Monday, November 20, 2017

BAUAW NEWSLETTER, MONDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2017

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Addicted to War:

And this does not include "…spending $1.25 trillion dollars to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and $566 billion to build the Navy a 308-ship fleet…"
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/18/funding-for-war-vs-natural-disasters/

Dear Comrades, attached is some new art, where Xinachtli really outdid himself some.

Kaepernick sports new T-shirt:

Love this guy!

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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter

Table of Contents:

A) EVENTS, ACTIONS AND ONGOING STRUGGLES

B) ARTICLES IN FULL

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A) EVENTS, ACTIONS AND ONGOING STRUGGLES

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Standing Rock raised the stakes for the global environmental and indigenous rights movements. Now, another victory. A North Dakota judge has ruled that my legal team is entitled to substantially more evidence from the North Dakota State Prosecutor's office than has been forthcoming in other water protector cases. We will be able to take sworn testimony and demand documents from Energy Transfer Partners and their private, militarized security firm, TigerSwan.

The timing on this ruling is important for all environmental protectors. 84 members of Congress—nearly all Republicans—recently sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions encouraging him to invoke the domestic terrorism statute to prosecute fossil fuel protesters. These attacks on our fundamental constitutional rights, spearheaded by Donald Trump and parroted by congressional shills of Big Oil, should deeply concern all citizens who value our right to speak freely and demonstrate.

Our team has produced a new video that explains how I was singled out and targeted—and the justification for our bold legal strategy to expose the illegal and immoral wedding of the fossil fuel industry, law enforcement, and militarized private security forces. You'll see why I took action on behalf of my people, millions of others downstream, and Unci Maka—Grandmother Earth. Please watch it, and share it widely.

Don't lose sight of what Standing Rock means. My tribe—one of the poorest communities in the nation—won't stop leading the struggles to protect the earth and freedom of expression. Continue to stand with me, my courageous fellow defendant HolyElk Lafferty, and hundreds of others being represented by our ally organization, the Water Protector Legal Collective. Our fight is your fight—and it is nothing less than the movement to protect freedom and the earth for future generations.

Wopila—I thank you.

Chase Iron Eyes
Lakota People's Law Project Lead Counsel

P.S. Help us reach 60,000 petition signatures. Please share our video with your network and together we will pressure North Dakota's legal authorities to do the right thing and #DropDAPLCharges. In the coming weeks, we will hand-deliver petitions to the state's attorney. More than 45,000 have already signed. Help us free the water protectors!

Lakota People's Law Project
547 South 7th Street #149
Bismarck, ND 58504-5859
United States

1) Why Do So Many Indian Children Go Missing?
By SONIA FALEIRONOV. 19, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/opinion/missing-children-india.html?action=
click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=
opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region

Children play on makeshift swings, on the outskirts of New Delhi, in May.
Prakash Singh/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

BAREILLY, Uttar Pradesh — One day in April last year, 13-year-old Savitri was walking down a road with her mother in Dataganj district, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, carrying a flask of tea to her father, a laborer at a brick kiln, when five men pulled her into a moving jeep. One of them was from their village.

After Savitri’s father was told of her abduction, he hitchhiked to the police station; he couldn’t afford to take the bus. The officers set out to look for the man who had been recognized. They couldn’t find him, but they demolished his hut. Then they put the matter aside. They didn’t file a First Information Report, which is required to open an investigation.

One of the officers present that day told me in October this year that he didn’t think they could have done anything more. “Girls run away,” he said, with a shrug.

Just like that, Savitri became another statistic — actually, she didn’t even become a statistic. Missing from home and then absent on paper, the teenager is a phantom. And she is just one among very many.

It is remarkably difficult to get reliable figures about how many Indian children go missing, but the scale of the problem appears to be staggering. According to the country’s Ministry of Women and Child Development, 242,938 children disappeared between 2012 and 2017. But according to TrackChild, a government database, nearly that many children — 237,040 — went missing between 2012 and 2014 alone.

Activists for children’s rights, who say that under-registration — as well as underreporting — of missing children is a chronic problem, estimate that the real numbers are much higher. According to Bhuwan Ribhu, a lawyer with Bachpan Bachao Andolan (Save the Childhood), an anti-trafficking organization, the figure may reach 500,000 a year.

Several factors account for the disappearances, but perhaps none more so than destitution. At least half of India’s minors are said to live in acute poverty. Looking for a missing child requires time, manpower and resources, and the police force in India is short on all of those.

Some police stations have no telephone, or have to provide their own car fuel. Since their performance is evaluated based on the number of cases they solve, officers have an incentive to open only those with a chance of success.

And then many missing children’s cases aren’t even reported to the police.

Abhijit Banerjee, a director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told me recently that “parents may be reluctant to report children who ran away as a result of abuse, sexual and otherwise — which I think is rampant.” Some parents sell their children or, deliberately allow unwanted daughters to stray in busy market places.

Just one bad monsoon season can devastate farmers, pushing them toward starvation. Some poor children voluntarily approach people they think are labor contractors, offering their services in exchange for an advance, and fall prey to trafficking networks.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, there were 3,490 cases of child trafficking registered in 2015, the most recent year for which the bureau disclosed figures. But the 2017 Trafficking in Persons Report, which the United States State Department releases annually, says that, “Experts estimate millions of women and children are victims of sex trafficking in India.” According to the 2016 Global Slavery Index, India had the largest number of slaves of any country in the world. Again, the lack of hard data about the issue is an issue in itself.

Last year the High Court in New Delhi, where the problem of missing children is especially acute, declared the subject to be of “extreme importance,” calling it “as bad as terrorism.” The court upbraided the local police for failing to recover more of the children who disappear. Of the 26,761 children who have gone missing in the city during the last five years, only 37 percent have been traced so far.

State governments, the police and charities have access to TrackChild, a government database with searchable photos of children who were formally reported as missing. But between 2012 and 2014, the police filed First Information Reports in only 40 percent of cases.

“Why are they so lifeless, so disinterested?” the Delhi court asked.

As of earlier this month, Savitri’s parents had no news about her.

In recent years, public opinion has mobilized against rape, the murder of journalists and suicide among farmers, demanding government action. But not for missing children. To many Indians, Rishi Kant of Shakti Vahini, a social advocacy group, told me by phone from Delhi last month, it is as if these children “are not our own.”

One of the stated goals of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is to “inculcate values amongst children.” It would do better instead to inculcate the value of children among Indians.

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2) This Is a Man Problem
By Charles M. Blow, Nov. 19, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/opinion/sexual-harassment-men-.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

Participants in the #MeToo March against sexual harassment and assault, held in Los Angeles on Nov. 12. Damian Dovarganes/Associated Press

It is impossible to say too often or loudly how important a moment this is, when many women feel brave and empowered enough to speak up about being sexually assaulted or harassed by powerful men.

