Good discussion on Penn State scandal

http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201207240900

I took a class from the guest on this radio show (Cal sports sociology prof and 49ers consultant Harry Edwards) when I was in high school and he is really insightful (C - were you in that course with me too?). He described how PSU football has become "too big to fail" (biggest student body and alum network in the US, one of the most famous football programs, huge $, TV contracts, scholarships, etc.), and there are so many emotional and financial vested interests that they couldn't tolerate any loose ends, even if it meant keeping child abuse quiet.

Paterno has a long record of showing above-and-beyond concern for his players and community (promoted high standards of conduct and graduation rates among his players, even spoke out against black athlete exploitation ahead of his time), so it's unlikely he just didn't care about those kid victims. That's what makes this lapse so shocking, and strengthens the argument that even such a historic and principled personality was powerless to speak up. I guess he was the victim (not meant to denigrate the true victims of this tragedy) of cognitive dissonance: he knew that even if he "did the right thing", the PSU-football-industrial-complex wouldn't have, so what's the point of fighting an impossible battle? It would have been "noble" for him to resign in protest and maybe go to the media (not the style of old school guys like him), but he knew that his players and the fan base were also counting on him. He didn't want to let his "family" down either (and PSU football is really serious about the "family" thing - it's not just cliche), so that meant letting the kids down instead. Though how can Paterno teach his players about living life right and being good men when he didn't walk the talk when he needed to? Like the Catholic sex abuse, the reputation and preeminence of the organization come first. Big money sport is very similar to big money religion and business, so unfortunately we've seen a lot of this stuff contributing to other scandals too. Powerful organizations and culture can enable their members to reach new heights, but ironically they can also force even moral, prominent individuals into bad decisions that end up hurting/destroying the org.

I don't know much about the NCAA and college sports, but the punishment is also kind of fishy and may not produce the intended results. From the Reggie Bush mess, USC was punished similarly (though much less) with wins erased and postseason ineligibility (not sure if they were fined also). They are another football powerhouse, with a coach who doesn't nearly have the likability and integrity record of Paterno, at least pre-2012. They bounced back rather well, and may now be a top ranked team coming into the new season. So it may not be the end of the world for PSU football (but who cares, it's just amateur football played by barely-literate teens?). Some wondered why the NCAA didn't give PSU the "death penalty" as they did to SMU for illegally paying players and other violations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Methodist_University_football_scandal). They were banned from intercollegiate competition for a year, but it really hurt the program for a decade since they needed to rebuild recruiting and such. Also SMU de-emphasized football and actually tried to be an institution of higher learning, so while they did recently appear in a minor bowl, they are not a top-ranked program anymore. Obviously that can't be so for PSU, where people literally enroll there for the football team (silly I know, but it's a free country). Though the NCAA's ruling has basically communicated to schools that they can practically kill someone, and their programs will not get the death penalty. But pay players a small fraction of the huge sums you are making off their talents? That is somehow worse than covering up child rape - because it perturbs the system. And we wonder why others think Americans are crazy! And it's not like SMU and USC are the only culprits. The big programs east of the Mississippi are probably just as corrupt, but the NCAA doesn't go after them out of fear, favoritism, or other COI.

I have always had a problem with collective punishment. 99.9% of the PSU community didn't know about the criminality going on (unlike SMU where it was pretty obvious to anyone with half a brain). Now their lives will be forever affected. I know they can't expect to have everything go back to the way it was after a big scandal. The program would change even if Sandusky never existed; Paterno would retire someday, PSU would go through slumps, etc. But now innocent people are hurting because of the misdeeds of a few. It's like economic sanctions against Iran/Cuba, or more extreme - nuking Hiroshima. Why not just ban the perpetrators for life, but leave the rest of the program alone - apart from assigning a special auditor and requiring extra training, charity, etc.? I guess the PSU punishment is kind of like letting Lehman fail out of principle? But it's not like other schools are going to clean house now and make sure they haven't been hiding any abuses. They're just going to hide their misdeeds more carefully.

