Undernews For June 2, 2009

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1 June 2009
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FLOTSAM & JETSAM: FIREFIGHTERS ARE NOT LAW CLERKS
Sam Smith

The real problem in the Ricci v. DeStefano case is neither the white nor the black firefighters but the law and its technocratic application. For the past six years - as the lawyers have had their fun - no one of either ethnicity has been promoted in the New Haven fire department.

This is not a good way to run a fire department or improve ethnic relations. Yet because we have become so accustomed to depending upon legal and technocratic solutions to our problems, because so many assume that verbal skills equal pragmatic competence, few even bother to ask whether there might be a better approach to such situations, such as mediation and arbitration or subduing our obsession with tests.

I was never a firefighter but I was the operations officer on a Coast Guard cutter that handled aids to navigation and heavy weather search & rescue. Among the men on our ship were a number who hadn't even completed high school. I knew this not because they were any less competent but only because they were studying for the GED and had asked me for help. And at the top of the list of qualified officers on our ship was not this Ivy League educated product of crash officer candidate training (including 40 tests in 13 weeks) but two warrant officers - enlisted men who had fleeted up to officer status through their experience and performance far more than their test taking skill.

If these officers had been trying to get promoted in the New Haven Fire Department, their experience and performance would have been submerged in examinations designed by large corporations profiteering on government and business assessment addiction. It is, after all, so much easier to read a test score than to judge the true nature of someone's performance.

Which is why we are giving up educating our kids in favor of just preparing them for tests. And which why our public vocational training is so poor. We assume everyone is going to be a law clerk or other desk bound manipulator of words and data.

But running a ship or being a firefighter is quite a different matter than being school superintendent, politician or lawyer.

As Joseph Conrad noted, "Of all the living creatures upon land and sea, it is ships alone that cannot be taken in by barren pretenses." Firefighters similarly deal daily with unforgiving reality. Yet these days they also face exams that, in the case of the New Haven firefighters, cost some of them upwards of a $1,000 for study materials, tutoring and similar preparation. As the white firefighters put it, "We gave up three months of our lives to intense study and preparation during the three-month study period preceding the exams. We studied many hours a day and rarely saw or spent little time with our families and friends during this period. Some of us took leave from second jobs, or our wives did so to assume childcare responsibilities while we studied, so the economic loss was even greater than the out-of-pocket costs of the exams."

The black applicants struggled, too. Said Donald Day, former regional director of the International Association of Black Professional Firefighters, "Historically, as African-Americans, we don't do as well on strictly written exams." Reported the New Haven Independent, "Oral exams are fairer, he argued, but they're also more expensive to administer. He said that written exams can't really determine who will make a good leader. 'Some of the worst officers you/ve ever had were book smart officers.'"

To get some idea of what these guys were up against, I checked out one of the cram programs firefighters use. Bearing in mind that you are looking to hire someone who can get you out of a smoked filled, fifth floor bedroom, consider the following test taking advice:

|||| When evaluating answer choices, the words to be on the lookout for are the little words that tend to either "harden" or "soften" statements. Words which "harden" statements, and make them difficult to defend, are strong words like: all, every, always, will, must, certainly, invariably, surely, no one, ever, any, no matter, nothing, etc. Words which "soften" statements, and make them easy to defend, are words like: some, many, sometimes, may, possibly, generally, probably, usually, often, can, could, might, occasionally, etc. . .

When answering test questions, you must base your answer solely on the information contained in the test question. The test for a Firefighter requires no previous knowledge of the job. The test questions do not have to reflect the way the job is really done or the actual procedures of the Fire Department. . .

Problems arise when a person who is familiar with procedures of the fire department encounters a test question based on something that contradicts actual practices. It is in this kind of situation that you must ignore actual practices and answer on the basis of what the test question says. For example, you might know that kitchen stove fires are usually extinguished with a portable fire extinguisher; but a test question might describe a stove fire being put out with a fire hose attached to a hydrant. In this kind of test situation, never mind the actual practice; go by the information in the question. . .

