ALEC: There Goes the Sun

In 1989, Dan Shugar, an engineer with Pacific Gas and Electric, demonstrated that distributed generation is a good deal both for electric power companies and their consumers. Distributed generation refers to an energy system consisting wholly or partly of small electricity-generating power plants located near the site of the end user. An example is solar photovoltaic cells on the rooftops of consumers who are connected to the power grid. Through an arrangement called net metering, consumers are credited by the power company with the retail rate for all the electricity the solar collector produces. If it produces as much electricity as the consumer uses—which seldom happens—the consumer pays nothing. Forty-three states have net metering policies, although the details vary from state to state.

Photo by grist.org

However, distributed generation is a pain in the ass to the utility companies. They have a different business model in mind. They would prefer to continue to use fossil fuels, or to build large, centralized wind farms or solar power plants and sell the electricity to their customers at the same rate they are now paying for power from fossil fuel plants, even though renewable energy will be cheaper to produce. So they and their allies at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have launched a campaign in the states to eliminate distributed generation. It involves labeling people with solar collectors as “free riders.”

This is their argument: When solar customers sell electricity to the power company, they use the existing energy grid, but they are not paying anything toward the cost of establishing and maintaining that grid. Therefore, they are indirectly increasing the rates of nonsolar customers. Sometimes they argue that poor customers (who can't afford solar) are subsidizing rich ones (who can). To recoup these fixed costs, the power companies want to penalize solar customers either by charging them a monthly fee or by reducing the amount they pay for the electricity solar collectors produce.

One document even claims that distributed generation is an “existential threat” to the power companies. They claim that if solar customers drive up the rates of nonsolar customers too far, everyone will be forced to go solar, thus driving the power companies out of business. While some of us may smile at this prospect, the sudden bankruptcy of large power companies would be disruptive.

The rebuttal from solar advocates is this: What Shugar said in 1989 is still true. Distributed generation reduces the power companies' costs by reducing the demand for power, especially during peak midday hours when solar collectors are producing energy. Therefore, the power companies have to spend less money building new generating plants and power lines. They can produce the energy they sell at a cheaper rate. If that's the case, there's no reason to pass along the “cost” of solar to nonsolar customers, since the cost is negative. Therefore, there is no existential threat.

Who is right? A study by energy consultant Tom Beach supported the solar advocates' argument. He found that distributed generation saves the power companies $92 million per year in Calfiornia and $34 million a year in Arizona. (Below is a political flyer based on the Beach study.) Of course, distributed generation does cost the power companies revenue, since every kilowatt hour produced by their solar customers is energy that they don't sell. Is it this competition that they object to?

Does it matter who is right? Probably not. Energy companies can lie about their costs, or they can use their superior spending power on campaign contributions and lobbying to render the science irrelevant.

Enter ALEC, an organization of corporations (including, of course, energy companies) and state politicians that produces model bills for conservative legislators to introduce at the state, and sometimes federal, level. It is ALEC that has given us such recent triumphs as stand-your-ground and voter ID laws. Legislators have introduced 77 ALEC energy bills in 34 states, intended to block the development of renewable energy at every stage. Bills have been introduced in Arizona, California, Colorado and Georgia to add a monthly surcharge to the electric bills of solar customers. Arizona has taken action. The original bill called for a monthly surcharge of $100 on solar collectors, which would have made them a huge money loser for consumers. They eventually settled on a fee that averages $4.90 per month. The solar companies are spinning this as a victory, but this added cost makes solar less attractive to homeowners.

Other energy initiatives pushed by ALEC include bills to eliminate state Renewable Portfolio Standards, which require utilities to produce a percentage of their power using renewable energy; and a federal bill to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of the power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. The ALEC legislative agenda is not just about deny women access to abortions or denying black people the right to vote. It also strikes at the continuing ability of this planet to support human life.

You may also be interested in reading:

The Catalyst

Don't Forget Not to Vote

Climate of Mistrust

Sy Hersh's Bombshell

A lot of reporters write articles purporting to expose secrets of the American intelligence community, but this is different. The article is written by Seymour Hersh, the country's foremost investigative journalist. He began his career in 1969 by exposing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and its coverup. Younger folks will know him for his reporting of American torture at the Abu Ghraib prison complex in Iraq.

In an article appearing today in the London Review of Books, Hersh accuses the Obama administration of “cherry picking” intelligence to support the conclusion that the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack in Eastern Ghouta last August, said to have killed somewhere between 280 and 1400 people. This conclusion was used to justify the threat of US bombing of Syria. His article begins this way:

Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country's civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded—without assessing responsibility—had been used in the rocket attack.

That other party is al-Nusra, a group affiliated with al-Qaeda, that is part of the coalition of rebel groups trying to overthrow Assad that the US government supports.

Hersh doesn't say Assad was not responsible for the attack, just that the US doesn't have enough evidence to threaten to start a Middle Eastern war. In effect, he is saying the Obama administration was as foolish and/or dishonest as the George W. Bush administration was during the buildup to the American invasion of Iraq. You might say it's deja vu all over again.

