The week
started with our return from Cuba. We learned a lot in a short 7 days. Read
those posts if you have time, starting
here.

Mr. Obama’s 5th State of the Union speech comes on
Tuesday. It will be accompanied by more Washington theater than usual with
three responses
by Republicans, Tea Partiers, and Rand Paul representing, well, Rand Paul.

Use this
quote by former Rep. Mo Udall (D-AZ), about the difference between the words “caucus”
and “cactus” to write your homily for this week:

Last
Monday, we celebrated the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. Here is what Clay
Bennett thinks about how we have managed the King legacy:

America’s voting
process is broken and neither party wants to address the true underlying issues.
A state desiring a picture ID must be willing to do whatever is necessary to
provide every voter with the required ID, including deploying mobile units to
provide them.

Reverend
King’s dream was equal opportunity. He never suggested redistribution from the
successful; he advocated for everyone to have the opportunity to be successful.
He encouraged people to prepare for and utilize opportunities.

Dr. King’s
dream was of an America providing a hand up and not a handout is far from a reality
and Congress is not helping. We still have fewer jobs today than we had at
the start of the Great Recession in 2008. Where have all the jobs gone?

Decide for
yourself whether any the following are part of the caucus coalition:

Governor
Christie lays low for now:

Mr. Obama reports that NSA is no different than Obamacare:

The Sochi Olympics are threaten by local terrorists:

Syrian negotiations won’t  produce peace:

What’s Wrong Today:

The Farm Bill expired on September 30, 2013. It happens to include the authorization for funding the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or Food Stamps). Senate lawmakers are proposing a $4 billion cut over the course of 10 years, while the Republican-controlled House voted to slash $40 billion from the program last year. Most lawmakers think the Farm Bill will be voted on in the next few weeks.

Congress should consider the unintended consequences of cutting food stamps.

A new study from the University of California, San Francisco, (UCSF) published online in the journal Health Affairs indicates that poor people with diabetes are significantly more likely to go to the emergency room (ER) for dangerously low blood sugar at the end of the month when food budgets are tighter than they are at the beginning of the month.

The ER admissions occur because diabetics can suffer from low blood sugar (hypoglycemia), when they have not had enough to eat, but continue taking medications for the disease. The symptoms include dizziness, sweating or nausea. In rare cases, hypoglycemia can cause fainting, coma, or death.

In order to control diabetes, patients need to keep their blood sugar within a narrow band. Levels that are either too low or too high (known as hyperglycemia) can be dangerous to diabetics. About 25 million Americans, or 8% of the US population have diabetes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The US spends more than $100 billion a year treating people with the disease, the CDC estimates.

And the poor are disproportionately affected: In the study, UCSF researchers matched hospital discharge records from 2000 to 2008 covering more than two million people in California with the patients’ ZIP codes. People living in the poorest ZIP codes, where average annual household income was below $31,000, were counted as low income.

For each 100,000 admissions of poor people, about 270 of them were given a primary diagnosis of hypoglycemia, compared to only 200 per 100,000 among people of higher incomes. Dr. Hilary Seligman, assistant professor of medicine at UCSF, and the study’s lead author, said the difference was statistically significant.

The New York Times reported that Dr. Seligman said she and her colleagues were aware of the debate in Washington about food stamps, and sought to document whether running out of food stamps or money to buy food at the end of the month damaged people’s health. Previous research had already established that people often give a higher priority to paying monthly bills for rent or utilities, for example, than to buying food, which is managed from day to day. From Dr. Seligman:

Seligman and her coauthors posit a plausible story about the “pay cycle” that develops in households of low-income individuals. Toward the end of the month, a household’s resources—income, SNAP, Social Security, and/or other benefits—can become exhausted, ostensibly changing food consumption patterns.

From the Study’s Abstract:

The Incidental Economist blog posted this chart from the Seligman study:

The chart shows that low-income individuals are at higher risk of hypoglycemia—and the risk increases over the course of a month, consistent with a hypothesis about exhausted food budgets. Their high-income counterparts exhibit no significant trend. Appendicitis findings are offered as a comparison which shows no significant change in admissions over the course of a month.

According to the authors, “hypoglycemia is one of the most common adverse drug events leading to visits to the emergency department”, and it’s been estimated that episodes of care for hypoglycemia have an average cost of $1,186. 

