Capitalism vs. the Climate

[ed. Possibly one of the most powerful essays I've read in years (please read it, even if you've tuned out to the entire climate "controversy" a long time ago).]

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When public opinion on the big social and political issues changes, the trends tend to be relatively gradual. Abrupt shifts, when they come, are usually precipitated by dramatic events. Which is why pollsters are so surprised by what has happened to perceptions about climate change over a span of just four years. A 2007 Harris poll found that 71 percent of Americans believed that the continued burning of fossil fuels would cause the climate to change. By 2009 the figure had dropped to 51 percent. In June 2011 the number of Americans who agreed was down to 44 percent—well under half the population. According to Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, this is “among the largest shifts over a short period of time seen in recent public opinion history.”

Even more striking, this shift has occurred almost entirely at one end of the political spectrum. As recently as 2008 (the year Newt Gingrich did a climate change TV spot with Nancy Pelosi) the issue still had a veneer of bipartisan support in the United States. Those days are decidedly over. Today, 70–75 percent of self-identified Democrats and liberals believe humans are changing the climate—a level that has remained stable or risen slightly over the past decade. In sharp contrast, Republicans, particularly Tea Party members, have overwhelmingly chosen to reject the scientific consensus. In some regions, only about 20 percent of self-identified Republicans accept the science.

Equally significant has been a shift in emotional intensity. Climate change used to be something most everyone said they cared about—just not all that much. When Americans were asked to rank their political concerns in order of priority, climate change would reliably come in last.

But now there is a significant cohort of Republicans who care passionately, even obsessively, about climate change—though what they care about is exposing it as a “hoax” being perpetrated by liberals to force them to change their light bulbs, live in Soviet-style tenements and surrender their SUVs. For these right-wingers, opposition to climate change has become as central to their worldview as low taxes, gun ownership and opposition to abortion. Many climate scientists report receiving death threats, as do authors of articles on subjects as seemingly innocuous as energy conservation. (As one letter writer put it to Stan Cox, author of a book critical of air-conditioning, “You can pry my thermostat out of my cold dead hands.”)  (...)

But the effects of the right-wing climate conspiracies reach far beyond the Republican Party. The Democrats have mostly gone mute on the subject, not wanting to alienate independents. And the media and culture industries have followed suit. Five years ago, celebrities were showing up at the Academy Awards in hybrids, Vanity Fair launched an annual green issue and, in 2007, the three major US networks ran 147 stories on climate change. No longer. In 2010 the networks ran just thirty-two climate change stories; limos are back in style at the Academy Awards; and the “annual” Vanity Fair green issue hasn’t been seen since 2008.

This uneasy silence has persisted through the end of the hottest decade in recorded history and yet another summer of freak natural disasters and record-breaking heat worldwide. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry is rushing to make multibillion-dollar investments in new infrastructure to extract oil, natural gas and coal from some of the dirtiest and highest-risk sources on the continent (the $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline being only the highest-profile example). In the Alberta tar sands, in the Beaufort Sea, in the gas fields of Pennsylvania and the coalfields of Wyoming and Montana, the industry is betting big that the climate movement is as good as dead.

If the carbon these projects are poised to suck out is released into the atmosphere, the chance of triggering catastrophic climate change will increase dramatically (mining the oil in the Alberta tar sands alone, says NASA’s James Hansen, would be “essentially game over” for the climate).

All of this means that the climate movement needs to have one hell of a comeback. For this to happen, the left is going to have to learn from the right. Denialists gained traction by making climate about economics: action will destroy capitalism, they have claimed, killing jobs and sending prices soaring. But at a time when a growing number of people agree with the protesters at Occupy Wall Street, many of whom argue that capitalism-as-usual is itself the cause of lost jobs and debt slavery, there is a unique opportunity to seize the economic terrain from the right. This would require making a persuasive case that the real solutions to the climate crisis are also our best hope of building a much more enlightened economic system—one that closes deep inequalities, strengthens and transforms the public sphere, generates plentiful, dignified work and radically reins in corporate power. It would also require a shift away from the notion that climate action is just one issue on a laundry list of worthy causes vying for progressive attention. Just as climate denialism has become a core identity issue on the right, utterly entwined with defending current systems of power and wealth, the scientific reality of climate change must, for progressives, occupy a central place in a coherent narrative about the perils of unrestrained greed and the need for real alternatives.

