspended during coronavirus lockdowns, and quietly lifted permanently by the FDA in December 2021. The new rule will allow mifepristone to be distributed by regular pharmacies, with a regular prescription.
But the FDA’s new guidance still maintains distinctions around mifepristone that mark it as distinct from other medications – distinctions that have nothing to do with the safety or efficacy of the drug, which have long been proven, and everything to do with the politics and stigma surrounding abortion. Some restrictions have been left in place.
Not all healthcare providers, for instance, can prescribe mifepristone: those that do must first prove to agency satisfaction that they are competent to perform abortions. Patients, too, must still sign a consent form, something not required of other medicines. And there are new obligations for the pharmacies that want to distribute the drug. Each pharmacy must appoint and train a compliance officer who is in charge of ensuring that all the rules surrounding mifepristone are followed, for example; steps must be taken to conceal the names of prescribing doctors, including from internal company databases, to protect them from violence and harassment.
The move does seem likely to marginally expand access to abortion pills, at least in Democratic-led states. On Thursday, CVS and Walgreens indicated that they would begin distributing mifepristone. The change is a small and important step toward removing the needless and bigoted bureaucratic obstacles that both stigmatize abortion care and place it out of reach, and towards placing these medications where they belong: over the counter.
But it’s still unclear how the FDA rule change will affect the biggest battles over medication abortion – the ones playing out in the courts. Since the Dobbs decision, demand for the pills has exploded, and a growing number of abortion providers have set up online operations – based both overseas and in the more robustly protective Democratic states – that send abortion medications through the mail.
These prescribers have opened a new era of abortion access in which abortion pills have become widely available even in states with strict bans, and women with internet connections, mailing addresses and a little bit of experience in covering up their digital tracks have found themselves able to terminate unwanted pregnancies safely, even in defiance of misogynist local laws. The anti-choice movement has succeeded in shuttering clinics across the south and midwest, but they haven’t managed to shut down the internet.
Enter the Comstock Act, a long-obscure federal law which has enjoyed a revival in anti-choice legal thinking since Dobbs. Passed in 1878, in the midst of a misogynist moral panic, the Comstock Act prohibits the mailing of “obscene” materials, including any “article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion”. The first arrests under the act were meant to suppress the distribution of a feminist pro-contraception tract.
The act has been largely defunct since the establishment of a right to contraception – and a right to privacy – in the 1965 supreme court ruling in Griswold v Connecticut. Recently, however, anti-choice forces have argued in court – repeatedly and aggressively – that since Roe has been overruled, Comstock applies, and sending abortion pills through the mail is once again illegal.
On Tuesday, the DoJ disagreed, publishing a legal memo arguing that the drugs can be legally sent through the mail, including to states with abortion bans – that is, so long as the sender believes that the recipient will use them in accordance with local law. The DoJ opinion clears the US Postal Service to keep delivering the packages – and provides a bit of legal cover and plausible deniability to those who send abortion medications into conservative states.
Will it hold up in court? Who knows. The memo issues one interpretation of current law, but the federal courts, packed with conservative ideologues and mealy-mouthed centrists who view hostility to women’s rights as a marker of their seriousness, might disagree.
Still, the moves are encouraging signs from the Biden administration, whose response to Dobbs, and to the mounting civil rights and public health crises that it has unleashed, has tended to vacillate between incompetence, indifference and outright contempt. The Democratic party has long treated the left, and feminism in particular, as an annoying younger sibling that it needs to keep in line.
But the midterms should have broken this spell: the Democrats performed much better than expected, and abortion was a big part of why. The elections should put to bed forever the dusty centrist conventional wisdom that support for abortion rights is electorally damaging to the Democrats – quite the opposite has proved to be the case. Hopefully, the Biden administration is listening.
READ MORE 
Ban 'em, FTC Chair Lina Khan. (photo: ;Graeme Jennings/Getty Images
They’re bad for workers, they’re bad for the economy, and the arguments to keep them make no sense.
Eric had recently earned his MBA and was working at a small consulting company in the Midwest. He wanted to change jobs, but had signed a sweeping noncompete agreement with his employer that prohibited him from working for a competing company for two years anywhere in North America.
Unfortunately, the agreement wasn’t specific about which companies were considered competitors. Eventually, Eric took a job at a software company that helped customers solve some of the same kinds of problems as his old consulting firm. He hoped that software was different enough from consulting that he wouldn’t get into legal trouble.
But a few months after switching jobs, Eric got a cease-and-desist letter from his old firm.
Eric was lucky enough to get some pro bono legal advice through a family connection. The lawyer told him he’d probably win in court, but the contract was so vaguely written that it was impossible to be sure. And while the lawyer was willing to help him negotiate a settlement, Eric would have to pay hefty legal fees if the case went to trial.