You should read the article, but I'll try to summarize: The US had wiretaps intended to monitor coversations of the Syrian high command, and sensors in the ground near chemical weapons facilities designed to detect any movement of these weapons. The wiretaps, and possibly the sensors, were discovered and neutralized sometime earlier in the year, so if the Syrians carried out the attack, the US was taken by surprise. Two days after the attack, the US used computer keywords to analyze several thousand radio communications from the Syrian army, looking for evidence of the attack. In other words, they started with the assumption that the Syrian government was responsible and look for confirming evidence—a clear example of confirmatory bias. They then assembled a scenario of what the Syrian army would have done if they had carried out the attack, based in part on a training exercise that the Syrians carried out the year before. This scenario was presented as if the US had monitored it in real time, which of course they did not. Hersh says the US also ignored evidence that the shells said to have been used to deliver the sarin had a shorter range than they claimed.

At the same time, another suspect, al-Nusra, has emerged. Hersh cites US intelligence sources claiming to be certain that al-Nusra has sarin, and others stating that the evidence is inconclusive. Those who claim al-Nusra does have sarin refer to the presence in their ranks of Ziyaad Tariq Ahmed, a chemical weapons expert from Iraq—a bit of possible  “blowback” from the Iraq War. Needless to say, the US didn't try to construct a case implicating al-Nusra. They probably didn't have the necessary data.

As journalist Marcy Wheeler points out, Hersh's story helps to answer such questions as why our European allies did not support our threat to attack Syria, and why Obama surprisingly backed off from the threat, agreeing to take the question to Congress, where he faced almost certain defeat, and eventually accepting the Russian plan for dismantling Syria's chemical weapons that is now being carried out. As Hersh puts it:

Do we have the whole story of Obama's willingness to walk away from his 'red line' threat to bomb Syria? He claimed to have an iron-clad case but suddenly agreed to take the issue to Congress, and later to accept Assad's offer to relinquish his chemical weapons. It appears possible that at some point he was directly confronted with contradictory information: evidence strong enough to persuade him to cancel his attack plan, and take the criticism sure to come from Republicans.

Hersh's article appears in a journal unlikely to be encountered by many Americans. (Why was it not published by The New Yorker, his usual outlet?) It will be interesting to see how many American media cover this article, and how it is covered. The corporate media usually jump on any story likely to embarrass the President. But in this case, the story conflicts with their usual unquestioning loyalty to the American security state. We'll probably hear a lot of anonymous denials coming from Washington in the next few days.

Update (12/10):

The corporate media have been largely silent about Hersh's article.  The exceptions are interviews he did on Democracy Now (see the interview below, in two parts) and CNN. As expected, a national intelligence spokesperson denied everything.

The most interesting facts to emerge so far are that the piece was turned down by both The New Yorker and The Washington Post.  The Post told Hersh the sourcing of the article did not meet their standards.

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Deja Vu

A Stroll Down Memory Lane

This Will Not Surprise You

This should have been an important year for news about climate change. In September, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released part one of its fifth assessment, raising their level of certainty than global warming is human-caused from 90% to 95%, increasing their estimate of sea-level rise, and discussing climate change's irreversability. 2013 was also an active weather year, including the Typhoon Haiyan, the strongest storm ever to make landfall in recorded history. But, as usual, the corporate media are still ignoring or confusing the issue.

The release of the IPCC report fell victim to false balancing when an article in The Economist suggested that there had been a “pause” in global warming during the last 15 years. Because of natural climate variability, whether there appears to be a “pause” is largely a function of which years you choose as your start and end points. 1998 was a year of record high temperatures, so most “pause” advocates start there. Below are the exact same climate data. The top chart shows in red the long term trend that best fits the data. The bottom chart marks in blue several places where global warming might appear to have “paused.”

The IPCC may have made a tactical error by addressing and refuting the “pause” claim, which increased its familiarity and allowed the media to suggest there was a “controversy” over whether climate change was really happening. (“The global atmosphere hasn't been warming lately,” CBS reported.)

Media Matters did a study of coverage of the IPCC report from August 1 through October 1 on six TV and eight print outlets. The majority of them mentioned the “pause.”

Although climate change coverage had been improving in recent years, the “pause” story brought about an increase in false balancing, with more attention given to climate skeptics. As usual, Fox News and The Wall Street Journal were the worst, but doubters were 20% of those quoted by CBS and 17% by The Washington Post. USA Today published side-by-side op-eds giving equal weight to the IPCC and its skeptics.

Another depressing feature of news coverage is their failure to mention climate change when reporting extreme weather events consistent with climate predictions. Scientists, being a cautious lot, have often said that no single weather event can be definitely attributed to climate change. The media seem to have interpreted these statements to mean that it would be irresponsible to even mention climate change when reporting on hurricanes, tornados, wildfires, droughts, etc.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) did an analysis of reports on extreme weather on ABC, CBS and NBC TV news from January through September—ending before Typhoon Haiyan. The results could hardly have been more conclusive.

