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Facing Extinction, the North Atlantic Right Whale Cannot Adapt. Can We? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=48209"><span class="small">Philip Hoare, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Saturday, 12 May 2018 13:46 |
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Hoare writes: "As if to confound everyone, this past week Dr Charles 'Stormy' Mayo and his team from the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies reported seeing up to 150 right whales in Cape Cod Bay."
A right whale and a diver. (photo: Brian Skerry/National Geographic)
Facing Extinction, the North Atlantic Right Whale Cannot Adapt. Can We?
By Philip Hoare, Guardian UK
12 May 18
Once the right whale to hunt, Eubalaena glacialis is now beset by nets, ships and changing seas. We are losing a beautiful beast
 s if to confound everyone, this past week Dr Charles “Stormy” Mayo and his team from the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies reported seeing up to 150 right whales in Cape Cod Bay. Dr Mayo – who has been studying these animals for 40 years and has a scientist’s aversion to exaggeration – is stunned.
“It is amazing for such a rare and utterly odd creature,” he tells me. All the more amazing since he knows this great gathering could be a final flourish. By 2040, the North Atlantic right whale may be gone. He hesitates, then uses the e-word: extinction.
How can such a huge mammal simply disappear within reach of the richest and most powerful nation on earth? Shifting food sources – due to climate change – are leading whales to areas where maritime industries are unused to them. In the past 12 months, 18 rights have died after ship strikes or entanglement in fishing gear. With as few as 430 animals left, 100 of them breeding females in a reduced gene pool, the species is unsustainable.
The right whale may be the strangest beast in the ocean. Vast and rotund, its gigantic mouth is fringed with two-metre strips of baleen, once “harvested” by humans to furnish Venetian blinds and corset stays but used by the whale to strain its diet of rice-sized zooplankton from the sea.
These bizarre animals are not easily known or imagined. They live far longer than us – like its Arctic cousin, the bowhead, the right whale may reach 200, perhaps more. Individuals could be older than constitutional America. They exist beyond us in time, dimension and experience. If we lose the right whale, we lose part of our planet’s biological history.
If any whale were to be so foolish as to claim nationality, the North Atlantic right whale would be American, spending all its life in US or Canadian waters. Its modern nickname, the urban whale, evokes its habit of foraging close to shore. Its historic name speaks to its fate. Being a surface-feeder, so near to land, made it vulnerable to humans. And when it was killed, its belt of blubber ensured that it floated conveniently. The right whale was in the wrong place, at the wrong time.
By 1935, with as few as 60 breeding individuals left, the situation was so dire that the right whale became the first cetacean to be protected by law. But by the start of this century, the numbers seemed to recover. Shipping lanes were shifted and fishing industries took on board the whale’s protected status. It even got its own air exclusion zone. “Like a Hollywood star,” as John Waters quipped to me.
For 18 years I’ve followed that tentative recovery in the waters off Cape Cod. I’ve stumbled on to the winter beach to witness their fins and flukes tumbling so near the tide line I might have waded out to them. I’ve even watched them from my bed overlooking the bay. And on research cruises with the Center for Coastal Studies, special licence allowed us to approach close enough to see the whale lice (cyamids) crawling round their heads.
On one memorable trip in April 2015, scientist Christy Hudak and her team spotted 80 animals – almost 20% of the population. It was like watching dinosaurs, but such is the sensitivity of the center’s work that I cannot show you the dozens of photographs I took that day.
That sense of a huge animal being and not being there speaks to a paradoxical fragility. Veteran whalewatch naturalist Dennis Minsky, based in Provincetown, takes this story personally: “An ancient and noble beast is constitutionally unable to adapt to an array of anthropogenic threats – speeding water craft, the myriad vertical lines of fishing gear, an increasingly noisy ocean and poorly understood changes in water quality.” Federal and state efforts to help seem little more than “mere tinkering”. And with 80% of right whales showing scars from entanglement, what about their individual suffering?
“The lucky ones, I suppose, drown,” Minsky says. “Others go for months or even years, dying an excruciating death.” Minsky shrugs, summing up the situation in five pithy words: “They cannot adapt: can we?”