It feels like a watershed, like something is fundamentally shifting.

But the greatest measure of fundamental change will be when everyday offenses by everyday people are also named and shamed, the trickle down of speaking up.

For most women, the perpetrator is not a Hollywood executive, or a sitting senator or an esteemed journalist. For most, there will be no press conferences if they come forward. There will be no celebrity attorney to sit at their sides and stroke their hands. There will be no morning news shows to praise their courage.

For most, the decision to speak up will still feel fraught and without sufficient benefit to outweigh the possibility of negative repercussions.

That is where the majority of this battle must be waged, among the ordinary, the powerless, the invisible. These women (and some men as well, it must always be noted) are the true Silent Majority of victims.

Speaking up, and even pressing charges when the law allows, will send a powerful message and will definitely have a chilling effect on this kind of behavior. Loss of livelihood and liberty after bad behavior is a strong deterrent.

But I believe that something far more fundamental has to take place. We have to re-examine our toxic, privileged, encroaching masculinity itself. And yes, that also means on some level reimagining the rules of attraction.

First, let’s state the obvious.

I’m a big believer in sexual liberty. Consenting adults should feel free to express their attractions as they please without shame or guilt. Just play safe.

But, there is no “sex” without consent. To believe that is a twisting of terminology.

Rape is not sex; it’s rape. Unwanted touching is not sexy; it’s assault. Sexual advances in a professional environment, particularly from a position of power, are highly inappropriate and could be illegal.

Also in business environments, rubbing your penis against people — known as Frotteurism, in case you’re wondering — masturbating in front of them, or even showing your penis is wrong and humiliating and possibly illegal. In fact, doing these things in almost all environments is wrong and possibly illegal.

Also, if you make sexual advances on, or become involved sexually with, a minor, that is not a relationship. That is not dating. That is not even sex if it progresses to intimacy. That is a morally despicable sexual exploitation of a minor at least, and statutory rape at worst.

Now that we have established that, we can move to the finer points.

We have to focus on recognizing an imbalance of power during sexual dynamics so that men better understand the implicit “no” even when women don’t feel empowered to articulate a “no.”

We have to focus on that space after attraction is sparked but before we are sure that it is mutual and reciprocal: the unrequited advance, the unwanted touch, the stolen kiss.

We have to focus on the fact that jokes that objectify women are not funny.

And we have to focus on the fact that society itself has incubated and nourished a dangerous idea that almost unbridled male aggression is not only a component of male sexuality, it is the most prized part of it.

We say to boys, be aggressive. We say to our girls, be cautious. Boys will be boys and girls will be victims.

We say, almost without saying it at all, that women are the guardians of virtue because an aroused man is simply an unthinking mass of hormones, raging and dangerous. We say that men in that condition are not really responsible for their actions, so it is up to women to do nothing to put them in that position.

Dress more modestly. Don’t smile or laugh to the degree that it could be taken as flirtation. Avoid “this one” or “that one.” Don’t walk home alone. Don’t go out to drinks or dinner with the co-worker or classmate. Don’t meet in rooms with closed doors.

This is the list of oppressions that women are read with religious rigor. These are the rules of the road. This is the outrage.

Women are not responsible for men’s bad behavior. The idea that horny men can’t control themselves is a lie!

Men have been so conditioned against emotional intelligence — that’s for women, we are told — that they are blithering idiots at reading the subtleties of allure or aversion.

Guys become gamblers. They simply play the numbers. What nine women may find revolting the tenth may reward.

They don’t even recognize what offense the nine may have experienced. They are blind to it. In the male mind, any peccadillo is excusable in the pursuit of compatibility.

This kind of bulldozer, pelvis-first mentality is the foundation of the more aggressive, more intrusive behavior, and until we recognize that, we will count on the courts to correct something that our culture should correct.

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3) Sale of Migrants as Slaves in Libya Causes Outrage in Africa and Paris
By NOUR YOUSSEFNOV. 19, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/world/africa/libya-migrants-slavery.html?rref=
collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world&region=
stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=7&pgtype=sectionfront

Demonstrators held a rally against slavery in Libya on the Champs-Elysees in Paris on Saturday.Zakaria Abdelkafi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

CAIRO — A CNN report about the sale of African migrants as slaves in the North African nation of Libya has incited outrage in recent days, prompting a protest in central Paris, condemnation by the African Union and an official investigation.

Hundreds of protesters, mostly young black people, demonstrated in front of the Libyan Embassy in central Paris on Saturday — with some carrying a sign that said, “Put an end to the slavery and concentration camps in Libya,” and chanting, “Free our brothers!” — three days after CNN aired footage of migrants being auctioned off in the Libyan capital, Tripoli.

“We have to mobilize — we can’t let this kind of thing happen,” one of the protesters told the television station France 24. “Did we really need to see such shocking pictures before taking a stand? I don’t think so.”

French police officers fired tear gas to disperse the rally, which had turned violent.

Moussa Faki Mahamat, the chairman of the African Union Commissionand the foreign minister of Chad, issued a statement after the rally, calling the auctions “despicable.” He urged the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights to assist the Libyan authorities with the investigation that they opened in response to CNN’s report.

The Guardian reported in April that West African migrants were being sold in modern-day slave markets in Libya, based on information from the International Organization for Migration, a United Nations agency. And Reuters reported on the issue in May.

The International Organization for Migration estimates that there are 700,000 to one million migrants in Libya, and more than 2,000 have died at sea this year.

Most of the migrants in Libya are fleeing armed conflict, persecution or severe economic hardship in sub-Saharan Africa. Their journey usually begins with a deadly trek through vast deserts to Libya and then involves either braving the Mediterranean Sea on rickety boats headed to Europe or struggling to survive in one of the overcrowded detention centers run by smugglers on the Libyan coastline.

Forced labor, sexual abuse and torture are widespread in these camps, according to the United Nations.

Since the Arab Spring uprising of 2011 ended the brutal rule of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, Libya’s coast has became a hub for human trafficking and smuggling. That has fueled the illegal migration crisis that Europe has been scrambling to contain since 2014.

Libya, which slid into chaos and civil war after the revolt, is now divided among three main factions: a feeble but internationally backed government in Tripoli; an ultraconservative Islamist government, also in Tripoli; and an anti-Islamist government in the east.

The reactions on Saturday highlight one of the many challenges facing the internationally recognized authorities in Libya, which are still struggling to restore order, win popular support and restore basic services like water and electricity.

