Category: Government

National Public Radio (NPR) Is “U.S. State-Affiliated Media”

Nobel-Prize-winner F.A. Hayek in The Road to Serfdom wisely worried about the independence of the press when it is funded by the government.

(p. B6) Twitter on Tuesday [April 5, 2023] evening added a label to National Public Radio’s account on the social network, designating the broadcaster “U.S. state-affiliated media.”

. . .

Twitter’s guidelines define state-affiliated accounts as “outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.” Other news media accounts with the label include RT of Russia and Xinhua of China.

According to cached versions of Twitter’s published policy, for much of Tuesday the guidelines noted that NPR and the BBC of Britain did not receive the label because they were “state-financed media organizations with editorial independence.” The reference to NPR has since been deleted from that policy.

. . .

Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment, and an email to Twitter’s communications department was returned with a poop emoji autoreply. Mr. Musk tweeted in apparent support of the move, posting a passage from Twitter’s policy and saying it “seems accurate” in a reply to a user pointing out the label on NPR’s account.

For the full story, see:

Lora Kelley. “In Policy Shift, Twitter Calls NPR ‘State-Affiliated Media.” The New York Times (Thursday, April 6, 2023): B6.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the same date April 5, 2023, and has the title “Twitter Labels NPR ‘State-Affiliated Media,’ in Change to Policy.”)

Hayek’s book mentioned above is:

Hayek, Friedrich A. von. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944.

Public Unions Are “Designed for Inefficiency”

(p. A13) Mr. [Philip] Howard, a lawyer and writer, first noticed how unions stymie governance during his public service in New York as a member of a neighborhood zoning board and chairman of the Municipal Art Society. “I kept wondering why my friends who had responsible jobs in government couldn’t do what they thought was right,” he recalls. That might be speeding up a land-use review for a construction project or approving repairs on a school building.

“I’d have discussions with them about what made sense in a particular situation, and they would say, ‘I wish I could, but I can’t.’ ” Any careful or profitable plans were quickly blown up by union rules, such as limits on workers’ hours and duties.

This week the New York transit union gave an example for the ages. It blocked the subway system’s plan to sync its schedule to new ridership norms, with fewer trains on slow days and lightly traveled routes and more trains on busy ones. The change would have saved $1.5 million a year, benefited riders and preserved workers’ paid hours. But an arbitrator shelved it Tuesday because the union couldn’t bear the “variations in start and end times.”

“They’re not just inefficient,” Mr. Howard says of the unions. “They’re designed for inefficiency.”

“They’re designed to require a new work crew to come cut a tree limb because the people fixing the rails don’t have authority to remove a tree limb. They’re designed to prevent supervisors from observing teachers, except under very controlled circumstances. They’re designed to prevent the principal from giving extra training to a teacher. They’re designed to prevent a supervisor in an agency from going and talking to a worker and soliciting ideas about how to make things work better.”

Mr. Howard, 74, keeps listing examples until I jump in to stop him. They’re fresh in his mind because these schemes are the target of his new book, “Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions.”

For the full interview, see:

Mene Ukueberuwa, interviewer. “THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW; Public Unions vs. the People.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, March 4, 2023): A13.

(Note: bracketed name added.)

(Note: the online version of the interview has the date March 23, 2023, and has the same title as the print version. In both versions, the word “designed” is in italics.)

Philip Howard’s book mentioned above is:

Howard, Philip K. Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions. Garden City, NY: Rodin Books, 2023.

Government Environmental Agency Accuses Itself of Bulldozing Habitat of “Threatened” Barred Owl and “Endangered” Redshouldered Hawk

(p. A18) A New Jersey state agency is accusing itself of violating its own regulations, saying it destroyed land that is home to rare owls and hawks while creating habitat for another type of bird.

At issue in the unusual bureaucratic conflict is the clearing of about 20 acres of swampy forest in a state-owned wildlife preserve in the southern part of the state as part of a project to improve conditions for the American woodcock, a common, plump shorebird prized by hunters.