For months, Eric worked at his new company with the threat of a career-destroying lawsuit hanging over his head. With a mortgage and a young daughter, he couldn’t afford to lose his job. But he also couldn’t really afford to fight the case in court.
“It was the worst time of my life,” Eric told me. “I was constantly worried.” Eric said he battled depression, lost friends, and “was not a great spouse during that time period.” Eric ultimately reached a settlement. Its terms were confidential and prohibited him from disparaging his old employer, which is one reason I’m not using his real name in this article. He says that he wound up taking a three-month break from his new job “to make the problem go away.”
Eric’s story is far from the worst abuse of noncompete agreements I’ve heard about. Back in 2021, I wrote about three nurses who were ordered to stop practicing their profession in Wyoming. One was forced to take a new job across state lines that paid less and required a two-hour commute; she burned through her savings paying for extra child care. Another woman near retirement age was forced to take a grueling job as a traveling nurse.
None of this would have happened in California, where courts have not enforced noncompete agreements since 1872. Now the FTC wants to make the whole country work like California.
“I wholeheartedly support that,” Eric told me.
Silicon Valley’s Secret Weapon
Defenders of noncompetes argue that these contracts are necessary so that businesses feel comfortable investing in their workers. One of them is Alden Abbott, the FTC’s general counsel during the Trump years and now a scholar at the Mercatus Center.
“Companies could say ‘We’re not going to invest in specialized training or pass on trade secrets to employees, because they might just go off and use that against us,’” Abbott told me. Abbott worries that banning noncompetes could lead to companies investing too little in developing the skills of their workers.
While that worry seems reasonable in theory, it’s hard to square with the existence of Silicon Valley. California’s refusal to enforce noncompete agreements really has promoted a culture of job-hopping in the state’s technology sector. But it does not seem like this has been a serious impediment to the development of Silicon Valley or its ability to innovate—quite the contrary.
In a famous 1999 article, law professor Ronald Gilson argued that California’s lack of noncompete enforcement was actually an important factor in Silicon Valley’s success in the late 20th century. Drawing on earlier research by UC–Berkeley’s AnnaLee Saxenian, Gilson compared Silicon Valley to the tech corridor along Route 128 outside of Boston. Until the 1970s, both of these regions were major centers for the fledgling computer industry.
But in the 1980s, Silicon Valley pulled ahead. And Gilson and Saxenian argued that Silicon Valley’s job-hopping culture was a major factor.
Because Massachusetts law allowed businesses to limit employee mobility, many engineers spent their careers at a single company. In contrast, California law gave engineers the freedom to spend a few years at one tech company before moving on to another one. This job churn was surely frustrating to Bay Area employers, but it also promoted the rapid spread of ideas from one firm to another.
California’s approach has also been a boon for startup creation. One of Silicon Valley’s first big successes was Intel, a company founded by veterans of another semiconductor pioneer called Fairchild Semiconductor. Fairchild, in turn, was founded by a group of engineers who left a company founded by industry pioneer William Shockley.
That tradition continues to the present day, with people regularly quitting jobs at Google, Facebook, or Apple to start new companies that might wind up competing with their old employers. Startups are free to poach talented engineers from the technology giants, allowing the startups to grow rapidly if they have promising ideas.
Again, this is undoubtedly frustrating for industry incumbents who are constantly losing talented engineers—indeed, several tech giants got in legal trouble for maintaining a no-poaching agreement with one another. And some economists have theoretical models where easy job-switching harms innovation by discouraging companies from investing in new technologies or in employee training. But it’s hard to take these models very seriously given the spectacular success of Silicon Valley.
Indeed, I suspect that these models are backward: that the rest of the country is being held back by the enforcement of noncompete agreements. If that’s right, then it would be a good thing for the U.S. economy if workers outside of California were as free as California workers to hop from job to job, taking their skills and knowledge—but not the employers’ trade secrets—with them.
An Uphill Battle in the Courts
The most important question about the FTC proposal is whether it will stand up in court. Federal law prohibits “unfair methods of competition” and gives the FTC authority to enforce that prohibition. To a layman like me, it seems plausible that a noncompete agreement could be an unfair method of competition. But Abbott, the Trump-era FTC lawyer, is skeptical.
To understand this debate, it’s helpful to know a little bit of history. In the 1980s, there was an intellectual revolution that narrowed the scope of antitrust law. Scholars like Robert Bork argued that some business arrangements that might seem superficially anticompetitive can actually be beneficial in practice, and so should be allowed under antitrust law. These arguments were embraced by the Reagan administration and the Supreme Court, and as a result they have been the law of the land for the past 30 to 40 years.