As Jim Naureckas has pointed out, every weather event is caused by the climate. While it's theoretically possible to imagine that Typhoon Haiyan might have occurred in a parallel universe in which we had not heated up the global temperature, defining “cause” that narrowly makes it impossible to ever attribute a weather event to the climate. This is not helpful when planning public policy. It's time for climate scientists to demand a new norm for reporting extreme weather. Current weather events should be compared to the historical record and changing trends should be reported every time the media do a weather story to which climate change is relevant.

You might also be interested in reading:

Death By Anecdote, Part 2

Public Getting Warmer

Climate of Mistrust

Nelson Mandela (1918-2013)

Photo by Jurgen Schadeberg

Herding Cats

You've all heard that trying to get liberals united behind a common goal is like herding cats, or that when liberals go into battle, they form a circular firing squad. A new study appears to support these clichés, and attributes the problem to a liberal personality trait, the need for uniqueness.

The false consensus effect is a cognitive error in which we believe that more people agree with our attitudes than is actually the case. For example, both those who favor and those who oppose the legalization of marijuana might think that theirs is the majority view. One explanation for false consensus is that we tend to associate with others who share our views and are therefore exposed to a biased sample of opinions. The opposite of false consensus is a false uniqueness effect in which people incorrectly believe that most others disagree with them. However, most studies of the general population find false consensus rather than false uniqueness.

In the study by Chadly Stern and others, 292 participants recruited over the internet were asked their opinions on 41 topics, 22 non-political and 19 political. They were asked to classify themselves as liberal, moderate or conservative. Then they were asked to estimate the percentage of people participating in the study “who share your political beliefs” who agreed with them on each item. A true measure of false consensus or uniqueness was obtained by comparing the participants' estimates to the actual beliefs of the study participants in their political in-group.

It was found that all three groups were inaccurate. Both moderates and conservatives showed the usual false consensus effect, but liberals showed false uniqueness. They underestimated the percentage of fellow liberals who agreed with them. In a second study, 287 participants were this time asked to estimate the percentage of people who shared their political beliefs in the American population who agreed with them on each item. The same results were obtained.

The authors proposed an explanation for the false uniqueness effect among liberals: That they are higher on a personality trait called need for uniqueness, defined as a strong dispositional desire to feel unique. The authors used 11 items from this 34-item Need for Uniqueness Scale, but I'm not sure which ones. Liberals are indeed higher than moderates and conservatives in need for uniqueness. An analysis showed that the relationship between political ideology and overestimation of consensus was mediated by need for uniqueness, meaning that the correlation between ideology and overestimation was significantly reduced when the effect of their common relationship to need for uniqueness was statistically removed.

I have some concerns about this study. For example, I'm not sure how participants interpreted the phrase “people who share your political beliefs.” It would have been better if the instructions had specifically referred to fellow liberals, moderates or conservatives. There are good reasons to expect liberals to underestimate the percentage of people in the general population who agree with them. As Justin Lewis has demonstrated, the corporate media tend to exclude progressive opinions from public debate, leading liberals to feel outside the political mainstream. For example, the media continually identify support for modest cuts in Social Security and Medicare as the centrist political position when their own polls show that the public is overwhelmingly opposed to such cuts. If the participants in the Stern study were confused about the group whose attitudes they were estimating, this could partially explain the results. Liberals have been marginalized by the corporate media.

I am also unimpressed with the attempt to explain liberals' behavior as resulting from a need for uniqueness. In my opinion, the words “need” and “uniqueness” are both overstatements. The items in the scale largely reflect the respondent's willingness to engage in nonconforming behavior. All the data in this study are correlational, not causal. The apparent "need" for uniqueness could be as much a result of the illusion of uniqueness as its cause. In any case, the relationship between ideology and overestimation of consensus appears to still be statistically significant after the effect of need for uniqueness is removed, so it's not a complete explanation for the phenomenon.

In the article, the authors contrast the Occupy Movement to the Tea Party. They note that the Tea Party became a potent political force, while they claim the Occupy Movement broke down due to internal bickering, presumably a result of their individual needs to feel unique. This ignores a far more important reason for the Tea Party's greater success. They received behind-the-scenes financial and logistical support from wealthy conservatives and were welcomed into the Republican Party. The Occupy Movement, on the other hand, received almost no outside support, and was shunned by the Democrats, who chose to side instead with their wealthy political donors, mostly members of the 1%.  To attribute the failure of the Occupy Movement to the personalities of its members is politically naive. One of my pet peeves is the tendency for psychologists—even social psychologists, who should know better—to attribute behavior primarily to personal motives and overlook situational forces that are much more likely explanations for the behavior.

Regardless of why liberals underestimate their political strength, it is important that they examine public opinion polls directly, rather than trusting the corporate media to interpret them. (See, for example, my recent post on the public's “surprising” views on climate change.)

You may also be interested in reading:

The Myth of the Conservative Voter

Public Getting Warmer

Who Cares What They Think

Merry Christmas

It's hard to believe that this greatest of all R&B Christmas records, "White Christmas" by the Drifters, is 59 years old. It was recorded on February 4, 1954, and released in November of that year. It reached #2 on the R&B charts the following month.