The CNN report, published on Wednesday, detailed the horrors that African migrants experience while trying to reach Europe in search of a better life. It included video footage of a slave auction last month outside Tripoli, where about a dozen migrants were sold as slaves in a matter of minutes. That auction was one of many, CNN said.

The network attributed the recent emergence of slave markets in Libya to the sharp fall in migrant arrivals in Europe over the summer. The Italian government reportedly began paying the warlords controlling Libya’s coast to curb the flow of migrants earlier this year. In August alone, the arrivals of migrants in Italy fell 85 percent.

This drop, CNN said, appears to have created a backlog of customers for Libya’s smugglers, who have responded by auctioning off migrants for as little as $400.

In his statement, Mr. Mahamat, of the African Union Commission, announced that the union would hold talks with Libya and other stakeholders in the region to find “practical steps” that would “address the plight of the African migrants in Libya.”

He vowed that the union would “spare no effort to help bring these acts to an end.”

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4) Morocco Food Stampede Leaves 15 Dead and a Country Shaken
By AIDA ALAMINOV. 19, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/world/africa/morocco-stampede.html?rref=
collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world&region=
stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=10&pgtype=sectionfront

MARRAKESH, Morocco — At least 15 women died and five were wounded in a stampede during a food distribution operation on Sunday morning in rural Morocco, government officials said.

The victims were crushed as hundreds of people, mostly women, gathered to collect baskets of food at the market of a small town, Sidi Boulaalam, according to news accounts. The town is about 40 miles from the coastal city of Essaouira.

In the aftermath of the stampede, clothes and other personal items were left scattered across the ground.

It is unclear what led to the stampede. The Moroccan Interior Ministry, which reported the death toll, said it had opened an investigation. The donor who organized the food distribution has not been publicly identified.

Morocco, with a population of 35 million, is generally regarded as much healthier economically than neighboring countries. According to the World Bank, its poverty rate fell to 4.2 percent in 2014, and tourism remains a robust part of the economy.

But that can mask the conditions in rural areas like Sidi Boulaalam, where things are far more dire. Nearly 19 percent of the rural population lives in poverty, and about 15.5 percent of Moroccans live on about $3 a day.

And there are troubling signs nationwide. The government expects the economy to grow by 3.2 percent in 2018, down from 4.8 percent this year.

During the Arab Spring, the government spent billions to calm protests, and amid pressure from international lenders in recent years it has cut spending on subsidies and public sector hiring. Unemployment is high — over 10 percent, according to the High Commission for Planning, a Moroccan state-run agency.

The Moroccan economy has gone through major changes in the last couple of decades with large-scale infrastructure projects like highways and Tanger Med, a giant container port. But critics say these projects did little to benefit the daily lives of most Moroccans. A United Nations ranking puts Morocco 123rd globally in terms of human development.

Still, photos that emerged from the stampede left many taken aback on Sunday.

“The image speaks loudly about the precariousness people live in,” said Mehdi Lahlou, an economist and professor at the National Institute of Statistics and Applied Economics in Rabat.

“Many initiatives have failed because of the way projects were handled. Spending is not monitored,” Mr. Lahlou said. “In this particular case, it seems that the event was badly organized and the local authorities did not take the necessary measures to prevent this from happening.”

In a speech in October, Morocco’s king, Mohammed VI, assailed the governing elites, saying that the socioeconomic development projects had failed and that a sizable part of the population still lived at risk. “Today, Moroccans need a balanced and equitable development that guarantees dignity for all, a development that generates income and jobs and that especially benefits young people,” the king said.

The Essaouira region, a popular tourism hub, is also known for producing argan oil, which is used in beauty products. In the last decades, many cooperatives have been created to help local women benefit from the production of the oil.

Asma Chaabi, a member of Parliament from Essaouira, said the task of improving people’s lives was daunting.

“This is an area that is very rich in terms of natural resources,” she said. “But there is a lot of work that needs to be done in order to advance human development, especially when it concerns the youth and women.”

At the market on Sunday, many who were injured were taken to hospitals in Essaouira and Marrakesh. A witness cited by local news reports said the donor had been distributing flour, cooking oil and sugar when the stampede broke out.

“There was a big crowd,” the witness said. “One woman started falling on the other, and they died.”

King Mohammed has ordered the local authorities to take all necessary measures to provide support and assistance to the families of the dead and injured, the statement from the interior ministry said. The king also pledged to pay the burial and hospitalization expenses for all of the victims.

Omar Arbib, a Marrakesh member of the Moroccan Association of Human Rights, said the Essaouira hospital was poorly equipped.

“It’s a shame that people are dying for a little bit of food,” he said.

“Many parts of Morocco are going through some crisis,” he said, pointing to recent protests in the south of the country over water shortages.

“A huge amount of people died today, and the government is responsible for it,” Mr. Arbib said. “We aren’t even talking about human rights anymore but about the basic needs of the Moroccan people.”

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5) Skin Cancers Rise — Along With Questionable Treatments
By KATIE HAFNER and GRIFFIN PALMERNOV. 20, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/health/dermatology-skin-cancer.html?rref=
collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=
stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

John Dalman was told he would need surgery on at least a half-dozen nonlethal cancerous lesions, as well as radiation for several weeks. Josh Ritchie for The New York Times

John Dalman had been in the waiting room at a Loxahatchee, Fla., dermatology clinic for less than 15 minutes when he turned to his wife and told her they needed to leave. Now.

“It was like a fight or flight impulse,” he said.

His face numbed for skin-cancer surgery, Mr. Dalman, 69, sat surrounded by a half-dozen other patients with bandages on their faces, scalps, necks, arms and legs. At a previous visit, a young physician assistant had taken 10 skin biopsies, which showed slow growing, nonlethal cancerous lesions. Expecting to have the lesions simply scraped off at the next visit, he had instead been told he needed surgery on many of them, as well as a full course of radiation lasting many weeks.

The once sleepy field of dermatology is bustling these days, as baby boomers, who spent their youth largely unaware of the sun’s risk, hit old age. The number of skin cancer diagnoses in people over 65, along with corresponding biopsies and treatment, is soaring. But some in the specialty, as well as other medical experts, are beginning to question the necessity of aggressive screening and treatment, especially in frail, elderly patients, given that the majority of skin cancers are unlikely to be fatal.

“You can always do things,” said Dr. Charles A. Crecelius, a St. Louis geriatrician who has studied care of medically complex seniors. “But just because you can do it, does that mean you should do it?”

Mr. Dalman’s instinct to question his treatment plan was validated when he went to see a dermatologist in a different practice. The doctor dismissed radiation as unnecessary, removed many of the lesions with a scrape, applied small Band-Aids, and was finished in 30 minutes.