The FTC’s new rule on noncompetes is part of a broader effort by the Biden administration to roll back the Bork revolution. Biden laid out his vision for competition policy in a 2021 executive order, and he appointed the antitrust hawk Lina Khan to chair the FTC around the same time. Last November, Khan’s FTC published a new policy statement laying out its expanded vision for Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which provides the legal foundation for Thursday’s new rule on noncompete agreements.
Defenders of the antitrust status quo don’t like the direction Biden and Khan are pushing antitrust law, and argument over the noncompete proposal is best understood as a front in that larger war.
Opponents’ core argument is that the FTC doesn’t have a history of regulating noncompete agreements, and that it’s not appropriate for the agency to start regulating these agreements without explicit authorization from Congress. Christine Wilson, a Republican member of the FTC, wrote in her dissent that the FTC proposal was a “radical departure from hundreds of years of legal precedent.”
Wilson also pointed to the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in West Virginia v. EPA this year, which held that Obama’s Clean Power Plan exceeded the EPA’s authority under environmental laws. The high court held that regulatory agencies needed explicit authorization from Congress before they tackled major new policy questions.
Wilson and Abbott argue that similar reasoning applies to the FTC’s new noncompete proposal. They say that the FTC does not have a history of regulating noncompete agreements, and so it needs explicit approval from Congress to do so.
But advocates counter that Congress deliberately gave the FTC broad powers to define and regulate anticompetitive conduct. The law prohibits “unfair methods of competition” without defining this phrase in any detail. Presumably Congress wanted to give the FTC some discretion to deal with new issues as they came up.
In our phone conversation, I asked Abbott about the story of the Wyoming nurses who were forced to quit their jobs and move out of the state to find work. Didn’t that seem like it could be an unfair method of competition?
Abbott didn’t think so. The nurses’ noncompete agreement “affects the nurses and harms them but it may not affect competition in the marketplace,” Abbott told me.
I pointed out that the term “noncompete agreement” literally has the phrase “noncompete” in it. That has to be a clue that it affects competition right? Abbott didn’t buy it.
“That’s not the way antitrust laws define competition,” Abbott told me. “Antitrust laws talk about a relevant market, competition between two steel companies or two utility companies, or whatever.” Antitrust laws didn’t apply to the relationship between a nurse and her employer because that was a “vertical relationship,” he said.
I’ll confess that this did not make very much sense to me. But I do think there’s a good chance that Abbott’s view will prevail in court. While there is a lot of grassroots interest in more aggressive enforcement of antitrust laws, on both the left and the right, there has been little sign that the Supreme Court’s six-justice conservative majority is ready to rethink the prevailing antitrust orthodoxy.
READ MORE 
Tesla CEO Elon Musk addresses guests at the Offshore Northern Seas 2022 (ONS) meeting in Stavanger, Norway, on August 29, 2022. (photo: Carina Johansen/NTB/AFP/Getty Images)
With Elon Musk’s unending display of incompetence in running Twitter, it’s easy to forget that the enterprise that made him famous, Tesla, is just as riddled with scandal, lies, and even death.
But let’s not forget there might be another culprit: the proliferation of deaths and lawsuits surrounding the company.
Around 765,000 of Tesla’s cars are equipped with the company’s so-called “Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving” systems while zipping around American streets as we speak, a shocking example of mass human beta testing that we’re all unwittingly part of. Over the year to July 2022, Tesla cars running Autopilot software were involved in 273 crashes, according to data from regulators, or 70 percent of the 392 crashes that involved all advanced driver-assistance systems. Scandalously, regulators found that Tesla’s vehicles had a habit of turning off around one second before the crash would actually happen, which is why regulators have now ordered car makers to disclose all crashes where this kind of software was being used within thirty seconds of impact, to stop them from using this as a loophole to under-report.
It got so bad that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) started investigating the software last year, after Tesla cars on Autopilot kept running into parked emergency vehicles, often at night and despite flashing lights, cones, and various other alerts. By the middle of last year, thirty-nine of the forty-eight crashes on the NHTSA’s entirely separate list of special crash investigations involved Tesla vehicles, which had killed nineteen people, and the agency bumped its investigation up to the final phase before potentially issuing a recall. One of those crashes saw the Tesla simply barge into a motorcycle that was in front of it, killing the driver, one of many such instances that have been rising in number.
Part of the problem is that Tesla’s “self-driving” cars aren’t actually self-driving at all, and require, as the company’s website says, constant supervision from a “fully attentive” driver with their hands on the wheel. The other part of the problem is that you wouldn’t know this from the company’s marketing materials or its celebrity CEO’s public statements, which have talked about the software letting you travel “without you touching the wheel” and the driver “not doing anything” because “the car is driving itself” — which is presumably why some of the drivers involved in these crashes were watching a movie or playing a video game on their phones.