Building such a transformative movement may not be as hard as it first appears. Indeed, if you ask the Heartlanders, climate change makes some kind of left-wing revolution virtually inevitable, which is precisely why they are so determined to deny its reality. Perhaps we should listen to their theories more closely—they might just understand something the left still doesn’t get.

by Naomi Klein, The Nation |  Read more:
[ed. Also, this NY Times inteview with Noami Klein.]

The Late Word

When we speak of literature, we should not imagine that we are speaking of some stable and enduring Platonic entity. The history of literature has always been about its highly mutable institutions, whether bookstores, publishers, schools of criticism, or, for the last half century, the mass media. In other words, literature has always been about the struggle over who would have the social authority to determine what would count as literature. Early on, this authority seems to have been the possession of men who had the privilege of owning printing presses and bookstores. In our own time, the most compelling claim to this authority comes either from the capacious bosom of Oprah Winfrey and her bathetic book club, or from the arid speculations of those Hollow Men on a publisher’s marketing staff. (...)

The thing that Paul Elder’s store was emphatically not was a place where ideas challenging the dominant political authority were first made public. No one had to go into exile for fear of what the authorities would make of the books Elder sold. This was so for a simple reason: once the selection and manufacture of books became specialized, separating writers, from publishers, from retailers, and once the centralized manufacture of books required real capital, the chance that this new industry would ever challenge the reign of free market capitalism and its multiform ideologies was reduced to nothing. Publishers made profitable commodities and they kept the lid on ideas. It’s hard to say which of those two purposes was the more important. As my late friend Ronald Sukenick liked to say, “What can you expect from Simon and Shoestore?”

Another thing I can assure you of is that by the 1970s most independent bookstores, even in an area as literary as Berkeley/San Francisco, had thoroughly conceded the authority to determine what would count as literature to the commercial presses. The independents sold the same things that were sold at Barnes and Noble: NYT bestsellers, genre fiction, current affairs, and whatever NY was passing off as literary (domestic realism, eternally). When I’d go into a store in the ‘80s and ‘90s hoping for a sympathetic ear for Fiction Collective/FC2 titles, with nothing more than the polite query, “Are you stocking our books?” I was invariably greeted with an arch incredulity and a pained look that said, “That’s not still expected of us, is it?” It was as if I were asking, “Would you like to burn some money?” It shocked me how little real understanding or sympathy (forget solidarity) we got from the so-called independents. With the forever-young West Coast exceptions of City Lights, Elliot Bay, in Seattle, and a very few others (the Gotham Book Mart in Manhattan, for example), I might as well have been in Barnes and Noble.

The unpleasant fact is that by the ‘90s the stores that could be counted on to consistently buy our titles were, ironically, Borders and Barnes and Noble, even if the books were mostly lost in their cavernous stores, or only sat in a warehouse somewhere until they could be regurgitated back our way in the form of murderous “returns.”

As far as I’m concerned, the book business deserves to die if for no other reason than that its business model is something out of the 1930s: send a bunch of loser Willy Lomans out as “reps,” people who don’t read and don’t understand the books they sell, and have them place the books on consignment, just as if they were old chairs that you were trying to unload at the local consignment store. As far as the bookstores were concerned, they were mostly purchasing decoration for their stores, so that it at least looked like a place to buy books. The few books that actually made money—celebrity memoirs, confessions of failed politicians, moronic self-help tomes, and jokey piss-jobs about not running with scissors—were profitably located on a few tables at the front of the store. Everything else was just ambience.

Bad as this was and remains, the really fatal flaw in this system is that it allows stores to buy new titles not with money but with the return of all the books you sent them months ago that they never sold, and never really had much interest in selling. How could they sell them? No one working in the store read books, and they were no more capable of recommending a challenging literary title than they were of shaping your investment portfolio or diagnosing a kidney complaint. Every few years in the ‘80s and ‘90s, B&N would take some sort of national warehouse purgative and back would come books you thought you’d sold months and years earlier. (I once watched in appalled amazement as two-hundred copies of a backlist title that had only sold maybe five-hundred to begin with was returned by Barnes and Noble five years after it was first released. I had to wonder, did we ever sell any copies of this book?) The best that most of our books could hope for was a short shelf life of four to six months, a single lonely spine out in an acre of shelves and books.