The state’s Department of Environmental Protection paid private contractors $200,000 for the job, which involved the removal of trees and the bulldozing of stumps, according to public documents obtained by the nonprofit New Jersey Conservation Foundation.

But clearing the forest, in the Glassboro Wildlife Management Area in Clayton, destroyed habitat for the barred owl, which is threatened in New Jersey, and the red-shouldered hawk, which is endangered, according to a notice of violation issued to one arm of the environmental agency by another on April 6 [2023].

“It’s just depressing, really,” Joe Arsenault, a plant ecologist and environmental consultant who lives nearby and has studied the area for 25 years, said of the project’s outcome. “The site had exquisite, mature growth. It had ancient trees. Today it’s like driving through a parking lot.”

. . .

The forest will slowly regrow, Mr. Arsenault said, adding that his surveys of the land had also uncovered evidence of early settlement by Native American tribes that could date to the earliest humans to settle in New Jersey. With the land upturned, the site’s archaeological record is lost forever.

“It’s a gut punch,” he said. “It is the epitome of poor decisions and poorly spent money.”

For the full story, see:

Christopher Maag. “Plan to Create Habitat Destroys Tract of Forest.” The New York Times (Saturday, April 15, 2023): A18.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the same date as the print version, and has the title “New Jersey Environmental Agency Accuses Itself of Harming Bird Habitats.”)


Elon Musk Says “Violent Crime in SF Is Horrific”

(p. A14) The fury erupted within hours, as word spread that the 43-year-old man who had been stabbed to death this week in an enclave of high-rise condominiums near the Bay Bridge was Bob Lee, a well-known tech executive.

The leaders of “lawless” San Francisco had Mr. Lee’s “literal blood on their hands,” Matt Ocko, a tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist in Palo Alto, Calif., tweeted. “I hate what San Francisco has become,” added Michael Arrington, the founder of the industry blog TechCrunch.

“Violent crime in SF is horrific,” Elon Musk, the chief executive of Twitter and Tesla, chimed in.

The drumbeat has built since then in the liberal city that only last year recalled its progressive district attorney amid calls for law and order and deepening frustration over the city’s homelessness crisis.

For the full story, see:

Kate Conger and Shawn Hubler. “Fatal Stabbing Stirs Outrage Over ‘Lawless’ San Francisco.” The New York Times (Saturday, April 8, 2023): A14.

(Note: the online version of the story was updated April 10, 2023, and has the title “Stabbing of Cash App Creator Raises Alarm, and Claims of ‘Lawless’ San Francisco.”)


Extreme Weather Can Bring Enough Water to Recharge California’s Aquifers

(p. A15) After a long, dry summer, winter has brought the gift of water to California, via a series of atmospheric river storms. Unfortunately, as these sprawling rivers in the sky have met developed areas covered with concrete and rivers locked in by levees, they have brought destruction: floods, mudslides, washed-out roads, blackouts, uprooted trees and at least six deaths.

But California doesn’t have to passively suffer through the whiplash of drought and floods. To reduce risk from both, it can return some of its land to water, working with natural systems.

One way to do this is by making use of unique geologic features called paleo valleys. These buried canyons carved into the state’s Central Valley were formed by Ice Age rivers that flowed down the western flank of the Sierra Nevada and were later filled in with coarse sand and gravel from glacial melt.

. . .

There is enough unmanaged surface water from rain and snow statewide to resupply Central Valley aquifers, making more water available to farmers, urban dwellers and the environment. Even with climate change, the state will most likely have enough water for recharge in the future in part because of more extreme weather, according to a 2021 study.

For the full commentary, see:

Erica Gies. “California Should Capture Its Floodwaters.” The New York Times (Monday, January 9, 2023): A15.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Jan. 7, 2023, and has the title “California Could Capture Its Destructive Floodwaters to Fight Drought.”)