For some perspective on food stamps, they are actually only about 2% of the overall federal budget. The program cost $78.4 billion in the 2012 fiscal year. The amount given to each household averages $272 per month. In the 2010 fiscal year, 40.3 million people were enrolled. Two years later, that number had jumped by 16% to nearly 47 million people. Just over 45% of those getting food stamps are children, according to the Agricultur
e Department.

In the Fox News version of America, food stamp spending is not higher than in the past because more people are poor and hungry. Rather, food stamp use is up because the Obama European Socialist Machine is deliberately trying to build a bigger, stronger, government-supporting coalition for future elections.

In reality, it’s a mirror of the social inequities that plague our nation and drive health disparities.

The poor are always first up for attacks by government. They do not make any campaign donations, and they don’t have lobbyists. Isn’t any Congressional agenda in the last 20 years simply a matter of following the money?

To Republicans, the poor are political poker chips. They are the poster children for an ever expanding government, as well as the preferred sacrifice when the time comes to “defend our principles”.

Anyone who suggests that we must care for the poor, is considered to have an ulterior motive. Give to defense contractors? That’s another story. You have to spend on defense, or the terrorists win.

(This
is the 2nd of 3 columns about the Wrongologist’s 7 day visit to
Cuba. The primary purpose of the trip was to learn about the Cuban health care
system.)

What happens when you
build a healthcare system on preventative medicine, family care, and free universal
access? This is what was established in Cuba after the 1959 revolution. 

We met with Dr. Rosa López Oceguera, a professor at the
University of Havana, who indicated that in 1959, Cuba had about 6000 doctors,
half of which fled the country during the revolution. There were only 16 Professors who remained at the University of
Havana’s Medical College. The exodus required Cuba to rebuild its health care
delivery and health education system from the ground up.

The result is that
over a 50 year period, Cuba has built a system where many health outcomes are
comparable to most industrialized nations. The system was built gradually,
starting with free vaccination services and a program to improve sanitation in
the 1960’s and community-based health services delivery in the 1970’s. In 1976, Cuba’s healthcare program
was enshrined in Article 50 of the Cuban
constitution that
states:

The Cuban
system is based on the concept that doctors must live in the neighborhoods they
serve.  A doctor-nurse team are part of the community and know their
patients well because they live at (or nearby) the consultorio (doctor’s office) where they work.  The
local consultorios are
backed up by policlínicos (polyclinics)
which bring together nursing, medical specialists and diagnostic and health
services. The polyclinics offer laboratory services, x-ray, and emergency care.
The polyclinic model exists in many
countries,
including Russia, Germany and France.

Some
national statistics on Cuba’s health care system:

• 1
  Nurse per 117 persons

• 1
  Doctor per 143 persons

• 1
  Dentist per 878 persons

• 36,478
  MD’s in primary care in Cuba

• 11,
  492 local doctor offices in Cuba, of which, 2,167 are located in Havana

• 452
  polyclinics in Cuba

• 152
  general hospitals

• 142
  maternity homes (for high-risk pregnancies)

• 126
  elder day care facilities

• 26
  blood banks

• 13
  medical research institutions

• 23
  medical schools

We visited
the Polyclinic of Revolution Square, a center-city polyclinic. Here is a photo
of some of the nurses who were working at this clinic on the day we visited:

The
Revolution Square polyclinic we visited had the following statistics:

• 173,000
  people are served by this polyclinic

• There
  are 6 pharmacies in the area

• There
  are 16 local doctor offices in the service area

• There
  are 235 staff in total assigned to the polyclinic, of which 86 are doctors and
  52 are nurses

• There
  are 58 medical technicians assigned to the clinic, along with 56 in general
  services and 41 other staff

We also
visited a local doctor’s office (consultorio) about a block from the polyclinic. It has two
permanent staff, a doctor and a nurse. We were told that the office serves 136 multigenerational
households and was open 8 hours/day, 6 days/week. They receive around
30 patient visits per day, or about 180/week. The doctor lives above the clinic
and is available off-hours to its families. The doctor said that she can make
appointments for specialists to visit her office to see patients as needed. Here is the
outside of the consultorio building:

These translate
into interesting numbers: If we assume a family has 6 individuals (possibly
low), the local office has a potential patient population of 816. We were told
that each patient sees the clinic staff 3.3 times per year, or 2,693
visits/year.