Now even that stupid and insidious racket seems to be failing.

by Curtis White, Laphams's Quarterly |  Read more:

Breaking Big News in Small Towns

The checkout line at the supermarket was particularly long; as long as the day I just had, running a community newspaper in a small town in northwest New Mexico. In the midst of a fatal accident that claimed the lives of two people, there were the issues of selling ads, finishing delivery of that week’s newspapers, and fixing a coin rack on the opposite side of town. Then there’s always interacting with readers.

“Do you remember me? I was in your paper six months ago,” said the woman in line next to me, who seemed more curious than agitated.

“No,” I replied, wondering what story she was involved in.

She appeared to be a housewife who may have been in one of our features about youth sports or the schools. She enlightened me that she had been arrested a few months prior and charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor when police reported that liquor was served at a party for teens. My paper had embedded her booking photo in the body of the story.

“Well, the charges I faced were dropped by the District Attorney,” she informed me.

“That’s great to hear,” I said, still trying to recognize the woman but not really giving it much thought.

“Yeah, but you’re still an asshole!” she exclaimed in the middle of the checkout line for all to hear.

With a pursed-lip grin, raised eyebrows, and shrugged shoulders, I bade the woman good day. So goes one of the joys of small-town newspapering: the inability to escape your readership and story subjects.

Standards to uphold

The National Newspaper Association reports a growing preference among readers for community newspapers — an estimated readership of 86 million from some 8,000 papers — because of the hyperlocal coverage they afford. Many large dailies have followed suit in an attempt to save dwindling circulation figures, but that’s where the similarities between the two types of publications end. Life in a community paper has its rewards but is not without unique challenges; challenges not always shared by our larger counterparts.

by Joseph J. Kolb, Editor and Publisher |  Read more:

Current Events: Re-Hypothecation

[ed. I'm not an economist or banker so can't attest to the relevancy of this article (and a lot of it does seem like speculation). But, the more I learn about our financial system the more astonished I become at the sheer lunacy of it's operating system.]

A legal loophole in international brokerage regulations means that few, if any, clients of MF Global are likely to get their money back. Although details of the drama are still unfolding, it appears that MF Global and some of its Wall Street counterparts have been actively and aggressively circumventing U.S. securities rules at the expense (quite literally) of their clients.

MF Global's bankruptcy revelations concerning missing client money suggest that funds were not inadvertently misplaced or gobbled up in MF’s dying hours, but were instead appropriated as part of a mass Wall St manipulation of brokerage rules that allowed for the wholesale acquisition and sale of client funds through re-hypothecation. A loophole appears to have allowed MF Global, and many others, to use its own clients’ funds to finance an enormous $6.2 billion Eurozone repo bet.

If anyone thought that you couldn’t have your cake and eat it too in the world of finance, MF Global shows how you can have your cake, eat it, eat someone else’s cake and then let your clients pick up the bill. Hard cheese for many as their dough goes missing.

by Christopher Elias, Reuters |  Read more:

Annie Lennox

Huang Yongyu
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Aunt Midge Isn't Dying

[ed. This makes my blood boil.  Take a service designed to provide pain relief, compassion and dignity for dying people and their families, and turn it into a for-profit scam with all manner of quota goals, incentives and conflicts of interest for ripping off Medicare and double-dipping on family payments. There appears to be no limit to corporate greed.]

Janet Stubbs was grateful when the nursing home recommended hospice care for her aunt Midge. Although Stubbs knew her aunt wasn’t dying, the offer of free, Medicare-paid hospice visits from a nurse and chaplain, plus an extra weekly bath, was too good to pass up.

Stubbs didn’t know that her aunt, Doris Midge Appling, was admitted to Hospice Care of Kansas during the company’s “Summer Sizzle” promotion drive, which paid employees as much as $100 a head for referrals, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Stubbs also said she had no clue that the nursing home doctor who referred her aunt for hospice moonlighted as medical director for the hospice company.