The 2021 study mentioned above is:

He, Xiaogang, Benjamin P. Bryant, Tara Moran, Katharine J. Mach, Zhongwang Wei, and David L. Freyberg. “Climate-Informed Hydrologic Modeling and Policy Typology to Guide Managed Aquifer Recharge.” Science Advances 7, no. 17 (April 21, 2021), doi:10.1126/sciadv.abe6025.

“Singapore’s Bill Gates” Thought Innovation Should Not Require Government Permission

(p. A9) In the late 1990s, before Singapore was known as a global center of digital innovation, Sim Wong Hoo had a theory about what was holding his country back.

Mr. Sim, who went on to become the city-state’s first tech billionaire, called it the “No U-Turn Syndrome,” or NUTS. In the U.S., he said, cars could turn around anywhere unless a sign told them not to. But in Singapore, drivers wouldn’t dare if it wasn’t expressly allowed. The “no rule, no do” mentality kept Singaporeans from thinking outside the box, he said.

So he wrote some new rules. Mr. Sim was raised in a poor household by illiterate parents before founding a startup that revolutionized computer audio and inspired a generation of Asian entrepreneurs. Many admirers still call him

. . .

Born in Singapore in 1955, when it was still under British rule, Mr. Sim grew up in a village in an area now called Bukit Panjang with 10 siblings. Their father died when he was young, and his mother struggled to support their large family by selling whatever seasonal fruits grew on the unkempt 1-acre farm she leased for about $15 a year. When not in school, the young Mr. Sim helped her sell eggs at a local market for about 1 cent apiece.

In his 1999 book, “Chaotic Thoughts From the Old Millennium,” Mr. Sim described himself as a weird child who made his own toys and board games because he couldn’t afford to buy them.

For the full obituary, see:

Feliz Solomon. “Singaporean Inspired Asian Tech Innovators.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Jan. 14, 2023): A9.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date January 13, 2023, and has the title “Sim Wong Hoo, Creator of Sound Blaster, Inspired Asian Tech Innovators.”)

Mr. Sim’s book mentioned above is:

Sim, Wong Hoo. Chaotic Thoughts from the Old Millennium. Singapore: Creative O., 1999.

Government Contractor UNOS Is 15 Times More Likely to Lose or Damage Transplant Organs as Private Airlines Are to Lose or Damage Luggage

(p. A24) Where Tonya lives in California, the wait for a kidney from a deceased donor is up to 10 years. Tonya, like many on dialysis to treat kidney failure, knows the odds of her surviving the wait are slim; the median survival time for patients on dialysis is five years.

. . .

Everyday Americans are doing their part, signing up to be organ donors, but the organizations in charge of organ recovery (known as organ procurement organizations, or O.P.O.s) have been plagued with inefficiencies and abuses, and the contractor that runs the national system — the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) — has been failing to oversee them.

The organ procurement system is made up of 56 organizations, each with a monopoly in its jurisdiction. When someone dies and can donate an organ, O.P.O.s are supposed to go to the hospital, talk to the person’s family and manage the process of transporting donated organs to those in need, but all too often they have failed to show up — literally.

. . .

Tonya asked the government to hold these organizations accountable, and naïvely, we thought it would be that simple. Our efforts would surely get Tonya a kidney.

She did everything she could to push for change, everything that our government asks of concerned citizens: She wrote an opinion essay; appeared in a government video; wrote letters to members of the Biden administration, including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (C.M.S.) administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure and the head of the Health Resources and Services Administration, Carole Johnson; worked with members of Congress, including Representative Katie Porter; and even testified before the House Oversight Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy in May 2021.

There she told the committee she would die without the federal government’s urgent action. A year and a half later, on Dec. 30, 2022, Tonya died of complications from kidney failure.

. . .

After the video Tonya and I made, in 2020 the Trump administration finalized a rule bringing accountability to the forefront, and the Biden administration has inherited it. This is a good start: The new rule changes the metrics by which O.P.O.s are evaluated and requires that they face decertification for failure to perform. But the rule would not replace a single failing organ contractor until 2026, which is not acceptable.

. . .

