Researchers find tipping point to sway public opinion

The task for our side is to find tactics to educate and mobilize people effectively. It can be done, because despite the huge edge that the system enjoys through its treacherous media, we have truth, reality, on our side, and that can’t be denied indefinitely.

Professional misleaders like Eric Cantor will have to be neutralized with counter information and mobilization campaigns of our own.

If just 10% of a social network is strongly committed to an opinion, that’s enough to rapidly convert the uncommitted 90% to adopt their point of view, say researchers who used computer models to discover the tipping point where a minority view becomes the majority opinion.

The findings of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) wererecently published in the journal Physical Review E.

“This is true not only for important opinions, like political views,” says Boleslaw Szymanski, SCNARC’s director and a distinguished professor at RPI. “It also applies to everyday decisions like, for instance, whether to buy a PC or a Mac or what fashion to wear or what movie to see. The spectrum of potential applications here is very, very broad.”

The aim of SCNARC, which focuses on broad fundamental questions pertaining to social networks, is to look at what factors influence the spread of opinions within those networks.

“One application might be a campaign in rural Africa where there is a high prevalence of disease carried by mosquitoes, yet people are reluctant to purchase mosquito nets,” explains SCNARC research associate Sameet Sreenivasan. “If just 10% of that population were committed to using nets—and if they spread positive messages about their use—that could easily tip over the entire community toward using them.”

And so, he says, rather than campaigns trying to influence every single member of a community, “it might be enough to just influence a percentage—which we call ‘the tipping point’—after which the entire social network does the job of converting everyone else toward being a believer.”

The researchers’ findings are also relevant to those involved in computational technology innovation, according to Szymanski, where new ideas aren’t always accepted—not because they aren’t improvements but because it is difficult to overcome inertia.

“What we are saying is that there’s no need to convince the entire community,” he explains. “It is much better to make a strong effort to enlist just 10% and then let the network do the rest of the job.”

At Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, Daniel Diermeier says he finds SCNARC’s findings “very interesting” and has “no doubt that committed minorities can have an impact on public opinion.”

Diermeier, the school’s IBM Distinguished Professor of Regulation and Competitive Practice, has worked, too, on using models in statistical mechanics and complex systems to study the spread of public opinion. “More and more, social media is playing an important role in shaping the perceptions of customers,” he says, “as well as in the political domain.” Which is why, he says, he isn’t surprised that SCNARC’s research is partly funded by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, the Army Research Office, and the Office of Naval Research.

“The Defense Department wants to know how public perception is formed through network communication,” he says. “It wants to understand, for example, how the revolts in the Middle East took place because they have a very limited knowledge about how these things occur. It is part of the overall national defense effort in the war on terrorism.”

Meanwhile, Szymanski says the next step in SCNARC’s research is to enrich the model by gathering additional social network data. He urges those who would like to collaborate with the researchers to contact the center.

Paul Hyman was editor-in-chief of several hi-tech publications at CMP Media, including Electronic Buyers’ News.

The War on the Planet

Keeping Score

by KIRKPATRICK SALE

Some recent evidence in the contest between capitalism and the earth:

In October, the U.S. officially edged past Russia as the world’s largest producer of oil and gas, an achievement largely due to the great increase in natural gas production through hydraulic fracturing of shale (fracking). Inasmuch as the process puts into the ground (and groundwater) 40 gallons of up to 600 chemicals in every well, no one doubts that it is one of the dirtiest and most polluting industries ever created.

Capitalism 1, Earth 0.

In December, the New England shrimp fishery was officially shut down for at least a year, maybe three, to allow a restoration of vastly depleted shrimp stocks, now at historic lows due to overfishing and warmer waters. Shrimpers made $10 million two years ago, just $1.2 million this year, and it is uncertain if or when the stocks will come back.

Capitalism 2, Earth 0.

According to a UN report in December , climate-change gasses in the atmospthere set a record high in 2012. The U.N. World Meteorological Organization said warming gasses increased 32 per cent 1990 to 2012, with Co2, industrialization’s chief byproduct, accounting for 80 per cent of that.

Capitalism 3, Earth 0.

Polar bear populations are shrinking everywhere in the Arctic, a September 2013 report found, as sea ice shrank to the lowest extent since records began in 1979. The shrinking ice means an increase in open water (in some places an area the size of Texas), thus limiting bears’ access to seals, their prime source of food.

Capitalism 4, Earth 0.

In August, President Rafael Correra of Ecuador abandoned a plan hatched in 2007 to save the Yasuni National Park in the Amazon from underground oil drilling through an international agreement to supply the country $3.6 billion over 13 years, half the cash value of the potential oil. After six years, only $13 million had been pledged, one-half of one per cent of the agreed sum.