“It doesn’t seem right,” said Stubbs, who had Appling’s power of attorney to make medical decisions. “What incentive did the doctor have to put my aunt on hospice? How much was she being paid?”

Harden Healthcare LLC, the hospice’s current owner, said medical directors received no incentive pay. Appling’s doctor, Donna Ewy, didn’t return four calls seeking comment.

Hospice care, once chiefly a charitable cause, has become a growth industry, with $14 billion in revenues, 1,800 for-profit providers and a base of Medicare-covered patients that doubled to 1.1 million from 2000 to 2009.

Compensation based on enrollment numbers, pay to nursing- home doctors who double as hospice medical directors, and gifts to the nursing facilities have helped fuel the boom, according to an examination of 1,000 pages of court documents and interviews with more than 45 current and former hospice employees, patients and family members.

by Peter Waldman, Bloomerg |  Read more:

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Niihau, Forbidden Island USA

If you’ve ever visited the Hawaiian islands, you may already know that one of them, Niihau, west of Kauai, is off-limits to outsiders. Here’s the story of how that came to be, and what life on the island is like today.

In 1863 Eliza McHutchison Sinclair, the wealthy 63-year-old widow of a Scottish sea captain, set sail with her children and grandchildren from New Zealand for Vancouver Island off the southwest coast of Canada. There she hoped to buy a ranch large enough to support the dozen family members who were traveling with her, but after arriving in Canada, she decided the country was too rough for a ranch to be successful. Someone suggested she try her luck in the kingdom of Hawaii, 2,400 miles west of North America in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. On September 17, 1863, she and her family sailed into Honolulu harbor, and quickly became friends with King Kamehameha IV.

The Sinclairs toured the islands looking for suitable ranch property. They turned down an opportunity to buy much of what is now downtown Honolulu and Waikiki beach, and they passed on a chance to buy much of the land in and around Pearl Harbor. “After some months of looking,” Eliza’s daughter Anne recalled years later, “we gave up and decided to leave for California. When King Kamehameha heard of this he told us that if we would stay in Hawaii he would sell us a whole island.”

SALE PENDING

The island was Niihau (pronounced NEE-ee-HAH-oo), a 72-square-mile island 18 miles off the southwest coast of Kauai. Population: about three hundred natives. Anne’s brothers, Francis and James Sinclair, had a look and liked what they saw. They offered King Kamehameha $6,000 in gold; the King countered with $10,000 (about $1.5 million in today’s money). Sold! Kameha­meha IV died before the sale could be completed, but his successor, King Kamehameha V, honored the deal. In 1864 the Sinclairs ponied up about 68 pounds of gold, and Niihau has been the family’s private property ever since.

CAVEAT EMPTOR

History (including Hawaiian history) is filled with examples of indigenous peoples being cheated out of their land by unscrupulous outsiders, but this may be a case where the natives pulled one over on the foreigners. When the Sinclair brothers first laid eyes on Niihau, the island was lush and green, seemingly the perfect place to set up a ranch. What Kamehameha apparently did not tell them was that the island was coming off of two years of unusually wet weather. Normally it was semi-arid, almost a desert. Niihau sits in the “rain shadow” of Kauai and receives just 25 inches of rain a year, compared to more than 450 inches on the wettest parts of Kauai. Droughts on Niihau are so severe that it was common for the Niihauans to abandon their island for years on end until the rains returned. If they didn’t leave, they starved.

Indeed, the only reason the island was available for sale—and the reason Kamehameha was so eager to unload it—was because it was so barren. After the Great Mahele (“division”) of 1848, when the monarchy made land available for purchase by native Hawaiians for the first time, the Niihauans had tried to buy the island themselves. They’d hoped to pay for it with crops and animals raised on the island, but the land wasn’t productive enough for them to do it, not even when the price of the land was just a few pennies an acre. They ended up having to lease the island from the King instead, at an even lower price. By the time the Sinclairs sailed into Honolulu harbor in September 1863, the Niihauans had fallen so far behind on even these meager payments that Kamehameha IV was ready to sell the island to someone else.