The Drifters are (from left to right) Clyde McPhatter, Jimmy Oliver, Andrew Thrasher, Gerhart Thrasher and Bill Pinkney. I'll always be grateful to deejay Alan Freed, who came to New York in September, 1954, for getting me interested in rhythm and blues, which led me to a lifelong obsession with jazz and blues.

This article is cross-posted from my music blog, The Blues and the Abstract Truth.  

"We Are America"

Jazz/R&B singer and bassist Esperanza Spalding has produced a music video entitled "We Are America," calling for the either the prosecution or the release of the detainees who have been held without trial at Guantanamo Bay for more than a decade.

In a statement accompanying the release of the video, Ms. Spalding reports that she became embarrassed about Gitmo while touring in Europe. When she returned home, she contacted several Congresspersons. She received an answer from one Senator who said she had no intention of doing anything about Guantanamo, but would "keep [her] comments in mind." Her recommendation? The people who see the video should write or call their Congresspersons.

It's difficult to abandon the cliches we've been taught as children, or to think of alternative ways of influencing the political system, even when it's clear that the old ways are completely ineffective.

This article is cross-posted from my music blog, The Blues and the Abstract Truth.  

Death By Anecdote, Part 2

Please read the first part of this article.

When a story is false, we run into a third problem: Even when misinformation is corrected, many people continue to believe it. For example, in one study, participants from Australia, Germany and the United States were asked about arguments made by the US government favoring the invasion of Iraq which were subsequently retracted, such as the claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). The Australian and German students were sensitive to retraction; that is, when they knew a claim had been retracted, they tended not to believe it. The Americans, however, were insensitive to retraction; on the whole, they tended to believe statements that they knew had been retracted about as much as statements they did not know had been retracted.

Paradoxically, attempts to correct misinformation can lead to a backfire effect, in which people are more likely to believe false information after it has been debunked. Sometimes this is due to increased familiarity with the claim as a result of its being repeated during the retraction. However, backfire effects are most likely to occur when the original claim is consistent with the ideology of the person who believes it. Not surprisingly, Republicans were more likely than Democrats to continue to believe that Iraq had WMDs even after the Bush administration admitted they didn't. When ideological backfire effects occur, people can be suspicious of the motives of the person or organization doing the correcting (often the news media) and discount the retraction.

Lewandowsky and others make three suggestions for successfully correcting misinformation: (1) warn people at the time of initial exposure that the information is suspect, (2) repeat the retraction several times, focusing only on the new, correct information, and (3) provide a plausible alternative explanation for the previous false belief. In the case of ideologically motivated false beliefs, they make a fourth recommendation: Affirm the target's ideology before attempting to correct the false belief. The first two remedies require news media cooperation that the Obama administration is unlikely to receive. Since no single alternative explanation accounts for all the anti-ACA anecdotes, providing plausible explanations for false beliefs requires extensive investigation of individual cases. The fourth suggestion would seem to require a statement like this: “We agree with you that Obamacare is a disaster, but in this case, you are wrong because . . .” 

Here is Lewandowsky discussing misinformation and its correction in the important area of climate change.

I see no magic bullet here. The best solution for the administration may be to appeal to the value Americans place on self-reliance and encourage them to explore their health care options for themselves. But they can't do that until their website is fixed. If they lose the cooperation of young people, the market will suffer from adverse selection—not enough people paying into the system, and too many older, sicker people drawing it down. Insurance rates could increase dramatically next year, just in time for the 2014 elections. Then Obama will see how much fun it would be if the Tea Party controlled the Senate as well as the House.

The HealthCare.gov fiasco is bad news for single payer advocates too. I'm afraid most people don't realize that it was Obama's reliance on an "overly-complicated, market-based Republican health care plan" that made the website so difficult to set up. They may simply conclude that government can't do anything right.

You may also be interested in reading:

Death By Anecdote, Part 1

Policy By Anecdote

Climate of Mistrust

Death By Anecdote, Part 1

You can lie with statistics, but a well-chosen anecdote is much more effective.

Here's something to look forward to, right along with your next colonoscopy.  The New York Times reports that the Republican Party plans to carry out a sustained, organized attack on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) for the next year, in the hope of gaining an advantage in the 2014 elections. The Republican campaign, described as a “multilayered sequenced assault,” is outlined in the House Republican Playbook, a 17-page strategy document prepared by their House leadership. It lists a series of talking points such as: “Because of Obamacare, I lost my insurance,” “Obamacare increases health care costs,” and “The exchanges may not be secure, putting personal information at risk.” House members are advised to collect anecdotes from constituents in support of these talking points through social media, letters and visits to their home distract. A new website, gop.gov/yourstory, centralizes the collection of these anecdotes. Republicans are instructed in the use of “messaging tools” for disseminating the stories, for example, a sample op-ed for submitting to local newspapers.

The idea is to flood the media with anecdotes in support of a particular talking point. If there is an effective counterresponse from Democrats, they will shift immediately to a different talking point. Topics waiting in the wings for possible use include insurance “rate shocks,” threats to being able to keep your doctor, and possible changes to Medicare Advantage policies.