I just don't know the point of it all, it's just college sports. The universities in most other nations don't even have organized intermural sports - if athletes are serious and good, then they are cultivated at a young age by the pro clubs using private money, and don't attend school anymore. You can be a big time jock or a serious student, but not both. The highest paid people in US academics now are not Nobel winners or historical figures, but football coaches. The coaches at Cal and UCLA make over $2M a year (the highest paid public employees in CA) and have probably gotten raises while academic staff were furloughed/laid off and tuition has gone up 50% over the last few years. But football is part of the college "arms race". Schools want to look awesome in order to attract better employees and students. Everyone loves a winner. Some sports make a lot of money for powerful people. Sadly or not, it's more valuable for Cal to spend big $ to get 2 more wins per season, rather than continue to fund an ethnic studies program or expand a medical research lab. And who knows - those intellectual enterprises could be total wastes or money, or possibly lead to significant, lucrative discoveries for the school and humanity. But the +2 wins are definite financial, recruiting, and PR boons, so I guess it's easier and less risky to invest for that goal?

Colorado movie shooting

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/why-the-aurora-shooting-wont-likely-change-the-gun-control-debate/2012/07/20/gJQA6qWpxW_blog.html?wprss=rss_politics

My wife and I recently saw "Bowling for Columbine" again and it's sad how not a damn thing has changed in a decade (except that Heston died in 2008), or maybe got worse (gun and ammo sales have spiked since Obama took office http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/why-the-gun-industry-secretly-loves-obama-09012011.html). This is despite VT, Oakland, Giffords, and many other incidents. Aurora CO is another suburb of Denver not far from Littleton, but this time the accused shooter is not a local but a neurosci PhD student who grew up in SD. Last time the pundits blamed Dylan and Eric's bloodlust on their enjoyment of Marilyn Manson music and violent video games. I guess this time techno music and Batman will be implicated (or stress and financial hardships from grad school?). Not that those are the real root causes.

If anyone watches "The Newsroom" on HBO, interesting fact that gun paranoia over Obama is totally unfounded: gun control watchdogs have given Obama an F rating, yet some people are convinced that he is coming for their weapons (http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/76717-gun-control-group-gives-obama-an-f

). I am not sure if "Fast and Furious" is part of that grade or not. Yet the NRA has declared Obama is the most anti-gun president ever. I guess anything to warp perceptions and try to kick him out of office?

It's the middle-class whites and Asians who perpetrate the mass killings in the US, but the public is still most scared of and hostile to poor urban blacks and Latinos.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/25/obama-gun-control_n_1704246.html?utm_hp_ref=tw

Yeah I forgot about Obama's 2008 comment about blue-collar whites "clinging to their guns." I wonder how much those 4 words really affected his future policy.

America is the only industrialized, non-wartorn nation with the following combination of conditions:
- A ton of legally and easily available guns (many with the capacity to inflict mass murder)
- A well-funded and entrenched pro-gun lobby
- A heritage of violence and individualism
- A media-consumer-social culture of paranoia, combativeness, and hostility towards each other
- Apathetic and/or reelection-obsessed politicians

Some nations have one or a few of those conditions, but no nation but us has them all. Maybe that would explain why we have the highest gun violence rates in the G20?

PS - in the slideshow at the bottom about the pivotal moments of the gun debate, for the image of the Reagan-Hinckley shooting, the Secret Service are carrying Uzis! To me that weapon doesn't seem appropriate for politician protection. 

MITT stands for "Moron, Idiot, Total Turd"

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/romney-gets-aggressive-against-obama-wants-americans-ashamed-190113055.html

Who makes arguments like this? And if you say "me" under your breath, I will go to your home and slap you. :)


"Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive," Obama said Friday, citing the teachers and people who build "roads and bridges." He continued: "If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." Romney seized on Obama's comment, calling it "foolishness" and "insulting to every entrepreneur and every innovator in America."