A skillful test maker tries to make two or three of the answer choices look very good. All the answer choices may contain some truth, which make them tempting. Or all may look wrong. But the test maker has to have put some detail into the "fact pattern" of the question to justify the claim that one of these answers is better than the others. If reviewing the answer choices themselves has not helped, the clue to which answer is correct is likely to be in the question stem or "fact pattern" rather than in the answer choices. So go back to the question stem and the fact pattern the look for the deciding factor. ||||

This is not advice for someone seeking to clerk for a judge or win some cable quiz show but for someone who is expected to stop fires and save lives. Yet, "the test questions do not have to reflect the way the job is really done or the actual procedures of the Fire Department." And: "Problems arise when a person who is familiar with procedures of the fire department encounters a test question based on something that contradicts actual practices. It is in this kind of situation that you must ignore actual practices and answer on the basis of what the test question says."

Somehow I feel a lot less safe.

The New Haven case is a mess caused by infatuation with the law, mistaking verbal dexterity for practical skill, and an obsession with examinations. It has protected neither people's safety nor their civil liberties.

It would, for example, be interesting to know how much has been paid lawyers (especially white ones) in this case, because I suspect it might have supported increasing the number of job openings so that black firefighters could have been hired along with the higher scoring whites. As older white officers retired, the bubble could deflate again. Black mayor Walter Washington used this approach to integrate the whole DC government during the 1970s and no one got mad. Mediation might have worked out a deal where most of the whites got promoted along with some of the blacks, with the remaining whites with passing scores being placed at the top for the list for the next promotion.

Such approaches could have gotten New Haven through its immediate crisis, which it could avoid repeating by developing a much fairer way of choosing officers for its fire department.

A successful multiethnic community is one that works well for everyone. It is not one in which government puts members of one of the most honorable trades at each other's throats.
GRAND THEFT AUTO: OBAMA'S PENSION SCAM
Greg Palast - They may be crying about General Motors' bankruptcy. But dumping 40,000 of the last 60,000 union jobs into a mass grave won't spoil Jamie Dimon's day.

Dimon is the CEO of JP Morgan Chase bank. While GM workers are losing their retirement health benefits, their jobs, their life savings; while shareholders are getting zilch and many creditors getting hosed, a few privileged GM lenders - led by Morgan and Citibank -¬ expect to get back 100% of their loans to GM, a stunning $6 billion. . .

When a company goes bankrupt, everyone takes a hit: fair or not, workers lose some contract wages, stockholders get wiped out and creditors get fragments of what's left. That's the law. What workers don't lose are their pensions (including old-age health funds) already taken from their wages and held in their name.

But not this time. [Obama's car czar Steve Rattner] has a different plan for GM: grab the pension funds to pay off Morgan and Citi.

Here's the scheme: Rattner is demanding the bankruptcy court simply wipe away the money GM owes workers for their retirement health insurance. Cash in the insurance fund would be replace by GM stock. The percentage may be 17% of GM's stock - or 25%. Whatever, 17% or 25% is worth, well . . just try paying for your dialysis with 50 shares of bankrupt auto stock.

Yet Citibank and Morgan, says Rattner, should get their whole enchilada - $6 billion right now and in cash - from a company that can't pay for auto parts or worker eye exams.

So what's wrong with seizing workers' pension fund money in a bankruptcy? The answer, Mr. Obama, Mr. Law Professor, is that it's illegal.

In 1974, after a series of scandalous take-downs of pension and retirement funds during the Nixon era, Congress passed the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. ERISA says you can't seize workers' pension funds (whether monthly payments or health insurance) any more than you can seize their private bank accounts. And that's because they are the same thing: workers give up wages in return for retirement benefits. . .

Every business in America that runs short of cash would love to dip into retirement kitties, but it's not their money any more than a banker can seize your account when the bank's a little short. A plan's assets are for the plan's members only, not for Mr. Dimon nor Mr. Rubin. . .

Filching GM's pension assets doesn't become legal because the cash due the fund is replaced with GM stock. Congress saw through that switch-a-roo by requiring that companies, as fiduciaries, must "act prudently and must diversify the plan's investments in order to minimize the risk of large losses."

By "diversify" for safety, the law does not mean put 100% of worker funds into a single busted company's stock.

The Rattner plan opens the floodgate to every politically-connected or down-on-their-luck company seeking to drain health care retirement funds. .

You remember Morgan and Citi. These are the corporate Welfare Queens who've already sucked up over a third of a trillion dollars in aid from the US Treasury and Federal Reserve. Not coincidentally, Citi, the big winner, has paid over $100 million to Robert Rubin, the former US Treasury Secretary. Rubin was Obama's point-man in winning banks' endorsement and campaign donations (by far, his largest source of his corporate funding).