Capitalism 5, Earth 0.

And so it goes. Don’t doubt that I could fill up another dozen pages this way, picking only the most glaring examples of humankind’s failure to protect and preserve the only known habitat on which it is known to be able to survive. And I have not mentioned the extinction of species, the destruction of ecosystems, the pollution of waters and soils, the elimination of forests, the spread of deserts, and the alteration of climate. The Ecosystem Millennium Assessment in 2005 put it simply: “Human activity is putting such a strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted.”

And let us understand that ”human activity” is essentially state-supported industrial capitalism and its offshoots and imitators, as practiced now on a global scale and at a never-ending pace, with technology of unprecedented power and destructiveness.

I made a somewhat-famous $1,000 bet in 1995 (see hanson.gmu.edu/press/wired-5-02) that Western civilization would collapse in all important economic and political ways in 2020, so I cannot say I am really surprised at the recent accounting of who is winning the battle for survival. What I suppose I’m most surprised about is those who don’t understand what this battle is all about and continue to demand, plead, organize, and urge that things be different. Paul Ehrlich, for example, in a recent blog on the website of the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere, called for scientists to “quickly generate a global ethical movement agreeing to change human actions for the benefit of our descendants.” (Descendants? the good capitalist says. What have they done for me lately?)

Things can’t be different—that must be understood. The way things are is the bargain we made as a society when we decided on a system dependent on unlimited growth (not to mention on all the seven deadly sins but sloth) and as much exploitation of natural resources for human betterment as fast and as extensively as possible. (“Exploit,” after all, in the language of this system, is a positive word, as so is “growth.”) It has in a sense upheld its end of the bargain, for it has produced an abundance of things (“goods” doesn’t quite seem the right word) and processes that have benefited a great many people over a great many years, never mind their inequitable distribution and impact. Yes, overpopulation, overproduction, and overconsumption have wrought a terrible price, but after all that’s what capitalism has always been based upon, and in the short term many prosper and a few grow very rich.

(I am reminded of a story told by Friederich Engels when he visited early industrial England and made some comment on the river of Manchester, “a coal-black, foul-smelling stream, full of debris and refuse,” and remarked to a leading manufacturer that he had never seen so ill-built and filthy a city: “The man listened quietly to the end, and said at the corner where we parted; ‘And yet there is a great deal of money made here; good morning, sir.’”)

Obviously I can’t say when the contest will end, though I have to say 2020 doesn’t seem like such a far-fetched date. I can only describe for you the nature of the contest, and who is winning.

Kirkpatrick Sale is the author of After Eden: The Evolution of Human Domination and eleven other books. This essay is adapted from Sale’s recent book: Emancipation Hell: the Tragedy Wrought by the Emancipation Proclamation. He is the director of the Middlebury Institute.

With Iran accord, US shifts tactics, not predatory aims

Jones, wsws.org

On January 20, a six-month agreement rolling back Iran’s civilian nuclear program will come into force. US President Barack Obama claims that Washington has joined with its European allies, Russia and China to negotiate this interim agreement because the US, having repeatedly threatened Iran with military force, now wants to “give peace a chance.”

US imperialism is trying “peace” only as a tactic in its pursuit of definite strategic aims, which it may well in the end seek to realize through war. Washington views the threat of US military action, which still hangs over Iran, as essential in pressing for deep and permanent concessions.

The diplomatic turn to talks with Iran, since Washington pulled back from an attack on Syria last September, has been driven by two predatory calculations. First, that yet another US war in the Middle East would dangerously detract from the “pivot to Asia,” that is, from efforts to isolate and militarily confront China.

Second, that Iran’s bourgeois rulers can be harnessed to US strategic interests, its oil industry and wealth re-divided for the benefit of US corporations, and its strategic position used to stabilize the Middle East—from Lebanon to Afghanistan—under US hegemony.

With the interim nuclear agreement, Washington has extorted sweeping concessions from Iran. These provisions trample on Iran’s rights both as a sovereign state and as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The deal restricts Iranian uranium enrichment to less than 5 percent, eliminates half of Iran’s 20 percent-enriched uranium, blocks Tehran from activating its Arak heavy-water reactor, and subjects the country’s civilian nuclear program to intrusive inspections of an unprecedented nature.

In exchange, the US and its EU allies are to give Iran some $7 billion in “reversible sanctions relief.” That amount—$7 billion—is what the sanctions cost Iran in lost oil imports in just six weeks! Moreover, the key sanctions—those that have halved Iran’s oil exports and frozen the country out of the world banking system—remain in full force.