Not surprisingly, Musk and the company have been taken to court over these and other scandals. The families of two of the victims have filed lawsuits alleging that Tesla vehicles are defective, lack an automatic emergency braking system, and “suddenly and unintentionally accelerated to an excessive, unsafe and uncontrollable speed.” A class-action suit launched last year accused Tesla of misleadingly advertising its autonomous driving technology since 2016 as fully functional or close to it, while another took Musk to court for serially claiming a fully self-driving car was only a year or two away, statements going back as early as 2015. Other class-action lawsuits allege a problem of cars suddenly stopping for nonexistent obstacles and defective door handles that fall off after a few years.
Other lawsuits charge there’s more that’s rotten at Tesla than the production line. The company has been hit with at least ten suits, including one from the State of California, over alleged widespread, shocking levels of racial discrimination at its Fremont, California, factory, including the regular use of racial slurs and black workers’ being segregated into separate areas. A different lawsuit alleges that Musk has inappropriate sway over Tesla’s board of directors, which he used to get an unduly massive pay package.
So yes, Musk’s incompetence at running Twitter has almost certainly hurt the enterprise that made him famous in the first place. But that enterprise itself is riddled with scandal and fatal incompetence, reminding us that the entire image of Musk, genius CEO, was dubious long before he got involved in the social media game.
READ MORE 
Army vet Mike Biggs, who has worked ten years for U.S.Vets in Phoenix, on Thursday, Dec. 8, 2022. (photo: Adriana Zehbrauskas/NPR)
"They said, 'Well, you're homeless.' And I'm like, 'No, I'm not.' So they had to explain to me what the definition of homelessness is," he said.
Biggs had been too busy getting by to realize his name hadn't been on a lease for five or six years after getting out of the military.
"I said, 'Well, yeah, and I've been homeless for a very long time then.' So they said, 'Well, you need to come with us.' Didn't know these guys from a can of paint," he said.
Those two veterans brought him to a transitional housing program run by U.S. Vets in Phoenix, and eventually offered him a job. He said he'd stay for 90 days. That was 2012, and Biggs is still working at U.S. Vets as a veterans service coordinator.
After several years of limited progress, an 11 percent drop since 2020 has encouraged advocates and VA officials. It's the biggest reduction in five years. There were 33,136 homeless vets in 2022 — down from 37,252 in 2020 according to the annual point in time count conducted by the VA, HUD and the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. The same count found 582,462 homeless people in America - the Biden Administration says it's aiming to reduce that number 25 percent by 2025.
Key to the effort is an approach called housing first, as Biggs explains.
"Housing first is a model where the ultimate goal and the main priority is to get a veteran housed. With that comes a thing called wraparound services," says Biggs.
The idea is to get veterans a place to live, and then take care of other problems like health care, substance abuse, counseling and job training. It's a key part of a plan that saw a 55 percent reduction in veterans homelessness since 2010.
That progress mostly stalled during the Trump Administration. Trump appointed a controversial critic of "housing-first" to head the federal Inter-Agency Council on Homelessness. Trump-backed candidates like Kari Lake in Arizona, who made it a campaign issue last year. As part of her failed bid to become governor, Lake argued that housing should be a reward for treatment, and called chronic homelessness a lifestyle choice.
"In some communities this has been more controversial, I think, than maybe it needs to be," says Kathryn Monet, CEO of the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans.
She hopes the Biden Administration's push to reduce all homelessness 25 percent by the end of his term will be spared from partisan politics.
"I do think that the renewed energy and focus that this administration has had on veteran homelessness has really allowed for communities and providers to focus on doing what works as opposed to really working to address some of the divisiveness that we've seen in recent years," said Monet.
Monet says once people get in housing it's less expensive to take on their other issues, so resources go further. She hopes that methodology, along with robust funding from HUD and VA, can sustain the downward trend on veterans homeless.
The biggest challenge is just finding the homes — with a nationwide shortage of low-income housing. Mike Biggs says the housing market in Phoenix is so tight that even people with jobs end up living on the streets.
"There's not enough affordable housing. When I first got here 10 years ago, you could find an apartment for $500 a month, $99 move-in special. Those places are gone. A lot of the locations now, it takes two incomes," he said, "It feels like it's an uphill battle."
READ MORE 
A man working in a tea shop in Hong Kong. (photo: Sergey Ponomarev/NYT)
Across East Asia, populations are graying faster than anywhere else in the world, and while younger generations shrink, older workers are often toiling well into their 70s and beyond.