Like Minsky and Mayo, I feel an intimate connection to the whales of the Cape, a place I hymn in my new book. This is the edge of our world, where we meet the other. As I swim in its waters, winter and summer, I find it hard to see this as a site of mortality rather than life. What could save its most enigmatic, sensate and sentient animal? New fishing gear technology, tighter regulations? Maybe. But out there, swimming under the blue expanse that Melville called “the ocean’s skin”, Eubalaena glacialis needs one thing more than anything else. Our empathy. Just for a moment, can we stop thinking human, and start thinking whale?
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FOCUS: A Broken Idea of Sex Is Flourishing. Blame Capitalism |
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Saturday, 12 May 2018 11:23 |
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Solnit writes: "Since the Toronto bloodbath, a lot of pundits have belatedly awoken to the existence of the 'incel' (short for involuntary celibate) online subculture and much has been said about it."
'Feminism and capitalism are at odds, if under the one women are people and under the other they are property.' (photo: Gabriel Bouys/Getty Images)
A Broken Idea of Sex Is Flourishing. Blame Capitalism
By Rebecca Solnit, Guardian UK
12 May 18
In this world, women are marketed as toys and trophies. Are we surprised when some men take things literally?
 ince the Toronto bloodbath, a lot of pundits have belatedly awoken to the existence of the “incel” (short for involuntary celibate) online subculture and much has been said about it. Too often, it has been treated as some alien, unfamiliar worldview. It’s really just an extreme version of sex under capitalism we’re all familiar with because it’s all around us in everything, everywhere and has been for a very long time. And maybe the problem with sex is capitalism.
What’s at the bottom of the incel worldview: sex is a commodity, accumulation of this commodity enhances a man’s status, and every man has a right to accumulation, but women are in some mysterious way obstacles to this, and they are therefore the enemy as well as the commodity. They want high-status women, are furious at their own low status, but don’t question the system that allocates status and commodifies us all in ways that are painful and dehumanizing.
Entitlement too plays a role: if you don’t think you’re entitled to sex, you might feel sad or lonely or blue, but not enraged at the people who you think owe you. It’s been noted that some of these men are mentally ill and/or socially marginal, but that seems to make them only more susceptible to online rage and a conventional story taken to extremes. That is, it doesn’t cause this worldview, as this worldview is widespread.
Rather, it makes them vulnerable to it; the worldview gives form or direction to that isolation and incapacity. Many of the rest of us have some degree of immunity, thanks to our access to counter-narratives and to loving contact with other human beings, but we are all impacted by this idea that everyone has a market value and this world in which so many of us are marketed as toys and trophies.
If you regard women as people endowed with certain inalienable rights, then heterosexual sex – as distinct from rape – has to be something two people do together because both of them want to, but this notion of women as people is apparently baffling or objectionable to hordes of men – not just incels.
Women-as-bodies are sex waiting to happen – to men – and women-as-people are annoying gatekeepers getting between men and female bodies, which is why there’s a ton of advice about how to trick or overwhelm the gatekeeper. Not just on incel and pick-up-artist online forums but as jokey stuff in movies. You could go back to Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Casanova’s trophy-taking, too.
It goes back before capitalism, really, this dehumanization that makes sex an activity men exact from women who have no say in the situation. The Trojan war begins when Trojan Paris kidnaps Helen and keeps her as a sex slave. During the war to get Helen back, Achilles captures Queen Briseis and keeps her as a sex slave after slaying her husband and brothers (and slaying someone’s whole family is generally pretty anti-aphrodisiac). His comrade in arms Agamemnon has some sex slaves of his own, including the prophetess Cassandra, cursed by Apollo for refusing to have sex with him. Read from the point of view of the women, the Trojan wars resemble Isis among the Yazidi.
Feminism and capitalism are at odds, if under the one women are people and under the other they are property. Despite half a century of feminist reform and revolution, sex is still often understood through the models capitalism provides. Sex is a transaction; men’s status is enhanced by racking up transactions, as though they were poker chips.
Which is why the basketball star Wilt Chamberlain boasted that he’d had sex with 20,000 women in his 1991 memoir (prompting some to do the math: that would be about 1.4 women per day for 40 years). Talk about primitive accumulation! The president of the United States is someone who has regularly attempted to enhance his status by association with commodified women, and his denigration of other women for not fitting the Playmate/Miss Universe template is also well-known. This is not marginal; it’s central to our culture, and now it’s embodied by the president of our country.