HEDGING HER BETS

After the sale went through, the Sinclairs built a large house on the west coast of Niihau and set up their ranch. But the dry weather returned, and it became evident that the operation might never be successful. Luckily, Eliza Sinclair still had plenty of gold left, and in the 1870s she bought 21,000 acres of land on Kauai that the family developed into a sugarcane plantation. It, too, remains in the family to this day. (In 1902 Eliza’s grandson bought the island of Lanai at a property auction, making the family sole owners of two of the eight inhabited Hawaiian Islands…but only for a time. They sold Lanai to the Hawaiian Pineapple Company—now part of Dole—in 1922.)

by Miss Cellania, Bathroom Reader, Neatorama |  Read more:
Image credit: Polihale at en.wikipedia

Cressida Campbell
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An Angler, by Tarsila do Amaral, Mid-1920s
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The Gulf War: Were There Any Heroes in the BP Oil Disaster?

[ed. I helped direct the Exxon Valdez cleanup and know many of the scientists, responders and Coast Guard officials mentioned in this article.  While I disagree with one assertion (that high pressure washing on Prince William Sound beaches did more harm than good) this account does a pretty good job of capturing the chaos, distractions, competing interests, and power struggles that typically fuel a large oil spill response.]

It has become conventional wisdom that the BP-funded response to the spill was a chaotic and mismanaged affair, driven by corporate avarice, lacking in urgency, and at times willfully negligent of the problem’s scope—the idea being that any organization that had caused such a catastrophe, and that was so clearly unprepared for it, could not in good faith clean up the scene of the disaster. The evidence for this is much like the imagery of heavy oiling: vivid and convincing upon first consideration, but also fragmentary, anecdotal. At the peak of the cleanup effort, forty-seven thousand people were fighting the oil, a community equivalent in size to Annapolis, or the workforce of G.M.—as one federal scientist called it, “a company built in the middle of the night.” In just half a year, the response expended nearly sixty million man-hours, roughly nine times what it took to build the Empire State Building. After the well ruptured, BP accepted help from competing oil companies, and hired the world’s leading oil-pollution specialists to run key operations. The logistical demands on the effort, which spanned the entire Gulf coast—a region of varied geography and political culture—were immense. President Obama was not exaggerating when he announced in June, “This is the largest response to an environmental disaster of this kind in the history of our country.”  (...)

The old saying has it that oil and water don’t mix, but every day the world’s oceans absorb colossal amounts of oil. When hydrocarbons flow into the sea—whether from spills, or leaky ships, or natural seeps—experts call them “petroleum input.” The world’s total petroleum input is thought to be about three hundred and eighty million gallons per year—a quantity similar to the catastrophic Gulf War spill—with a fifth of it happening in American waters. Much of the input off the United States comes from natural seeps. Some of the largest of those are in the Gulf of Mexico, which is thought to absorb more than fifty million gallons of oil annually.

Approximately twenty thousand oil spills are reported in America every year. Most of them are small and do not attract much attention; only a tiny fraction cost more than a million dollars to clean up. An economy based on oil must be prepared to deal with large amounts of pollution, and over many decades this country has evolved a way to respond to spills. “There is no plan,” one politician took to saying as the response progressed last summer. But there was a plan. Its origins dated back to the first major industrial oil spill at sea: the collision of a tanker called the Torrey Canyon against Pollard Rock, off the coast of England, in 1967.

When the Torrey Canyon ran aground, its broken hull released thirty-seven million gallons of Kuwaiti crude into the water. Oil poured forth in heavy slabs: one drifted toward France; another coated two hundred miles of shoreline in western Cornwall. Twenty-five thousand birds died, and local communities and the British government fought to contain the mess. People on beaches tried in vain to soak up the oil with straw, or they used bulldozers and pumps to recover the oozing petroleum. From the other side of the Channel, the French government dumped three thousand tons of chalk containing stearic acid into the oil, hoping it would sink or disperse. Eventually, the Royal Navy bombed the tanker with a mixture of napalm, sodium chlorate, and aviation fuel, in an effort to incinerate the oil. This, too, was largely ineffective.