House
calls seem to be routine. Usually, the local office does not schedule
appointments in the afternoon, in part because it’s the responsibility of the
doctor and nurse team to understand the health issues in the neighborhood. By catching diseases and health hazards before they get
big, the Cuban medical system can spend a little on prevention rather than a
lot later on to cure diseases, stop outbreaks, or cope with long-term
disabilities.

One value
of the community-based model is that Cuba has standardized immunization
nationally. This has eliminated polio, diphtheria, tetanus, rubella, mumps,
syphilis, tuberculosis, rabies, Nile virus, and yellow fever. It has controlled
meningitis, pneumonia, Hepatitis B, and leptospirosis.

In
addition, most of Cuba’s health indicators are at or near those of the OECD
countries. The CIA Factbook indicates that:

• Cuba’s
  infant mortality (under 1 year) was 4.78/thousand in 2012 while the US was 5.90

• Life
  expectancy in Cuba was 78.05 years, while it was 78.6 years in the US

• Health
  care expense in Cuba was 10% of GDP, while it was 17.9% in the US

The major
cause of death in 2014 is expected to be cancer, possibly because about 50% of
the population smokes, which causes high incidence of lung, throat, and head
and neck cancers. Dr. Oceguera told us
that this is a change from 2012, when the #1 killer was heart disease followed
by cancers and cardiovascular disease.

On the other
hand, most technology was antiquated. We saw a suction apparatus that probably
was new in the 1950’s and an EKG monitor which would have been new in the
1970’s. Here is a photo taken inside the polyclinic:

The medical
records are simple and handwritten, similar to those we used in the US 20 years
ago.

When we
asked the nurses what resources they needed, they asked for syringes. It is hard to imagine what Type I Diabetics use if the polyclinic is short of syringes.

We visited a facility
for high-risk pregnancies. It had 50 beds for in-patient care, but most women
visit on an out-patient basis. The facility serves 5 municipalities in Old
Havana. The usual process is for women at high risk of losing their baby to be
referred to the Hogar Materno. High
risk is defined as pregnant women over 30 years old, or under age 16, or having
a history of low weight births. The day we visited, there were 49 inpatients. The
officials we spoke with attribute Cuba’s marked improvement in infant mortality
to the attention paid to high risk pregnancies. Here is the waiting room of the
Hogar Materno:

As is visible in the
photo above, many mothers are using the facility on an out-patient basis. Birth
control is encouraged, and is free. Abortions are permitted with the agreement
of the father and mother, but it is seen as a failure of pregnancy prevention. Adoption
is difficult, with the government very involved in the process.

We also visited an
elder care day care center in Old Havana. Retirement is at age 65 for men and
60 for women. This facility was most
similar to what we would see in the US:

This facility provided services for cultural/social
activities, PT and rehab from falls, and eye care. In addition, it cared for 88
patients in their homes. We saw a modern eye care and eye glass production lab
in the elder care home. They made progressive and bi-focal lenses in about an
hour.

Medical
services as an export commodity:

Cuba started in the
1960’s to build a health care education machine. This was developed primarily
because so many health care professionals left the country during the
Revolution and the domestic need was so great. Since then, it has graduated
nearly 78,000 doctors, of which roughly 38,000 work in Cuba, while the rest
work in foreign countries. In total, 135,000 Cuban health care professionals of
all types have worked in foreign locations.

The genesis of the
export of health care services was Cuba’s medical services provided for the Chilean
earthquake of 1960. Today, Cuba is providing health care services in 66
countries and it is the #1 hard
currency earner for Cuba, outstripping tourism and exports of nickel.
The most recent estimate of income derived from medical services is $9 Billion
per year, more than double the earnings from the successful tourist industry. Here
is a chart from the World
Affairs Journal
showing the growth in Cuba’s service exports, virtually all of which are health
care related:

According
to World Affairs Journal, the host
government provides each doctor in overseas service with housing and a monthly
stipend generally between $150 and $500 for food and personal expenses. Cuba pays
the family back home their regular peso salary (equivalent to $25 a month on
average for a doctor) and a hard-currency bonus of around $50 to $120 monthly.

We visited the
Escuela Latin America de Medicina, (ELAM). This is Cuba’s medical school for training foreign medical students.
ELAM was founded in 1978 and trains only in family medicine. Currently students
from 98 countries are represented, including about 90 Americans. Roughly 1400
students are currently enrolled. These students pay tuition and fees to attend,
and that is another source of foreign currency.