Dermatology — a specialty built not on flashy, leading edge medicine but on thousands of small, often banal procedures — has become increasingly lucrative in recent years. The annual dermatology services market in the United States, excluding cosmetic procedures, is nearly $11 billion and growing, according to IBISWorld, a market research firm. The business potential has attracted private equity firms, which are buying up dermatology practices around the country, and installing crews of lesser-trained practitioners — like the physician assistants who saw Mr. Dalman — to perform exams and procedures in even greater volume.

The vast majority of dermatologists care for patients with integrity and professionalism, and their work has played an essential role in the diagnosis of complex skin-related diseases, including melanoma, the most dangerous form of skin cancer, which is increasingly caught early.

But while melanoma is on the rise, it remains relatively uncommon. The incidence of basal and squamous cell carcinomas of the skin, which are rarely life-threatening, is 18—20 times higher than that of melanoma. Each year in the U.S. more than 5.4 million such cases are treated in more than 3.3 million people, a 250 percent rise since 1994.

The New York Times analyzed Medicare billing data for dermatology from 2012 through 2015, as well as a national database of medical services maintained by the American Medical Association that goes back more than a decade. Nearly all dermatologic procedures are performed on an outpatient, fee-for service basis.

The Times analysis found a marked increase in the number of skin biopsies per Medicare beneficiary in the past decade; a sharp rise in the number of physician assistants, mostly unsupervised, performing dermatologic procedures; and large numbers of invasive dermatologic procedures performed on elderly patients near the end of life.

In 2015, the most recent year for which data was available, the number of skin biopsies performed on patients in the traditional Medicare Part B program had risen 55 percent from a decade earlier — despite a slight decrease in the program’s enrollment overall.

Skin cancers are more common in older people, which means Medicare pays for much of the treatment. In 2015, 5.9 million skin biopsies on Medicare recipients were performed.

More than 15 percent of the biopsies billed to Medicare that year were performed by physician assistants or nurse practitioners working independently. In 2005, almost none were, said Dr. Brett Coldiron, a former president of the American Academy of Dermatology, who has studied the use of clinicians who are not physicians in medical practices.

Dr. Coldiron, a dermatologist in Cincinnati, said he was skeptical of the growing use of such clinicians in the specialty. “Ads will say ‘See our dermatology providers,’” he said. “But what’s really going on is these practices, with all this private equity money behind them, hire a bunch of PA’s and nurses and stick them out in clinics on their own. And they’re acting like doctors.”

Dermatology on Wheels

Bedside Dermatology, a mobile practice in Michigan, sends clinicians to 72 nursing homes throughout the state for skin checks and treatment.

Dr. Steven K. Grekin, a dermatologist, said that when he founded Bedside, many of the nursing home patients had not been examined by a dermatologist for several years.

“We were seeing a real unmet need,” he said.

In 2015, Bedside Dermatology’s traveling crews performed thousands of cryosurgeries — spraying liquid nitrogen on precancerous lesions with an instrument that resembles a blowtorch. Other spots on the nursing home patients’ skin were injected with steroids, or removed with minor surgery.

Examining the 2015 Medicare billing codes of three physician assistants and one nurse practitioner employed by Bedside Dermatology, The Times found that 75 percent of the patients they treated for various skin problems had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Most of the lesions on these patients, were very unlikely to be dangerous, experts said, and the patients might not even have been aware of them.

“Patients with a high level of disease burden still deserve and require treatment,” Dr. Grekin said. “If they are in pain, it should be treated. If they itch, they deserve relief.”

Dr. Eleni Linos, a dermatologist and epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who has argued against aggressive treatmentof skin cancers other than melanomas in the frail elderly, said that if a lesion was bothering a patient, “of course we would recommend treatment.” However, she added, many such lesions are asymptomatic.

Dr. Linos added that physicians underestimate the side effects of skin cancer procedures. Complications such as poor wound healing, bleeding, and infection are common in the months following treatment, especially among older patients with multiple other problems. About 27 percent report problems, her research has found.

“A procedure that is simple for a young healthy person may be a lot harder for someone who is very frail,” she said.

The work of Bedside Dermatology reflects a wider tendency to diagnose and treat patients for skin issues near the end of life. Arcadia Healthcare Solutions, a health analytics firm, analyzed dermatologic procedures done on 17,820 patients over age 65 in the last year of life, and found that skin biopsies and the freezing of precancerous lesions were performed frequently, often weeks before death.

Arcadia found that the same was true for Mohs surgery, a sophisticated procedure for basal and squamous cell skin cancers that involves slicing off a skin cancer in layers, with microscopic pathology performed each time a layer is excised until the growth has been entirely removed. Each layer taken is reimbursed separately.

In 2015, one out of every five Mohs procedures reimbursed by Medicare was performed on a patient 85 or older, the Times found.

Rise of Physician Assistants

Bedside Dermatology is owned by Advanced Dermatology and Cosmetic Surgery, the largest dermatology practice in the country, with a database of four million active or recently established patients. Last year, Harvest Partners, a private equity firm, invested a reported $600 million in the practice, known as ADCS.

ADCS has its headquarters in Maitland, Fla., in a sleek suite of offices and cubicles the size of a football field. One morning early this year, the buzz of corporate expansion was everywhere. A delivery crew wheeled in a stack of cubicle partitions. Employees at a large phone bank scheduled appointments around the country. A transition team was preparing to visit a newly acquired practice in Pennsylvania, and Dr. Matt Leavitt, ADCS’s founder and chief executive, was congratulating his director of business development on snagging a sought-after recruit.

In an email last week, Dr. Leavitt said the company currently has 192 physicians, but declined to confirm other numbers because ADCS is privately held. The company’s website advertises “180+ locations.” The website also lists 124 physician assistants. That is a 400 percent increase from 2008, according to web pages preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. ADCS offers a six-month fellowship program for physician assistants to provide additional training in dermatology.

“My number one goal would be to have people take skin cancer much more seriously than they have, especially baby boomers,” said Dr. Leavitt, a dermatologist. “And we’ve got to continue to work at getting better access for patients.”

While health care experts agree that access to care is of growing importance, there is an ongoing debate over whether practitioners who are not physicians are qualified to make diagnoses, identify skin cancers and decide when to perform biopsies — skills dermatologists acquire through extensive training — particularly among the elderly.

The frequency with which physician assistants and nurse practitioners take skin biopsies — compared with M.D.’s — was the subject of a 2015 study at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Based on 1,102 biopsies from 743 patients, researchers found that physician assistants and nurse practitioners performed nearly six biopsies for every skin cancer found — more than twice the number performed by physicians.