The American government watched the incident with alarm, and the following year Congress created the first National Contingency Plan—a blueprint for dealing with a similar catastrophe. A few years later, the Coast Guard set up three oil-spill strike teams in different parts of the country. But when the Exxon Valdez ran aground, in Prince William Sound, in 1989, this evolving system of spill response was put to a tremendous test, and in many ways it failed. Though the Exxon Valdez spill is only the world’s fifty-seventh largest, it was ecologically devastating. The rocky, remote Alaska shoreline was difficult to clean, and the subarctic weather made it impossible to work in winter. On a number of occasions, the response’s methods, such as the use of high-powered jets to blast crude off rocks and beaches, did more damage to the environment than the oil did—but public outrage often demanded action, even if scientists advised against it. Eleven thousand people gathered in Prince William Sound to assist in the effort, and they fell into arguments over basic decisions. Vice-Admiral Clyde Robbins, who led the federal spill response, struggled to get Exxon and government authorities to set aside their mutual distrust and collaborate. “It made it difficult to move ahead on anything,” he told me. “I didn’t really have authority.”

The problems that the Coast Guard faced in Alaska were not entirely about the oil. They were also about emergency response and public perception. “All oil spills are emotional events,” Ann Hayward-Walker, a responder who had worked on the Exxon Valdez incident, told me one evening in Houma. It is possible to fight a forest fire and not be distracted by how the calamity was caused, and whether the cause taints the integrity of the people who deal with it. But oil spills are saturated in blame and political confusion—and opportunity. There is a sense that they are not accidents but accidents waiting to happen, and thus acts of greed. As a result, oil-soaked birds and fish come to symbolize a reviled industry’s heedless behavior. Every year, as many as four hundred thousand birds are killed in America by electricity-generating wind turbines, but they do not make the cover of Time. Incremental ecological damage, even if it is severe, does not easily cause outrage.

by Raffi Khatchadourian, New Yorker |  Read more:
Photograph by Daniel Beltrá.

Black Friday: Beware the Retail Hype

If you opened a newspaper or flipped on a TV last weekend, you were deluged with statements hyperventilating about holiday retail sales. Declarations that this was the best Black Friday in years, and it bodes well for the holiday season.

Savvy investors have learned to take these over-the-top declarations with a grain of salt. If you have paid attention in the past, the reality is far different from the spin: No Virginia, surveys of our gift-shopping intentions do not reveal our actual purchases. We humans are bad at forecasting the future and, as individuals, we are especially poor at predicting our own economic behavior. Marketers and trade groups, well aware of this, exploit that knowledge.

Let’s take a closer look at the annual hype that kicks off the season I like to call “Shopmas.” The actual data are much more revealing about the state of the consumer, the retail sector and the overall economy than the holiday hype.

We begin with a quick review of the retail sector in 2011: Sales improved versus 2010 by 3 to 4 percent. We use year-over-year comparisons because of the highly seasonal nature of retail sales. In 2010, sales were fairly soft, in part because much of the nation experienced severe weather. In the business, we call those “easy comps” — a low comparable data point that should be easy to beat.

Based on the first 10 months of the year, holiday shopping in 2011 should see similar improvements. Consistent with the year-over-year retail numbers, expect sales gains of 3 to 4 percent. Even so, these numbers come with caveats.

Prices in some products have risen — in some cases, substantially. The three most noteworthy are gasoline (up 15 percent), food (5 percent) and cotton (a whopping 230 percent).

The price pressures on these — all consumer staples — are reflected in the total retail sales data. When we look at total sales, we get a sense of how much the nation is spending — but, because of inflation, not how many goods people bought. Based on that data, we can conclude that a decent amount of the total dollar gains in retail sales are not improvements, but rather price inflation.

by Barry Ritholtz, Washington Post |  Read more:

Kodak's Long Fade to Black

Kodak Brownie and Instamatic cameras were once staples of family vacations and holidays — remember the "open me first" Christmas ad campaigns? But it may not be long before a generation of Americans grows up without ever having laid hands on a Kodak product. That's a huge comedown for a brand that was once as globally familiar as Coca-Cola.

It's hard to think of a company whose onetime dominance of a market has been so thoroughly obliterated by new technology. Family snapshots? They're almost exclusively digital now, and only a tiny fraction ever get printed on paper.

Eastman Kodak engineers invented the digital camera in 1975; but now that you can point and click with a cheap cellphone, even the stand-alone digital camera is becoming an endangered species on the consumer electronics veld. The last spool of yellow-boxed Kodachrome rolled out the door of a Mexican factory in 2009. Paul Simon composed his hymn to Kodachrome in 1973, but his camera of choice, according to the lyrics, was a Nikon.