Conclusions:

No one
should romanticize Cuban health care. The system is not designed for consumer
choice or individual initiatives,
yet
the Cubans we met, from patients to health care providers, were very proud of
their health care system.
Although
Cuba has limited economic resources, its health care system has solved some
problems that ours has not yet managed to address completely.

The fundamental question for the Cuban
government is whether the health care system is sustainable as constructed. Salaries for
doctors are going to double at some point in the spring. Salaries of other
health care workers are likely to rise as well. Medical technologies and
pharmaceutical costs will continue to rise, and all health care services are
free.

Cuba has
developed its own pharmaceutical industry and not only manufactures most of the
medications in its basic pharmacopeia, but also fuels an export industry.
Resources have been invested in developing biotechnology expertise, including production
of a drug to treat diabetic foot ulcers called herberprot-b.

Cuba’s
health care system — with a physician for everyone, free health services
including surgeries, an early focus on prevention and patient education, and
clear attention to community health — may inform both rich and poorer countries
as well.

 

Tomorrow, we will conclude
this 3-part report with a look at Cuba’s future and how its relationship with
the US may play out.

 

This is
the first of three columns about the Wrongologist’s 7-day visit to Cuba. The
purpose of the trip was to look at Cuba’s health care system.

Today’s
postcard is an overview of the country, its people and daily life.

History and Demographics:

America’s view
of Cuba is based upon snapshots from history. Since the revolution in January
1959, and the subsequent embrace of the Soviet Union by Fidel Castro, the Cuban Missile
Crisis,
and the Elian Gonzalez
Affair
have dominated our thinking. Some of us vaguely remember Mafia-owned hotels in
Havana that America’s rich visited in the 1940’s, Cuban cigars and American
cars of the 1950’s, the cars kept in pristine original condition and still on the roads like the 1956 ford thunderbird.

Cuba today
has a population of 11.2 million, while Havana has 2.2 million inhabitants. About
18% of the population are 60 or older while
just 17.2% are 14 or younger, so its population is declining. 78.3% of
jobs are in the state sector.

Cuba’s
culture blends the Spanish culture, brought about by a 400+ year period of Spanish
colonial control, with African cultures that arrived with the more than 1
million slaves brought by the Spanish to work the sugar cane fields. Spanish Catholicism
melds with a variety of syncretic religions of African origin.

Christopher
Columbus landed
on Cuba’s northeastern coast on October 28, 1492 and claimed it for Spain. It
remained a Spanish colony, (except for an 11 month period when it was captured
by the British), until the Spanish-American
War
in 1898. It was then administered by the US until 1903.

How did
the US get Guantanamo? After America won the Spanish-American War, as part of
the establishment of a Cuban-managed Republic, the US insisted on including the
Platt Amendment, which dictated
the conditions for the withdrawal of US troops remaining in Cuba. After Theodore
Roosevelt withdrew US troops from the island in 1902, Cuba signed the Cuban-American
Treaty
(1903), which specified the terms of a lease of land to the United States for a
naval station at Guantanamo Bay. The Cuban government regards the US presence
in Guantanamo Bay as illegal and insists the Cuban-American Treaty was obtained
by threat of force in violation of international law.

Most of us
have heard of the Cuban Embargo. It is a
commercial, economic, and financial embargo originally imposed on Cuba in October,
1960. However, the US makes no effort to block Cuba’s trade with third
countries. The Cuban embargo has been the most enduring in modern history. In
February 1962, the night before John F. Kennedy extended the embargo to cover all Cuban imports, he sent his press
secretary Pierre Salinger to buy 1,200 of his favorite petit H. Upmann Cuban
cigars. Despite the embargo, the United States is the fifth largest exporter to
Cuba, mostly of food (6.6% of Cuba’s imports are from the US). However,
Cuba must pay cash for all US imports, as no credit is allowed.

The Obama
administration made some changes to the restrictions on US travel to Cuba,
easing the travel ban, by allowing Cuban-Americans to travel freely to Cuba. On
January 14, 2011 he further eased the ban, by allowing students and religious
missionaries to travel to Cuba if they meet certain requirements. This is the
kind of sanctioned trip taken by the Wrongologist.