The Republicans recognize that anecdotes can have a powerful influence on public opinion. When making inferences, people use judgmental heuristics, or mental shortcuts to make decisions quickly and easily. The use of heuristics is automatic and unconscious. They usually lead to correct inferences, but they sometimes lead us astray.

One inference we often make is to estimate the size of a category or the frequency of an event. For example, how many Americans are being harmed by the ACA? The availability heuristic suggests that the size of a category is judged by the ease with which examples can be brought to mind. Examples are more easily retrieved from memory if they are concrete rather than abstract, if they are dramatic and interesting, or if they happened recently or nearby. Personal experiences are particularly salient. When people are asked to estimate the frequency of various causes of death, they overestimate homicides and auto accidents, but underestimate strokes and diabetes. Clearly, their estimates are influenced by media coverage.

The problem gets worse when you consider the base rate fallacy, which states that people are inattentive to population statistics, and their judgments are not sufficiently affected by them. In one study, participants were given vivid stories about misbehavior by prison guards or welfare recipients. Attitudes toward these groups were equally negatively affected regardless of whether they were told that the anecdotes were typical of the population, not typical of the population, or they were given no base rate information. In another study, college students' intentions to take courses were affected by single brief face-to-face comments from a stranger, but hardly at all by statistical summaries of the course evaluations of much larger numbers of students who had previously taken the course.

The availability heuristic and the base rate fallacy suggest that even if people are given accurate information suggesting than the story is unrepresentative, their false impression is unlikely to be corrected. There was heavy media coverage of the first wave of anecdotes from people who claimed that their insurance costs went up due to Obamacare. When critics examined them more closely, many of these anecdotes were found to be misleading. Insurance companies cancelled policies and raised rates long before the ACA. The percentage of people whose policies were cancelled was small. Some of these people were able to get equal or better insurance through the exchanges without paying more. However, the corporate media can't be counted on to investigate anecdotes before airing them, and the debunking stories seldom receive anywhere near the attention given to the original report.

The Obama administration has apparently decided that the best defense is a good offense, so they are responding with anecdotes of their own—so-called Obamacare “success stories.” While this may be the best they can do under the circumstances, they are unlikely to get much cooperation from the corporate media in publicizing these stories. The media don't cover successful airplane landings--unless you land it in the Hudson River. Meanwhile, the administration and the media have largely overlooked another potential source of much more tragic stories: the 5.2 million people who are being denied health insurance entirely because they happen to live in states where Republican governors and legislatures have blocked Medicaid expansion. But to the corporate media, an upper middle class person losing a few dollars a month is much more newsworthy than a poor person losing his or her life.

But remember, the plural of anecdote is not data. To be continued.

You may also be interested in reading:

Death By Anecdote, Part 2

Policy By Anecdote

The Coverage Gap:  The Real Failure of Obamacare

Are You Feeling Lonely?

Outlier (noun): (1) a person whose residence and place of business are at a distance; (2) something (as a geological feature) that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body; (3) a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has released Health at a Glance, its 2013 report on the performance of health systems in its member nations. Here is one of the charts.

The vertical dimension is life expectancy in years. On the horizontal is health care spending per person in US dollars. The line is the curve which best fits the data. It has both a linear component—as health care spending goes up, life expectancy increases—and a quadratic component—as spending increases, each dollar spent has diminishing returns. The United States is an outlier. We are spending quite a bit more (about $2400 per person more) than any other country, but our life expectancy is 26^th out of the 40 countries, almost one year lower than the international average. Another way of looking at it is that the two countries closest to us in life expectancy, Chile and the Czech Republic, are spending less than a quarter of what we're spending per capita on health care.

We're spending lots of money, but not getting a good return on our investment. A substantial portion of the money is being spent not on improved health care services, but rather on ever higher profits for private insurers, drug companies, and giant hospital chains.

The next time a politician says we have “the best health care system in the world,” you are free to burst out laughing.

You may also be interested in reading:

Where's the Outrage?

Why Are American Health Care Costs So High?

"Based on a True Story," Part 2

The Fifth Estate

Feature films are the most powerful and insidious shapers of public perception, because they fly under the radar of conscious exclusion.

                                                                                          Julian Assange

Journalists refer to the media as “the fourth estate,” since they presumably serve as a check on the integrity of the three branches of government—executive, legislative and judicial. But it is apparent—as shown by the propaganda buildup to the invasion of Iraq—that the corporate media serve primarily as “stenographers to power,” passing along without evaluation false statements from politicians and passively maintaining state censorship. Julian Assange proposed that, since the “fourth estate” wasn't doing its job, a “fifth estate” was needed to expose important information withheld from the public by governmental and corporate censorship.

I went to this film with low expectations. It is based on two books hostile to Assange. Inside Wiki-Leaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website, by Daniel Domscheit-Berg, is the memoirs of the former Wiki-Leaks volunteer who became Assange's second-in-command, and whose falling out with Assange supplies the personal drama of the film. Wiki-Leaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy, is by David Leigh and Luke Harding, two Guardian reporters whose newspaper prospered when it released information obtained by Wiki-Leaks, but who later broke with him for the same reason as Domscheit-Berg. They contend that Assange was reckless in releasing unredacted versions of documents leaked by Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning. With these two books lined up against him, it is not surprising that Assange assumed the worst and refused to cooperate with actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who portrays him in the film. (The quote above is from Assange's letter to Cumberbatch, which deserves to be read in its entirety.) The fact that the film was produced by Dreamworks, a division of the Disney corporation, was hardly reassuring.