Riley Wood, age 82, arrived one morning last February at an ADCS clinic in Heathrow, Florida, for a skin check with David Fitzmaurice, a physician assistant.

For Mr. Fitzmaurice, the exam was routine; Mr. Wood was one of a few dozen patients he sees each day. On the day a reporter observed him, Mr. Fitzmaurice moved quickly through the visits, many of which entailed procedures like biopsies and cryosurgery.

Mr. Wood had already had two other cancers — kidney and throat. Mr. Fitzmaurice decided Mr. Wood needed two biopsies — one on his scalp, for a suspected squamous cell carcinoma, and a second on his neck, for a spot that might be a melanoma.

The bleeding from the biopsy wound to Mr. Wood’s neck persisted for several minutes, leaving the patient worried and depleted.

“I don’t like needles,” said Mr. Wood, in a voice close to a whisper, adding that the word cancer frightened him. Still, Mr. Wood said, he usually goes with the recommendations of Mr. Fitzmaurice, whom he called “Dr. David.” “I like him. He’s very thorough and cordial.”

With Mr. Wood’s permission, a reporter photographed the area Mr. Fitzmaurice biopsied for a suspected melanoma, and sent the image to nine physician-dermatologists. A few dismissed the biopsied lesion as nothing, while others said it was hard to tell from the photograph. None said the spot had the telltale signs of melanoma.

Yet all nine dermatologists, with no prompting, pointed to an adjacent lesion that had gone unremarked by Mr. Fitzmaurice, saying it looked like a skin cancer that was not melanoma.

Two months later in a telephone interview, the reporter asked Dr. Leavitt about Mr. Fitzmaurice’s apparent oversight. Dr. Leavitt defended his employee, saying Mr. Fitzmaurice had probably seen the spot but his higher priority was the suspected melanoma.

The morning after the interview, Mr. Wood received a call from ADCS, telling him to come in for a second look. The spot Mr. Fitzmaurice biopsied for melanoma turned out to be benign. The one next to it, which Mr. Fitzmaurice did not flag, was in fact a squamous cell carcinoma in situ, Dr. Leavitt said in a follow-up email.

While Dr. Leavitt pointed out that “routine skin checks are a great way to catch potential problems early,” Dr. Coldiron said he was wary of clinicians who are not physicians doing basic skin checks, given the evidence that those often lead to unnecessary biopsies.

Arielle Rought, a physician assistant with ADCS who is in her late 20s, called skin checks “our bread and butter.” On the day a reporter visited, Ms. Rought biopsied a spot on a patient’s hand to rule out melanoma. Her supervising physician was standing out in the hall, yet she did not ask him to take a look. Asked why she had not called him into the room, she said she did not consider it necessary. The biopsy was negative.

In an emailed statement, the president of the American Academy of Dermatology, Dr. Henry W. Lim, said: “The AAD believes the optimum degree of dermatologic care is delivered when a board-certified physician dermatologist provides direct, on-site supervision to all non-dermatologist personnel.”

Ms. Rought said it was not unusual for a skin check to lead her to to freeze as many as 30 precancerous lesions called actinic keratoses on a patient during a single visit. Actinic keratoses are called precancerous because they can sometimes turn into squamous cell carcinoma. Ms. Rought said her “rule of thumb” was that 20 percent of actinic keratoses progress to cancer.

While that might once have been the popular understanding, research now suggests otherwise. Dr. Martin A. Weinstock, a professor of dermatology and epidemiology at Brown University, reported in a 2009 study of men with a history of two or more skin cancers that were not melanomas that the risk of an actinic keratosis progressing to skin cancer was about 1 percent after a year, and 4 percent after four years. More than 50 percent of the lesions went away on their own.

Dr. Lim said the dermatology academy’s position is that actinic keratoses should be treated, as it is impossible to know which ones will turn into cancer, but some specialists are questioning whether that’s necessary.

The Doctor Is Not In

The experience of Mr. Dalman, the patient who fled the waiting room, began in January, when he made an appointment as a new patient at the clinic of Dr. Joseph Masessa, believing he would be seen by the dermatologist. Instead, he was seen by a young woman in a lab coat, whom he assumed was a physician, though she did not identify herself as one. She biopsied 10 different lesions.

At his next visit in February, he was seen by another young woman, whom he also took to be a physician. As it turned out, both women were physician assistants.

The second physician assistant told Mr. Dalman that he would need radiation on basal cell carcinomas on his temple, shoulder, and ear. He said he tried to argue with her, explaining that he’d had many similar lesions in the past that were removed with a simple scrape.

He said she countered that if she attempted to remove the lesion above his right eye, he might end up unable to blink that eye. And without superficial radiation on his ear, he was in danger of losing the entire ear. She said he would also need Mohs surgery on several of the basal cell carcinomas. She did not respond to requests from The New York Times to speak about the case.

Although Dr. Masessa signed Mr. Dalman’s chart, Mr. Dalman never met him. This could be because the clinic he went to, northwest of West Palm Beach, Fla., is one of more than a dozen clinics scattered across three states associated with Dr. Masessa, who is based in New Jersey but licensed in Florida. Supervision of physician assistants is required by state law. The Florida Department of Health website lists Dr. Masessa as supervising four physician assistants in the state.

Dr. Masessa did not respond to repeated requests for comment. An associate, who identified himself as Jeff Masessa, returned a call and asked for questions by email. Neither he nor Dr. Masessa responded to a detailed list of questions, despite repeated follow-up emails from the Times.

On the day of Mr. Dalman’s surgery, the same physician assistant injected a local anesthetic, then instructed Mr. Dalman to return to the waiting room, Mr. Dalman said.

Then something dawned on him. Since he had not laid eyes on a physician in several visits, he worried that the physician assistant would be doing the procedure. The prospect made him nervous and he decided to make a swift exit.

Mr. Dalman later went to see Dr. Joseph Francis, a dermatologist near West Palm Beach. Dr. Francis said there was no indication for superficial radiation, a treatment of which the American Academy of Dermatology has voiced skepticism. Moreover, Dr. Francis decided, many of the basal cell carcinomas could be scraped off.

Dr. Francis said he was shocked not only by the number of biopsies that had been taken at once, but by the aggressive treatment proposed.

Moreover, when he reviewed Mr. Dalman’s records from Dr. Masessa’s clinic, he saw four skin exams documented over the four-month period. But when he examined the patient, Dr. Francis noticed a pigmented, asymmetrical spot slightly bigger than a pencil eraser on Mr. Dalman’s shoulder.

It turned out to be a malignant melanoma, not documented by the physician assistant. Dr. Francis removed it before it had a chance to spread.