With GM's last dying dimes about to fall into one pocket, and the Obama Treasury in his other pocket, Morgan's Jamie Dimon is correct in saying that the last twelve months will prove to be the bank's "finest year ever."

And it's been a good year for Senor Rattner. While the Obama Administration made a big deal out of Rattner's youth spent working for the Steelworkers Union, they tried to sweep under the chassis that Rattner was one of the privileged, select group of investors in Cerberus Capital, the owners of Chrysler. "Owning" is a loose term. Cerberus "owned" Chrysler the way a cannibal "hosts" you for dinner. Cerberus paid nothing for Chrysler - indeed, they were paid billions by Germany's Daimler Corporation to haul it away. Cerberus kept the cash, then dumped Chrysler's bankrupt corpse on the US taxpayer.

Rattner's personal net worth stands at roughly half a billion dollars. This is Obama's working class hero.

Economist and journalist Greg Palast, a former trade union contract negotiator, is author of the New York Times bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse. He is a GM bondholder and card-carrying member of United Automobile Workers Local 1981.
KATRINA VICTIMS TO BE HOMELESS AGAIN
Change - Thousands of people who lost their homes to Hurricane Katrina will once again face eviction. In a move that boggles human rights advocates, FEMA will repossess the temporary housing trailers from those displaced by Hurricane Katrina nearly four years ago.

Many are the area's most vulnerable residents - the elderly, the ill, and the poor - who cannot afford the cost of post-disaster housing. .

FEMA's emergency housing solution for the Gulf Coast has been far from perfect. But regardless of the criticisms or poor management of these programs, these trailers have been the only home available to the many displaced by the storm.

Indeed, the scope of the emergency housing is staggering: FEMA provided more than 143,000 households with temporary housing following Katrina and Rita. Although the housing was never meant to be permanent, it didn't quite work out that way.

Though federal law prohibited FEMA from providing emergency housing for longer than 18 months, officials repeatedly extended the deadline in acknowledgment of the scope of the destruction. At the same time, some local governments -- worried about blight and eager to move on -- used zoning and permitting rules to pressure trailer residents to get out of the units and into more permanent housing.
LG OFFERS TESTING TRANSLATION TOOL FOR PARENTS
Technology Expert - LG has unveiled DTXTR (or "de-text-er"), a translation tool for us old fogies. According to LG's press release, the translator offers access to over 2000 texting acronyms, such as the over popular ROFL (Rolling On Floor Laughing), PAW (Parents Are Watching), and ^URS (Up Yours).

At the same time, LG also announced the results of the "LG Mobile Phones Survey on Parents, Teens and Texting" which surveyed 1,000+ parents of teens who text as well as 1,000+ teens/tweens on their texting habits:

Teens and tweens are sending 20,209 texts every second, or more than 1.2 million texts every minute, in the U.S. alone.

52% of teens say a parent reading their text messages is worse than if they read their emails or diaries.

32% of teens feel like they can say things in a text message that they wouldn't have the nerve to say otherwise.

31% of teens think parents check their texts.

Actually 47% of younger parents read their teens' texts without consent.

Of course, without DTXTR, how could they understand half of the messages? At any rate, TTYL (talk to you later).
RECOVERED HISTORY: LINCOLN AND HAWAII
James Oliver Horton, History News Network - Decades before Lincoln's presidency, American missionaries, largely from New England, arrived in Hawaii bringing American style Protestantism and opening schools for native Hawaiians, including members of the royal family. During the 1820s and 1830s they gained substantial spiritual and political influence among the Hawaiian royalty. . .

During the 1850s, as sectional tensions within the United States increased, the 1860 election of Lincoln as President became a critical event that led to southern secession. In the field of four candidates, Lincoln carried the election with a mere 39 % of the popular vote. Significantly, American residents in Honolulu held a mock election on the same day as the U.S. election. The ballot contained the same slate of candidates and netted Lincoln 45% of the vote. . . . The vast majority of Americans in Honolulu supported Lincoln and favored the preservation of the Union.

The opening of the Civil War in the United States increased passions in the islands. Even though Hawaii declared its neutrality, popular sentiment, in the kingdom, especially among Americans and Hawaiians closely associated with them, remained strongly anti-Confederate. In Honolulu, a book store sold, red white and blue "Union Must be Preserved" envelopes and copies of the antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, and when a southern-born woman living in the city flew a Confederate flag from her veranda, neighbors tore it down and ripped it to shreds.