Instead, every morning at 1:30, Mr. Oonami, 73, wakes up and drives an hour to a fresh produce market on an islet in Tokyo Bay. While loading mushrooms, ginger root, sweet potatoes, radishes and other vegetables into his car, he frequently lifts boxes that weigh more than 15 pounds, straining his back. He then drives across Japan’s capital city, making restaurant deliveries up to 10 times a day.
“As long as my body lets me, I need to keep working,” Mr. Oonami said on a recent morning, checking off orders on a clipboard as he walked briskly through the market.
With populations across East Asia declining and fewer young people entering the work force, increasingly workers like Mr. Oonami are toiling well into their 70s and beyond. Companies desperately need them, and the older employees desperately need the work. Early retirement ages have bloated the pension rolls, making it difficult for governments in Asia to pay retirees enough money each month to live on.
Demographers have warned about a looming demographic time bomb in wealthy nations for years. But Japan and its neighbors have already started to feel the effects, with governments, companies — and most of all, older residents — grappling with the far-reaching consequences of an aging society. The changes have been most pronounced in the workplace.
Working at his age “is not fun,” said Mr. Oonami, rummaging through a box of carrots. “But I do it to survive.”
For some older people, the demand for workers has given them new opportunities and leverage with employers, especially if they felt pushed out by early retirement ages in favor of younger workers. Now, the question these aging nations are grappling with is how to adapt to the new reality — and potential benefits — of an older work force, while ensuring that people can retire after a lifetime of work without falling into poverty.
In East Asia, where populations are graying faster than anywhere else in the world, there is an urgent need for more flexibility. Japan, South Korea and China have all been forced to experiment with policy changes — such as corporate subsidies and retirement adjustments — to accommodate population shifts. Now, with the rest of the world not far behind, many nations will likely look to Asia for lessons in how to respond to similar crises.
“Are you just going to panic about it and run around being frightened?” said Stuart Gietel Basten, a professor of social science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “Or do you say, ‘It’s very complex, and we will have to adapt our lives and institutions in lots and lots of different ways?’”
Adapting to the needs of older workers.
Long before Mr. Oonami started delivering vegetables, he tried working in an office and as a cabdriver. Eventually, he decided he preferred the solo life of a truck driver. That decision consigned him to perennial contract work rather than the more traditional path taken by many early postwar employees in Japan, with lifelong jobs of guaranteed salaries, regular promotions and corporate retirement benefits.
As a truck driver, Mr. Oonami would often lift heavy cargo, which became unsustainable for him after he turned 50. His doctor told him that so much lifting had worn down the cartilage in his spine. “Moving the boxes was very rough for my body,” Mr. Oonami said.
He switched to smaller delivery jobs and landed a contract at the produce market about 15 years ago. Yet even as he approached Japan’s traditional retirement age of 60, Mr. Oonami could not afford to stop working. Having held contract gigs his entire career, he is only eligible for a basic national pension — about 60,000 yen a month, or about $477 — not enough to cover his daily expenses.
Japan isn’t the only country in East Asia where older people feel they have no choice but to keep working. In South Korea, with a poverty rate among older people close to 40 percent, a similar proportion of those 65 and older are still working. In Hong Kong, one in eight older residents works. The ratio is more than a quarter in Japan — compared to 18 percent in the United States.
In Japan and South Korea, temporary job agencies and unions have formed to support these older laborers. While many of them must work out of economic necessity, employers have also become more reliant on them.
To cope with what demographers call “super aging societies,” policymakers in East Asia initially focused on trying to spur births and tinkering with immigration laws to shore up work forces. Such measures have done little to alter the aging trend line, as fertility rates have plunged and many countries have resisted large-scale immigration plans.
That has left employers desperate for workers. In Japan, for example, surveys show that as many as half of companies report shortages of full-time workers. Older workers have stepped in to fill the gaps. “We have so much unused and untapped working capacity,” said Naohiro Ogawa, a visiting fellow at the Asian Development Bank Institute.
Koureisha is a temporary agency in Tokyo where job listings specify that applicants must be at least 60 years old. Fumio Murazeki, the president, said he believed employers were growing more receptive to hiring older workers. “People who are over 65, or even up until 75, they are very active and healthy,” he said.
Rental car agencies and building concierge services are eager to hire older workers, said Mr. Murazeki. One popular job for older contract workers is to sit in the front passenger seat of service vehicles while electricians or gas repairmen assist clients on site. The contract worker can move the vehicle when necessary, helping companies avoid parking tickets or traffic fines, Mr. Murazeki said.