These sanctions are among the harshest ever imposed outside war. They are themselves an act of aggression, disproportionately targeting the most oppressed sections of Iranian society. The sanctions have devastated Iran’s economy, slashed state revenues, and fueled 40 percent inflation and massive job losses. They have cost thousands of lives by blocking the import of pharmaceuticals and other medical supplies.

Washington’s Iran policy is of a piece with the sectarian war it has waged through its Sunni Islamist proxies in Syria—a point Washington underscored by ratcheting up its campaign for regime-change in Syria as its deal with Iran was made public.

On Monday, the Obama administration announced that it would exclude Iran from the upcoming conference on the war in Syria. Tehran would be invited, US Secretary of State John Kerry said, only if it agreed that the conference would transfer power in Damascus to a “transitional government” in which US-sponsored Islamist insurgents would have half the seats.

At the same time, Washington provocatively stepped up its military aid to its Syrian proxies. The Obama administration reportedly views the likelihood that its aid will go to Al Qaeda groups and lead to terrorist “blowback” in the US as acceptable “collateral damage” of its war drive in Syria.

The current interim agreement with Iran is supposed to set the stage for talks on a “final” agreement delimiting Iran’s nuclear program—although, as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran is supposed to have the unfettered right to a full-cycle civilian nuclear program.

Obama and Kerry have already declared that these talks will be “far tougher” than those that led to the interim agreement, with the US president publicly proclaiming a “50-50” chance they will fail. Failure, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney declared Monday, “would result in action by the United States”—that is, harsher sanctions and a countdown to war.

For the US, the nuclear issue has always been a pretext to bully and isolate Iran and lay the political groundwork for regime-change, pursued militarily if necessary. In the final analysis, American imperialism has never reconciled itself to the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which overthrew the brutal dictatorship of its client, the Shah.

The Iranian Revolution was a mighty anti-imperialist upsurge. However, the Stalinist Tudeh Party and assorted petty-bourgeois “left” groups systematically subordinated the working class to the national bourgeoisie, insisting that Iran was not ready for socialism. Exploiting this breathing room provided to it, the bourgeoisie used Ayatollah Khomeini’s nationalist-clerical regime to harness the mass movement, then brutally suppress the left and stamp out all expressions of working class power and self-organization.

For 35 years, the rulers of the Islamic Republic have declaimed against US imperialism. But their opposition has always been two-faced, rooted in their resentment over the limits imperialist domination places on the Iranian bourgeoisie’s own ability to exploit the working class.

Time and again, the Iranian regime has sought an accommodation with Washington. In 2001, Tehran provided Washington with intelligence as the US invaded Afghanistan, and helped the Bush administration install Hamid Karzai as its puppet ruler in Kabul. In 2003, Tehran proposed a “grand bargain” in which it would recognize the state of Israel and cut off support to Israel’s main military opponents in the region: the Palestinian group Hamas and the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah.

In seeking an accommodation with Washington, the Iranian bourgeoisie is seeking to accelerate pro-market reforms and eliminate what remains of the social concessions made to the working class after the Revolution. What is emerging is an explosive confrontation of the working class throughout the Middle East against the neo-colonial intrigue of the imperialist powers.

As the interim nuclear deal was being finalized, Tehran announced that Iranian President Hassan Rouhani would travel to next week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he will woo the Western business and political elite. His government has already rolled out the red carpet for US and EU energy giants, offering them privileged access to Iran’s massive oil and natural gas reserves.

The only force that can consistently oppose imperialism and prevent it from plunging humanity into new wars even more devastating than the world wars of the last century is the international working class, mobilized on the basis of a revolutionary socialist program.

Profit at the center of the game: Medical Price Gouging

The Skyrocketing Impact

by RALPH NADER

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An epidemic of sky-rocketing medical costs has afflicted our country and grown to obscene proportions. Medical bills are bloated with waste, redundancy, profiteering, fraud and outrageous over-billing. Much is wrong with the process of pricing and providing health care.

The latest in this medical cost saga comes from new data released last week by National Nurses United (NNU), the nation’s largest nurse’s organization. In a news release, NNU revealed that fourteen hospitals in the United States are charging more than ten times their costs for treatment. Specifically, for every $100 one of these hospitals spends, the charge on the corresponding bill is nearly $1,200.