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6) Serving Extra Years in Prison, and the Courthouse Doors Are Closed
By Adam Liptak, Nov. 20, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/us/politics/trump-justice-department-prison-sentences.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=6&pgtype=sectionfront

The Justice Department reversed its longstanding position, essentially endorsing an opinion Justice Neil M. Gorsuch wrote when he was an appeals court judge. Sait Serkan Gurbuz/Associated Press

WASHINGTON — It is one thing for a new administration to switch sides in a legal dispute. That is merely unusual. It is another to urge the Supreme Court to deny review in a case that would test whether the government’s new position is correct.

In a Supreme Court brief filed last month, the Justice Department tried to have it both ways. It told the justices that it no longer believed that some federal prisoners serving longer prison terms than the law allowed were entitled to challenge their sentences in court.

For the last 16 years, the Justice Department had taken the opposite view. It said so in at least 11 Supreme Court briefs. You might think the Supreme Court should settle things.

But the department urged the justices to refuse to hear an appeal from Dan C. McCarthan, a Florida man who said he was sentenced to seven more years than the law allowed. It did so even as it acknowledged that the legal question was significant and that the department’s new position could lead to harsh results, condemning inmates to serve out unlawful sentences.

The administration’s request that the Supreme Court deny review in Mr. McCarthan’s case was “incredibly unseemly” and “not a good look for the Department of Justice,” said Leah Litman, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and an authority on the complicated web of statutes that govern post-conviction challenges from federal prisoners.

The Justice Department’s litigation two-step also drew a sharp response from Mr. McCarthan’s lawyers, who include Kannon K. Shanmugam, a partner at Williams & Connolly.

“There is nothing inherently wrong with a new administration’s changing position on a question before this court — although it is rare on a question involving the administration of the criminal justice system,” Mr. Shanmugam wrote in a brief filed last week. “But when the government changes position on a concededly important question that has divided the circuits, it should at least have the courage of its convictions and be willing to defend its new position on the merits in this court.”

Nine federal appeals courts allow the challenges, while two do not.

The new case, McCarthan v. Collins, No. 17-85, started in 2003, when Mr. McCarthan pleaded guilty to a federal gun charge. That conviction would ordinarily have subjected him to a maximum sentence of 10 years. But the judge sentenced him to more than 17 years under a federal law that requires longer terms for career criminals.

A career criminal, the law says, is one who has been convicted of at least three serious drug offenses or violent felonies.

One of the convictions that justified Mr. McCarthan’s extra seven years was for escape. In 1988, he walked away from the Tampa Community Corrections Center without permission. The center was unsecured, and Mr. McCarthan was allowed to leave it to go to work.

Leaving the center without permission was a felony. But was it a violent felony?

When Mr. McCarthan was sentenced, courts treated all escapes as violent. As the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta, put it in 2001, an escape “does present the potential risk of violence, even when it involves a ‘walkaway’ from unsecured correctional facilities.”

The Justice Department’s litigation two-step also drew a sharp response from Mr. McCarthan’s lawyers, who include Kannon K. Shanmugam, a partner at Williams & Connolly.

Nine federal appeals courts allow the challenges, while two do not.

A career criminal, the law says, is one who has been convicted of at least three serious drug offenses or violent felonies.

Leaving the center without permission was a felony. But was it a violent felony?

The Supreme Court rejected that position in 2009, and the 11th Circuit naturally followed suit. “A ‘walkaway’ escape is not a ‘violent felony,’” the court ruled in 2009, six years after Mr. McCarthan was sentenced to extra time based on just such an escape. He then asked the courts to take another look at his sentence.

In March, the 11th Circuit rejected Mr. McCarthan’s challenge. The vote was 7 to 4, with the majority saying that Mr. McCarthan had filed his challenge too late under a federal law that places strict limits on habeas corpus petitions.

But the law has an exception, enacted in 1948, for cases in which the ordinary procedure “is inadequate or ineffective to test the legality” of a prisoner’s detention.

The Justice Department had long agreed that the exception applied in cases like Mr. McCarthan’s. It said so in Mr. McCarthan’s own case before the 11th Circuit.

Since the government and Mr. McCarthan agreed that he should at least be allowed the present his challenge, the 11th Circuit appointed a lawyer to argue the opposite position. Then it accepted the appointed lawyer’s argument, which was based on a technical analysis of various statutory provisions.

Only one other federal appeals court has interpreted the 1948 law to bar challenges like Mr. McCarthan’s. In 2011, the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, in Denver, ruled that a prisoner who had pleaded guilty to money laundering in 1999 could not challenge his conviction after the Supreme Court, in a decision issued nearly a decade later, undermined the prosecution’s theory.

The 10th Circuit’s majority opinion was written by Judge Neil M. Gorsuch, who joined the Supreme Court this year. His 2011 opinion, Professor Litman wrote in January, before his nomination, “makes one wonder what a Justice Gorsuch would mean for criminal justice at the Supreme Court.”

In 2011, the Justice Department criticized Judge Gorsuch’s opinion. Last month, it endorsed it.

Mr. McCarthan, the department’s brief said, should have argued from the start that his escape was not a violent felony, even though the law at the time was squarely against him. He should have asked “to have the adverse precedent overturned,” the brief said. It was now too late to raise the question, the brief said.

The department said it was “working on a legislative proposal” to address the gap in the law. It added that Mr. McCarthan could ask President Trump for clemency.

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7) The Climate Crisis? It’s Capitalism, Stupid
By Benjamin Y. Fong, Nov. 20, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/opinion/climate-capitalism-crisis.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region

Nick Cote for The New York Times

Even casual readers of the news know that the earth is probably going to look very different in 2100, and not in a good way.

A recent Times opinion piece included this quotation from the paleoclimatologist Lee Kump: “The rate at which we’re injecting CO₂into the atmosphere today, according to our best estimates, is 10 times faster than it was during the End-Permian.”

The End-Permian is a pre-dinosaurs era of mass extinction that killed 90 percent of the life in the ocean and 75 percent of it on land. It is also called the Great Dying. Although those who write about environmental change like to add notes of false personalization around this point — “My children will be x years old when catastrophe y happens” — there is really no good way of acclimating the mind to facts of this magnitude.

However, the cause of the disaster that, by all indications, we are already living through should be clearer. It is not the result of the failure of individuals to adopt the moralizing strictures of “green” consciousness, and it is a sign of just how far we have to go that some still believe reusable shopping bags and composting (perfectly fine in their own right) are ways out of this mess.