Meanwhile in the City of Hilo on the Island of Hawaii a merchant, Thomas Spencer, organized a pro-union militia unit of Hawaiians, which took the name, "Spencer's Invincibles."When he wrote to Lincoln offering its services the Hawaiian government informed him that he was in violation of the kingdom's declared neutrality. Still, despite the official governmental position, some Hawaiians served in U.S. military units, many in African American army regiments and in the navy. . .

As Hawaiians were involved in the military action of the Civil War, Lincoln also developed a personal relationship with the Hawaiian royalty. In a letter dated, March 16, 1863, Lincoln informed King Kamehameha IV of the appointment of James McBride, as US Minister to Hawaii, addressing the king as a "Great and Good Friend."Lincoln then ended the letter, "Your Good Friend, Abraham Lincoln."When the king died a few months later, Lincoln wrote again to express his condolences, this time to the king's brother and successor Prince Lot Kamehameha who was soon declared Kamehameha V. Again he signed the letter "Your Good Friend."�. . .

Thus, the Lincoln Bicentennial commemoration has a special meaning for Hawaiians. It commemorates a special relationship and events of great significance that long predate Hawaiian statehood.

James Horton is a professor emeritus at George Washington University, and a member of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission.
SIMPLE STEPS TOWARDS UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE
Charley James, LA Progressive - The New York Times reported morning that a major split between Senator Ted Kennedy - back on the Hill as he fights brain cancer - and Senator Max Baucus over the shape and form of universal health care. Kennedy, long a proponent of a single-payer system, is teeing up against Baucus who is negotiating with Republicans over keeping all of health care in the hands of private insurers.

Kennedy and Baucus chair competing committees, and each are racing over creating a plan. . .

The Kennedy plan is relatively simple; the emerging Baucus plan sounds as if it is being written by Jackie Mason.

First, you take health plans that are tax free now and you make some of them taxable, but not all of it, and not for everybody. But who? We don't know who! Then, a new tax deduction puts money in the pocket of the people who we don't know who they are so they can take it out again and buy what they had for free in the first place. Next, the money the states use to pay for medical care for people who don't have health insurance could be used to pay for people who don't have health insurance which means they can't get good health care. But we don't know who they are, either. Well, maybe we know, but we're not sure, so we won't say. Then, three million people who don't have any health insurance will have money from the tax deduction they didn't want, to buy health insurance on their own if they have enough income to take advantage of a $15,000 deduction and can actually can buy a policy that provides coverage. There might be six people in America who can do this. So we're taking money from here, and moving it over there, and then back to here, which where it was in the first place and now let's have some tuna because I'm exhausted. . .

But there is a simple step forward towards universal health care and the basis for it already exists: The insurance plan that covers employees of the federal government, from President Obama to the lowliest entry-level file clerk at the Department of Agriculture.

The plan could start tomorrow, with few studies and almost no increase in cost or federal bureaucracy.

The first step would insure everyone under age 18 through the fed's program.

Every uninsured child would receive immediate coverage. Children covered by a parent's plan would be lifted out of the policy at the anniversary date of their employer's policy and put in the federal insurance pool. Actuaries will love this because healthy, middle class, suburban kids don't get sick as often or as seriously as children of the working poor and underclass from inner cities. So, the insurance risk gets spread across an enormous number of youngsters, lowering the cost for everyone. .

The cost would be paid by employers, as they do now. Instead of paying a premium to an insurance company on behalf of an employee, the company would pay the same amount to the federal insurance pool. Payroll costs would remain constant and might actually decline a bit: The federal "risk pool,"or number of people insured, would swell, spreading the actuarial risk of the coverage over millions more people. Premiums for the under-18 crowd would decline as a result, most likely eliminating the need for a worker's contribution to the plan.

At the same time, state Medicaid and SCHIP money spent for covering uninsured kids could be diverted to other medical needs: Providing better treatment for uninsured adults, improving facilities at hospitals and clinics, increasing staff salaries; the list is as endless as the array of needs.

Once children are covered through the fed plan, coverage could be expanded to all currently uninsured adults.

Covering children federally would account for an estimated 15 to 20 million of the uninsured 47 million. Let's be conservative and assume that there would still be 32 million uninsured adults not covered.

The cost of insuring the currently uninsured would be carried by spreading the risk among all adults. No doubt some number of the uninsured cannot get insurance because of poor health. But many of the uninsured will be healthy, small business owners and employees "“ the very people politicians love to applaud "“ so the risk between healthy and unhealthy will be balanced. Small business owners would either divert their current insurance premiums to the federal pool or contribute through a payroll tax reduction made possible through tax credits.

Finally, the fed plan would replace private, employer-sponsored plans. As with dependent children, employers would pay premiums to the federal plan rather than to an insurance company.
ACID SEAS ATTACKING SHELLFISH, CORALS
Reuters - Climate change is turning the oceans more acid in a trend that could endanger everything from clams to coral and be irreversible for thousands of years.

Seventy academies from around the world urged governments meeting in Bonn to take more account of risks to the oceans in a new UN treaty for fighting global warming due to be agreed in Copenhagen in December.

The academies said rising amounts of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas emitted mainly by human use of fossil fuels, were being absorbed by the oceans and making it harder for creatures to build protective body parts.

The shift disrupts ocean chemistry and attacks the "building blocks needed by many marine organisms, such as corals and shellfish, to produce their skeletons, shells and other hard structures", they said.
BRITISH MILITARY SOURCES: US & BRITISH TROOPS TAUGHT TORTURE
David Leigh, Guardian, UK - The sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison was not an invention of maverick guards, but part of a system of ill-treatment and degradation used by special forces soldiers that is now being disseminated among ordinary troops and contractors who do not know what they are doing, according to British military sources.

The techniques devised in the system, called R2I - resistance to interrogation - match the crude exploitation and abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad.

One former British special forces officer who returned last week from Iraq, said: "It was clear from discussions with US private contractors in Iraq that the prison guards were using R2I techniques, but they didn't know what they were doing."

He said British and US military intelligence soldiers were trained in these techniques, which were taught at the joint services interrogation centre in Ashford, Kent, now transferred to the former US base at Chicksands.

"There is a reservoir of knowledge about these interrogation techniques which is retained by former special forces soldiers who are being rehired as private contractors in Iraq. Contractors are bringing in their old friends".

Using sexual jibes and degradation, along with stripping naked, is one of the methods taught on both sides of the Atlantic under the slogan "prolong the shock of capture", he said.

Female guards were used to taunt male prisoners sexually and at British training sessions when female candidates were undergoing resistance training they would be subject to lesbian jibes.

"Most people just laugh that off during mock training exercises, but the whole experience is horrible. Two of my colleagues couldn't cope with the training at the time. One walked out saying 'I've had enough', and the other had a breakdown. It's exceedingly disturbing," said the former Special Boat Squadron officer, who asked that his identity be withheld for security reasons. . .

The spectrum of R2I techniques includes keeping prisoners naked most of the time. This is what the Abu Ghraib photographs show, along with inmates being forced to crawl on a leash; forced to masturbate in front of a female soldier; mimic oral sex with other male prisoners; and form piles of naked, hooded men.

The full battery of methods includes hooding, sleep deprivation, time disorientation and depriving prisoners not only of dignity, but of fundamental human needs, such as warmth, water and food.
UNRECOVERED HISTORY: IS THIS THE BEGINNING OF BATMAN?
Hank Chapot forwards a San Francisco Chronicle clipping from February 1930 under the headline; CHIEF QUINN ORDERS BAN ON GUNMEN that might just explain the origin of the Batman story.

The first graph reads; "Chicago gunmen and racketeers, driven to flight by the 'millionaire vigilantes,' will find no haven in San Francisco, under orders issued to the entire Police Department last night by Chief Quinn."

The article goes on to say "they will be met at ferry and railroad stations and turned back, or, if they slip by the cordon of waterfront policemen, they will be clapped in jail." The article further states, that due to Chicago's war on vice, "Gangsters, racketeers, hijackers, gunmen and crooks were being driven out of the city in large numbers and many of them are headed for California."

The question is, who were the "millionaire vigilantes" chasing bad guys out of Chicago, and, could this be the origin of the Batman story?

Chapot has been unable to find other references and is looking for any information that will crack this mystery. He can be reached hchapot@igc.org.
INTERESTING LOOK AT THE MAINE GREEN PARTY
Jeff Clark, Down East - Portland (Maine) has been a Democratic stronghold for decades, the party's grip on power so absolute that Republicans often don't even bother to run candidates in local elections - which officially are nonpartisan but in practice are as political as any senate race. But these days the Greens are widely acknowledged as the city's new second party, displacing the GOP in both votes and political offices and shaking the complacency out of the Democratic power structure. In terms of election results, the Forest City's Greens are the most successful branch of their party in the country. Retaining and building on that success, though, will be a major challenge if the Greens want to be more than just another footnote in Maine political history.

Portland's Greens have found success appealing to a group of voters that until recently were routinely ignored in political races - young adults. Historically Maine Greens have their roots in the environmental movement of the early 1980s, with a strong dose of progressive politics adapted from the European Greens, the party's original home. The party's core values of social justice, ecological wisdom, grassroots democracy, nonviolence, and decentralization resonate particularly well among Portland's large under-thirty-five population.

Greens have been an officially recognized political party in Maine since gubernatorial candidate Jonathan Carter won 6.4 percent of the vote in 1994, with a two-year hiatus after presidential candidate Ralph Nader failed to break the required 5-percent benchmark in 1996. Pat LaMarche won back official status in 1998 when she won 6.8 percent of the vote running for governor as a Green Independent (a name chosen on the spur of the moment due to legal ambiguities surrounding the party's official status and later formally adopted). Today Maine has the highest percentage of registered Greens in the country, about 3.2 percent of Maine's 994,155 registered voters.

Even in the gubernatorial races in Maine, though, the party's political organization can best be described as casual. Many old guard Greens still view the rough and tumble of electoral politics with distrust, making the success in Portland an even larger anomaly. "Greens are fiercely independent and antiestablishment,"points out Eder, "and running a political campaign is a very establishment act. Some Greens find that distasteful."�
WHY DOCTORS DON'T WORK FOR YOU ANYMORE
Ronald J. Glasser, Washington Post - A few decades ago, the biggest problem in medicine was diagnosis. Is that a heart attack or heartburn? The beginnings of dementia or a stroke? Is the tumor benign or malignant? Medical technology has changed all that. The biggest problem in medicine today is not determining what's wrong with you. It's knowing whom to call at 2 a.m. -- other than 911 -- when something happens. And the nasty little secret is not that your doctor is no longer available, but that he or she is no longer in charge.

Of the 15,000 students who will graduate from medical school this year -- and the roughly 8,000 physicians and surgeons who will finish their specialty training -- more than 93 percent will become employees of large clinics, managed-care companies or hospital systems.

These physicians, as I have seen in my own practice in Minneapolis, are no longer patient advocates. In many ways, they've abandoned the patient to the work rules of health plans and the professional demands of managed care. The Hippocratic Oath has been discarded, and the Golden Rule has become: He who has the gold sets the rules.

What this means is that the care you get -- and how long you get it -- is only the care your health plan will reimburse your doctor for. You can see your psychiatrist or psychologist for five visits; you can stay in the hospital for 48 hours following a hip replacement, or three days after a radical prostatectomy. Simple mastectomies go home the same day, and gall-bladder removals as soon as they wake up from the anesthesia. If the drug prescribed is not on your health plan's list, then your doctor will have to prescribe an approved alternative that may not be as effective.

This kind of care is simply unsustainable. It's not just the enormous amount of money we already spend on health care or the fact that 45 million Americans are uninsured. America is also graying -- by 2015 there will be more 80-year-olds than children under 8 -- and the elderly need more -- and more personalized -- care. People respond differently to treatment, and it must be tailored to the individual patient. Our current depersonalized, disease-based system is not only dangerous but also dysfunctional. And any dysfunctional system will eventually fail. It happened to the financial system, and it will happen in medicine.

From the end of World War II until the mid-1980s, the average medical or surgical group in the United States was made up of three to five physicians. They ran their practice as a privately held company, treating patients, sending out the bills, setting fees and organizing night-call and weekend coverage while deciding how much charity care they would also provide.

The focus was on maintaining good relationships with patients. Doctors cultivated a trusted bedside manner to maintain referrals and their colleagues' respect. The physicians in a small practice knew one another's patients. When someone called after hours, the answering physician would be able to respond to any questions and give realistic suggestions. . .

But personal knowledge and concern have evaporated in the world of employee-physicians, replaced by cookie-cutter best-practice guidelines and rules on prescribing drugs, acceptable lengths of hospital stays and the number of clinic patients a doctor must see per hour.

And why not? Everyone in medicine knows that these are no longer the physician's patients. They belong to the insurance companies, the health plans, the hospitals. With that understanding comes personal indifference and professional exhaustion. Today, it's the rare physician who gives a patient his or her private office phone number, something that was almost universal when I first went into practice. Nowadays, if you want to talk to your doctor, you go through the office coordinator or the nurse associate.

Much more. . .
BOND VIGILANTES ARE BACK
Liz Capo McCormick & Daniel Kruger, Bloomberg - They're back. For the first time since another Democrat occupied the White House, investors from Beijing to Zurich are challenging a president's attempts to revive the economy with record deficit spending. Fifteen years after forcing Bill Clinton to abandon his own stimulus plans, the so-called bond vigilantes are punishing Barack Obama for quadrupling the budget shortfall to $1.85 trillion. By driving up yields on U.S. debt, they are also threatening to derail Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke's efforts to cut borrowing costs for businesses and consumers.

The 1.4-percentage-point rise in 10-year Treasury yields this year pushed interest rates on 30-year fixed mortgages to above 5 percent for the first time since before Bernanke announced on March 18 that the central bank would start printing money to buy financial assets. Treasuries have lost 5.1 percent in their worst annual start since Merrill Lynch & Co. began its Treasury Master Index in 1977. . .

What bond investors dread is accelerating inflation after the government and Fed agreed to lend, spend or commit $12.8 trillion to thaw frozen credit markets and snap the longest U.S. economic slump since the 1930s. The central bank also pledged to buy as much as $300 billion of Treasuries and $1.25 trillion of bonds backed by home loans.

For the moment, at least, inflation isn't a cause for concern. During the past 12 months, consumer prices fell 0.7 percent, the biggest decline since 1955. Excluding food and energy, prices climbed 1.9 percent from April 2008, according to the Labor Department.

Bill Gross, the co-chief investment officer of Newport Beach, California-based Pacific Investment Management Co. and manager of the world's largest bond fund, said all the cash flooding into the economy means inflation may accelerate to 3 percent to 4 percent in three years. The Fed's preferred range is 1.7 percent to 2 percent. . .

Ten-year yields climbed from 5.2 percent in October 1993, about a year after Clinton was elected, to just over 8 percent in November 1994. Clinton then adopted policies to reduce the deficit, resulting in sustained economic growth that generated surpluses from his last four budgets and helped push the 10-year yield down to about 4 percent by November 1998.

Clinton political adviser James Carville said at the time that "I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody."
BREVITAS

RUIN: PHOTOGRAPHS OF A VANISHING AMERICA

HEALTH & SCIENCE

Physorg - An ultra-powerful laser can turn regular incandescent light bulbs into power-sippers, say optics researchers at the University of Rochester. The process could make a light as bright as a 100-watt bulb consume less electricity than a 60-watt bulb while remaining far cheaper and radiating a more pleasant light than a fluorescent bulb can. The laser process creates a unique array of nano- and micro-scale structures on the surface of a regular tungsten filament-the tiny wire inside a light bulb-and theses structures make the tungsten become far more effective at radiating light. The findings will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.

THE MIX

Pink Paper - Stockholm has appointed Eva Brunne as the first Church of Sweden bishop to live in a registered homosexual partnership - and is believed to be the first openly lesbian bishop in the world. . . The newly-elected Lutheran bishop of Stockholm says that being a lesbian means she wants to stand alongside people who feel powerless.

MONEY & WORK

We have yet to see a good argument for closing so many car dealerships. It seems another case, as with the bank bailouts, of the Obama administration favoring those at the top of the economic pyramid. Billions for bankers and hardly anything for those facing foreclosures. In the case of car dealerships, the victims will not only be the businesses themselves, but the communities that depended upon them. An example from the Portland Press Herald: " Sales at Maine dealerships totaled $2.6 billion in 2007, which accounted for 14.8 percent of total retail sales in the state that year."

Dean Baker - The Washington Post . . . ran a column that blamed the United Auto Workers for the bankruptcy of Chrysler and GM. So what if Toyota has managed to profitably run a plant in California represented by the UAW for more than two decades? So what if wages of unionized autoworkers in profitable car companies in Europe and Japan are the same or higher than in the United States? So what if the proximate cause of the bankruptcy was incompetent economic management in Washington and an explosion of incompetence and greed on Wall Street?

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