At Tokyu Community, a property management company for apartment complexes in Tokyo, almost half the staff is 65 or older, said Hiroyuki Ikeda, head of human resources. With a salary of just 2,300,000 yen a year — less than $17,146 — the jobs do not appeal to younger workers, while older people are willing to accept the low pay to supplement their pension income.
The Japanese government now provides subsidies to small- and medium-sized companies that install accommodations for older workers, like additional railings on staircases or extra rest areas for workers.
Gloria, a company outside of Tokyo that produces uniforms for policemen, abolished its mandatory retirement age six years ago because of a labor shortage. To assist its older workers, the company built a ramp to the front door and moved electrical wires previously strung across the factory floor to the walls and ceilings to prevent employees from tripping.
On its website, Gloria says it wants to “become a company where people can work until they themselves decide they want to quit.”
Aikawa Unsou, a delivery company, installed grip handles in its trucks to help drivers climb into and out of vehicles. “The work environment has to be aging-friendly,” said Feng Qiushi, an associate professor of anthropology and sociology at the National University of Singapore. “They need to provide training opportunities and provide flexible retirement opportunities.”
Trying to make ends meet on a small pension.
While social media will often showcase inspirational septuagenarians lifting weights or running successful small businesses, older people in China, Hong Kong, Japan or South Korea are just as likely to be low-paid office cleaners, grocery store clerks, delivery service drivers or security guards.
Full-time, stable employment is reserved for the relatively young in these countries, leaving many older workers to engage in precarious, low-wage contract jobs after being forced out of their long-term employment by low retirement ages. Once they retire, state-backed pensions usually do not cover basic living expenses. In Japan, China and South Korea, the average monthly pension is under $500. And unlike in the United States, 401(k)s are not yet widely available in the region.
To help fend off a labor shortage and keep up with pension payments, governments are trying to nudge retirement ages higher, which has set off some resistance. In China, “people get angry,” said Sheying Chen, a professor of public administration and social policy at Pace University in New York. “They say, ‘I worked full-time and made it to retirement age — you want me to work more?’”
More often, it is employers who balk at legislative efforts to lift retirement ages. With the seniority-based pay systems that are prevalent across East Asia, companies want to push older employees off the payroll, not extend their time on the job.
“Even if older people are equally productive, if you’re forced to pay them more because they have been hanging around longer, their cost-effectiveness is going to be lower,” said Philip O’Keefe, a director at the Centre of Excellence in Population Aging Research in Sydney, Australia.
In the absence of more government support, some older people are forging their own working opportunities. Li Man, 67, was forced to retire at 45 from a job at a state-owned refrigerated warehouse in Beijing. The government told her it was too dangerous for her to continue working in freezing temperatures.
Ms. Li figured she could still work “in the prime time of my life” to afford her daughter’s tuition and living expenses at film school in California. She started babysitting and selling homemade dishes like braised fish and stir-fried pork with squash to neighbors.
“Going back to work has made me less anxious,” said Ms. Li. Yet lately, she is plagued by back pain and high blood pressure. “Maybe it’s time to retire,” she said.
For Mr. Oonami, the vegetable delivery man in Japan, retirement is just a dream. A twice-divorced father of three, he lives with his youngest son. He has no savings and said he takes vitamin supplements to keep healthy. “Right now,” he said, “I can’t even imagine a life where I am not working.”
Given his early schedule, he has little time for hobbies. When he arrives home in the afternoon, Mr. Oonami usually fixes himself a stir-fried dinner, feeds his two Maltese dogs and falls asleep by 6 p.m.
“You shouldn’t work until the end.”
Eiji Sudo, 69, wasn’t quite ready to retire.
He had spent more than four decades working maintenance and construction jobs at Tokyo Gas, a natural gas supplier. He retired at 60, and the company offered him a four-day-a-week contract at about half his peak salary. Once he hit 65, though, the company would no longer extend his contract, he said.
To earn enough money to travel comfortably with his wife, Kazue, Mr. Sudo wanted to keep working. He signed up with the Koureisha agency and now works as a contractor for Asuqa, a gas pipeline company in Tokyo. Three days a week he drives to neighborhoods where the company is installing or repairing gas lines, knocking on doors to inform residents of upcoming construction work.
About one in 10 workers at Asuqa are 65 or older. Most of them officially retired at 60 — the company’s retirement age — and subsequently accepted contract roles at reduced pay. “We have always had to supplement by rehiring older workers,” said Kazuyuki Tabata, an Asuqa manager.
Mr. Sudo said he enjoys traveling across multiple suburbs and meeting new people. It keeps him curious and engaged, he said, and is better than playing golf every day. “Every person is different,” he said. “It is good for me.”