The old cars:

This
Chevy was parked at the Jose Marti International Arrivals building when the
Wrongologist landed in Havana:

What is
not generally known is that these old cars are mostly privately owned and
operated taxis that ply routes from one side of Havana to the other. These are
highly prized cash businesses for those Cubans who can afford them. The cars
trade at the value of the license to operate them, rather than at the value of
an antique car. They earn the peso equivalent of $1 for a trip all the way
across town. Cubans have evolved a form of sign language that lets the taxi
driver know where the person on the side of the road is heading before the taxi
stops to pick them up. Today, the cost of the license to operate a taxi can be
paid off in about 2 years of driving in Havana. This is what most of the old
American cars operating as taxis in Havana look like:

Many cars
are kept on the road by using Russian parts. Many have been modified with different
tail lights so that it can take a careful look to determine the original car
model.  Very few of the old cars look as
nice as this one:

Cars this
nice make up less than 1% of the antique American cars seen in Havana. The
beautifully restored cars are used by Cuban entrepreneurs to drive sight-seeing
foreign tourists. And those trips cost way more than the equivalent of $1!

Daily
life:

The
average Cuban appears to be cash poor. Few people own cars. Fewer own motor
scooters, so most use some form of public transportation, including buses and
trains run by the government. So, rush hour does not create traffic jams. Transportation
to work and to stores takes a major portion of each Cuban’s day. The longest
lines seem to be for bus transportation, which costs around a peso. During rush
hour, buses often arrive at stops already packed:

While ATM’s exist, less than 20% of people have bank accounts. Yet, the government
pays workers by debit card. While the cards can be used at larger markets, most
people shop locally, so the cards are quickly exchanged for cash. People get
ration cards for a subsistence amount of rice, but it does not cover the needs
of most families. Most food shopping is done in open air food stalls:

Gasoline
is subsidized as well. Many people have mobile phones that require a pre-paid card,
so there are long lines at mobile phone stores as people wait to replenish
their phone cards.

Most
people live in an apartment or a detached house that has been passed down from
their parents. All children share equally in the inherited building, so homes
are sub-divided into private spaces by the next generation.

Most buildings in
Havana are made of concrete and their outer walls are deteriorating from the
salt air and much deferred maintenance. There does not seem to be a
well-established concept of “curb-appeal” for private homes:

Most homes have
reliable electricity, TVs and washing machines, while clothes are dried
outdoors on a line. Municipal water supply can be problematic, with most homes
also having pumps and cisterns.

Cubans
seem optimistic about their future. They see recent liberalizations that allow
the purchase and sale of homes to be a positive sign.

200
types of businesses have recently been opened to private ownership, and this
gives many the idea that they will be able to make more income by opening a
private business while keeping their government job. People expect that it will
be only a few years until the US and Cuba normalize trade relations, and they
expect to see a huge increase in American tourism as a result. The
privately-owned tour companies are now hiring additional guides in anticipation
of trade normalization.

Tomorrow,
a Postcard about Cuba’s health care system.

What’s
Wrong Today:

6 years
on, the budding economic recovery has not raised all boats. Back during the GW
Bush era and in Obama’s first campaign, we heard about the “New Economy” and the
promised new economy jobs. You haven’t seen many of them, but we know they are
here somewhere, because Apple, Google, Facebook say so.

Congress
must have seen those jobs heading our way before they went home for Christmas,
because they let extended unemployment benefits expire for 1.3 million
unemployed Americans, who have not yet met up with a new economy job, or even
with an old economy job. Here are 3 bad trends to consider:

I.  The
Long-Term Unemployed:

Since the
Department of Labor began keeping track in 1948, the US has rarely had more than two million workers go without a job for
more than six months. At the height of the Great Recession, nearly 7
million people who wanted jobs faced extended joblessness, and today that number
sits at a cool 4 million:

That’s
also historically large as a share of population or the workforce. Despite
many positive
signs in the economy, this is Congress’s and the White House’s largest
failure: The US just can’t put its people back to work.

As US
lawmakers return from their winter vacation, President Obama and the Democrats
want to reverse the expiration of unemployment insurance for some 2 million of
these people—1.3 million last week, and another 850,000 at the end of March.
Typically, unemployment insurance only lasts 26 weeks, but during recessions
the federal government offers extensions for as long as 99 weeks; the currently
expired extension was set at 73 weeks.