NNU’s key findings note that the top 100 most expensive U.S. hospitals have “a charge to cost ratio of 765 percent and higher — more than double the national average of 331 percent.” They found that despite the enactment of “Obamacare” — the Affordable Care Act — overall hospital charges experienced their largest increase in 16 years. For-profit hospitals continue to be the worst offenders with average charges of 503 percent of their costs compared to publically-run hospitals (“…including federal, state, county, city, or district operated hospitals, with public budgets and boards that meet in public…”) which show more restraint in pricing. The average charge ratios for these hospitals are 235 percent of their costs.

According to NNU’s data, the top 10 Most Expensive Hospitals in the U.S. listed according to the huge percentage of their charges relative to their costs are:

1. Meadowlands Hospital Medical Center, Secaucus, NJ – 1192%
2. Paul B. Hall Regional Medical Center, Painsville, KY – 1186%
3. Orange Park Medical Center, Orange Park, FL – 1139%
4. North Okaloosa Medical Center, Crestview, FL – 1137%
5. Gadsden Regional Medical Center, Gadsden, AL – 1128%
6. Bayonne Medical Center, Bayonne, NJ – 1084%
7. Brooksville Regional Hospital, Brooksville, FL – 1083%
8. Heart of Florida Regional Medical Center, Davenport, FL – 1058%
9. Chestnut Hill Hospital, Philadelphia, PA – 1058%
10. Oak Hill Hospital, Spring Hill, FL – 1052%

The needless complications of the vast medical marketplace have provided far too many opportunities for profiteering. Numerous examples of hospital visit bills feature enormous overcharges on simple supplies such as over-the-counter painkillers, gauze, bandages and even the markers used to prep patients for surgery. That’s not to mention the cost of more advanced procedures and the use of advanced medical equipment which are billed at several times their actual cost. These charges have resulted in many hundreds of millions of dollars in overcharges.

When pressed for answers, many hospital representatives are quick to defer to factors out of their control. It’s the cost of providing care they might say, or perhaps infer that other vague aspects of running the business of medical treatment add up and are factored into these massive charges. Cost allocations mix treatment costs with research budgets, cash reserves, and just plain accounting gimmicks. These excuses shouldn’t fly in the United States.

Few in the medical industry will acknowledge the troubling trend. One thing is undeniably certain however — the medical marketplace is not suffering for profits. Health-care in the United States is a nearly 3 trillion dollar a year industry replete with excessive profits for many hospitals, medical supply companies, pharmaceutical companies, labs and health insurance vendors.

Americans spend more on health care than anywhere else in the world. One would hope and wish, at the least, that this enormous expenditure would provide a quality of healthcare above and beyond that found in the rest of the western world. The reality is that the results on average are no better than in France, Germany, Canada and elsewhere, which manage to provide their quality treatment without all the overcharges.

Much like our similarly wasteful, bloated military budget, the U.S. spends more on health care than the next ten countries combined — most of which cover almost all of their citizens.The United States spends $8,233 per person, per year according to a 2012 figure from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The average expenditure of the thirty three other developed nations OECD tracked is just $3,268 per person.

It gets worse. Harvard’s Malcolm Sparrow, the leading expert on health care billing fraud and abuse, conservatively estimates that 10 percent of all health care expenditure in the United States is lost to computerized billing fraud. That’s $270 billion dollars a year!

And unlike other commercial markets, where the advance of technology routinely makes costs lower, the reverse trend is in effect when providing medical care — the prices just keep soaring higher and higher. The flawed, messy Obamacare system will do little to help this worsening profit-grab crisis, which is often downright criminal in the way it exploits tragedy-stricken people and saddles them with mountains of debt.

Steven Brill’s TIME magazine cover story from February 2013 titled “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us” gives an in-depth and highly-researched rundown of the severity of the medical cost problem and provides some of the worst, most astonishing examples of profiteering off of the plight of the sick or injured.

Here’s a fact that puts the full scope of this troubling trend into perspective — Brill writes: “The health-care industrial complex spends more than three times what the military industrial complex spends in Washington”. Specifically, the medical industry has spent $5.36 billion on lobbying in Washington D.C. since 1998. Compare that expenditure to the $1.53 billion spent lobbying by the also-bloated defense and aerospace sector.

One line summarizes the breadth of Brill’s enormous piece: “If you are confused by the notion that those least able to pay are the ones singled out to pay the highest rates, welcome to the American medical marketplace.”

Americans who can’t pay and therefore delay diagnosis and treatment are casualties. About 45,000 Americans die every year because they cannot afford health insurance according to a peer-reviewed report by Harvard Medical School researchers. No one dies in Canada, Germany, France or Britain because they do not have health insurance. They are all insured from the time they are born.