Typical individualist bias. Of course people like Romney are winners just because they are personally so awesome, right? They deserve all the credit. It didn't have anything to do with the facts that he:
- Was born the son of a governor, and grew up in a peaceful community, stable home, and with good role models
- Was born a white, heterosexual, Christian, rich male with no major physical or mental handicaps (except for being lame and boring to a clinical degree)
- Was born in an advanced nation with functional institutions, rule of law, and markets
- Attended elite schools (through merit and connections)
- Didn't have to go to Vietnam

You're a stellar guy Mitt, but other people made you who you are also. Don't act like it's not true. You got so much help on the way up (on top of the people you stepped on or out-competed in order to win), it's not even funny. That's why more average Americans can relate to your opponent, a half-black guy who grew up on tropical islands and has the middle name of Hussein. He actually had to struggle against disadvantages to reach the pinnacle of success (with some luck along the way too), and never forgot to thank the people who made it possible. He wants to use his time in office to give more people a fair chance, not to help the rich get richer like you want. That's why you can't connect to the average voter. Ignorant frustration over the economy and media misinformation are the only things keeping you in this race.

"I'm ashamed to say that we're seeing our president hand out money to the businesses of campaign contributors," Romney said at one point.

Wow, like that's never happened before, especially under Republican leadership.

"President Obama attacks success. And, therefore, under President Obama, we have less success," Romney said. "I will change that." ...But Romney largely focused on the larger picture of what he called Obama's hostility toward business—which he argued has been a setback to efforts to revive the economy and has, in turn, made life tougher for struggling Americans. He accused Obama of "crushing economic freedom" in the country with burdensome regulations.

Increasing access to college, extending the Bush tax cuts, and enacting several new private sector tax cuts of his own were such terrible attacks on success. Hostility towards business huh? That must be why the S&P500 has risen 50% over the last 3 years under Obama (not that the president controls stock prices, but you'd think a leader who is so anti-business wouldn't preside over such huge equity growth). And which is it Mitt? First you say Obama is giving $ away to his allies' businesses, and now you say he's anti-business?

And I think the abuses enabled by 3 decades of steady deregulation have made life tougher for struggling Americans than any new regs Obama has pushed through (most of his campaign proposals didn't pass Congress of course).

"I'm convinced he wants Americans to be ashamed of success," Romney declared. "I want Americans to welcome and celebrate success and to encourage people to reach as high as they can. … I don't want government to take credit for what the individuals of America accomplish."

Great deductive logic. No comments needed here, the guy is just a textbook d-bag.

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Follow-up to this thread from the 7/25 Daily Show:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/wed-july-25-2012-joseph-stiglitz

"Mr. Romney, hanging your attack on a person's slight grammatical misstep is what people do in an argument when they're completely f**ked and they know they have no argument!" - Jon Stewart

Basically the DS described how the MSM misrepresented Obama's recent comments about society enabling individual businesses to succeed, presumably to reduce the significance of Romney's private sector success record and legitimacy of his minimal government model for prosperity. They made it sound like Obama was suggesting that business owners don't get credit for their success, as it was due to the government only. Anyone with half a brain would know that Obama would never make such a claim, and the confusion was due to a "slight grammatical error" as he chose to say "You didn't build that" instead of "those" (referring to roads, bridges, internet, and other state-funded infrastructure that enable commerce). "That" could be misconstrued as Obama claiming that businesspeople didn't actually build their businesses, which of course doesn't make sense. And if you read or listen to the speech uncut (see link at end), you can grasp the context of his comments and would never jump to that erroneous conclusion. But of course the conservatives and Romney campaign pounced on it hard. The president is saying that the government is the economy, not the small business owners! Apparently the Romney camp is even selling shirts and other merchandise saying "I built my business, Mr. President!"