To make matters worse, in the Biden administration’s 2023 budget, the C.M.S. requested flexibility to recertify failing O.P.O.s so they can keep their contracts even after 2026. If we allow failing O.P.O.s to keep operating, then we essentially nullify the reform we’ve worked so hard for and ensure further delays and more deaths.

. . .

When the Senate Finance Committee finally began investigating, it found that UNOS has systematically failed to provide oversight. At the committee hearing, doctors and transplant professionals testified that they have been afraid to criticize UNOS publicly, for fear it will retaliate against their patients. Also at the hearing, Senators Elizabeth Warren, Charles Grassley and Rob Portman called out another mind-boggling fact: From 2014 to 2019, UNOS was 15 times as likely to lose or damage an organ in transit as an airline is a passenger’s luggage.

For the full commentary, see:

Kendall Ciesemier. “She Feared the Organ Donation System Would Kill Her. It Did..” The New York Times (Wednesday, February 1, 2023): A24.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Jan. 28, 2023, and has the title “Tonya Ingram Feared the Organ Donation System Would Kill Her. It Did.”)

Regulators Are Bad at Monitoring Unhealthy Banks

(p. A26) Silicon Valley Bank’s failure looks a bit like an S.&L. crisis in miniature. Like its 1980s counterparts, S.V.B. grew extremely rapidly, had many assets parked in fixed, long-term bonds, and was done in when inflation caused the Fed to raise interest rates, raising the cost of keeping deposits.

Like the S.&L.s, Silicon Valley Bank was heavily concentrated. It catered to start-ups for whom an S.V.B. account was a matter of status. One tech savant who had recently changed jobs (aren’t they always switching jobs?) told me that in his experience, roughly two thirds of start-ups banked with S.V.B. (the bank claimed that nearly half the country’s venture capital-backed technology and life science companies were customers).

. . .

The regulators clearly failed to monitor S.V.B.’s unhealthy mismatch of assets and liabilities.

. . .

Once you take risk out of a part of a bank’s operations, it is hard to let market principles govern the rest.

. . .

In past bank failures, uninsured depositors did not lose all — 10 to 15 percent was typical. And in this episode, there wasn’t any systemically bad asset à la mortgages in 2008. Given that the risk was contained, and that the Federal Reserve provides liquidity to banks facing runs (and provided emergency liquidity this week), allowing uninsured depositors of banks that fail to suffer a haircut might have been healthier for the system in the long run.

For the full commentary, see:

Roger Lowenstein. “The Bank Rescues Just Changed Capitalism.” The New York Times (Thursday, March 16, 2023): A26.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date March 15, 2023, and has the title “The Silicon Valley Bank Rescue Just Changed Capitalism.”)

Tighter Zoning Laws Resulted in More Racial Segregation

(p. A22) Across the New York City suburbs, a thicket of local zoning laws thwarts the building of all but the most expensive single-family homes.

In some parts of Scarsdale, in Westchester County, new homes must be built on lots of at least two acres. In most parts of the village of Muttontown, on Long Island, new homes must be at least 2,000 square feet. The Town of Oyster Bay, also on Long Island, requires that some guest apartments, known as accessory dwelling units, be occupied only by family members or domestic servants.

These zoning laws are among the most restrictive in the country. They severely limit the state’s housing supply, making the entire region less affordable. And they are rooted in Jim Crow.

For much of the 20th century, towns surrounding New York City used a stomach-churning mix of racial covenants and restrictive zoning laws to shut out Black Americans and others considered undesirable from thriving suburbs. The federal government supported this system in myriad ways, including by denying government backing for mortgage loans in Black neighborhoods, a practice known as redlining, which hardened segregation and sharply restricted the ability of Black Americans to secure mortgages and buy homes. After World War II, the government greatly expanded its role in residential segregation by backing large suburban developments across the United States like Levittown, on Long Island, on the condition that they exclude Black buyers.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 made racial discrimination in housing illegal. But communities were still allowed to enact and maintain zoning laws that had the same effect. By this time, prices had risen, and the generous postwar federal subsidies that made it possible for white Americans to buy suburban homes — but which had largely been denied to Black Americans — were no longer available. Even if a suburb might no longer be allowed to overtly ban Black families, limiting development to large and expensive homes could achieve a similar goal.