Women’s status is ambiguous in relation to sexual experience, or perhaps it’s just wrecked either way: there’s that famous scene in The Breakfast Club in which a female character exclaims, “Well, if you say you haven’t, you’re a prude. If you say you have then you’re a slut. It’s a trap.” Reminiscing about these 1980s teen movies she starred in, Molly Ringwald recently recalled: “It took even longer for me to fully comprehend the scene late in Sixteen Candles, when the dreamboat, Jake, essentially trades his drunk girlfriend, Caroline, to the Geek, to satisfy the latter’s sexual urges, in return for Samantha’s underwear.” The Geek has sex with her while she’s unable to consent, which we now call rape and then called a charming coming-of-age movie.
This idea of sex as something men get, often by bullying, badgering, tricking, assaulting, or drugging women is found everywhere. The same week as the Toronto van rampage, Bill Cosby was belatedly found guilty of one of the more than 60 sexual assaults that women have reported. He was accused of giving them pills to render them unconscious or unable to resist. Who wants to have sex with someone who isn’t there? A lot of men, apparently, since date rape drugs are a thing, and so are fraternity-house techniques to get underage women to drink themselves into oblivion, and Brock Turner, known as the Stanford rapist, assaulted a woman who was blotted out by alcohol, inert and unable to resist.
Under capitalism, sex might as well be with dead objects, not live collaborators. It is not imagined as something two people do that might be affectionate and playful and collaborative – which casual sex can also be, by the way – but that one person gets. The other person is sometimes hardly recognized as a person. It’s a lonely version of sex. Incels are heterosexual men who see this mechanistic, transactional sex from afar and want it at the same time they rage at people who have it.
That women might not want to grow intimate with people who hate them and might want to harm them seems not to have occurred to them as a factor, since they seem bereft of empathy, the capacity to imaginatively enter into what another person is feeling. It hasn’t occurred to a lot of other men either, since shortly after an incel in Toronto was accused of being a mass murderer the sympathy started to pour out for him.
At the New York Times, Ross Douthat credited a libertarian with this notion: “If we are concerned about the just distribution of property and money, why do we assume that the desire for some sort of sexual redistribution is inherently ridiculous?” Part of what’s insane here is that neither the conservative Douthat nor libertarians are at all concerned with the just distribution of property and money, which is often referred to as socialism. Until the property is women, apparently. And then they’re happy to contemplate a redistribution that seems to have no more interest in what women want than the warlords dividing up the sex slaves in the Trojan war.
Happily someone much smarter took this on before Toronto. In late March, at the London Review of Books, Amia Srinivasan wrote: “It is striking, though unsurprising, that while men tend to respond to sexual marginalisation with a sense of entitlement to women’s bodies, women who experience sexual marginalisation typically respond with talk not of entitlement but empowerment. Or, insofar as they do speak of entitlement, it is entitlement to respect, not to other people’s bodies.”
That is, these women who are deemed undesirable question the hierarchy that allots status and sexualization to certain kinds of bodies and denies it to others. They ask that we consider redistributing our values and attention and perhaps even desires. They ask everyone to be kinder and less locked into conventional ideas of who makes a good commodity. They ask us to be less capitalistic.
What’s terrifying about incel men is that they seem to think the problem is that they lack sex when, really, what they lack is empathy and compassion and the imagination that goes with those capacities. That’s something money can’t buy and capitalism won’t teach you. The people you love might, but first you have to love them.
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FOCUS: Trump's Drug Pricing Scam |
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Saturday, 12 May 2018 11:01 |
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Reich writes: "Trump promised to rein in drug prices. It was his only sensible campaign promise. But the plan he announced Friday does little but add another battering ram to his ongoing economic war against America's allies."
Former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich. (photo: Steve Russell/Toronto Star)
Trump's Drug Pricing Scam
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
12 May 18
 rump promised to rein in drug prices. It was his only sensible campaign promise.
But the plan he announced Friday does little but add another battering ram to his ongoing economic war against America’s allies.
He calls it “American patients first,” and takes aim at what he calls “foreign freeloading.” The plan will pressure foreign countries to relax their drug price controls.