I went into the film with two concerns. First, I was afraid it would turn into a character assassination of Julian Assange, which would turn the audience against him and distract from the substantive issues raised by Wiki-Leaks. Secondly, when debating whether governments should be allowed to keep vast numbers of classified documents, including evidence of war crimes, secret from the public, I was afraid the film would come down firmly on the side of the US government.

My first concern was not entirely justified. Assange is portrayed as an eccentric, but his character is sympathetic in many ways. Benedict Cumberbatch has an uncanny resemblance to Assange, an accomplished Aussie accent, and brings real complexity to the role. He deserves an Oscar nomination, although he probably won't get it. Daniel Bruhl, fresh from his role as Formula-1 driver Niki Lauda in Rush, provides stalwart support as the dedicated introvert, Domscheit-Berg. The film is at its best when conveying the excitement of Wikileaks' early successes in releasing a variety of secrets, such as the records of the Swiss bank Julius Baer, than embarrassed and sometimes incriminated corporations and governments.

Cumberbatch presents Assange as so completely driven by his mission of transparency that he is insensitive to the feelings of those around him. This is dramatized, for example, in a painful scene in which he insults Domscheit-Berg's well-meaning parents when they invite him to dinner. At one point, Assange diagnoses himself as falling “somewhere along the autism spectrum,” which seems like a reasonable possibility. The film goes off the deep end, however, when it speculates about childhood origins of his behavior. The film rightly ignores recent allegations of sexual misconduct made against Assange.

Assange is shown to be concerned about the safety of his whistleblowers. In a foreshadowing of the film's central theme, two Kenyan men whose expose of their government's corruption was released by Wiki-Leaks are murdered. Assange is extremely upset despite the fact that the men chose to sign their names to the document. This dramatic scene sets up an expectation in the audience that when Wiki-Leaks releases documents, people are going to be killed. There is some danger that the audience may conflate this incident with later events.

The central dilemma of the film is the disagreement between Assange and Domscheit-Berg, The Guardian, and the US government over the costs and benefits of releasing the Manning files. The government painted a dire picture of their potential impact, arguing that the lives of American troops and informants working undercover for the US would be endangered. Assange refers to this as a “canard” that has been used for over 50 years to justify government secrecy. He counters by saying that the release of the documents could do significant good. They reveal evidence of US war crimes, such as the infamous “Collateral Murder” video showing the aerial killing of innocent civilians in Iraq, and the “Afghan War Logs,” documenting the extent of civilian deaths in that country. Assange argues that these revelations might ultimately save lives, since governments might hesitiate to behave so heinously if they knew such incidents might become public knowledge.

To the film's credit, both sides are given opportunities to state their case. (The government is represented by Laura Linney and Stanley Tucci as two anonymous CIA or State Department operatives.) The central question then becomes: Are the arguments presented fairly, or is the playing field tilted to favor one side? This is a subjective judgment, no doubt influenced by my general agreement with Assange. I think the script subtly favors the government position.

The film dramatizes the danger to US agents by creating the composite character of a Libyan spy working undercover to overthrow the Gaddafi regime. Of all US undercover operations around the world, this is one that might have had the most public approval. Both the character and his American handler (Linney) are presented sympathetically. Early in the film, he is offered a chance to come to America, but he chooses to remain in Tripoli, since it is his home. Later in the film, when it's known that Assange may release the documents, he and his family are forced to leave Libya on short notice.  This leads to a mini-thriller as they pass through a border checkpoint.

The people Assange claims might be helped by the release of the Manning files are largely abstract subjects of dialogue. The "Collateral Murder" footage (featured prominently in the official trailer) is the only case in which American wrongdoing is shown. How different would this film have been if one of its recurrent themes had been a dramatization of the fate of an Afghan village in which civilians were killed by American bombing?

It was revealed at Bradley Manning's trial by retired Gen. Robert Carr, head of the $6.2 million, 125-person Information Release Task Force, that the government was not aware of any American or foreign national who had been harmed by the release of the documents. (There was some talk of an Afghan man who was killed, but he was not mentioned in the Manning files.) The film makes this point, but it is presented as a claim made by Assange rather than an admission by the government, which may lead the audience to discount it.

I think the film subtly lowers the bar for what potential consequences might justify censorship. Unable to present evidence of anyone having been killed or injured, the filmmakers seem to argue that Wiki-Leaks should not have published the papers if there was a chance that someone, such as a semi-fictitious Libyan informant, might be seriously inconvenienced by their release.

What counts as a “harm” serious enough to send Manning—and potentially, Assange—to jail for decades for releasing classified documents? Why should they be sent to jail, while the perpetrators of the rampant torture and assassination they revealed go free? The Fifth Estate raises these questions, but in order to give an informed answer, you have to seek out more than is revealed in this film.

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"Based on a True Story," Part 1

Zero Thirty Darkness

Where's the Outrage?