As a result, the tighter zoning laws became associated nationally with increased racial segregation, as well as a diminished housing supply.

For the full commentary, see:

Mara Gay. “To Cut New York Housing Costs, Ease Suburbs’ Zoning Laws.” The New York Times (Thursday, Feb. 23, 2023): A22.

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date February 21, 2023, and has the title “The Era of Shutting Others Out of New York’s Suburbs Is Ending.”)

Allow Entrepreneurial Competition in Medicine by Ending Obamacare’s Ban on Physician-Owned Hospitals

(p. A17) A tiny paragraph in the enormous Affordable Care Act prohibits physicians from building or owning hospitals. Any existing physician-owned hospital built before 2010 is prohibited from growing beyond the size it was when the bill passed. This law limits competition, defies common sense and is likely contributing to higher prices for Medicare and reduced access to treatment for millions of Americans.

. . .

. . . recent research affirms the power of American entrepreneurship to lower costs and improve quality. Doctors, whether at the bedside or the forefront of scientific innovation, are well-suited to reimagine healthcare operations, lower costs and improve the quality of care.

Specialty physician-owned hospitals focused on cardiology and cardiac surgery were found to deliver higher-quality care than nonprofit hospitals, with lower rates of hospital readmission or mortality for high-risk surgery. Physician-owned specialty hospitals for orthopedic procedures, such as hip and knee replacements, offered lower costs and higher quality than nonprofit counterparts.

. . .

Healthy competition drives job creation, innovation and long-term economic growth. The federal government doesn’t prohibit plumbers from owning plumbing companies, radio hosts from owning radio stations or farmers from owning farmers markets. It’s time to reopen the free market in healthcare and let the power of competition do its work.

For the full commentary, see:

James Lankford and Brian J. Miller. “End ObamaCare’s Ban on Physician-Owned Hospitals.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2023): A17.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date February 20, 2023, and has the same title as the print version.)

State Bureaucracies Did Not Nimbly and Effectively Spend Massive Pandemic Crisis Funds

(p. A1) . . . when the Biden administration gave Mississippi $18.4 million in mid-2021 to hire public health workers — part of $2 billion in grants to bolster the Covid work force at state and local health agencies nationwide — it appeared that help had, at long last, arrived.

But as of January [2023], 18 months later, Mississippi had spent just $3.6 (p. A14) million of its grant — less than a fifth. Its attempts to hire epidemiologists, nurses and other soldiers in the war against Covid had largely fallen flat. The state has lost one in 224 residents to Covid-19, one of the nation’s worst death rates, including 122 people in tiny Scott County alone.

Mississippi’s woes are an acute example of a larger public health failure that is reprised nearly every time a major health threat grabs headlines. The problem, experts say, is that Congress starves state and local health agencies of cash for even basic needs in quiet times. Then, when a crisis hits, it floods them with millions or even billions of dollars earmarked to battle the disease of the moment. And the sluggish machinery of Capitol Hill often ensures that most of the aid arrives only after the worst of the crisis has passed.

The $2 billion in Covid hiring grants is the latest example. Nationwide, states and localities had spent only $371 million of the money by December, or about 19 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the conduit for the funds.

. . .

The record is replete with other such fumbles.

Six months after the World Health Organization declared the H1N1 influenza pandemic over in mid-2010, states and localities had used just a third of the $1.4 billion in federal funds they had received to combat it. The outbreaks of the Ebola virus in 2014 and the Zika virus in 2016 also led to funding windfalls, but health experts say most of the money arrived late.

For the full story, see:

Sharon LaFraniere. “In Mississippi, Covid Millions Left Unspent.” The New York Times (Monday, Feb. 13, 2023): A1 & A14.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the same date as the print version, and has the title “Why Mississippi, a Covid Hot Spot, Left Millions in Pandemic Aid Unspent.”)