It is also not the deceit of specific immoral companies that is to blame: We like to pick out Volkswagen’s diesel scandal, but it is only one of many carmakers that “deliberately exploit lax emissions tests.” Nor does the onus fall on the foundering of Social Democratic reforms and international cooperation: Even before the United States backed out of the Paris Accord, we were well on our way to a 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit temperature rise by 2100, “a temperature that at times in the past has meant no ice at either pole.”

The real culprit of the climate crisis is not any particular form of consumption, production or regulation but rather the very way in which we globally produce, which is for profit rather than for sustainability. So long as this order is in place, the crisis will continue and, given its progressive nature, worsen. This is a hard fact to confront. But averting our eyes from a seemingly intractable problem does not make it any less a problem. It should be stated plainly: It’s capitalism that is at fault.

As an increasing number of environmental groups are emphasizing, it’s systemic change or bust. From a political standpoint, something interesting has occurred here: Climate change has made anticapitalist struggle, for the first time in history, a non-class-based issue.

There are many reasons we do not typically talk about climate change in this way. The wealthy are holding fast to theirs. Bought politicians and state violence are on their side. Eco-apartheid is not yet seen as full-on apartheid. Everyday people have plenty to keep up with, and they don’t want to devote their precious time off work to often tedious political meetings. The inertia, it is sad to say, makes enough sense.

Perhaps the most common belief about this problem is that it is caused by widespread ignorance — even outright “stupidity” — and that its solution lies in its opposite, intelligence. This belief is neatly expressed in progressive opposition to Donald Trump and his administration. Trump voters are often criticized for being unintelligent, for voting against their objective interests. Trump himself is regularly portrayed as unintelligent.

The basic idea is that if voters were intelligent, they would vote for an intelligent person who listened to intelligent people and all would be well. It is a staple of the liberal imaginary. Reflected here is the obtuse belief that the populist tide is simply mistaken, that it has gotten something wrong, which has the effect of veiling the real and justified dissatisfaction with the past 40 years of neoliberalism. Also reflected is the common view, which is not confined to one end of the political spectrum, that our biggest problems are essentially technical ones, and that the solution to them lies in the empowerment of intelligent people. The aura around Elon Musk is an extreme example of this kind of thinking.

The problem with the general view that intelligence will save us is that it involves pinning the failures of capitalist society on supposedly dumb people (them), who, so the logic goes, need to be replaced with supposedly smart ones (us). This is a spectacular delusion.

When a company makes a decision that is destructive to the environment, for instance, it is not because there are bad or unintelligent people in charge: Directors typically have a fiduciary responsibility that makes the bottom line their only priority. They serve a function, and if they don’t, others can take their place. If something goes wrong — which is to say, if something endangers profit making — they can serve as convenient scapegoats, but any stupid or dangerous decisions they make result from being personifications of capital.

The claim here is not that unintelligent people do not do unintelligent things, but rather that the overwhelming unintelligence involved in keeping the engines of production roaring when they are making the planet increasingly uninhabitable cannot be pinned on specific people. It is the system as a whole that is at issue, and every time we pick out bumbling morons to lament or fresh-faced geniuses to praise is a missed opportunity to see plainly the necessity of structural change.

Put differently, the hope that we can empower intelligent people to positions where they can design the perfect set of regulations, or that we can rely on scientists to take the carbon out of the atmosphere and engineer sources of renewable energy, serves to cover over the simple fact that the work of saving the planet is political, not technical. We have a much better chance of making it past the 22nd century if environmental regulations are designed by a team of people with no formal education in a democratic socialist society than we do if they are made by a team of the most esteemed scientific luminaries in a capitalist society. The intelligence of the brightest people around is no match for the rampant stupidity of capitalism.

On the defensive for centuries, socialists have become quite adept at responding to objections from people for whom the basic functions of life seem difficult to reproduce without the motive power of capital. There are real issues here, issues that point to the opacity of sociability, as Bini Adamczak’s recent book, “Communism for Kids,” playfully explores. But the burden of justification should not fall on the shoulders of those putting forward an alternative. For anyone who has really thought about the climate crisis, it is capitalism, and not its transcendence, that is in need of justification. And don’t be surprised, or fooled, when its defenders point to the tireless work of intelligent people.

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8) Yemen: More than 50,000 children are expected to die of starvation and disease by the end of the year

Blockade on rebel-held parts of country by Saudi Arabia-led coalition has restricted access to food and aid

Lydia Smith
Wednesday 15 November 2017

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/yemen-war-saudi-arabia-children-deaths-famine-disease-latest-figures-a8057441.html

More than 50,000 children in Yemen are expected to die by the end of the year as a result of disease and starvation caused by the stalemated war in the country, Save the Children has warned.

Seven million people are on the brink of famine in the country, which is in the grips of the largest cholera outbreak in modern history.

An estimated 130 Yemeni children are dying every day and an estimated 400,000 children will need treatment for acute malnutrition this year, the charity said.

“These deaths are as senseless as they are preventable,” said Tamer Kirolos, Save the Children’s country director for Yemen.

“They mean more than a hundred mothers grieving for the death of a child, day after day.”

Eighteen-month-old Nadhira from the Bani Qais district of Hajja, northern Yemen, is suffering from severe acute malnutrition and respiratory diseases.

Her mother saved the family’s income for three days to afford to take her to Hajja city for treatment, but her condition deteriorated once again after they were left unable to afford the medicine.

“I worry about my family’s food and medicine when they get sick. I want my daughter to live: she’s my biggest concern now. I wish my daughter recovers from her sickness soon,” her mother Shaika said.

The charity has warned the death toll as a result of starvation and disease could be even higher, as the calculations were made before Saudi Arabia tightened a blockade on rebel-held parts of the country in response to a missile fired from rebel territory towards Riyadh international airport this month.

The blockade has closed the major entry ports of Hodeidah and Saleef, as well as the airport in the capital Sanaa, which has severely hindered the access of food and aid.

Already soaring prices of food and fuel have spiralled in just a few days, further eroding the limited capability of humanitarian organisations to deliver aid.

“Our staff cannot reach communities to provide life-saving care and much-needed supplies and relief workers cannot enter the country,” Mr Kirolos said.

“Essential medicines, fuel and food stocks could start running out in a matter of weeks. It’s utterly unacceptable to let children die of neglect and a lack of political will.

“Unless the blockade is lifted immediately more children will die.”

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9) Huge Human Inequality Study Hints Revolution is in Store for U.S.
Every society has a tipping point
By Yasmin Tayag, November 15, 2017
https://www.inverse.com/article/38457-inequality-study-nature-revolution

There’s a common thread tying together the most disruptive revolutions of human history, and it has some scientists worried about the United States. In those revolutions, conflict largely boiled down to pervasive economic inequality. On Wednesday, a study in Nature, showing how and when those first divisions between rich and poor began, suggests not only that history has always repeated itself but also that it’s bound to do so again — and perhaps sooner than we think.