Drs. Peter Ubel, Amy Abernethy and Yousuf Zafar, all medical doctors, published an editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine entitled “Full Disclosure—Out-of-Pocket Costs as Side Effects.” An abbreviated version by Dr. Ubel appeared as an op-ed in The New York Times as “Doctor, First Tell Me What It Costs.” They argue that, just as doctors typically discuss negative side effects of drugs and medical treatments with their patients, they should also discuss the financial cost of drugs and medical treatments before the patient makes a decision. These costs should be treated as a potential side-effects because stress from the threat of financial ruin can adversely affect the patient's health. They note that cost is sometimes not discussed because both patients and doctors are too embarrassed to bring it up.

Some examples of costly decisions are given.

• Bevacizumab (or Avastin), a drug which extends the lives of colorectal cancer sufferers an average of five months beyond chemotherapy alone, has a median price of $44,000. A patient on Medicare would be responsible for 20% of that cost, or $8800.

• A breast cancer patient with a high deductible health insurance policy faces average out-of-pocket costs of $55,000—obviously, more than the life savings of most Americans. A person with a high deductible plan faces a bill of $40,000 for myocardial infarction, and $4,000 per year for management of “uncomplicated” diabetes. (Meanwhile employers are increasingly shifting workers to insurance policies with higher co-payments and deductibles.)

The authors state four reasons it would be beneficial for doctors to inform patients in advance of the cost of treatment. My comments on each are in parentheses.

1. Informing the patient of the cost of treatment may cause some patients to switch to a less expensive alternative treatment that is just as effective. (Why would a doctor ever recommend a drug or treatment if there is an equally effective and less expensive alternative?)
2. Some patients may be “willling to trade off some chance of medical benefit” in exchange for lower cost. (This possibility, which the authors refer to as “complex and ethically charged,” gets to the heart of the matter. Some patients may choose to forego treatment rather than leave themselves or their families bankrupt. It is implied that knowing the full cost of treatment may persuade some folks to commit passive suicide.)
3. Patients could attempt to obtain financial assistance in advance of the treatment. (An example is given of someone who was able to obtain help from a charity—a rare event, at best.)
4. “A growing body of evidence” suggests that if patients take cost into account, it “might reduce costs for patients and society in the long term.” (However, there is no citation to this body of evidence and the authors do not elaborate. They may mean that if everyone became more cost-conscious, prices might come down, but does the health care industry operate the same way as other more competitive markets?)

It seems so obvious that doctors should discuss costs with patients that it hardly seems necessary for NEJM to publish an editorial suggesting that they do so. But the most revealing thing about this article is the issues Ubel and his colleagues don't even mention.

First of all, they don't ask why the costs of drugs and medical treatment are so much higher in this country than in other industrialized countries. Medical costs are treated as if they were merely an uncontroversial feature of the natural environment, and no mention is made of how they might be reduced.

My colleague Paul Ricci has blogged frequently—for example, here—about how we're spending much more per person on health care than other countries, and getting mediocre results. Ezra Klein has posted 21 graphs with comparative data on the costs of specific drugs and medical treatments. Medical bills account for over 60% of U. S., bankruptcies, and 75% of people with medically-related bankruptcies had health insurance.  A 2013 survey of 11 countries by the Commonwealth Fund found that Americans were more likely than residents of the other ten countries to forego health care because of cost and to have difficult paying for care even when they were insured.

There is some objective data comparing the causes of our higher prices. A 2012 study by the Institute of Medicine, a division of the National Academy of Sciences, estimated that the U. S. health care system wastes $750 billion a year, roughly 30% of the money spent. The report identified six major areas of waste: unnecessary services ($210 billion annually), inefficient delivery of care ($130 billion), excess administrative costs ($190 billion), inflated prices ($105 billion), prevention failures ($55 billion), and fraud ($75 billion). Our doctors are more highly compensated than doctors in the rest of the world. Our hospitals attempt to maximize their profits, regardless of whether they are legally registered as for-profit or nonprofit corporations. Part of the problem is political corruption. For example, when Congress expanded Medicare to include prescription drug coverage, Medicare was forbidden to use its purchasing power to negotiate for lower drug prices.

More importantly, the authors don't even question why it is necessary for so many Americans to choose between financial ruin and illness or death when they suffer from common medical conditions. They fail to mention that the rest of the world's developed countries have largely solved this dilemma by establishing government run single payer health care systems. If this were merely a matter of money, we could talk about the vast sums this country wastes on overseas military misadventures, or the way our billionaires grow increasingly rich while paying lower tax rates than their secretaries. But these outrages are irrelevant, since a single payer system will save money. All the countries with single payer spend less per capita on health care than we do.

To be fair, Ubel does say, “No one should have to suffer unnecessarily from the cost of medical care.” But he fails to pursue any of the implications of this remark. The authors never make the point that single payer would almost certainly solve many of the financial problems they agonize over in these articles. I suppose it's possible Ubel and his colleagues are secretly hoping to build momentum for single payer by encouraging doctors to empathize more with their patients, but there's nothing in the article to support this speculation.

