What News was in My In-Box

Some pretty interesting articles this week. I like the one about Alito. With trump, I can not figure out what was in his mind when he walked off with boxes of classifies documents. You are I would be in jail right now. Usual stuff about student loans. The $10,000 on many of these loans will go to pay fee, interest, penalties and consolidation fees. What will me left is more of the same and few dollars will get to relieve the original loan amounts. No one has determined how many people were left completely debt free. I doubt it was many.

Politics and Law

“Supreme Court Justice Alito’s Crusade Against a Secular America Isn’t Over” | The New Yorker, Margaret Talbot, Some baby boomers were permanently shaped by their participation in the countercultural protests and the antiwar activism of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Others were shaped by their aversion to those movements. Justice Samuel Alito belongs to the latter category.

“The Dangers of Trump-Prosecution Syndrome” | The New Yorker, David Rohde, In January, fifteen boxes of records that Donald Trump had taken from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate, arrived at the National Archives. Inside were printouts of news stories, personal letters, photographs, and other mementos—the detritus of the Trump Presidency.

“DHS January 6 Investigators Disclosed Access Issues in 2021″ (theintercept.com), Ken Klippenstein, “broke the news that the Secret Service had deleted text messages from on and around January 6, the Department of Homeland Security’s watchdog came under fire for not having notified Congress that it had discovered the deletions sooner. Top congressional Democrats have taken the extraordinary step of calling for DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari’s recusal from the January 6 investigation.”

Healthcare

“ACA Round-Up: $100 Million For Navigators, Approval Of Idaho Waiver, And More” | Health Affairs, Katie Keith, On August 26, 2022, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that it was awarding $98.9 million for 59 navigator grantees. This is the most significant investment in the navigator program to date, and the funds will be used to support education

“How Long Has Polio Been Circulating in the U.S.?” | MedPage Today, Michael DePeau-Wilson, The fact that poliovirus was detected in New York City wastewater samples as far back as April of this year shouldn’t be surprising, as the virus likely has been circulating for longer and more widely than previously believed, several experts told MedPage Today.

“U-M Team Develops Clear Coating That Kills SARS, E. Coli, MRSA, and Other Pathogens” – DBusiness Magazine, R.J. King, A team of University of Michigan engineers and immunologists has developed a durable clear coating that has proved deadly to SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19), E. coli, MRSA, and a variety of other pathogens.

“Fauci Stepping Down After Half-Century in Public Service” | MedPage Today, Kristina Fiore, Anthony Fauci, MD, will step down in December from his positions as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), as President Biden’s chief medical advisor, and as chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Immunoregulation.

“Paxlovid Reduces Risk of COVID Death by 79% in Older Adults” (medscape.com), Carolyn Crist, The antiviral drug Paxlovid appears to reduce the risk of dying from COVID-19 by 79% and decrease hospitalizations by 73% in at-risk patients who are ages 65 and older, according to a new study published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

“What Dobbs Means for Patients with Breast Cancer” | NEJM, Nicole T. Christian, and Virginia F. Borges. Our patients have to make difficult choices about whether to continue working through chemotherapy, how much time to take off while recovering from surgery, and how to manage the impact cancer care will have on everything from their personal finances to their sex lives.

“Are We Approaching ‘Herd Safety’ With COVID-19?” | MedPage Today, Ingrid Hein, Despite the emergence of the latest Omicron subvariants — BA.2, BA.2.12.1, BA.4, and BA.5 — Massachusetts observed no significant excess mortality this spring, researchers said.

“The global macroeconomic burden of road injuries: estimates and projections for 166 countries” – The Lancet Planetary Health, “Road injuries are among the ten leading causes of death worldwide and also impede economic wellbeing and macroeconomic performance. Beyond medical data on the incidence of road injuries and their resulting morbidity and mortality, a detailed understanding of their economic implications is a prerequisite for sound, evidence-based policy making. We aimed to determine global macroeconomic costs of road traffic injuries and their cross-country distribution.”

Education

“The Origin of Student Debt: The Danger of Educated Proles” (theintercept.com), Jon Schwarz, San Francisco Chronicle under the headline “Professor Sees Peril in Education.” According to the Chronicle article, Freeman said, “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. … That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow [to go to college].”

“Actually, Canceling Student Debt Will Cut Inflation” – The Atlantic, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Whatever your view of student-debt cancellation, the inflation argument is a red herring and should not influence policy. Taking that logic to the extreme, canceling food stamps would do far more to reduce inflation—but that would be cruel and inhumane, and fortunately, no one has suggested doing so.

“When Private Equity Takes Over a Nursing Home” | The New Yorker, Yasmin Rafiei, After an investment firm bought St. Joseph’s Home for the Aged, in Richmond, Virginia, the company reduced staff, removed amenities, and set the stage for a deadly outbreak of COVID-19.

VA

“VA botched thousands of Camp Lejeune water contamination cases,” (militarytimes.com), Leo Shane III, Veterans Affairs processors in recent years mishandled more than one-third of all disability claims related to water contamination issues at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, potentially cheating as many as 21,000 veterans out of financial compensation, a government watchdog said Thursday.

Economy

“Tesla Supplier Panasonic Plans Additional $4 Billion EV Battery Plant in U.S.” – WSJ, River Davis and Rebecca Elliot, a supplier to electric-vehicle maker Tesla Inc., TSLA -3.36%▼ is in discussions to build an additional roughly $4 billion EV battery plant in the U.S., according to people familiar with the matter.

The Japanese company is looking at Oklahoma as the location for its new plant, though there are no guarantees that an agreement will be reached, the people said.

“US economy may have actually grown in the first half of 2022″ — Quartz (qz.com), Nate DiCamillo, another indicator out today, gross domestic income, shows that the economy expanded during the first half of the year. Gross domestic income (GDI) measures the size of the economy based on the money earned for all the goods and services produced rather than their value, like GDP. 

“Cars, Reopening, & Housing Drove American Inflation While Natural Gas Heated European Inflation: Disaggregating Differences in US-Europe Inflation” (employamerica.org), Preston Mui, When we disaggregate the aggregate inflation statistics, we find that the sources of high inflation in the US and Europe are different. In the US, the main story was motor vehicle transportation. High prices of cars and fuel account for a large portion of the excess inflation in the US.

“Over 70 Economists Call for Biden Administration to Return Afghanistan’s Central Bank Reserves” – Center for Economic and Policy Research (cepr.net), Dan Beeton, More than 70 economists sent a letter to President Joe Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen today urging them to allow the central bank of Afghanistan access to $7 billion in foreign reserves that the Biden administration blocked access to last year following the Taliban takeover of the Afghan government and the US military withdrawal from the country. 

Substack

“August 27, 2022″ – Heather Cox Richardson (substack.com) “Letters from an American,” In a speech Thursday night, President Joe Biden called out today’s MAGA Republicans for threatening “our personal rights and economic security…. They’re a threat to our very democracy.” When he referred to them as “semi-fascists,” he drew headlines, some of them disapproving.