It's not uncommon for great companies to be humbled by what the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called the forces of "creative destruction." Technology, especially digital technology, has been the most potent whirlwind sweeping away old markets and old strategies for many decades. Changing economics and global competition have reduced behemoths of the past, such as General Motors, into mice of the present.

Kodak's decline is of a different order from GM's. The latter still manufactures a product with a huge market demand; it just got sloppy and inefficient at turning out its cars and trucks. That's why the federal government, not to mention GM's unions and other stakeholders, thought a dramatic restructuring might put it back on its feet. (That it was a central player in an industry employing hundreds of thousands of Americans was part of the calculus too.)

Kodak, however, markets a process technology; and as the chemistry of film has yielded to digital electronics, consumer demand for Kodak's traditional products has evaporated. A similar transition afflicts newspapers, book publishers, movie studios, broadcasters and record labels today, but the issues for those industries are different yet.

Their business models are under pressure because they're dependent on outdated distribution technologies; but their core products (information, entertainment) are still very much in demand.

So Kodak has faced a tougher challenge than automakers or content producers. Still, it has met the challenge ham-handedly. This is characteristic of companies that have enjoyed what one might think of as success on a tragic scale.

by Michael Hiltzick, LA Times |  Read more:
Photo: Gary Wiepert, Reuters

How Doctors Die

Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient’s five-year-survival odds—from 5 percent to 15 percent—albeit with a poor quality of life. Charlie was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as good as possible. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation, or surgical treatment. Medicare didn’t spend much on him.

It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.

Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. And they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain, and dying alone. They’ve talked about this with their families. They want to be sure, when the time comes, that no heroic measures will happen—that they will never experience, during their last moments on earth, someone breaking their ribs in an attempt to resuscitate them with CPR (that’s what happens if CPR is done right).

Almost all medical professionals have seen what we call “futile care” being performed on people. That’s when doctors bring the cutting edge of technology to bear on a grievously ill person near the end of life. The patient will get cut open, perforated with tubes, hooked up to machines, and assaulted with drugs. All of this occurs in the Intensive Care Unit at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a day. What it buys is misery we would not inflict on a terrorist. I cannot count the number of times fellow physicians have told me, in words that vary only slightly, “Promise me if you find me like this that you’ll kill me.” They mean it. Some medical personnel wear medallions stamped “NO CODE” to tell physicians not to perform CPR on them. I have even seen it as a tattoo.

To administer medical care that makes people suffer is anguishing. Physicians are trained to gather information without revealing any of their own feelings, but in private, among fellow doctors, they’ll vent. “How can anyone do that to their family members?” they’ll ask. I suspect it’s one reason physicians have higher rates of alcohol abuse and depression than professionals in most other fields. I know it’s one reason I stopped participating in hospital care for the last 10 years of my practice.

How has it come to this—that doctors administer so much care that they wouldn’t want for themselves? The simple, or not-so-simple, answer is this: patients, doctors, and the system.

by Ken Murray, Zocalo Public Square |  Read more:
*Photo courtesy of patrick.ward04.

Liz Brizzi
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The Revolution in Photography

When a set of online teasers for a new camera called the Lytro appeared earlier this year, you could have been forgiven for seeing the invention as just another gimmick. The camera’s attention-grabbing feature is a kind of after-the-fact autofocus: with a click, any blurry portion in a picture can be snapped into sharpness—another step in the march of idiot-proof photography.

In fact, such image correction is merely a side effect of what is genuinely different about the technology. The Lytro, scheduled to reach buyers early next year, creates a wholly new kind of visual object, one that both exemplifies and exploits the way images are consumed in the digital era.

The underlying technique is called “light-field photography.” A traditional camera, of course, captures light reflected off its subject through a lens and onto a flat surface. Proper focus is important to ensure that the image you get is the precise slice of visual reality you want. But “computational photography,” pioneered by Marc Levoy of Stanford University and others, takes a different approach, essentially using hundreds of cameras to capture all the visual information in a scene and processing the results into a many-layered digital object. One of Levoy’s former students, Ren Ng, added the twist that resulted in the Lytro: instead of using multiple cameras, he integrated hundreds of micro lenses into a single device.