To paraphrase a point frequently made by Noam Chomsky, no one becomes a tenured professor at an elite university, or is invited to write an editorial for The New York Times, unless he or she has completely internalized the world view of the ruling class, and in the process learned to ignore all the really important issues facing our society.

You may also be interested in reading:

Why Are American Health Care Costs So High?

New Time Magazine Article on Health Care Costs

Protecting the Parasites:  The Irony of Obamacare

Geithner Goes to the Trough

I've written this piece before, when Allegheny County Executive Dan Onorato took a job as a lobbyist with the health insurance firm, Highmark. But Onorato is a small time player compared to former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

It was quietly announced yesterday that Geithner will become President of Warburg-Pincus, the country's fifth largest private equity firm—similar to Bain Capital, the ninth largest private equity firm, formerly headed by Mitt Romney. These are the vulture capitalists that buy up troubled companies and either close them and sell off their assets, or attempt to revive them by seeking loans and imposing austerity measures, then selling them at a profit. Either way, layoffs are an almost certain result. Economist Robert Reich explains how private equity firms work.

Geithner takes his place behind previous Treasury Secretaries like Robert Rubin and John Snow, who, after accepting several years of poverty-level wages in “public service,” walked through the revolving door between business and government to cash in for all the favors they had done for Wall Street while they were in office.

As Treasury Secretary, Geithner supervised the Troubled Asset Relief Fund, aka, the bank bailout, which ensured that banks and investment firms made huge profits following the 2008 recession, even as the rest of the country lost money. Here's future Senator Elizabeth Warren in 2009 quizzing him about where the money went.

Geithner is known for institutionalizing the idea that some banks are too big to fail, and in fact, the financial sector is more concentrated now than it was before the recession. He is also credited with ensuring that there would be no meaningful reregulation of the financial sector—for example, no separation between commercial and investment banking, and no meaningful changes in the trading of derivatives—thereby making it likely that we will have another recession before long.

Geithner had previously stated that he was “extremely unlikely” to take a job in the private finance industry. Maybe he didn't realize how grateful the 1% would be for the services he had rendered.

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Dan Onorato's Happy New Year

What the Data Say

Public Getting Warmer

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), co-chairs of the Bicameral Task Force on Climate Change, released some surprising new public opinion data earlier this week. The data were prepared by social psychologist Jon Krosnick of Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment. Krosnick did a secondary analysis of 21 random-digit telephone surveys and internet surveys conducted, mostly by Stanford, between 2006 and 2013, with a total sample size of almost 20,000 respondents. Krosnick's mathematical model looked at changes over time, and the data he presented are his best estimate of public opinion today.

The results show that there is broad consensus among the American public that climate change is happening and that government should do something about it. Here are the percentages in each state who believe global warming is happening.

The overwhelming majority agree, not only in liberal states like New York (84%) and California (82%), but also in conservative states like Mississippi (82%) and Texas (84%). At least 75% of residents in every state surveyed believe in the existence of climate change. (There were a couple of states for which Krosnick lacked enough data to make a reliable estimate.) Sixty-five percent or more in every state believe that global warming is caused by humans, and 58% or more believe that it poses a serious problem for the United States. Krosnick believes that personal experience with hot weather is primarily responsible for these opinion changes. 

There was only slightly less agreement on whether the U. S. government should take action to address climate change. In only four sparsely populated Western states (ID, MT, NV, UT) did the majority not agree that the government should do more. Here are the percentages by state who believe government should limit greenhouse gas emissions from U. S. businesses.

Similar majorities favor limiting emissions of greenhouse gases from power plants, tax breaks to produce renewable energy, and a cap-and-trade system to limit greenhouse gas production. You can go to this site to check out the maps for all the questions that were reported. If you would like to take a closer look at Pennsylvania's results, they are here.

Where did the public draw the line? In only five states did bare majorities endorse tax breaks for nuclear power. And in no state did a near-majority endorse consumption taxes on gasoline or electricity, or government support for all-electric cars.

These data are not new, but they seem to be sharply at odds with previous statements about American public opinion on climate change made by politicians and the corporate media. The consistency across states is particularly surprising. Here is Krosnick's take on how American public opinion is represented politically.

I have often heard legislators in Washington express the belief that there is considerable variation in opinions about global warming across parts of the country, and that most of the people in their state or district are skeptical about global warming. When I ask about the polling they have done that led them to this belief, I have routinely been told that they had not done polling and, instead, base their impressions on phone calls, emails and conversations with and from constituents on the issue. Our findings suggest that the balance of those direct communications from constituents to elected representatives may have created a misimpression of the public's opinions on the issue.

My guess is that Krosnick is trying to be diplomatic. This is not the first time politicians have been show to misperceive voter attitudes. Not only do Congresspeople not hear from a random sample of constituents, the ones they do hear from are primarily large campaign contributors.

Now that these data are available to Congress, we will have yet another opportunity to observe whether the American political system is responsive to public opinion. Would you like to estimate the chances of these surveys having an impact?

You may also be interested in reading:

Reality Shows a Slight Gain

The Myth of the Conservative Voter

Whose Opinion Matters?