His wife, who faithfully packs him a homemade lunch when he works, appreciates that he gets out of the house: It means they both have “our ‘me time,’” she said. Still, “it would be very sad for anyone to die working,” she added. “You shouldn’t work until the end like that.”
READ MORE 
Cattle at the Texana Feeders feedlot in Floresville, Texas. (photo: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
Big Meat Just Can't Quit Antibiotics
Kenny Torrella, Vox
Torrella writes: "The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) knew that America's meat industry had a drug problem."
Meat production is making lifesaving drugs less effective. Where’s the FDA?
Over time, once easily treatable human infections, like sepsis, urinary tract infections, and tuberculosis, became harder or sometimes impossible to treat. A foundational component of modern medicine was starting to crumble. But it wasn’t until the mid-2010s that the FDA finally took the basic steps of requiring farmers to get veterinary prescriptions for antibiotics and banning the use of antibiotics to make animals grow faster — steps that some European regulators had taken a decade or more prior.
Thanks to those two actions alone, sales of medically important antibiotics for livestock plummeted 42 percent from 2015 to 2017. But according to Matthew Wellington of the Public Interest Research Group, the FDA’s reforms went after the low-hanging fruit, and they didn’t go nearly far enough. Now, in a concerning course reversal, antibiotic sales for use in livestock ticked back up 7 percent from 2017 to 2021, per a new FDA report. The chicken industry, which had led the pack in reducing antibiotic use on farms, bought 12 percent more antibiotics in 2021 than in 2020.
It’s a sobering turn of events with life-and-death implications. In 2019, antibiotic-resistant bacteria directly killed over 1.2 million people, including 35,000 Americans, and more than 3 million others died from diseases where antibiotic resistance played a role — far more than the global toll of HIV/AIDS or malaria, leading the World Health Organization to call antibiotic resistance “one of the biggest threats to global health, food security, and development today.”
Public health advocates want to see the FDA take the threat much more seriously, and often point to Europe as a role model. From 2011 to 2021, antibiotic sales for use in livestock fell by almost half across the European Union, and use per animal is now around half that of the US. Last year, the EU implemented perhaps its most significant reform yet: banning the routine use of antibiotics to prevent disease, reserving their use for only when animals are actually sick. That critical step is expected to slash the continent’s antibiotic use further.
It’s unlikely the FDA will follow in Europe’s footsteps any time soon. Asked about an EU-style ban on preventive use of antibiotics, an FDA spokesperson responded, “The laws in the US and our livestock population are not the same as that of the EU or other countries. The FDA’s initiatives to promote judicious use and reduce AMR [antimicrobial resistance] were devised specifically for the US and the conditions we face with the aim of maximizing effectiveness and cooperation of drug sponsors, veterinarians, and animal producers.”
The FDA and the US food industry have proven that they can make progress on the issue — but to keep antibiotics working, they need to do a lot more. That will require them to tackle beef and pork, two of the more stubborn and complex sectors of America’s meat system that just can’t seem to quit antibiotics, since doing so could demand substantive changes to how animals are farmed for food.
The American antibiotic-free revolution that wasn’t
It wasn’t just the FDA’s new rules that caused antibiotic sales for livestock to plunge in a two-year period — Big Chicken played a part too.
In the early 2000s, the nation’s fourth-largest chicken producer Perdue Farms began efforts to wean its birds off antibiotics, which it achieved in 2016 by changing chickens’ diets and replacing antibiotics with vaccines and probiotics. At first, chicken raised without antibiotics cost 50 percent more, but the company says it has since been able to all but close the cost differential.
In the mid-2010s, while Perdue was making progress, activists leveraged the momentum and successfully convinced McDonald’s to source chicken raised without medically important antibiotics. Tyson Foods, the nation’s largest poultry producer, then committed to reducing antibiotic use, contributing to a “domino effect” in which producers and restaurants made further pledges to reduce antibiotics in poultry, said Wellington.
By 2020, a little over half of America’s 9 billion chickens farmed for meat were raised without antibiotics, according to an industry survey.
The sea change in chicken production demonstrated it was possible to quickly scale down antibiotics in farming, but it didn’t do much to reduce overall use, as the chicken industry only used 6 percent of antibiotics in agriculture in 2016. And the momentum didn’t spread to other parts of the meat business, like beef and pork, which together account for over 80 percent of medically important antibiotics fed to farmed animals.
Some of the lack of progress in beef and pork comes down to the simple fact that pigs and cattle are raised differently than chickens. Chickens are slaughtered at just six or seven weeks old, so the chance they’ll get sick is lower than pigs, who are slaughtered at six months old, or cattle, slaughtered at around three years of age.