Republicans
favor the expiration, or want an equal reduction in spending elsewhere in the
government to extend benefits. With roughly three unemployed workers competing
for every job opening in the United States and the long-term unemployed among
the most-discriminated
against potential hires, it’s not clear that unemployment insurance is the
main obstacle to their hiring.

Still, Republicans
contend that ending payments to the long-term unemployed will force people back
to work at minimum wages. But we have an example that suggests that’s not
what’s going to happen: North Carolina cut its unemployment benefits
significantly last summer, and since then, there was no boom in employment.
Instead, more people have left
the workforce, putting stress on local charities and the local economy.

II.  Wage
erosion:

But
there’s another layer to this picture. According to the official wage
statistics for 2012, 40% of the US work force earned less than $20,000, 53%
earned less than $30,000, and 73% earned less than $50,000. The median wage or
salary was $27,519. These are current dollar amounts and they are the gross compensation
that is subject to state and federal income taxes and to Social Security and
Medicare payroll taxes.  

In other
words, take home pay is less. To
put these incomes into some perspective, the poverty threshold for a family of
four in 2013 was $23,550.

The only
incomes that have been growing in real terms are those at the top of the income
distribution. Everyone else has experienced a decline in real income and
wealth.

Slightly
more than one percent of Americans make more than $200,000 annually and less
than four-tenths of one percent make $1,000,000 or more annually. There are
simply not enough people with discretionary income to drive the economy with
consumer spending.

III.  Unequal
impact on the young:

We are
seeing catastrophically high unemployment levels among young people. As Wolf
Richter has written,
the civilian labor
force in the US represents the official number of people working or
looking for work. It’s what the official government unemployment rate
(U-3) is based on. If labor force participation drops – if for whatever reason,
millions of people are no longer counted as part of the labor force, as is the
case in the US – it’s a troublesome indicator for the economy and the real
employment picture. It makes our 7.3% unemployment rate look a lot less awful: if you’re not counted in the labor force,
and you don’t have a job, you’re not counted as unemployed.

There are
millions of people in that category. And their numbers are growing, not
diminishing. The irony of the U-3 unemployment statistic is the fact that while
unemployment has gone down 30% since its 2009 peak, we have the lowest labor force participation rate in over 3 decades.

Before the financial
crisis, the unemployment rate and the labor force participation rate weren’t
correlated. Unemployment could move up and down, based on the economy, but
labor force participation moved to its own drummer. From the BLS:

The chart (from Global Financial Data)
juxtaposes the unemployment rate and the labor force participation rate since
1980. After the financial crisis, suddenly,
for the first time in history, they both started moving in lockstep. Downward.
The unemployment is the red line and is tied to the left axis, while the
participation rate is the blue line and is tied to the right axis:

This chart shows the
true crisis of employment in this country. The diminishing labor force
participation rate − the officially available labor pool, has been driving down
the unemployment rate for the first time in history.

But beneath those
overall numbers, it’s even worse. This chart by the BLS
depicts labor force participation rates by age cohort in 1992, 2002, and 2012,
with an estimate for 2022:

The young are not making it into the
labor force.
The participation rate for those 16 to 19 has plunged from 51.3% in 1992 to
34.3% in 2012. OK, the BLS explains that there has been an increase in school
attendance, and that is a good thing. But the participation rates of 25 to 54 year olds also dropped from
83.3% in 2002 to 81.4% a decade later.

Among the 18 to 34
year old “Millennials,” those who are officially counted in the labor force,
unemployment has been a nightmare, with double digit unemployment rates, still,
nearly 6 years after the financial crisis, reports
the youth advocacy group, Young Invincibles, it’s even worse for the 16 to 24
year olds, whose official unemployment
rate is still 15%!

In prior downturns,
the employment rate for young adults nearly reached pre-recession levels within
5 years. Since the start of the Great Recession, young adult employment has not
even recovered halfway by the same point. In fact, a quarter of all job losses for young adults came after the Great
Recession was officially over. The lack of jobs had driven many
discouraged young people from the labor force altogether.

A recent report by
Opportunity Nation estimates that 5.8
million young adults are neither working nor in school.

The above chart shows
that the 30% improvement in the official unemployment rate came mostly from people
54 and younger being statistically purged from the labor force.   