In the largest study of its kind, a team of scientists from Washington State University and 13 other institutions examined the factors leading to economic inequality throughout all of human history and noticed some worrying trends. Using a well-established score of inequality called the Gini coefficient, which gives perfect, egalitarian societies a score of 0 and high-inequality societies a 1, they showed that civilization tends to move toward inequality as some people gain the means to make others relatively poor — and employ it. Coupled with what researchers already know about inequality leading to social instability, the study does not bode well for the state of the world today.

“We could be concerned in the United States, that if Ginis get too high, we could be inviting revolution, or we could be inviting state collapse. There’s only a few things that are going to decrease our Ginis dramatically,” said Tim Kohler, Ph.D., the study’s lead author and a professor of archaeology and evolutionary anthropology in a statement.

Currently, the United States Gini score is around .81, one of the highest in the world, according to the 2016 Allianz Global Wealth Report.

A recent Credit Suisse report shows that the richest 1 percent of humanity owns half the world's wealth.

Kohler and his team had their work cut out for them, as studying inequality before the age of global wealth reports is not a straightforward task. It’s one thing to measure modern day economic inequality using measures of individual net worth, but those kind of metrics aren’t available for, say, hunter-gatherers chasing buffalo during the Paleolithic. To surmount this obstacle, the researchers decided to use house size as a catch-all proxy for wealth, then examined the makeup of societies from prehistoric times to modern day using data from 63 archaeological digs.

Overall, they found that human societies started off fairly equal, with the hunter-gatherer societies consistently getting Gini scores around .17. The divide between rich and poor really began once humans started to domesticate plants and animals and switch to farming-based societies. Learning to till the land meant introducing the concept of land ownership, and inevitably, some people ended up as landless peasants. Furthermore, because these societies no longer lived as nomads, it became easier to accumulate wealth (like land) and pass it down from generation to generation.

The Gini scores got higher as farming societies got bigger. The small scale “horticultural” farmers had a median Gini of .27, and larger-scale “agricultural” societies moved up to .35. This pattern continued until, oddly, humans moved into the New World — the Americas. Then, over time, the researchers saw that Gini scores kept rising in Old World Eurasia but actually hit a plateau in the Americas. The researchers think this plateau happened because there were fewer draft animals, like horse and water buffalo, in the New World, making it harder for new agricultural societies to expand and cultivate more land.

Overall, the highest-ever historical Gini the researchers found was that of the ancient Old World (think Patrician Rome), which got a score of .59. While the degrees of inequality experienced by historical societies are quite high, the researchers note, they’re nowhere near as high as the Gini scores we’re seeing now.

“Even given the possibility that the Ginis constructed here may somewhat underestimate true household wealth disparities, it is safe to say that the degree of wealth inequality experienced by many households today is considerably higher than has been the norm over the last ten millennia,” the researchers write in their paper.

On Monday, a global report from Credit Suisse showed that modern humans are continuing the trends set by our predecessors: Now, the report showed, half of the world’s wealth really does belong to a super-rich one percent, and the gap is only growing. Historically, Kohler says in his statement, there’s only so much inequality a society can sustain before it reaches a tipping point. Among the many known effects of inequality on a society are social unrest, a decrease in health, increased violence, and decreased solidarity. Unfortunately, Kohler points out, humans have never been especially good at decreasing inequality peacefully — historically, the only effective methods for doing so are plague, massive warfare, or revolution.

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Monday, November 20, 2017

BAUAW NEWSLETTER, MONDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2017

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A) EVENTS, ACTIONS AND ONGOING STRUGGLES

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No More War! — Käthe Kollwitz

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Labor Studies and Radical History

4444 Geary Blvd., Suite 207, San Francisco, CA 94118

415.387.5700

http://www.holtlaborlibrary.org/mayday.html

Hours(call 415.387.5700 to be sure the library is open for the hours you are interested in. We close the library sometimes to go on errands or have close early) suggested)

7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Closed on all major holidays and May Day We can arrange, by request, to keep the library open longer during the day or open it on weekends. Just ask.

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Reference Librarian On-site Email and Telephone Reference Interlibrary Loan Online Public Access Catalog Microfilm Reader/Printer DVD and VCR players Photocopier Quiet well-lighted place for study and research For an appointment or further information, please email: david [at] holtlaborlibrary.org

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Prison Radio UPDATE: Please sign this petition:

Judge Orders DA to Produce Complete File for Mumia's Case

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Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?

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FREE OUR BROTHERS Campaign to Stop Modern Day Slavery in Colorado, Demanding Equal Rights to the Under Represented http://freeourbrothers.com Petitioning Denver FBI & US Department of Justice

Stop Slavery in Colorado

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Support: CONTRIBUTE Thank you for being a part of this struggle.Cuando luchamos ganamos! When we fight we win! Noelle Hanrahan, Director To give by check: PO Box 411074 San Francisco, CA 94141 Stock or legacy gifts: Noelle Hanrahan (415) 706 - 5222

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*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* *---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* When they knock on your front door: Preparing for Repression

BAY AREA ANTI-REPRESSION COMMITTEE

Mothers Message to the NY/NJ Activist Community

In order to effectively combat the existing opportunism, hidden agendas and to better provide ALL genuinely good willed social justice organizations and individuals who work inside of the New York and New Jersey metropolitan areas... with more concrete guidelines;

The following "10 Point Platform and Justice Wish List" was adopted on Saturday, May 13, 2017 during the "Motherhood: Standing Strong 4 Justice" pre-mothers day gathering which was held at Hostos Community College - Bronx, New York.......

"What We Want, What We Need"

May, 2017 - NY/NJ Parents 10 Point Justice Platform and Wish List

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Hours

(call 415.387.5700 to be sure the library is open for the hours you are interested in. We close the library sometimes to go on errands or have close early) suggested)

7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Closed on all major holidays and May Day

We can arrange, by request, to keep the library open longer during the day or open it on weekends. Just ask.

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Prison Radio UPDATE:

Please sign this petition:

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FREE OUR BROTHERS

Campaign to Stop Modern Day Slavery in Colorado, Demanding Equal Rights to the Under Represented

http://freeourbrothers.com

Petitioning Denver FBI & US Department of Justice

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Support:

CONTRIBUTE

Thank you for being a part of this struggle.

Cuando luchamos ganamos! When we fight we win!

Noelle Hanrahan, Director

To give by check:

PO Box 411074

San Francisco, CA

94141

Stock or legacy gifts:

Noelle Hanrahan

(415) 706 - 5222

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When they knock on your front door: Preparing for Repression

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