So the Romney campaign is showing its true colors (and FNC too - by busting out their "big guns" interview with child lemonade stand owners!). They don't have a legit plan for improving the economy and employment for the sub-rich, so they are resorting to misrepresenting the president's words (or should I say word singular, out of the thousands of words he has uttered about the economy over his short political career) in order to make him look like an anti-business, Marxist a-hole. Unfortunately many people do not see through this, and may even buy their argument.

I was surprised that "The Ticket" by Yahoo! News (source of the article I cited originally) was no better than Faux News. They failed to provide context for Obama's quote, and did not include his key summary statement of, "The point is when we succeed... we succeed from our individual initiative, but also because we do things together." Why exclude a sentence starting with "The point is..."!?! Actually that sentence was all they needed to show, and there wouldn't have been any criticism (actually Romney said basically the same thing during a campaign speech too). But they didn't, because twisting the message makes this a more juicy, buzzworthy story. I doubt that was part of a big anti-Obama, Koch-funded conspiracy, as probably the author just wanted to ignite a fire where there isn't even smoke. Still, it's reprehensible and shameful "journalism". It's also a sad reflection on the MSM that we needed the Daily Show to point this out. However, despite Y! News not providing context for the Obama quote, I could clearly understand what the president was trying to say. It's not exactly cryptic or novel. So the conservatives actually had to exert a lot of effort to twist his statement into something offensive and untrue. I guess I really shouldn't be surprised. They're resorting to desperation attacks yet the polling is enigmatically neck-and-neck. Maybe if Obama's lucky, they'll swing for a home run with the VP pick a la Palin style, and select a total loser like Jindal or something.

Obama's unedited comments: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=192oEC5TX_Q&feature=related

It's actually kind of sad that in 2012 Obama still has to explain the obvious, but laissez-faire classical propaganda has been working hard since the Guilded Age.

Right wing media's take: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK19WEwOIOo&feature=related

FNC host: "[Obama's statements are] all in an effort to justify increasing taxes on the so-called 'rich' in this country... Joining me now for a 'fair and balanced' debate..." She then introduces the panel guests, of course a hot blonde conservative chick who hosts another FNC program and a black small business owner (see the GOP is diverse!) vs. an old, ugly, meek liberal former Clinton-Gore strategist (and she even pronounces his name wrong, despite him being a repeat FNC guest a.k.a. self-hating Democrat punching bag). 

Argh typical crap from their playbook... I haven't watched FNC in years so I forgot how bad it was. #1 cable news network, booyeah!!

FDA spies on dissenting staff, possibly illegally

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/us/fda-surveillance-of-scientists-spread-to-outside-critics.html?_r=1&hp

F.D.A. officials went to the inspector general at the Department of Health and Human Services to seek a criminal investigation into the possible leak, but they were turned down. The inspector general found that there was no evidence of a crime, noting that “matters of public safety” can legally be released to the news media. Undeterred, agency officials began the electronic monitoring operation on their own.

Rep Van Hollen: “It is absolutely unacceptable for the F.D.A. to be spying on employees who reach out to members of Congress to expose abuses or wrongdoing in government agencies.”
Senator Grassley:  “[The FDA] have absolutely no business reading the private e-mails of their employees. They think they can be the Gestapo and do anything they want.”
Just freaking ridiculous. 6 PhD scientists at the FDA were concerned that their agency was approving scanning devices (made by GE Healthcare) for mammograms and colonoscopies that were giving patients too much radiation. They tried to voice their opinions, but were shut down. So then they attempted back-channel communications with Congressmen, the press, and even the White House to try to get some leverage against their management, whom they felt were making a mistake and putting patients at risk.