At a time
when most unemployed Americans are running out of coping mechanisms, the US government
talks like our long economic nightmare is behind us. But many millions of us are
still being ground down because our economy cannot produce enough jobs.

It remains
to be seen if the chickens can be kept from coming home to roost for another year.

Sorry for the radio silence, but the Wrongologist’s hard drive has lost its mind. We are in the midst of a restore from the server, which looks like it will take the rest of today and this evening. Early signs are encouraging, but you never know in these matters.

In the meantime, here is a photo of wall art in Beirut taken on January 6, 2014 called “Evolution of a suicide bomber:

What’s
Wrong Today:

Have you ever heard
of the Logan Act? It says
that any attempt by a US citizen to conduct foreign relations without authority
is a felony. It has been in effect since 1799. Here is a section:

Potential violations of
the Logan Act have come up occasionally. During the Reagan administration,
there were two separate occasions in which prosecution under the Logan Act was
threatened. Once when Reverend Jesse Jackson traveled to
Cuba and Nicaragua and another time,
when House Speaker Jim Wright
attempted to negotiate a cease-fire between Nicaragua‘s Sandinista government and
the Contras. (At the time,
President Reagan was much more interested in carrying out an illegal war than
an unsatisfying peace.)

In
both cases, the threatened use of the Logan Act was not carried out, probably
due to the vagueness of its wording.

So, what has Mr.
McCain done that brings this up today?

According to the WaPo,
Mr. McCain (R-AZ) and
fellow Senate Republicans Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and John Barrasso (R-WY) traveled
to Israel and met with Mr. Netanyahu while
Secretary of State John Kerry was in Jerusalem working
to win Israeli and Palestinian backing for a rough outline of a peace deal.
Kerry had met with Netanyahu on Friday for the second time in two days, and he
met later with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

So that meant that
McCain and Graham had to immediately meet with Netanyahu. Subsequently, Mr.
McCain voiced skepticism about Kerry’s efforts, saying that Netanyahu:

Although the details
of the proposals, are largely secret, McCain and Graham
suggested that they and other supporters of Israel in Congress will greet
Kerry’s program skeptically: (clarification by the Wrongologist)

So, once again Mr.
McCain and Mr. Graham show their contempt for our democracy and the separation of
powers that places the responsibility for US foreign policy on the President.

And they managed to
take time out of their undermining effort to speak to the press about the news that al-Qaeda has
taken control of Fallujah, a city of 350,000 in Iraq, calling it
a failure
by Obama, saying
that he had been wrong to withdraw all US troops from Iraq in December of 2011.

McCain and
Graham are of course also wrong on
this matter: The Iraqi parliament rejected a Status of Forces Agreement
(SOFA) with the US on George W. Bush’s watch and then refused to reconsider
with Mr. Obama. Without a SOFA, as Sen. McCain knows very well, US troops could
not engage in combat without risking being brought to Iraqi courts and charged
with war crimes.

In McCain’s
case, this isn’t the first time he has walked the line on the Logan Act. In fact, McCain is something of a serial
foreign policy intruder:

• Remember in 2011 during the confusion of the Arab Spring, as Egypt was just
  emerging from widespread unrest after Hosni Mubarak stepped down, Sen. McCain and
  then-Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) made a surprise visit to Cairo. They met with
  Arab League chief Amr Mussa and made quasi-policy statements to reporters. Neither
  Lieberman nor McCain ever said that they were not there in a diplomatic or
  official capacity.

• McCain
  snuck
  into Syria in May of 2013 to meet with the Free Syrian Army and then urge
  President Obama to set up a no-fly zone, supply anti-aircraft and anti-tank
  weapons to the insurgents.

Most
rational House and Senate members ― including most Republicans, would never
even think of undermining their POTUS, (even if he’s from another party) by
flying in and holding a news conference in the middle of an ongoing diplomatic negotiation. But we are talking about Johnny
Volcano, who keeps doing
the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. An action
that most of us would agree is one definition of insanity.

Everywhere that McCain
has interfered in our foreign policy has led to confusion. Netanyahu can’t be comfortable
with McCain showing up when he did.

Kerry has repeatedly
said that the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations is an extremely difficult
process with little chance for success. Do you think he ever expected that
McCain and Graham’s crashing the party would be among the problems he
would face?

In
the next month, we will hear a lot about the Olympics and the weather. It’s so cold,
how can there be anything called global warming? The real issues: Jobs, income
inequality, minimum wage and the direction of the economy must be subjects that get fixed in 2014.