America’s trading partners “need to pay more because they’re using socialist price controls, market access controls, to get unfair pricing,” said Alex Azar, Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, who, perhaps not incidentally, was a former top executive at the drug maker Eli Lilly and Company.
By this tortured logic, if other nations allow drug companies to charge whatever they want, U.S. drug companies will then lower prices in the United States.
This is nonsensical. It would just mean more profits for U.S. drug companies.
While it’s true that Americans spend far more on medications per person than do citizens in any other rich country – even though Americans are no healthier – that’s not because other nations freeload on American drug companies’ research.
Big Pharma in America spends more on advertising and marketing than it does on research – often tens of millions to promote a single drug.
The U.S. government supplies much of the research Big Pharma relies on through the National Institutes of Health. This is a form of corporate welfare. No other industry gets this sort of help.
Besides flogging their drugs, American drug companies also spend hundreds of millions lobbying the government. Last year alone, their lobbying tab came to $171.5 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
That’s more than oil and gas, insurance, or any other American industry. It’s more than the formidable lobbying expenditures of America’s military contractors. Big Pharma spends tens of millions more on campaign expenditures.
They spend so much on politics in order to avoid price controls, as exist in most other nations, and other government attempts to constrain their formidable profits.
For example, in 2003, Big Pharma got a U.S. law prohibiting the government from using its considerable bargaining clout under Medicare and Medicaid to negotiate lower drug prices. Other nations with big healthcare plans routinely negotiate lower drug prices.
During his campaign Trump promised to reverse this law. But the plan he revealed Friday seeks only to make it easier for private health insurers to negotiate better deals for Medicare beneficiaries.
In reality, private health insurers don’t have anywhere near the clout of Medicare and Medicaid – which was the whole point of Big Pharma’s getting Congress to ban such negotiations in the first place.
In the last few years, U.S. drug companies have also blocked Americans from getting low-cost prescription drug from Canada, using the absurd argument that Americans can’t rely on the safety of drugs coming from our northern neighbor – whose standards are at least as high as ours.
Trump’s new plan doesn’t change this.
To put all this another way, when Americans buy drugs in the United States, they really buy a package of advertising, marketing, and political influence-peddling. Consumers in other nations don’t pay these costs. Which explains a big part of why drug prices are lower abroad.
Trump’s so-called plan to lower drug prices disregards this reality.
Trump’s plan nibbles at the monopoly power of U.S. pharmaceutical companies, but doesn’t deal with the central fact that their patents are supposed to run only twenty years but they’ve developed a host of strategies to keep patents going beyond then.
One is to make often insignificant changes in their patented drugs that are enough to trigger new patents and thereby prevent pharmacists from substituting cheaper generic versions.
Before its patent expired on Namenda, its widely used drug to treat Alzheimer’s, Forest Labs announced it would stop selling the existing tablet form of in favor of new extended-release capsules called Namenda XR. Even though Namenda XR was just a reformulated version of the tablet, the introduction prevented generic versions from being introduced.
Other nations don’t allow drug patents to be extended on such flimsy grounds. Trump’s plan doesn’t touch this ploy.
Another tactic used by U.S. drug companies has been to sue generics to prevent them from selling their cheaper versions, then settle the cases by paying the generics to delay introducing those cheaper versions.
Such “pay-for-delay” agreements are illegal in other nations, but antitrust enforcement hasn’t laid a finger on them in America – and Trump doesn’t mention them although they cost Americans an estimated $3.5 billion a year.
Even after their patents have expired, U.S. drug companies continue to aggressively advertise their brands so patients will ask their doctors for them instead of the generic versions. Many doctors comply.
Other nations don’t allow direct advertising of prescription drugs – another reason why prices are lower there and higher here. Trump’s plan is silent on this, too.
If Trump were serious about lowering drug prices he’d have to take on the U.S. drug manufacturers.
But Trump doesn’t want to take on Big Pharma. As has been typical for him, rather than confronting the moneyed interests in America he chooses mainly to blame foreigners.
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Every Democrat Should Support Bernie Sanders's New Labor Bill |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=38755"><span class="small">Eric Levitz, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Saturday, 12 May 2018 08:41 |
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Levitz writes: "The Democratic Party's official mission is to win elections for its candidates - and 'a better deal' for American workers. Strengthening America's labor unions would advance both of those goals, simultaneously."