What did the FDA do about it? They hired a security firm to use off-the-shelf spyware to monitor the communications of these "trouble-makers". They have also since terminated those employees. But this could be illegal under new laws on retribution against whisteblowers. Of course when the news broke, the FDA said that was not their intent, and instead they were building a case that these employees were leaking confidential information (discussions between the FDA and companies are confidential to "protect trade secrets", though I don't think they should be). I find that argument bizarre, since it's not like Wikileaks and national security here, putting spies or diplomats in harm's way. And even if the scientists were leaking info, if GE and the FDA did nothing wrong, then they have nothing to hide. If the scanner gets approved, then we should be able to know everything about it, right? But the whole secrecy concern was moot anyway, because the moron contractors that the FDA hired to snoop on the scientists accidentally posted all the classified reports the scientists were working on online (they have since been taken down). One of the scientists happened to discover this when he was Googling one of his "co-conspirators". Obviously GE is not happy either: the Keystone Cops FDA was ostensibly trying to protect its secrets, and ended up exposing them to a worse degree. Hollywood couldn't make this stuff up.

So is this about a medical device company using its leverage to get its regulatory agency to rubber-stamp its next big-money product, even if it's not entirely safe? Those FDA managers probably want "real jobs" after they do their time in gov't, and GE is a big, rich employer. When principled, concerned scientists try to DO THEIR JOBS, then they are threatened and spied on. The FDA was concerned about those "defaming" their agency. What are they, the Islamic State of Iran? In America we TOLERATE DISSENT, especially when it's in the interest of public safety. After Nixon, I thought we weren't supposed to have "enemies lists". And it's not like one disgruntled quack scientist here; 6 were putting their careers on the line because they felt so strongly about this issue. Maybe they're not all noble saints and other things are going on here, but at least this justifies a second opinion on the scanners, especially now that Americans are starting to express their disapproval over excessive radiation and diagnostic costs imposed on us by device companies and doctors.

Housing market news

1) Wells Fargo to pay $175M (unfortunately just 4% of their quarterly profit) settlement on discrimination against blacks and Latinos for mortgage terms:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/wells-fargo-justice-department-settle-discrimination-case-for-175-million/2012/07/12/gJQAX66ZgW_story.html

"...Even when black and Hispanic customers got prime loans, they paid higher fees than white borrowers, Justice alleged. The average African American taking out a $300,000 prime loan was charged $2,064 more in broker fees than a similarly qualified white customer. Latino borrowers paid an average of $1,251 more."

This wasn't an isolated incident, it occurred in at least 36 states affecting 34,000 borrowers over 5 years. It was obviously policy, set forth by higher rungs of leadership. I supposed there is more "risk" associated with borrowers living in certain neighborhoods and holding certain jobs, but borrowers had the exact same credit scores as whites but got worse terms. Prime borrowers of black and Latino heritage were 3-4X more likely to receive subprime terms than whites. Similar settlements were hashed out with SunTrust and CountryWide/BofA, so it wasn't just WF. And to be fair to WF, the implicated brokers were independent affiliates, and now WF no longer works with independents.

2) San Bernardino County (part of Southern CA where HALF of mortgages are underwater) considering a plan to use eminent domain to expedite voluntary refinancing:
http://www.npr.org/2012/07/13/156683302/county-considers-eminent-domain-as-foreclosure-fix

An interesting concept. Fed and local gov'ts have tried almost everything to get banks to stop dragging their feet on re-fis, and it hasn't really worked. One person interviewed for the story had a good point: when your mortgage is underwater, you feel poorer and therefor spend less, which further depresses the economy. So re-fis are a "public good" (and therefore arguably covered under eminent domain), especially when borrowing rates are at record lows but too few people can take advantage of it. Of course the realtors and mortgage brokers are against this, and they have a point - unfortunately at present the County plans to work with a single lending agency to issue new mortgages. That smacks of corruption. Maybe if they opened it up to a few or all lenders to bid for the mortgages, it might make lending rates more competitive and the process more transparent? This process will be probably tied down with red tape for years, but maybe the threat will pressure the banks to streamline re-fis a bit more?