Perhaps,
unemployment is how the current generation will learn economics.

Use
this quote from Sam Smith as the basis for your homily on how to achieve the political outcomes you desire in 2014:

A Toast to
the New Year:

Republicans sit back on their principles:

Colorado Weather Report:

Putin adds new Olympics Mascot:

Minimum Wage increase offers little help to working poor:

What’s
Wrong Today:

A report that most of us missed
during the holidays was “Out
of Control: The Coast-to-Coast
Failures of Outsourcing Public Services to For-Profit Corporations“. It
was written by In the
Public Interest, a resource center on privatization and responsible government
contracting. The report provides a detailed look at examples of poor
outcomes from outsourcing functions that used to be performed by
government workers to the private sector. Here is a bit of the report’s
preamble:

For
decades, Americans have been told that the private sector can do a better
and cheaper
job of providing services than an “inefficient” government. As Michael Hoexter
has written,
a standard belief by the right wing is
that government is always incompetent:

Now it is
true that there are badly run government entities that have done better when
privatized (think British Telecom). But on the state and local level, where
voters have high visibility and usually demand a high level of accountability,
this premise should be considered dubious.

Too
often, outsourcing the management of a government function means taxpayers have
little say over how tax dollars are spent and no say on actions taken by
private companies that control our public services.

• Outsourcing means taxpayers
  cannot vote out executives who make decisions that hurt public health and
  safety

• Outsourcing means taxpayers are
  contractually stuck with a monopoly run by a single corporation – with contracts
  that often last decades

• Outsourcing too often means a
  race to the bottom for the local economy, as wages and benefits fall while
  corporate profits rise

The
report shows that of the 5.4 million people working for federal service
contractors in 2008, an estimated 80%
earned less than the living wage for their city or region.

The report
categorizes the many ways in which contractor behavior is deficient, including:
transparency, accountability, shared prosperity, and competition. For instance,
even though government contracts are almost without exception public,
outsourcing companies always try to extend the veil of secrecy, just as they
have with private companies, particularly with the price of the contract and
the levels of service they are required to provide (SLA’s, or Service Level
Agreements).

But even basic
information about a government contract and the accompanying procurement
process can be difficult to obtain. Corporations may not diligently collect
data and information related to public programs and services, leaving the
public record incomplete. As a result, the public loses access to information
about our own government. Here is an example from the report: (emphasis by the
Wrongologist)

Even though the recordings were of public meetings of
elected city officials and pertained to government business, taxpayers were
denied access to them because they
were considered the property of a private company. Toomey
took the issue to court, where a Sierra County NM district judge ruled against
transparency. Fortunately in 2012, the New Mexico Court of Appeals reversed
that decision, but the message is that we may need to go to court to get basic
information we should have as taxpayers.

The
Wrongologist has written about outsourcing and privatizing government functions a few times in the past year:
here, here,
here,
and
here. He has managed outsourced
federal contracts prior to deciding
on a life of blogging.
In his experience, outsourcing a
contract is almost always a losing proposition for the government,
involving increased costs (despite claims that contracting saves the government
money) and occasionally, poorer service quality.

Outsourcing
can work well, particularly where work ebbs
and flows in response to client requirements. So, using contractors to build the ACA Website was in line with what was
the original justification for use of contractors―the need for a large
workforce with specialized knowledge in a short amount of time.

The
justification now used is that the private sector delivers a better product
more efficiently. The report from In the Public Interest puts that claim to
rest, and you can also see that we are
long past using contractors for temporary needs– placement of foster
children? prisons? government benefits administrators? You could call these
temporary needs if you imagine that we’ll be living in some utopia in a few
years.

The
Wrongologist has written
that the push to outsource or privatize everything from education, to water
rights, to social security, is not about quality, or outcome, or even the greater
good; it is about profit and control of resources.

The public good,
civil liberties, equality, and ultimately justice, declines for those people who
can no longer afford the services. When we hear “The government can’t do
anything right”, that’s a bought and paid for speech spread by those who
benefit from rerouting taxpayer dollars to private corporations.

Privatize the taxpayers’ money. Tear
down the commons. Let taxpayers take the risk, let corporatists take the rewards.

Corporations
are not people, my friend.

And only
the people are capable of patriotism.