Obamacare, which has already confused and infuriated many Americans — and even some experts — with its complexity made up of thousands of pages of legislation and regulations is clearly not the answer to the problem. Long before the internet, President Lyndon Johnson enrolled 20 million elderly Americans into Medicare in six months using index cards. Canada’s single-payer system was enacted with only a thirteen page bill — and it covers everyone for less than half of the cost per capita compared to the U.S.’s system. (Check out 21 Ways the Canadian Health Care System is Better Than Obamacare)

Enacting a single payer, full Medicare-for-all system is the only chance the United States has of unwinding itself from the spider web of waste, harm, and bloat that currently comprise its highly flawed health insurance and health care systems. It’s time to cut out the corporate profiteers and purveyors of waste and fraud and introduce a system that works for everybody.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition.

GOP—with Dems complicity—guts environmental defenses

GOP Congress Guts Toxic Waste Clean Up Laws, As WV Struggles Without Water

By RANDA MORRIS

The same day Freedom Industries spilled toxic waste in WV, House republicans passed a bill to eliminate the EPA’s power to enforce clean up of toxic spills – Photo of Mayflower oil spill by Ryan Liggett @KATV

On January 11^th, 2013, US House republicans passed a bill that will gut toxic waste clean up regulations in the United States. H.R. 2279, otherwise known as ‘The Reducing Excessive Deadline Obligations Act’ would basically eliminate the power of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to impose clean up deadlines, following toxic spills like the recent WV spill. The vote took place on the same day the WV chemical spill left people in 9 West Virginia counties without clean water.

The bill shifts the cost of clean up efforts onto the public.

The bill also weakens the government’s power to force corporations like Freedom Industries to carry insurance designed to cover the cost of potential clean up efforts. Republicans claim they passed the bill because protecting citizens from the harmful effects of toxic spills is just “wasteful government spending.” The bill would shift the burden of the cost of clean up after such spills away from the companies responsible, and onto the public.

[pullquote]If these corporate bastards do this right here in America, with impunity, imagine what they get to do abroad.[/pullquote]

President Obama promised to veto the legislation.

White House Policy Advisors came out in strong opposition to the bill, writing that:

“the bill’s requirements could result in significant site cleanup delays, endangering public health and the environment.”

President Obama has promised to veto the legislation, should it somehow pass the Senate. [Don’t trust this man to do anything for the public. Get on his ass.—Eds]

Scott Slesinger, legislative director at the Natural Resources Defense Council referred to the bill as “a New Year’s gift to corporate interests.” He stressed that the bill would force taxpayers to assume the cost of clean up, while giving corporations a free pass.

The GAO reports there are 50,000 sites that need environmental clean up.

In contrast to House Republican policy, a report issued by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) in May, 2013, called for tightening the rules. The report states that taxpayers have paid more than $30 billion for clean up of toxic waste sites, since 1986.

The report also found that a majority of private industries that do contaminate land and water, are aware of the limitations of the EPA when it comes to enforcing clean up. It is common practice for private companies to cause extreme environmental damage, then close their doors, leaving the taxpayers to foot the bill for clean-up.

The GAO states that there are currently 50,000 sites in the US that have been contaminated by toxic waste, and abandoned by their former private owners. Clean up efforts at all of these sites are now the responsibility of the government, and the bill will be paid by the taxpayers.

When will republicans wake up and realize that the people they are voting for, do not have their best interests at heart?

Nearly every House Republican voted in support of HR 2279, including WV representatives, David McKinley and Shelley Capito. Only five Democrats voted in favor. Unbelievably, one of the five Democrats who supported this bill was WV’s Nick Rahall. The bill passed the House with 225 supporting votes and 188 opposing votes.

WV has only three House Representatives. Even as the President declared a state of emergency, following a toxic spill that stretched for 1500 miles, all three House Reps from WV were voting to support of a bill that would delay clean up efforts and shift the burden of the cost of clean up away from Freedom Industries and onto their constituents.

Every member of Congress that voted for this should bill should be held accountable. (Better still, should be declared an official enemy of the people.)

Right now in WV, hundreds of thousands of people cannot bathe, brush their teeth, or even wash their hands, in the water that flows through their taps. Yet their elected representatives went to Washington the same day that Freedom Industries poisoned their water, and voted for a bill that would let the company responsible for this disaster off the hook. The bill would prevent EPA enforcement of clean up efforts and lengthen the amount of time it takes to restore water supplies in WV. It would also allow Freedom Industries to pass the cost of clean up onto WV citizens.

Hopefully voters across the country will hold Republicans [and their stealthy accomplices, corporatized Democrats] accountable for this legislation. West Virginia voters, more than any others, should show up at the polls with a vengeance.