Bernie Sanders talks to supporters during a rally at the University of Washington, in Seattle. (photo: Joshua Trujillo/Seattlepi.com)
Every Democrat Should Support Bernie Sanders's New Labor Bill
By Eric Levitz, New York Magazine
12 May 18
he Democratic Party’s official mission is to win elections for its candidates — and “a better deal” for American workers. Strengthening America’s labor unions would advance both of those goals, simultaneously.
Over the past four decades, America’s private-sector unionization rate has collapsed — along with labor’s share of productivity gains. A large and growing body of economic research has demonstrated that this is no coincidence: Unions don’t just grow paychecks for their members, but also put upward pressure on wages throughout their industries. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that weekly wages for private-sector male workers would be 5 percent higher today, were America’s unionization rate still as high as it was in 1979 (changes in the prevalence of gender wage discrimination and female participation in the workforce complicate the comparison for working women). Back then, 34 percent of private-sector workers belonged to a union; today, just 10.7 percent do.
If Democrats want to give workers a better deal, there are few better things they can do than promote unions (i.e., organizations that were invented to do just that).
Alternatively, if Democrats decide that they don’t actually care about helping workers — and their sole policy goal is to pass laws that make it easier for them to win elections — there are few better things they can do than promote unions.
In recent years, a number of Republican-controlled states have passed “right-to-work” laws — measures that undermine organized labor by allowing workers who join a unionized workplace to enjoy the benefits of a collective bargaining agreement without paying dues to the union that negotiated it. This encourages other workers to skirt their dues, which can then drain a union of the funds it needs to survive. And that has the effect of draining the Democratic Party of the funds — and grassroots organizing — that it needs to thrive: A recent study from researchers at Boston University, Columbia, and the Brookings Institution found that when a state passes a right-to-work law, the Democratic Party’s share of its presidential vote drops by an average of 3.5 percent. For Democrats, promoting unionization isn’t just the “progressive” thing to do; it’s also the pragmatic one.
This week, 14 Senate Democrats signaled that they understand this. On Wednesday, Bernie Sanders introduced the Workplace Democracy Act, a bill that aims to increase America’s unionization rate by:
- Allowing workers to form unions simply by collecting signatures in favor of unionization from a majority of their colleagues, instead of holding elections, which provide employers with the opportunity to lobby against the union before ballots are cast.
- Requiring companies to bargain with a new union within ten days of receiving a request.
- Nullifying right-to-work laws, by requiring workers to pay some amount of dues to unions that bargain on their behalf, regardless of the state they live in.
- Drastically increasing penalties on employers that illegally fire workers during union drives.
- And expanding the definition of “employee” so that America’s growing population of contract laborers — like the “gig economy” workers who power Uber and Lyft — can access the wide array of mandatory benefits that only employees can currently claim (including the right to collective bargaining). Specifically, the bill stipulates that a company’s workers are “employees,” unless the services they provide are “outside the usual course of the employer’s business” (so, a hardware store can hire a plumber to fix its toilets on contract, but a plumbing service would need to employ said plumber, if it wishes to avail itself of his or her services).
Thirteen of Sanders’s Democratic colleagues have signed onto this legislation — including virtually every suspected 2020 hopeful in the upper chamber (Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris are all represented). And yet, a wide array of (self-identified) progressive senators — including ones from states with strong labor presences — have not signed onto the bill.
It’s possible that these legislators simply haven’t gotten around to it — there is a lot going on right now, and this bill isn’t gonna come up for a vote any time soon. It’s also possible that they object to some little detail in this proposal but are hard at work at their own labor bills.
But if 35 Senate Democrats have no intention of supporting comprehensive labor-law reform of any kind, then 35 Senate Democrats are so deeply committed to protecting the ability of employers to exploit their workers, they’re willing to put their party at an electoral disadvantage for the sake of abetting such exploitation. There’s little reason to believe that this actually the case. But those who haven’t signed onto Sanders’s bill would do well to clarify that it isn’t, posthaste.
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alling it “maybe the worst deal ever,” Donald J. Trump said on Wednesday that he is considering pulling the United States out of the United States Constitution.