The chicken industry is also vertically integrated, meaning a company like Tyson or Perdue controls virtually every link in the supply chain, so making big changes like cutting out antibiotics is easier than in the more decentralized supply chain of beef. For example, the typical steer will change hands several times before slaughter, going from a breeder to pasture grazing to a feedlot, all of which make it harder to coordinate an antibiotic-free regimen. In the last few months of their life cattle are also fed a high-grain diet that they aren’t adapted to digest, which increases the chance they’ll develop a liver abscess, a condition that’s prevented with — you guessed it — antibiotics.
The pork sector, like poultry, is also vertically integrated, but the industry has largely opposed animal welfare, environmental, and antibiotic reforms. Antibiotics in pig production shot up 25 percent from 2017 to 2021.
There’s also no pork or beef giant that’s taken the antibiotic-free leap like Perdue did for chicken. That could change in the years ahead: McDonald’s, the world’s largest beef purchaser, announced at the end of 2022 that it plans to reduce antibiotic use in its beef supply chain. However, the announcement didn’t come with a timeline, which worries advocates like Wellington, and the company has failed to make good on other pledges.
Although voluntary change can move the needle, without regulation, industry has little incentive to make the dramatic reductions needed to safeguard antibiotics. While the FDA has prohibited meat producers from using antibiotics to speed up growth— their original purpose in agriculture — some of the antibiotics that promote growth, like tylosin, are still allowed for disease prevention, a loophole that disincentivizes producers from reducing antibiotics, Wellington said: “Our concern has always been that they’re just putting a different name on the same kind of use, which is a problem.”
In response to this concern, an FDA spokesperson said, “Veterinarians are on the front lines and as prescribers, they’re in the best position to ensure that both medically important and non-medically important antimicrobials are being used appropriately.”
Aside from outright banning the routine use of medically important antibiotics to prevent disease, Wellington said he’d like to see the FDA take three actions: set a target of reducing antibiotic use by 50 percent by the end of 2025 (based on 2010 levels); publish data on antibiotic use, not just sales; and limit the duration of antibiotic courses for farmed animals.
An FDA spokesperson said specific reduction targets weren’t possible because the agency doesn’t know how many antibiotics farmers are using: “We cannot effectively monitor antimicrobial use without first putting a system in place for determining [a] baseline and assessing trends over time.” The agency right now only collects sales data, and it’s been exploring a voluntary public-private approach to collect and report real-world use data.
Some states haven’t waited on federal regulators: Maryland and California have both restricted the use of antibiotics on farms.
How the Europeans — and some Americans — are quitting antibiotics on the farm
Just because it’s difficult to reduce antibiotics in beef and pork production doesn’t mean it’s impossible, as the story of Iowa pig farmers Tim and Deleana Roseland demonstrates.
In 2005, they switched from raising pigs in the conventional manner — tightly cramped and fed a steady diet of antibiotics — to raising pigs for Niman Ranch, a higher-welfare meat company now owned by Perdue. That required the Roselands to ditch the routine use of antibiotics.
“I was nervous about it at first but as it turned out, it was no big deal whatsoever,” Tim Roseland said. But he added that it wouldn’t have been possible with his old setup: “There’s too much overcrowding, small pens, too many pigs crammed into a little area.”
Their newer system gives each pig more space in larger pens, and bedding that they root through and chew on, instead of, when they’re packed into factory farms, chewing on each other. They also give the pigs more vaccines and feed them probiotics.
And there’s a lot to learn from the Europeans: Denmark, the continent’s second-largest pork producer, has become the de facto case study in how to wean Big Meat off antibiotics. In the early 1990s, it started phasing out antibiotics in pigs with little impact on the industry. From 1992 to 2008, antibiotic use per pig fell by over 50 percent, and while pig mortality went up in the short term, by 2008 it had dropped back to near-1992 levels.
The small country’s transformation wasn’t a matter of rocket science, but a suite of smart management practices: more frequent barn cleaning, better ventilation, later piglet weaning, more space per pig, extra vaccines, and experimenting with feed and additives.
All this comes with difficult tradeoffs: antibiotic-free pork costs more and requires more land, which increases its carbon footprint. But we can’t expect to have cheap meat forever without a cost to public health, an uncomfortable truth that’s led many environmental and public health groups to champion a message of “less but better” meat.
“I think the fact that Denmark, despite very low antibiotic use since 1995, is still one of the biggest pork exporters in the world, already speaks for itself,” said Francesca Chiara, a director at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.
Given the projected rise of global antibiotic sales for agriculture, Denmark’s example may not be speaking loudly enough. But it’s time we listen — nothing less than the future of human medicine is at stake.
READ MORE
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.