The upshot is a photograph that’s less a slice of visual information than a cube, from which you can choose whichever layer would make the most pleasing two-dimensional image for printing and framing. But you can also leave the picture as it is—a three-dimensional capture suitable for digital display or distribution—and let others do the fiddling. Rather than a definitive, static image, a light-field visual object is intrinsically interactive.

In the pictorial examples the Lytro company has released online, this flexibility comes across as a fun novelty: you can focus on the Empire State Building in the distance, or the raindrop-splattered window in the foreground. But the implications are more profound. “It’s fair to say that this technology is a game changer,” says Richard Koci Hernandez, a photographer and assistant professor of new media at the University of California at Berkeley. The company gave Hernandez a Lytro prototype to beta test, and he argues that it represents as important a breakthrough as auto-focus itself, or even the great shift to digital photography.

Imagine, he suggests, a photojournalist covering a presidential speech whose audience includes a clutch of protesters. Using a traditional camera, he says, “I could easily set my controls so that what’s in focus is just the president, with the background blurred. Or I could do the opposite, and focus on the protesters.” A Lytro capture, by contrast, will include both focal points, and many others. Distribute that image, he continues, and “the viewer can choose—I don’t want to sound professorial—but can choose the truth.”

by Rob Walker, The Atlantic |  Read more: 
Graphic: Bryan Christie

Noela Mills, “Forest-Vines Reaching”, acrylic on paper
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Battlefield Main Street

[ed. Lots of links in this article to support the author's thesis that police forces across the country are becoming more reactive and militarized.  This might have something to do with it: Pentagon's 1033 program gave away over $500 million of leftover military gear to law enforcement agencies in 2011.]

In February of last year, video surfaced of a marijuana raid in Columbia, Mo. During the raid on Jonathan Whitworth and his family, police took down the door with a battering ram, then within seconds shot and killed one of Whitworth's dogs and wounded the other. They didn't find enough pot in the house to charge Whitworth with even a misdemeanor. (He was, however, charged with misdemeanor possession of drug paraphernalia when police found a pipe.) The disturbing video went viral in May 2010, triggering outrage around the world. On Fox News, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer and Bill O'Reilly cautioned not to judge the entire drug war by the video, which they characterized as an isolated incident.

In fact, very little about the raid that was isolated or unusual. For the most part, it was carried out the same way drug warrants are served some 150 times per day in the United States. The battering ram, the execution of Whitworth's dog, the fact that police weren't aware Whitworth's 7-year-old child was in the home before they riddled the place with bullets, the fact that they found only a small amount of pot, likely for personal use -- all are common in drug raids. The only thing unusual was that the raid was recorded by police, then released to the public after an open records request by the Columbia Daily Tribune. It was as if much of the country was seeing for the first time the violence with which the drug war is actually fought. And they didn't like what they saw.

That video came to mind with the outrage and public debate over the now-infamous pepper-spraying of Occupy protesters at the University of California-Davis protest earlier this month. The incident was just one of a number of high-profile uses of force amid crackdowns on Occupy protesters across the country, including one in Oakland in which the skull of Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen was fractured by a tear gas canister, and in New York, where NYPD Officer Anthony Bologna pepper-sprayed protesters who had been penned in by police fencing.

But America's police departments have been moving toward more aggressive, force-first, militaristic tactics and their accompanying mindset for 30 years. It's just that, with the exception of protests at the occasional free trade or World Bank summit, the tactics haven't generally been used on mostly white, mostly college-educated kids armed with cellphone cameras and a media platform.

Police militarization is now an ingrained part of American culture. SWAT teams are featured in countless cop reality shows, and wrong-door raids are the subject of "The Simpsons" bits and search engine commercials. Tough-on-crime sheriffs now sport tanks and hardware more equipped for battle in a war zone than policing city streets. Seemingly benign agencies such as state alcohol control boards and the federal Department of Education can now enforce laws and regulations not with fines and clipboards, but with volatile raids by paramilitary police teams.

by Radley Balko, Huffington Post |  Read more:
Photo: Stephen Brashear/Getty via: