State legislators' ties to nonprofit groups prove fertile ground for corruption

New York scandals reveal unsavory pattern of 'quid pro quo' links between lawmakers and 'charities' 

By Nicholas Kusnetzemail

 Source : The Center for Public Integrity

When investigators examined the operations of a sprawling New York social service organization, what they uncovered was deeply troubling. Board members of the Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council had almost no experience in nonprofit management. Several couldn’t name any of the group’s programs. Two of them could not identify the executive director, who in turn told investigators she was unaware of a fraudulent scheme carried out under her watch: Employees had squandered or stolen most of an $80,000 city grant.

As a result of that July 2010 report by New York City’s Department of Investigation, both the city and state quickly pulled the plug, suspending the organization’s grants, which provide practically all of its funding. But just as quick, the Brooklyn-based group won back it’s government support on the condition that it enact corrective measures, and today, the council has active grants from the city and the state totaling more than $50 million. Maybe that’s because the organization provides critical services, such as senior care and affordable housing, as a city spokeswoman said when funding was restored. But the council may also be thriving because its founder, Vito Lopez, was for years one of New York’s most powerful politicians — a state legislator who spent much of his career channeling that power through Ridgewood Bushwick.

Lopez personally directed at least $505,000 in state grants to the organization from 2007 through 2010, the only years for which data are available, and has reportedly had a hand in millions more. He helped elevate the group’s employees to political office. Other candidates, elected with Lopez’s help, have directed even more public money to Ridgewood Bushwick in return. The council’s former executive director, forced out in disgrace, was Lopez’s campaign treasurer; she later pleaded guilty to lying about a raise that hiked her salary to $782,000 for the fiscal year ending in June 2010. And Ridgewood Bushwick’s housing director is Lopez’s girlfriend.
This may look bad. It’s not unusual. Vito Lopez is but one example of a surprisingly common phenomenon afflicting state legislatures. Since 2010, at least eight New York lawmakers or their related charities have been investigated, charged or convicted of pillaging public funds. Earlier this year, former state Sen. Shirley Huntley pleaded guilty in two separate cases, one in which she sent state grants to a nonprofit she had founded before pocketing the money, the other in which she helped her niece and a former aide steal funds she directed to another group that, yes, Huntley herself created.

New York’s legislators outshine their peers in this department, but they’re not alone. Two former Florida state senators repeatedly directed state funds to a struggling group on whose board they sat, apparently not a violation of state law. A Pennsylvania charity had its state funding frozen after a state audit found it allegedly gave no-show jobs worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to a pastor and his aide at the direction of a state lawmaker. Illinois, Ohio and South Carolina all have seen similarly close ties between certain legislators and charities they helped fund.

While several examples led to criminal charges of theft and fraud, others appear to be perfectly legal: public officials are simply tipping the scales in favor of groups they are associated with or have a family member working for.

“The issue to me is what’s legal, and the fact that there’s a tremendous amount that’s legal,” said John Kaehny, executive director of Reinvent Albany, a group advocating government transparency. Kaehny said public officials in New York have used charities to conduct “widespread looting” of taxpayer funds with little repercussion.

As for Lopez, he’s gotten into plenty of trouble in recent weeks — but not for anything related to Ridgewood Bushwick, despite reports of federal investigations back in 2010. Instead, in May, the New York Assembly forced Lopez to resign after the state’s ethics commission released a report exposing lurid details of several sexual harassment complaints against him. On June 11, the Legislative Ethics Commission said that Lopez's conduct had violated state law and fined him $330,000.

Lopez and his attorney did not return calls seeking comment. James Cameron, who became CEO of Ridgewood Bushwick in 2011 after the city ordered the group to overhaul its leadership, said the organization is fully independent of Lopez. Any ties exist simply because it operates in the neighborhoods he has represented for decades.

“He does not control, influence or dictate anything that happens in the organization,” Cameron said. “But it’s a large organization. If he’s talking to staff out there in the field I would have no way of knowing.” The former executive director, interviewed by city investigators three years ago, likewise distanced herself from her subordinates’ actions, saying she had no “crystal ball” to know if employees were dishonest. Ridgewood Bushwick and affiliates employ 2,100 people.
Lopez is now running for a seat on the New York City Council and has received campaign contributions from at least 10 employees of the organization.

Rick Cohen, who has written extensively on the links between politicians and charities for Nonprofit Quarterly, said that in state capitols across the country, lawmakers direct taxpayer money to their pet groups irrespective of whether they need or deserve scarce public dollars. “I’ve seen very little evidence in … states that do this,” he said, “that there’s an accountability regimen or the oversight that’s needed.”

A lack of scrutiny
Over the past few decades, state governments have increasingly outsourced many functions to community-based nonprofits in an attempt to provide more effective, flexible social services. But the result, some say, has been the creation of what is essentially another arm of government.

“The function may be outsourced, but a lot of the funding is coming from government,” said Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, a good government group. Ridgewood Bushwick, for instance, derived $13.4 million of its $15.5 million in outside funding in the fiscal year ending in June 2012 from government grants (affiliated groups pulled in some $42 million more, mostly in government health care contracts). When independent nonprofits spend that cash, rather than a government agency, Lerner said, public money does not receive the same level of oversight. “It has a tendency to fall into nepotism and favoritism and cronyism.”

Separating favoritism from efficient use of funds has proven to be a daunting task for state governments. Some ethics experts say states should draw a clear line: that lawmakers cannot be involved in sending funds to any group with which they have a direct link, even as an unpaid board member.

“Where there’s a real personal connection, financial or otherwise, I think it makes sense for the law to say that you can’t be involved in that,” said Peter Sturges, who served as executive director of the Massachusetts State Ethics Commission from 2000 to 2007. “You can’t be making decisions objectively.”

But few states draw such a line. Most laws consider a situation a conflict only if an official derives a direct financial benefit; sending money to your pet project, regardless of merit, is fine as long as you don’t get a cut. In many states, lawmakers do not have to disclose if they hold an unpaid board position with a nonprofit in their community, or if family members or political staffers do (New York is among the few that do require this disclosure, though it does not extend to staff members of the lawmaker or grown children).

Ethics oversight bodies have weighed in on the topic in several states, and in most cases, they have allowed the lawmakers to help fund nonprofits with which they are associated.
In Texas, one lawmaker who worked for a nonprofit wanted to solicit contributions for the group (Texas, like most states, has a part-time legislature). The Ethics Commission said that solicitations “could be viewed as improper under certain circumstances” and advised the legislator to use “extreme caution,” but in January the body gave its approval.

Two 2006 advisory opinions from Colorado’s Ethics Board allowed lawmakers to vote on or sponsor legislation that benefited nonprofits they were associated with, one as a paid director, the other as an unpaid board member.

The general counsel for Florida’s House of Representatives has issued four relevant opinions since 2007, each time determining that soliciting funds or voting on a bill that could benefit the nonprofit did not raise a conflict of interest. In one case, the lawmaker was a paid employee of a nonprofit,while the other three had volunteered for the group, co-hosted events, or were otherwise associated with an organization or its founders.

In one of these cases, a legislator wanted to solicit funds for a group the lawmaker volunteered for and sometimes partnered with on “joint community projects.” The general counsel said the lawmaker was free to solicit the funds, but highlighted state laws against using an official position for personal gain or to grant special privilege, saying, “it would be prudent to keep these in mind.” The opinion adds that while “the law grants latitude to members,” because they serve part-time, “what may be a legally tolerated conflict of interest may be viewed as inappropriate or corrupt” by the public.

The counsel was sounding a common theme: the gulf between what is legally permissible but seemingly inappropriate.

“I’m certainly aware of a growing trend nationally of public officials having ties with nonprofits and those nonprofits perhaps, not always, benefiting from the public official’s position of power,” said Carol Carson, executive director of Connecticut’s Office of State Ethics. She said state employees, including executive branch officials, often come to her office to ask whether they can be involved in awarding a grant to a group they are associated with. As long as the grant doesn’t directly benefit them financially, she tells them yes. “That might not pass muster with the court of public opinion,” she said, “but under the Code of Ethics, that would be allowable.”

Trouble in Gotham
“It’s become a routine headline in New York: Politician pinched in charity scandal,” said a September 2012 article by Andrew J. Hawkins in Crain’s New York Business. “The story changes little from case to case: An elected official funds a nonprofit and staffs it with cronies. Sometimes the group works on his campaigns — or does no work at all.”

Assemblyman William Boyland  Jr. accounts for several of these tales just by himself. Boyland Jr. comes from a line of Brooklyn legislators: he gained his post through a special election in 2003 after his father resigned; his uncle held the seat previously. The district is covered with the family name — a street, a school, a housing project and more are all named for the elder Boylands.

Boyland Jr.’s activities first came to light in March 2011, when federal prosecutors charged him with taking bribes, in the guise of consulting fees, from the executive of a nonprofit that operates hospitals in exchange for helping the organization, MediSys, secure millions in state funds. Boyland Jr. had worked for MediSys before taking office, and continued earning a salary after his election without reporting it as required, prosecutors said. The MediSys executive was eventually convicted of offering bribes to Boyland Jr. and two other lawmakers, but a jury acquitted Boyland Jr. in November 2011. One juror told The New York Times, “We could not say that because he got the money, he advocated for MediSys. … We couldn’t do that beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Within a month, however, prosecutors charged Boyland Jr. in another, unrelated bribery case. The allegations include the solicitation in an Atlantic City hotel suite of more than $250,000 in bribes from undercover FBI agents posing as real estate investors. According to the indictment, in exchange for the cash, Boyland Jr. was to help with development deals in his district and secure state financing for the purchase and resale of a hospital building. Prosecutors had just filed the first set of charges against him, so Boyland Jr. needed cash to pay his lawyers, he allegedly told one of the agents.

In May, prosecutors updated the new charges to include allegations that Boyland Jr., from 2007 through 2010, sent public funds to a nonprofit group while directing some of the money to be spent on political events and expenses for the lawmaker, including the printing of T-shirts that said “Team Boyland.” (The family reportedly had handed out these shirts for years.) Boyland Jr. is facing 21 criminal counts and has pleaded not guilty. The trial has yet to start.

Boyland Jr. has ties to another, upstate New York charity, the Altamont Program, which also has operations in Brooklyn. The FBI and state authorities raided the upstate offices in December. The Albany Times Union said agents were looking into Boyland Jr.’s direction of $1.2 million in state grants to Altamont and a related group from 2004 to 2009, using a controversial legislative vehicle called “member items” that put state funds at the discretion of individual lawmakers. Boyland Jr.’s father went to work for the organization as a consultant after he resigned as a legislator in 2003. Boyland Jr.’s sister also reportedly worked for the group.

Boyland Sr. says he worked for the group from 2008 to 2010. He was reportedly fired after the organization discovered that he had used a company credit card for personal expenses. In an interview, the elder Boyland did not deny using the card for the purchases, but said that in consulting work, it’s impossible to distinguish between business and personal expenses.
A spokeswoman for Boyland Jr. referred questions to his lawyer, Nancy Ennis. She did not return phone calls and emails requesting comment.

Many a similar scandal in New York, including Huntley’s and Lopez’s, has been fueled by those “member items” — part of a gentlemen’s agreement between legislative leaders and the governor that for years disbursed hundreds of millions of dollars to groups of lawmakers’ choosing with no oversight or trail of who got what. In 2007, Gov. Eliot Spitzer pushed a bill that required the legislature to disclose each member item. The same year, the Attorney General’s office reached an agreement with the legislature that required recipients to certify the funds were being used appropriately. But even with this level of oversight, watchdogs and some legislators ridiculed the practice as corrupt and wasteful.
“It’s a system which invites abuse,” said Lerner, of Common Cause.

In 2010, Gov. David Paterson vetoed thousands of member items in the budget, citing fiscal austerity, and Gov. Cuomo has continued to veto the requests, effectively ending the practice for now. But there are still funds from multi-year grants that have not yet been spent. And political insiders in New York say new tricks have taken the place of the “member item” abuses.

“There are lots of ways to direct money,” said state Sen. Liz Krueger, who has co-sponsored a bill that would ban legislators from giving member items to groups that employ family members or staff and would apportion them equally to each district. Traditionally, the majority party controlled most of the funds and disbursed them as it pleased.

Machine politics in Illinois
Lawmakers in other states have their own ways to send money to charities, particularly in states with hefty budgets. In Illinois, legislators can direct funds without having to disclose they were the source, much as in New York. In 2009, for example, a paragraph tucked into an appropriations bill included a $98 million grant to the United Neighborhood Organization, a Latino community group that builds and operates charter schools in Chicago.

Over the past several years, the group built close ties to the state’s most powerful politicians, pushing the boundaries of appropriate activity by tax-exempt charities, which are barred by federal law from working on political campaigns. After the organization’s CEO, Juan Rangel, co-chaired Rahm Emanuel’s successful campaign for Chicago mayor, Emanuel jokingly referred to the fact that the charity is not supposed to be directly involved in politics. The organization’s staff and lobbyists include former city officials, and some of them have left to enter politics. Rangel regularly endorses candidates. Contractors hired by UNO (often with public money) have contributed to those candidates. Rangel hosted a fundraiser for state House Speaker Michael Madigan in October, with the organization’s contractors giving more than $24,000 to Madigan, according to a Chicago Sun-Times report.

The close relationships paid off with that 2009 grant of $98 million. But in February, a report by the Sun-Times revealed that UNO had spent millions from the grant on insider contracts with relatives of the organization’s staff and political allies. Within days, Rangel said the organization had launched an internal review and had suspended some of the suspect contracts. He also said, however, that all of the contractors were qualified and that the work had been fulfilled. The organization’s vice president, whose brothers had won a contract, resigned. The state determined that the practices constituted apparent violations of the grant, and in March suspended what remained of the grant. In response, the group hired a full time compliance officer and Rangel stepped down from the board of directors (though he stayed on as CEO). In June, the state restored the flow of funding.

Officials at UNO did not respond to requests for comment.

Steve Brown, a spokesman for Madigan, who sponsored the spending bill that included the grant to UNO, said the speaker is a supporter of the organization, but that the grant had nothing to do with the contributions from the Rangel fundraiser, which he described as modest in relation to Madigan’s overall fundraising.

Rey López-Calderón, executive director of Common Cause Illinois, said some nonprofits have become modern-day political machines in Illinois, citing UNO as the prime example. Groups receive state grants with the help of politicians and in return, he said, their members contribute money and even time to the officials’ campaigns. “That kind of activity is rampant in Illinois.”

Other nonprofits or their employees in Illinois have been questioned about the extent of  their ties to legislative patrons. In 2010, for example, a federal grand jury subpoenaed records related to dozens of state grants for nonprofits linked to at least one lawmaker. Thomas Homer, the state’s legislative inspector general, said there are no requirements that lawmakers disclose their ties to nonprofits unless they receive a salary from the group, and that there are no ethics rules that apply to the situation beyond general laws prohibiting bribery and kickbacks. He said his office refers complaints of schemes involving nonprofit groups to the FBI, and that there are several open cases, though their nature and number remain confidential.

Behested payments
In addition to state grants, lawmakers have found another source of funds they can direct to nonprofits: corporate contributions. It’s become common practice in many states and in Congress for corporate donors and lobbyists to contribute money to specific charities at the request of lawmakers, in what’s often called a behested payment. A few states have formal systems to regulate this, but in many cases it’s an uncharted field.

The payments present a “win-win situation all around,” said Nola Werren, a client specialist at State and Federal Communications, which provides corporate clients with information about state lobbying laws. “The lawmaker gets this benevolent image for his constituents and shows that he cares,” while the corporation gets its name on the donation and the nonprofit gets the money. But the arrangement can also serve as a route around restrictions on gifts to lawmakers or campaign contributions, allowing corporations to curry favor with politicians, frequently without disclosure.

California is one of the few states that does require disclosure, but that hasn’t discouraged the practice, said Phillip Ung, a spokesman for California Common Cause. Last year, 57 lawmakers reported such contributions, totaling $2.3 million.

Ung pointed to state Sen. Roderick Wright, who has directed $166,500 in corporate contributions to the National Family Life and Education Center from 2010 through 2012. In the fiscal year ending in June 2011, the last year records for the organization are available, the payments comprised more than half of the group’s outside income. Wright has co-hosted several events where the group handed out prizes, school supplies and provided health screenings to families in his district.

In an email, Ung praised the fact that the funds are helping the community but added, “there is the ethical question of why are these corporate interests giving at the behest of Mr. Wright and what do these behested payments earn them in political influence.”

Among the contributors are AT&T, Time Warner Cable, Edison International and the Morongo Band of Mission Indians. Wright is the chairman of the Governmental Organization Committee, which oversees gambling by Indian tribes in the state, and sits on the Energy, Utilities and Communications Committee.

Cine Ivery, Wright’s chief of staff, said the nonprofit helps mentor youths in the senator’s district, and that it couldn’t do the work without the corporate donations. The companies get nothing in return, she said. The organization did not return phone calls or emails.

The practice is on the rise across the country, Werren said. Her company has gotten so many requests from clients about the rules covering such payments that it decided to canvass state laws. According to State and Federal Communications, only 14 states require lobbyists to disclose such gifts. California is the only state Werren knows of that requires lawmakers to disclose them, and only New York and Maryland prohibit behested payments.

Changes slow to come
Even as experts say the questionable ties between nonprofits and politicians are on the rise, many states have been slow to enact reforms that might prevent them. One step would be to ban, or restrict, discretionary spending directed by a single lawmaker.

But there are many reasons why even advocates for reform say this could be a bad idea. “Legislators, if they’re good, know what their district needs. They know the good organizations,” said Sturges, the former Massachusetts regulator. “Why should they not be able to direct funds to the best organizations in their districts?”

There’s no doubt that many charities provide critical services in poor communities as a result of grants shepherded by their representatives. Sen. Krueger of New York pointed out that some small community groups do not fit the pre-packaged conditions required by many state grant programs, but are worthy recipients nonetheless. And, both Krueger and Sturges said, there’s no indication that leaving such decisions to governors or other executive branch officials produces markedly better results.

In lieu of prohibitions, many good-government groups are pushing for increased disclosure of all budgetary spending. They say that whatever discretionary funds do exist should have strict requirements tied to them that would dictate what types of projects can be funded and prevent staff, relatives or associates of public officials from being associated with any recipients of the funding.

Kaehny, of Reinvent Albany, has called for more disclosure from the nonprofit world as well. In New York, for example, he said that an independent body should regulate charities, rather than the politically charged Attorney General’s office, and that all the data that is already public from tax forms and other documents should be added into a searchable database.
Lawmakers have introduced bills that would require their colleagues to disclose positions with nonprofit organizations in Arizona and Florida, but neither bill has passed. In response to a series of scandals, Pennsylvania’s House and Senate adopted rules in 2007 and 2013 restricting members’ ability to form and fund nonprofits. But two bills that would have gone further, including one that would have ended “legislative initiative grants,” the state’s own version of member items, failed to pass the legislature. The bill that Sen. Krueger cosponsored in New York to reform member items has also failed to pass.As have repeated efforts to require disclosure of Illinois’ own version of the funding, called “member initiatives.”

Cohen, of Nonprofit Quarterly, said that any changes face an uphill battle because most of those with the ability to enact them, from lawmakers to charities, benefit from the status quo. “There are a lot of players that have a stake in this,” he said, “and want to see it continue.”

NSA leaker reveals identity, says surveillance poses ‘existential threat to democracy’

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by Gabriela Resto-Montero
A 29-year-old man who said he is behind the leaks exposing NSA surveillance on American citizens revealed his identity Sunday in an interview with The Guardian.

Edward Snowden, a former CIA communications expert and current defense contractor living in Hawaii, said that he released the documents to alert the American public about what is being done in their name.

“I’m willing to sacrifice all of that because I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building,” Snowden said to The Guardian.

Roughly two weeks ago Snowden said that he told his superiors at Booz Allen Hamilton, a firm where he earned $200,000 a year working on a contract with the NSA, that he was seeking treatment for his epilepsy and would need some time off. He then left on a plane bound for Hong Kong where he set up a meeting with Guardian reporters. Snowden first sent documents to reporters three weeks ago and said that he acted alone, the paper reported.

In a statement released Sunday afternoon, Booz Allen Hamilton said that Snowden had worked for the firm for less than three months.

“We will work closely with our clients and authorities in their investigation of this matter,” the statement read.

James Clapper, Jr., director of National Intelligence had said Saturday that the Justice Department was already investigating who leaked documents detailing the NSA’s collecting of telephone information from Verizon Wireless customers, and the PRISM program, which allows the government to tap into the servers of major internet companies in the U.S. and UK.

Snowden, who served some time in the Army, said that he first thought about exposing government secrets while serving with the CIA in Geneva, Switzerland, in 2007 but hoped that the Obama presidency would rein in the intelligence gathering behavior. Instead, Snowden said he witnessed the president advance the same programs that he objected to, which “hardened” him to reveal the information.

President Obama defended government surveillance Friday, insisting that, “Nobody is looking at your telephone calls.”

“What the intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers and durations of calls. They are not looking at people’s names and they’re not looking at content,” Obama said.

Snowden said in an interview with the Washington Post that a lack of accountability in the Bush Administration led to the current abuses.

“It set an example that when powerful figures are suspected of wrongdoing, releasing them from the accountability of law if ‘for our own good,’” he said to the paper. “That’s corrosive to the basic fairness of society.”

In a note sent along with the first package of documents to Guardian reporters, Snowden wrote that he accepted that his life would change as a result of his decision.

“I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions,” Snowden wrote. “I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant.”

Snowden told The Guardian that he hoped to seek asylum in Iceland—which has strong Internet freedom laws—but that he understood that may never happen.

Our Surveillance Society: What Orwell And Kafka Might Say

by Alan Greenblatt Source: NPR

President Obama says he's not Big Brother. The author who created the concept might disagree.

Addressing the controversy over widespread government surveillance of telephone records and Internet traffic Friday, Obama said, "In the abstract, you can complain about Big Brother and how this is a potential program run amuck, but when you actually look at the details, then I think we've struck the right balance."

But for many commentators, revelations this week that the federal government is sweeping up records of communications and transactions between millions of Americans sounds uncomfortably like the vision of the British novelist and journalist George Orwell.

His novel Nineteen Eighty-Four portrayed a society in which the state constantly tracks the movements and thoughts of individuals. Its slogan is "Big Brother Is Watching You."

"Throwing out such a broad net of surveillance is exactly the kind of threat Orwell feared," says Michael Shelden, author of Orwell: The Authorized Biography.

The phrases "Big Brother" and "Orwellian" have been commonplace in news coverage and social media this past week. Orwell's novel, a bestseller upon publication in the 1940s, has remained a classic because it seems to crystallize what life under totalitarian regimes looks like.

Obama — and many others — insist that the U.S. is not living under such a regime. The government is not listening to everyone's telephone calls, , nor is it using the information to spy on innocent Americans.

And, even in the tradition of prophetic literature that warns of the dangers of bureaucratic power run amok, there is an awareness that the protection of the state, while intrusive, is necessary.

Based On Experience

Although set in the future, Nineteen Eighty-Four was based on Orwell's observations of Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, as well as his own experiences as a broadcaster and colonial officer in the British Empire.

"He was so good at picking up on trends that he picked up our whole future," says Shelden, who teaches English at Indiana State University.

In particular, Shelden says, Orwell's time as a cop serving in Burma showed him how governments seek to keep track of people and what they're up to — the more complete the file, the better.

"What he saw was that over time, surveillance would become pervasive," Shelden says. "He just took that idea and expanded it in Nineteen Eighty-Four to basically a police state."

Although Orwell's ideas struck some as paranoid, the British government in 2007 opened up its file on the author. It turned out the spy agency MI5 had been tracking him from 1929 until his death in 1950.

Big Data = Big Brother?

Orwell certainly would have understood that officials would point to the unending threat of something like terrorism as a justification for ongoing, widespread surveillance.

"He could see that war and defeating an enemy could be used as a reason for increasing political surveillance," Shelden says. "You were fighting a never-ending war that gave you a never-ending excuse for looking into people's lives."

What would have surprised Orwell, he says, was not that governments are collecting huge amounts of data about individuals, but that private actors are as well.

Even if it didn't turn out that the into Verizon, Google, Yahoo and other such companies, those companies would control huge amounts of information about Americans on their own.

And it's not just the corporations performing surveillance. What Orwell calls the "proles" in his novel — the average citizens who help the state keep an eye on everybody — are also tracking and documenting each other's movements in real life these days.

With the advent of smartphones and widespread surveillance cameras, no conversation or movement in the public sphere can be considered private.

On Wednesday, a woman she said she'd sat near on a train, who'd been bragging with friends about affairs they'd had without their wives catching on. By Saturday morning, the image had been shared more than 170,000 times.

"We have the capacity now to be a huge nation of informers," Shelden says.

Kafka's Binocular Vision

Image collection by everybody can have its uses. The sharing of images of the Boston Marathon helped law enforcement quickly home in on the alleged perpetrators.

The mixed feelings people have about the balance between privacy and security would have been familiar to Franz Kafka, the famed 20th century author of novels and stories about bureaucracies that are out of touch and out of control.

There are many elements of the current situation that are Kafkaesque, says Stanley Corngold, an emeritus professor of German and comparative literature at Princeton University. Kafka raises questions not only about governments collecting massive amounts of information "like a giant vacuum cleaner," Corngold says, but what they do with it.

In Kafka's novel The Castle, the authorities can't find the document that would determine whether the person who's been brought in is wanted, or not.

"They have piles and piles and piles of documents, but they don't do anything with them," says Corngold, a Kafka translator and scholar.

But although Kafka is remembered for creating situations in which characters helplessly seek to appeal judgments when they're not even sure what the charges are, he also recognized that the people are often, in fact, guilty. "Kafka has the uncanny ability to see the point of view of both parties," Corngold says.

In stories such as "The Great Wall of China," Kafka recognized that people look to the state to protect them from "barbarians," recognizing that they're not capable of fending off outside threats on their own.

"At times, he mocks the illusion of an effective, centralized authority," Corngold says. "At other times, he suggests that without its aid, we cannot cope with the 'barbarians.'"

Fires have burned 3 percent of Amazon rainforest in 12 years, NASA says

Scientists find that hard-to-track fires in forest ‘understory’ have done even greater damage to rainforest than traditional deforestation.

By Mark Trumbull, Source: © The Christian Science Monitor

The size of the Amazon rainforest has been shrinking – and not just because of traditional deforestation.

Fires that creep slowly and low in the forest understory burned nearly 3 percent of the world’s largest tropical rainforest in a little more than a decade, scientists at NASA say.

Because they are hard to measure from space, “we've never known the regional extent or frequency of these understory fires," said Doug Morton of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., the lead author of a study publicized by the space agency Friday.

RECOMMENDED: Think you know Latin America? Take our geography quiz.

 

The study estimated that between 1999 and 2010, understory forest fires burned more than 33,000 square miles (85,500 square kilometers), or 2.8 percent of the forest.

The fires are typically caused by human activities such as cooking, cigarettes, or agricultural waste burning.

But they’re not directly related to deforestation activity, which can include fires that Mr. Morton describes as “massive, towering infernos.” Rather, an important indicator of risk for understory fires is dryness.

Frequent understory fire activity coincides with low nighttime humidity, the NASA research found.

By contrast, in some of the peak years for forest-clearing activity (2003 and 2004), adjacent forests had low rates of understory fires.

In understory fires, flames generally reach only a few feet high. They often burn for weeks at a time, spreading a few feet per minute.

To gauge the scale of understory fire activity, Morton and colleagues used observations from early in the dry season, from June to August, collected by MODIS – the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer instrument on NASA's Terra satellite.

The researchers tracked the timing of damage and recovery in various disturbed areas. Areas of deforestation lack signs of recovery for at least two years. But degradation from understory fires is visible in the year after the burn, then dissipates quickly as the forest regrows.

Separately, NASA and academic researchers on Friday released predictions that the 2013 fire season will be “considerably higher” than in 2011 and 2012 in many parts of the Amazon.

The scope of the understory fires doesn’t make deforestation less important, but it suggests that such fires “are important source of [carbon] emissions that we need to consider," Morton said.
 

13-year old with IQ higher than Einstein is also refreshingly modest

"They've achieved so much that I couldn't even dream of achieving," says Ramu

By Prachi Gupta

13 year-old Neha Ramu has earned the highest possible score on the Mensa test, with an IQ of 162 — outscoring geniuses like Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.

The BBC recently interviewed Ramu about her induction into Mensa and her future plans, but she hasn’t let the news get to her head. “Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein, they’ve achieved so much that I couldn’t even dream of achieving, so it’s not right to compare me to them just cause of my IQ. If I don’t put in my effort and make use of my IQ, then there is no point in having it,” said Ramu.

“Some people think I study loads and stuff, but I actually don’t really, at all. I just relax and do basic stuff.”

Ramu, who lives in the U.K., hopes to study neurology at Harvard.

Source: Salon

President Barack Obama Weekly Address June 08, 2013 (Video/Transcript)

Remarks of President Barack Obama
The Weekly Address
Mooresville, North Carolina
June 8, 2013

Hi, everybody.  In the next few days, America will take an important step towards fixing our broken immigration system.  The entire United States Senate will begin debating a commonsense immigration reform bill that has bipartisan support.

See, we define ourselves as a nation of immigrants.  The promise we find in those who come from every corner of the globe has always been one of our greatest strengths.  It’s kept our workforce vibrant and dynamic.  It’s kept our businesses on the cutting edge.  And it’s helped build the greatest economic engine the world has ever known.

But for years, our out-of-date immigration system has actually harmed our economy and threatened our security.

Now, over the past four years, we’ve taken steps to try and patch up some of the worst cracks in the system.

We strengthened security on the southern border by putting more boots on the ground than at any time in our history.  And, in part, by using technology more effectively – today, illegal crossings are near their lowest level in decades.  

We focused enforcement efforts on criminals who are here illegally – who endanger our communities – and today, we deport more criminals than ever before.

And we took up the cause of “Dreamers,” the young people who were brought to this country as children.  We said that if they’re able to meet certain criteria, we’d consider offering them the chance to come out of the shadows so they can continue to work here, and study here, and contribute to our communities legally.

But if we’re going to truly fix a broken system, we need Congress to act in a comprehensive way.  And that’s why what’s happening next week is so important.

The bill before the Senate isn’t perfect.  It’s a compromise.  Nobody will get everything they want – not Democrats, not Republicans, not me.  But it is a bill that’s largely consistent with the principles I’ve repeatedly laid out for commonsense immigration reform.

This bill would continue to strengthen security at our borders, increase criminal penalties against smugglers and traffickers, and hold employers more accountable if they knowingly hire undocumented workers.  If enacted, it would represent the most ambitious enforcement plan in recent memory.

This bill would provide a pathway to earned citizenship for the 11 million individuals who are in this country illegally – a pathway that includes passing a background check, learning English, paying taxes and a penalty, and then going to the back of the line behind everyone who’s playing by the rules and trying to come here legally.

This bill would modernize the legal immigration system so that, alongside training American workers for the jobs of tomorrow, we’re also attracting highly-skilled entrepreneurs and engineers who will grow our economy.  And so that our people don’t have to wait years before their loved ones are able to join them in this country we love.

That’s what immigration reform looks like.  Smarter enforcement.  A pathway to earned citizenship.  Improvements to the legal immigration system.   They’re all commonsense steps.  They’ve got broad support – from Republicans and Democrats, CEOs and labor leaders, law enforcement and clergy.  So there is no reason that Congress can’t work together to send a bill to my desk by the end of the summer.

We know the opponents of reform are going to do everything they can to prevent that.  They’ll try to stoke fear and create division.  They’ll try to play politics with an issue that the vast majority of Americans want addressed.  And if they succeed, we will lose this chance to finally fix an immigration system that is badly broken.  

So if you agree that now is the time for commonsense reform, reach out to your Representatives.  Tell them we have to get this done so that everyone is playing by the same rules.  Tell them we have the power to do this in a way that lives up to our traditions as a nation of laws, and a nation of immigrants.

In the end, that’s what this is all about.  Men and women who want nothing more than the chance to earn their way into the American story, just like so many of our ancestors did.  Throughout our history, that has only made us stronger.  And it’s how we’ll make sure that America’s best days always lie ahead.

Thanks.  And have a great weekend. 

Financial elite at 'secretive' annual meeting (Video)

Politicians, business leaders and royalty from Europe and the US meet near London for a secretive three-day event.

 

Source: Al Jazeera's Charlie Angela
Politicians, business leaders and royalty from Europe and the US are meeting near London for a secretive three day event to discuss global policy.
Known as the Bilderberg Group, their annual conferences are not recorded, nor do they produce any statements.
Their lack of transparency often fuels theories that they are the secret rulers of the world.

President Obama Makes a National Security Personnel Announcement (Video/Transcript)

Rose Garden

THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you, everybody.  (Applause.)  Thank you.  Please, everybody have a seat.  Well, good afternoon.  It is a beautiful day, and it's good to see so many friends here.
Of all the jobs in government, leading my national security team is certainly one of the most demanding, if not the most demanding.  And since the moment I took office, I've counted on the exceptional experience and insights of Tom Donilon.  Nearly every day for the past several years I've started each morning with Tom leading the presidential daily brief, hundreds of times, a sweeping assessment of global developments and the most pressing challenges.  As my National Security Advisor his portfolio is literally the entire world.

He has definitely advanced our strategic foreign policy initiatives while at the same time having to respond to unexpected crises, and that happens just about every day.  He's overseen and coordinated our entire national security team across the government, a Herculean task.  And it's non-stop -- 24/7, 365 days a year.

Today, I am wistful to announce that after more than four years of extraordinary service, Tom has decided to step aside at the beginning of July.  And I am extraordinarily proud to announce my new National Security Advisor, our outstanding Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice -- (applause) -- as well as my nominee to replace Susan in New York, Samantha Power.  (Applause.)

When I first asked Tom to join my team, I knew I was getting one of our nation's premier foreign policy leaders, somebody with a deep sense of history and a keen understanding of our nation's place in the world.  He shared my view that in order to renew American leadership for the 21st century, we had to fundamentally rebalance our foreign policy.  And more than that, he knew how we could do it.

See, Tom is that rare combination of the strategic and the tactical.  He has a strategic sense of where we need to go, and he has a tactical sense of how to get there.

Moreover, Tom’s work ethic is legendary.  He began his public service in the Carter White House when he was just 22 years old -- and, somehow, he has been able to maintain the same drive, and the same stamina, and the same enthusiasm and reverence for serving in government.  He has helped shape every single national security policy of my presidency -- from forging a new national security strategy rooted in our economic strength here at home to ending the war in Iraq.  Here at the White House, Tom oversaw the operation that led us to bin Laden.  He’s helped keep our transition on track as we wind down the war in Afghanistan.
At the same time, Tom has played a critical role as we’ve bolstered the enduring pillars of American power -- strengthening our alliances, from Europe to Asia; enhancing our relationship with key powers; and moving ahead with new trade agreements and energy partnerships.  And from our tough sanctions on Iran to our unprecedented military and intelligence cooperation with Israel -- (baby cries) -- it’s true --  (laughter) -- from New START with Russia to deeper partnerships with emerging powers like India, to stronger ties with the Gulf states, Tom has been instrumental every step of the way.

I’m especially appreciative to Tom for helping us renew American leadership in the Asia Pacific, where so much of our future security and prosperity will be shaped.  He has worked tirelessly to forge a constructive relationship with China that advances our interests and our values.  And I’m grateful that Tom will be joining me as I meet with President Xi of China this week.
And finally, Tom, I am personally grateful for your advice, for your counsel, and most of all for your friendship.  Whenever we sit down together -- whether it’s in the Oval Office or the Situation Room -- I do so knowing that you have led a rigorous process:  that you’ve challenged assumptions, that you’ve asked the tough questions, that you’ve led an incredibly hard-working national security staff, and presented me with a range of options to advance our national interests.  A President can’t ask for anything more than that, and this is a testament to your incredible professionalism, but also your deep love of country.

I know that this relentless pace has meant sacrifices for your family -- for Cathy, who is here, Dr. Biden’s former Chief of Staff, who I was proud to nominate as our new Global Ambassador for Women; and for Tom and Cathy’s wonderful children, Sarah and Teddy.  So today, I want to publicly thank all the Donilons for their abiding commitment to public service that runs through the family.  (Applause.)

You’ve been with me every step of the way these past four years, and the American people owe you an enormous debt of gratitude for everything that you’ve done.  You’ve helped to restore our nation’s prestige and standing in the world.  You’ve positioned us well to continue to lead in the years ahead.  I think that Tom Donilon has been one of the most effective national security advisors our country has ever had, and he’s done so without a lot of fanfare and a lot of fuss.  So, Tom, on behalf of us all, thank you for your extraordinary service.  (Applause.)

Now, I am proud that this work will be carried on by another exemplary public servant -- Ambassador Susan Rice.  (Applause.)  Susan was a trusted advisor during my first campaign for President.  She helped to build my foreign policy team and lead our diplomacy at the United Nations in my first term.  I’m absolutely thrilled that she’ll be back at my side, leading my national security team in my second term.

With her background as a scholar, Susan understands that there is no substitute for American leadership.  She is at once passionate and pragmatic.  I think everybody understands Susan is a fierce champion for justice and human dignity, but she’s also mindful that we have to exercise our power wisely and deliberately.

Having served on the National Security Council staff herself, she knows how to bring people together around a common policy and then push it through to completion -- so that we’re making a difference where it matters most, here in the country that we have pledged to defend, and in the daily lives of the people we’re trying to help around the world.

Having served as an Assistant Secretary of State, she knows our policies are stronger when we harness the views and talents of people across government.  So Susan is the consummate public servant -- a patriot who puts her country first.  She is fearless; she is tough.  She has a great tennis game and a pretty good basketball game.  (Laughter.)  Her brother is here, who I play with occasionally, and it runs in the family -- throwing the occasional elbow -- (laughter) -- but hitting the big shot.

As our Ambassador to the U.N., Susan has been a tireless advocate in advancing our interests.  She has reinvigorated American diplomacy, in New York.  She has helped to put in place tough sanctions on Iran and North Korea.  She has defended Israel.  She has stood up for innocent civilians, from Libya to Cote d’Ivoire.  She has supported an independent South Sudan.  She has raised her voice for human rights, including women’s rights.

Put simply, Susan exemplifies the finest tradition of American diplomacy and leadership.  So thank you, Susan, for being willing to take on this next assignment.  I'm absolutely confident that you're going to hit the ground running.  And I know that after years of commuting to New York while Ian, Jake and Maris stayed here in Washington, you will be the first person ever in this job who will see their family more by taking the National Security Advisor's job.

(Applause.)

Now, normally I'd be worried about losing such an extraordinary person up at the United Nations and be trying to figure out how are we ever going to replace her.  But fortunately, I'm confident we've got an experienced, effective and energetic U.N. ambassador-in-waiting in Samantha Power.

Samantha first came to work for me in 2005, shortly after I became a United States senator, as one of our country's leading journalists; I think she won the Pulitzer Prize at the age of 15 or 16.  One of our foremost thinkers on foreign policy, she showed us that the international community has a moral responsibility and a profound interest in resolving conflicts and defending human dignity.

As a senior member of my national security team, she has been a relentless advocate for American interests and values, building partnerships on behalf of democracy and human rights, fighting the scourge of anti-Semitism and combatting human trafficking.  To those who care deeply about America’s engagement and indispensable leadership in the world, you will find no stronger advocate for that cause than Samantha.

And over the last four years, Samantha has worked hand-in-glove with Susan in her role because Samantha has been the lead White House staffer on issues related to the United Nations.  And I'm fully confident she will be ready on day one to lead our mission in New York while continuing to be an indispensable member of my national security team.

She knows the U.N.'s strengths.  She knows its weaknesses.  She knows that American interests are advanced when we can rally the world to our side.  And she knows that we have to stand up for the things that we believe in.  And to ensure that we have the principled leadership we need at the United Nations, I would strongly urge the Senate to confirm her without delay.

So, Samantha, thank you.  To Cass, and you, and Declan and Rian for continuing to serve our country.

This team of people has been extraordinarily dedicated to America.  They have made America safer.  They have made America's values live in corners of the world that are crying out for our support and our leadership.  I could not be prouder of these three individuals -- not only their intelligence, not only their savvy, but their integrity and their heart.

And I'm very, very proud to have had the privilege of working with Tom.  I'm very proud that I'll continue to have the privilege of working with Samantha and with Susan.
So with that, I'd invite Tom to say a few words.  Tom.  (Applause.)

MR. DONILON:  Thank you, Mr. President.  You mentioned the many hours that we’ve worked together in the Situation Room, put together here by John Kennedy and without windows.

THE PRESIDENT:  No windows.

MR. DONILON:  No windows.  So I would first like to thank you for this rare opportunity to be outside and experience the natural light.  (Laughter.)

You also mentioned how I began my public service here under President Carter in 1977 when I was 22 years old.  And I still remember leaving at the end of the day, walking up West Executive Drive, past the office of then-National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, and looking up at the windows of the White House -- the light is always on in Zbig’s office, no matter how late.  And I’d think to myself, don’t those guys ever go home?  And now, these many years later, I finally have the answer -- no, they don’t go home very much, at least not as often or as early as their spouses and families would like.

Mr. President, to serve in this capacity where we’ve had the opportunity to protect and defend the United States, to improve the position of the United States in the world, has been the privilege of a lifetime.  To serve during your presidency, however, is to serve during one of the defining moments in our nation’s history.  This is because of your vision, your principled leadership, your commitment to defending our interests and upholding our ideals.

Those many hours of meetings and briefings have given me the opportunity to see you as few people do:  behind closed doors, away from the cameras, when a leader’s character is revealed.  And with your permission, I’d like to take this opportunity to share a little bit of what I’ve seen.

First, I’ve seen you make the most difficult decisions a Commander-in-Chief can make -- the decision to send our men and women in uniform into harm’s way.  I’ve seen the great care with which you have weighed these grave decisions and I’ve seen your devotion to the families of our men and women in uniform.

I have seen your fierce patriotism, your love of our country.  When confronted with competing agendas and interests, you always bring the discussion back to one question:  What’s in the national interest, what’s best for America?  I’ve seen your abiding commitment to the core values that define us as Americans, our Constitution, civil liberties, the rule of law.  Time and time again, you have reminded us that our decisions must stand up to the judgment of history.

Finally, Mr. President, I’ve seen you represent the United States around the world and what you mean to the people around the world when you represent our country.  When you step off that plane with the words, “United States of America”, when you reach out to foreign audiences and speak to the basic aspirations we share as human beings, you send a clear message that America wants to be their partner.  And that ability to connect, to forge new bonds, is a form of American power and influence that advocates our interests and ideals as well.

To Vice President Biden and Jill, Cathy and I have considered you dear friends for more than 30 years, and it has been an honor to make this journey with you.

To my colleagues and friends here at the White House and across the government, the American people will never truly know how hard you work in their defense.

To my long-time partners in the senior leadership of the National Security Council -- Denis McDonough, John Brennan, Tony Blinken, Lisa Monaco, Mike Froman, Ben Rhodes, and Brian McKeon.  I could not have asked for better brothers or sisters in this effort.

To you and all our remarkable national security staff, you're a national treasure.  And every day you get up, you come here -- you devote your days to keeping our country secure.  You are the best our nation has to offer, and it's been an honor and a privilege to serve with each and every one of you.  And I'm glad so many of you are here today.  (Applause.)

And to my friends and colleagues -- Susan and Sam -- congratulations, the nation is fortunate to have leaders of your intellect, compassion, character, and determination.  Susan, you'll be an outstanding National Security Advisor.  Sam, you'll be an outstanding Ambassador to the United Nations.  And we really appreciate your willingness to do this.  (Applause.)
Finally, and most importantly, to Cathy, Sarah and Teddy -- as the President said, this job has meant great sacrifices for you.  And each of you in your way has made a contribution to the country.  And I could not be more grateful.

So again, Mr. President, thank you for the opportunity -- the extraordinary opportunity to serve you and to serve our nation.  I stand here -- 36 years ago, almost to the day when I first came on the 18 acres of the White House to come to work, and I must tell you I leave this position much less cynical and never more optimistic about our country and its future.  Thank you very much, Mr. President.  (Applause.)

Susan.

AMBASSADOR RICE:  Mr. President, thank you so much.  I'm deeply honored and humbled to serve our country as your National Security Advisor.  I'm proud to have worked so closely with you for more than six years.  And I'm deeply grateful for your enduring confidence in me.
As you've outlined, we have vital opportunities to seize and ongoing challenges to confront.  We have much still to accomplish on behalf of the American people.  And I look forward to continuing to serve on your national security team to keep our nation strong and safe.

Tom, it's been a real honor to work with you again.  You have led with great dedication, smarts, and skill, and you leave a legacy of enormous accomplishment.  All of us around the principals’ table will miss you.  And I wish you and Cathy, and your family, all the very best.
Above all, I want to thank my own wonderful family for their unfailing support -- my mother, Lois; my wonderful husband, Ian; our children Jake and Maris; and my brother, John, have all been my strength and my greatest source of humor.  I'm also thinking today about my late father, who would have loved to be here.  I'm forever grateful to my family for their love and sacrifice.

I want to thank my remarkable colleagues at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations.  I am so proud of the work we've done together under your leadership, Mr. President, to advance America's interests at the United Nations.

And, Samantha, my friend -- warmest congratulations.  You're a tremendous colleague, and the United States will be extremely well served by your leadership at the United Nations.  And I'm so glad we get to continue to work together.

Mr. President, having participated in the national security decision-making process over the last four years, I admire the exemplary work done every day by our colleagues at State, Defense, the intelligence community, and across the government to make our nation more secure.  I look forward to working closely with you, your extraordinary national security team, our country's most experienced leaders from both parties, and your superb national security staff to protect the United States, advance our global leadership, and promote the values Americans hold dear.

Thank you very much.

Sam.  (Applause.)

MS. POWER:  Thank you, Mr. President.  From the day I met you and you told me that you had spent a chunk of your vacation reading a long, dark book on genocide -- (laughter) -- I knew you were a different kind of leader, and I knew I wanted to work for you.

It has been my privilege here at the White House to serve you, and it would be the honor of a lifetime to fight for American values and interests at the United Nations.  Now that I have two small children, Declan and Rian -- somewhere -- the stakes feel even higher.

Thank you, Tom and Susan.  I consider myself immensely fortunate these last four years to have collaborated with both of you.  There are two no more dedicated professionals on this Earth, no more strategic stewards of our foreign policy than these two individuals.  And I'm honored and immensely humbled to share the stage with you.

I moved to the United States from Ireland when I -- with my parents, who are here -- when I was 9 years old.  I remember very little about landing in Pittsburgh, except that I was sure I was at the largest airport in the history of the world.  I do remember what I was wearing -- a red, white and blue stars and stripes t-shirt.  It was the t-shirt I always wore in Ireland on special occasions.

Even as a little girl with a thick Dublin accent who had never been to America, I knew that the American flag was the symbol of fortune and of freedom.  But I quickly came to learn that to find opportunity in this country, one didn’t actually need to wear the flag, one just needed to try to live up to it.

For the next three months, I came home from school every day, as my mother can attest, my dad can attest, and I sat in front of the mirrors for hours, straining to drop my brogue so that I, too, could quickly speak and be American.

Not long ago, my husband, Cass Sunstein, came across a letter written toward the end of World War II by his father, Dick Sunstein, who was a Navy lieutenant.  Dick had happened to stop briefly in San Francisco after his two years fighting for this country in the Pacific, and he wrote to his family on April 25th, 1945, the very day that the nations of the world were coming together in San Francisco to establish the new United Nations.

And in this letter to my mother-in-law, who I never had the chance to meet, he wrote, excitedly, “Conference starts today.  The town is going wild with excitement.  It is a pleasure to be here for the opening few days.  Let’s pray that they accomplish something.”

Let’s pray that they accomplish something.  The question of what the United Nations can accomplish for the world and for the United States remains a pressing one.  I have seen U.N. aid workers enduring shellfire to deliver food to the people of Sudan.  Yet I’ve also see U.N.
peacekeepers fail to protect the people of Bosnia.  As the most powerful and inspiring country on this Earth, we have a critical role to play in insisting that the institution meet the necessities of our time.  It can do so only with American leadership.

It would be an incomparable privilege to earn the support of the Senate and to play a role in this essential effort, one on which our common security and common humanity depend.  Thank you.  (Applause.)

THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you, everybody.  (Applause.)

Hero Rats

A very interesting program. How a team of super-rodents, trained to sniff out the bacterial infection tuberculosis, are saving thousands of lives.

 

Source: Al Jazeera  The Cure
Giant rats are not an obvious ally in the fight against deadly diseases but, in Tanzania, scientists are training a team of super-rodents to sniff out the bacterial infection tuberculosis (TB).

TB kills more people than any other infectious disease, apart from HIV, and can be difficult to diagnose without costly, sophisticated equipment.

The charity Apopo is already using native African giant pouched rats to sniff out landmines, and now the intelligent rodents have shown a talent for identifying infections.

The rats have improved detection rates in local TB clinics by over 30 percent; can screen patients’ samples dozens of times faster than humans can; and will work - literally - for peanuts.

Dr Javid Abdelmoneim visits the world's first laboratory that uses rats to diagnose disease.

THE NORMAL WELL-TEMPERED MIND (Video/Transcipt)

A Conversation with Daniel C. Dennett

The vision of the brain as a computer, which I still champion, is changing so fast. The brain's a computer, but it's so different from any computer that you're used to. It's not like your desktop or your laptop at all, and it's not like your iPhone except in some ways. It's a much more interesting phenomenon. What Turing gave us for the first time (and without Turing you just couldn't do any of this) is a way of thinking about in a disciplined way and taking seriously phenomena that have, as I like to say, trillions of moving parts. Until late 20th century, nobody knew how to take seriously a machine with a trillion moving parts. It's just mind-boggling.  

 Source: Edge
THE NORMAL WELL-TEMPERED MIND
I'm trying to undo a mistake I made some years ago, and rethink the idea that the way to understand the mind is to take it apart into simpler minds and then take those apart into still simpler minds until you get down to minds that can be replaced by a machine. This is called homuncular functionalism, because you take the whole person. You break the whole person down into two or three or four or seven sub persons that are basically agents. They're homunculi, and this looks like a regress, but it's only a finite regress, because you take each of those in turn and you break it down into a group of stupider, more specialized homunculi, and you keep going until you arrive at parts that you can replace with a machine, and that's a great way of thinking about cognitive science. It's what good old-fashioned AI tried to do and still trying to do.

The idea is basically right, but when I first conceived of it, I made a big mistake. I was at that point enamored of the McCulloch-Pitts logical neuron. McCulloch and Pitts had put together the idea of a very simple artificial neuron, a computational neuron, which had multiple inputs and a single branching output and a threshold for firing, and the inputs were either inhibitory or excitatory. They proved that in principle a neural net made of these logical neurons could compute anything you wanted to compute. So this was very exciting. It meant that basically you could treat the brain as a computer and treat the neuron as a sort of basic switching element in the computer, and that was certainly an inspiring over-simplification. Everybody knew is was an over-simplification, but people didn't realize how much, and more recently it's become clear to me that it's a dramatic over-simplification, because each neuron, far from being a simple logical switch, is a little agent with an agenda, and they are much more autonomous and much more interesting than any switch.

The question is, what happens to your ideas about computational architecture when you think of individual neurons not as dutiful slaves or as simple machines but as agents that have to be kept in line and that have to be properly rewarded and that can form coalitions and cabals and organizations and alliances?  This vision of the brain as a sort of social arena of politically warring forces seems like sort of an amusing fantasy at first, but is now becoming something that I take more and more seriously, and it's fed by a lot of different currents.

Evolutionary biologist David Haig has some lovely papers on intrapersonal conflicts where he's talking about how even at the level of the genetics, even at the level of the conflict between the genes you get from your mother and the genes you get from your father, the so-called madumnal and padumnal genes, those are in opponent relations and if they get out of whack, serious imbalances can happen that show up as particular psychological anomalies.

We're beginning to come to grips with the idea that your brain is not this well-organized hierarchical control system where everything is in order, a very dramatic vision of bureaucracy. In fact, it's much more like anarchy with some elements of democracy.

Sometimes you can achieve stability and mutual aid and a sort of calm united front, and then everything is hunky-dory, but then it's always possible for things to get out of whack and for one alliance or another to gain control, and then you get obsessions and delusions and so forth.

You begin to think about the normal well-tempered mind, in effect, the well-organized mind, as an achievement, not as the base state, something that is only achieved when all is going well, but still, in the general realm of humanity, most of us are pretty well put together most of the time. This gives a very different vision of what the architecture is like, and I'm just trying to get my head around how to think about that.

What we're seeing right now in cognitive science is something that I've been anticipating for years, and now it's happening, and it's happening so fast I can't keep up with it. We're now drowning in data, and we're also happily drowning in bright young people who have grown up with this stuff and for whom it's just second nature to think in these quite abstract computational terms, and it simply wasn't possible even for experts to get their heads around all these different topics 30 years ago. Now a suitably motivated kid can arrive at college already primed to go on these issues. It's very exciting, and they're just going to run away from us, and it's going to be fun to watch.

The vision of the brain as a computer, which I still champion, is changing so fast. The brain's a computer, but it's so different from any computer that you're used to. It's not like your desktop or your laptop at all, and it's not like your iPhone except in some ways. It's a much more interesting phenomenon. What Turing gave us for the first time (and without Turing you just couldn't do any of this) is a way of thinking in a disciplined way about phenomena that have, as I like to say, trillions of moving parts. Until late 20th century, nobody knew how to take seriously a machine with a trillion moving parts. It's just mind-boggling.

You couldn't do it, but computer science gives us the ideas, the concepts of levels, virtual machines implemented in virtual machines implemented in virtual machines and so forth. We have these nice ideas of recursive reorganization of which your iPhone is just one example and a very structured and very rigid one at that.

We're getting away from the rigidity of that model, which was worth trying for all it was worth. You go for the low-hanging fruit first. First, you try to make minds as simple as possible. You make them as much like digital computers, as much like von Neumann machines, as possible. It doesn't work. Now, we know why it doesn't work pretty well. So you're going to have a parallel architecture because, after all, the brain is obviously massively parallel.

It's going to be a connectionist network. Although we know many of the talents of connectionist networks, how do you knit them together into one big fabric that can do all the things minds do? Who's in charge? What kind of control system? Control is the real key, and you begin to realize that control in brains is very different from control in computers. Control in your commercial computer is very much a carefully designed top-down thing.   
     
You really don't have to worry about one part of your laptop going rogue and trying out something on its own that the rest of the system doesn't want to do. No, they're all slaves. If they're agents, they're slaves. They are prisoners. They have very clear job descriptions. They get fed every day. They don't have to worry about where the energy's coming from, and they're not ambitious. They just do what they're asked to do and do it brilliantly with only the slightest tint of comprehension. You get all the power of computers out of these mindless little robotic slave prisoners, but that's not the way your brain is organized.   
     
Each neuron is imprisoned in your brain. I now think of these as cells within cells, as cells within prison cells. Realize that every neuron in your brain, every human cell in your body (leaving aside all the symbionts), is a direct descendent of eukaryotic cells that lived and fended for themselves for about a billion years as free-swimming, free-living little agents. They fended for themselves, and they survived.
          
They had to develop an awful lot of know-how, a lot of talent, a lot of self-protective talent to do that. When they joined forces into multi-cellular creatures, they gave up a lot of that. They became, in effect, domesticated. They became part of larger, more monolithic organizations. My hunch is that that's true in general. We don't have to worry about our muscle cells rebelling against us, or anything like that. When they do, we call it cancer, but in the brain I think that (and this is my wild idea) maybe only in one species, us, and maybe only in the obviously more volatile parts of the brain, the cortical areas, some little switch has been thrown in the genetics that, in effect, makes our neurons a little bit feral, a little bit like what happens when you let sheep or pigs go feral, and they recover their wild talents very fast.

Maybe a lot of the neurons in our brains are not just capable but, if you like, motivated to be more adventurous, more exploratory or risky in the way they comport themselves, in the way they live their lives. They're struggling amongst themselves with each other for influence, just for staying alive, and there's competition going on between individual neurons. As soon as that happens, you have room for cooperation to create alliances, and I suspect that a more free-wheeling, anarchic organization is the secret of our greater capacities of creativity, imagination, thinking outside the box and all that, and the price we pay for it is our susceptibility to obsessions, mental illnesses, delusions and smaller problems.

We got risky brains that are much riskier than the brains of other mammals even, even more risky than the brains of chimpanzees, and that this could be partly a matter of a few simple mutations in control genes that release some of the innate competitive talent that is still there in the genomes of the individual neurons. But I don't think that genetics is the level to explain this. You need culture to explain it.

This, I speculate, is a response to our invention of culture; culture creates a whole new biosphere, in effect, a whole new cultural sphere of activity where there's opportunities that don't exist for any other brain tissues in any other creatures, and that this exploration of this space of cultural possibility is what we need to do to explain how the mind works.

Everything I just said is very speculative. I'd be thrilled if 20 percent of it was right. It's an idea, a way of thinking about brains and minds and culture that is, to me, full of promise, but it may not pan out. I don't worry about that, actually. I'm content to explore this, and if it turns out that I'm just wrong, I'll say, "Oh, okay. I was wrong. It was fun thinking about it," but I think I might be right.

I'm not myself equipped to work on a lot of the science; other people could work on it, and they already are in a way. The idea of selfish neurons has already been articulated by Sebastian Seung of MIT in a brilliant keynote lecture he gave at Society for Neuroscience in San Diego a few years ago. I thought, oh, yeah, selfish neurons, selfish synapses. Cool. Let's push that and see where it leads. But there are many ways of exploring this. One of the still unexplained, so far as I can tell, and amazing features of the brain is its tremendous plasticity.

Mike Merzenich sutured a monkey's fingers together so that it didn't need as much cortex to represent two separate individual digits, and pretty soon the cortical regions that were representing those two digits shrank, making that part of the cortex available to use for other things. When the sutures were removed, the cortical regions soon resumed pretty much their earlier dimensions. If you blindfold yourself for eight weeks, as Alvaro Pascual-Leone does in his experiments, you find that your visual cortex starts getting adapted for Braille, for haptic perception, for touch.
The way the brain spontaneously reorganizes itself in response to trauma of this sort, or just novel experience, is itself one of the most amazing features of the brain, and if you don't have an architecture that can explain how that could happen and why that is, your model has a major defect. I think you really have to think in terms of individual neurons as micro-agents, and ask what's in it for them?

Why should these neurons be so eager to pitch in and do this other work just because they don't have a job? Well, they're out of work. They're unemployed, and if you're unemployed, you're not getting your neuromodulators. If you're not getting your neuromodulators, your neuromodulator receptors are going to start disappearing, and pretty soon you're going to be really out of work, and then you're going to die.

In this regard, I think of John Holland’s work on the emergence of order. His example is New York City. You can always find a place where you can get gefilte fish, or sushi, or saddles or just about anything under the sun you want, and you don't have to worry about a state bureaucracy that is making sure that supplies get through. No. The market takes care of it. The individual web of entrepreneurship and selfish agency provides a host of goods and services, and is an extremely sensitive instrument that responds to needs very quickly.

Until the lights go out. Well, we're all at the mercy of the power man. I am quite concerned that we're becoming hyper-fragile as a civilization, and we're becoming so dependent on technologies that are not as reliable as they should be, that have so many conditions that have to be met for them to work, that we may specialize ourselves into some very serious jams. But in the meantime, thinking about the self-organizational powers of the brain as very much like the self-organizational powers of a city is not a bad idea. It just reeks of over-enthusiastic metaphor, though, and it's worth reminding ourselves that this idea has been around since Plato.

Plato analogizes the mind of a human being to the state. You've got the rulers and the guardians and the workers. This idea that a person is made of lots of little people is comically simpleminded in some ways, but that doesn't mean it isn't, in a sense, true. We shouldn't shrink from it just because it reminds us of simpleminded versions that have been long discredited. Maybe some not so simpleminded version is the truth.

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There are a lot of cultural fleas
My next major project will be trying to take another hard look at cultural evolution and look at the different views of it and see if I can achieve a sort of bird's eye view and establish what role, if any, is there for memes or something like memes and what are the other forces that are operating. We are going to have to have a proper scientific perspective on cultural change. The old-fashioned, historical narratives are wonderful, and they’re full of gripping detail, and they're even sometimes right, but they only cover a small proportion of the phenomena. They only cover the tip of the iceberg.

Basically, the model that we have and have used for several thousand years is the model that culture consists of treasures, cultural treasures. Just like money, or like tools and houses, you bequeath them to your children, and you amass them, and you protect them, and because they're valuable, you maintain them and prepare them, and then you hand them on to the next generation and some societies are rich, and some societies are poor, but it's all goods. I think that vision is true of only the tip of the iceberg. 
    
Most of the regularities in culture are not treasures. It's not all opera and science and fortifications and buildings and ships. It includes all kinds of bad habits and ugly patterns and stupid things that don't really matter but that somehow have got a grip on a society and that are part of the ecology of the human species in the same way that mud, dirt and grime and fleas are part of the world that we live in. They're not our treasures. We may give our fleas to our children, but we're not trying to. It's not a blessing. It's a curse, and I think there are a lot of cultural fleas. There are lots of things that we pass on without even noticing that we're doing it and, of course, language is a prime case of this, very little deliberate intentional language instruction goes on or has to go on.

Kids that are raised with parents pointing out individual objects and saying, "See, it's a ball. It's red. Look, Johnny, it's a red ball, and this is a cow, and look at the horsy" learn to speak, but so do kids who don’t have that patient instruction. You don't have to do that. Your kids are going to learn ball and red and horsy and cow just fine without that, even if they're quite severely neglected. That's not a nice observation to make, but it's true. It's almost impossible not to learn language if you don't have some sort of serious pathology in your brain.
Compare that with chimpanzees. There are hundreds of chimpanzees who have spent their whole lives in human captivity. They've been institutionalized. They've been like prisoners, and in the course of the day they hear probably about as many words as a child does. They never show any interest. They never apparently get curious about what those sounds are for. They can hear all the speech, but it's like the rustling of the leaves. It just doesn't register on them as worth attention.

But kids are tuned for that, and it might be a very subtle tuning. I can imagine a few small genetic switches, which, if they were just in a slightly different position, would make chimpanzees just as pantingly eager to listen to language as human babies are, but they're not, and what a difference it makes in their world! They never get to share discoveries the way we do and to share our learning. That, I think, is the single feature about human beings that distinguishes us most clearly from all others: we don't have to reinvent the wheel. Our kids get the benefit of not just what grandpa and grandma and great grandpa and great grandma knew. They get the benefit of basically what everybody in the world knew in the years when they go to school. They don't have to invent calculus or long division or maps or the wheel or fire. They get all that for free. It just comes as part of the environment. They get incredible treasures, cognitive treasures, just by growing up.

I've got a list as long as my arm of stuff that I've been trying to get time to read. I'm going to Paris in December and talking at the Dan Sperber conference, and I'm going to be addressing Dan's concerns about cultural evolution. I think he's got some great ideas and some ideas I think he's wrong about. So that's a very fruitful disagreement for me.

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A lot of naïve thinking by scientists about free will
"Moving Naturalism Forward" was a nice workshop that Sean Carroll put together out in Stockbridge a couple of weeks ago, and it was really interesting. I learned a lot. I learned more about how hard it is to do some of these things and that's always useful knowledge, especially for a philosopher.

If we take seriously, as I think we should, the role that Socrates proposed for us as midwives of thinking, then we want to know what the blockades are, what the imagination blockades are, what people have a hard time thinking about, and among the things that struck me about the Stockbridge conference were the signs of people really having a struggle to take seriously some ideas which I think they should take seriously.

I was struggling, too, because there were scientific ideas that I found hard to get my head around. It's interesting that you can have a group of people who are trying to communicate. They're not showing off. They're interested in finding points of common agreement, and they're still having trouble, and that's something worth seeing and knowing what that's about, because then you go into the rest of your forays sadder but wiser. Well, sort of. You at least are alert to how hard it can be to implant a perspective or a way of thinking in somebody else's mind.

I realized I really have my work cut out for me in a way that I had hoped not to discover. There's still a lot of naïve thinking by scientists about free will. I've been talking about it quite a lot, and I do my best to undo some bad thinking by various scientists. I’ve had some modest success, but there's a lot more that has to be done on that front. I think it's very attractive to scientists to think that here's this several-millennia-old philosophical idea, free will, and they can just hit it out of the ballpark, which I’m sure would be nice if it was true.

It's just not true. I think they're well intentioned. They're trying to clarify, but they're really missing a lot of important points. I want a naturalistic theory of human beings and free will and moral responsibility as much as anybody there, but I think you've got to think through the issues a lot better than they've done, and this, happily, shows that there's some real work for philosophers.

Philosophers have done some real work that the scientists jolly well should know. Here's an area where it was one of the few times in my career when I wanted to say to a bunch of scientists, "Look. You have some reading to do in philosophy before you hold forth on this. There really is some good reading to do on these topics, and you need to educate yourselves."

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A combination of arrogance and cravenness
The figures about American resistance to evolution are still depressing, and you finally have to realize that there's something structural. It's not that people are stupid, and I think it's clear that people, everybody, me, you, we all have our authorities, our go-to people whose word we trust. If you want to question about the economic situation in Greece, for instance, you need to check it out with somebody whose opinion on that we think is worth taking seriously. We don't try to work it out for ourselves. We find some expert that we trust, and right around the horn, whatever the issues are, we have our experts, and so a lot of people have as their experts on matters of science, they have their pastors. This is their local expert.   

I don't blame them. I wish they were more careful about vetting their experts and making sure that they found good experts. They wouldn't choose an investment advisor, I think, as thoughtlessly as they go along with their pastor. I blame the pastors, but where do they get their ideas? Well, they get them from the hierarchies of their churches. Where do they get their ideas? Up at the top, I figure there's some people that really should be ashamed of themselves. They know better.

They're lying, and when I get a chance, I try to ask them that. I say, "Doesn't it bother you that your grandchildren are going to want to know why you thought you had to lie to everybody about evolution?" I mean, really. They're lies. They've got to know that these are lies. They're not that stupid, and I just would love them to worry about what their grandchildren and great grandchildren would say about how their ancestors were so craven and so arrogant. It's a combination of arrogance and cravenness.

We now have to start working on that structure of experts and thinking, why does that persist? How can it be that so many influential, powerful, wealthy, in-the-public people can be so confidently wrong about evolutionary biology? How did that happen? Why does it happen? Why does it persist? It really is a bit of a puzzle if you think about how they'd be embarrassed not to know that the world is round. I think that would be deeply embarrassing to be that benighted, and they'd realize it. They'd be embarrassed not to know that HIV is the vector of AIDS. They'd be embarrassed to not understand the way the tides are produced by the gravitational forces of the moon and the sun. They may not know the details, but they know that the details are out there. They could learn them in 20 minutes if they wanted to. How did they get themselves in the position where they could so blithely trust people who they'd never buy stocks and bonds from? They'd never trust a child's operation to a doctor that was as ignorant and as ideological as these people. It is really strange. I haven't got to the bottom of that.

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This pernicious sort of lazy relativism
A few years ago, Linda LaScola, who's a very talented investigator, questioner, interviewer, and I started a project where we found closeted non-believing pastors who still had churches and would speak in confidence to her. She's a very good interviewer, and she got and earned their trust, and then they really let their hair down and explained how they got in the position they're in and what it's like. What is it like to be a pastor who has to get up and say the creed every Sunday when you don't believe that anymore? And they're really caught in a nasty trap.
When we published the first study, there was a lot of reaction, and one of the amazing things was the dogs that didn't bark. Nobody said we were making it up or it wasn't a problem. Every religious leader knows. It's their dirty little secret. They knew jolly well that what we were looking at was the tip of an iceberg; that there are a lot of pastors out there who simply don't believe what their parishioners think they believe, and some of them are really suffering, and some of them aren't, and that's interesting, too.

Phase two we've spread out and looked at a few more, and we've also started looking at seminary professors, the people that teach the pastors what they learn and often are instrumental in starting them down the path of this sort of systematic hypocrisy where they learn in seminary that there's what you can talk about in the seminary, and there's what you can say from the pulpit, and those are two different things. I think that this phenomenon of systematic hypocrisy is very serious. It is the structural problem in religion today, and churches deal with it in various ways, none of them very good.

The reason they can't deal with them well is they have a principle, which is a little bit like the Hippocratic oath of medicine. First, do no harm. Well, they learn this, and they learn that from the pulpit the one thing they mustn't do is shake anybody's faith. If they've got a parish full of literalists, young earth ceationists, literal Bible believers who believe that all the miracles in the Bible really happened, and that the resurrection is the literal truth and all that, they must not disillusion those people. But then they also realize that a lot of other parishioners are not so sure; they think it's all sort of metaphor. Symbolic, yes, but they don't take it literally true.           
How do they thread the needle so that they don't offend the sophisticates in their congregation by insisting on the literal truth of the book of Genesis, let's say, while still not scaring, betraying, pulling the rug out from under the more naïve and literal-minded of their parishioners? There's no good solution to that problem as far as we can see, since they have this unspoken rule that they should not upset, undo, subvert the faith of anybody in the church.

This means that there's a sort of enforced hypocrisy where the pastors speak from the pulpit quite literally, and if you weren't listening very carefully, you’d think: oh my gosh, this person really believes all this stuff. But they're putting in just enough hints for the sophisticates in the congregation so that the sophisticates are supposed to understand: Oh, no. This is all just symbolic. This is all just metaphorical. And that's the way they want it, but of course, they could never admit it. You couldn't put a little neon sign up over the pulpit that says, "Just metaphor, folks, just metaphor." It would destroy the whole thing.

You can't admit that it's just metaphor even when you insist when anybody asks that it's just metaphor, and so this professional doubletalk persists, and if you study it for a while the way Linda and I have been doing, you come to realize that's what it is, and that means they've lost track of what it means to tell the truth. Oh, there are so many different kinds of truth. Here's where postmodernism comes back to haunt us. What a pernicious bit of intellectual vandalism that movement was! It gives license to this pernicious sort of lazy relativism.

One of the most chilling passages in that great book by William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, is where he talks about soldiers in the military: "Far better is it for an army to be too savage, too cruel, too barbarous, thant to possess too much sentimentality and human reasonableness.” This is a very sobering, to me, a very sobering reflection. Let's talk about when we went into Iraq. There was Rumsfeld saying, "Oh, we don't need a big force. We don't need a big force. We can do this on the cheap," and there were other people, retrospectively we can say they were wiser, who said, "Look, if you're going to do this at all, you want to go in there with such overpowering, such overwhelming numbers and force that you can really intimidate the population, and you can really maintain the peace and just get the population to sort of roll over, and that way actually less people get killed, less people get hurt. You want to come in with an overwhelming show of force."     

We didn't do that, and look at the result. Terrible. Maybe we couldn't do it. Maybe Rumsfeld knew that the American people would never stand for it. Well, then, they shouldn't go in, because look what happened. But the principle is actually one that's pretty well understood.  If you don't want to have a riot, have four times more police there than you think you need. That's the way not to have a riot and nobody gets hurt because people are not foolish enough to face those kinds of odds. But they don't think about that with regard to religion, and it's very sobering. I put it this way.     

Suppose that we face some horrific, terrible enemy, another Hitler or something really, really bad, and here's two different armies that we could use to defend ourselves. I'll call them the Gold Army and the Silver Army; same numbers, same training, same weaponry. They're all armored and armed as well as we can do. The difference is that the Gold Army has been convinced that God is on their side and this is the cause of righteousness, and it's as simple as that. The Silver Army is entirely composed of economists. They’re all making side insurance bets and calculating the odds of everything.

Which army do you want on the front lines? It's very hard to say you want the economists, but think of what that means. What you're saying is we'll just have to hoodwink all these young people into some false beliefs for their own protection and for ours. It's extremely hypocritical. It is a message that I recoil from, the idea that we should indoctrinate our soldiers. In the same way that we inoculate them against diseases, we should inoculate them against the economists’—or philosophers’—sort of thinking, since it might lead to them to think: am I so sure this cause is just? Am I really prepared to risk my life to protect? Do I have enough faith in my commanders that they're doing the right thing? What if I'm clever enough and thoughtful enough to figure out a better battle plan, and I realize that this is futile? Am I still going to throw myself into the trenches? It's a dilemma that I don't know what to do about, although I think we should confront it at least

President Barack Obama Weekly Address June 01, 2013 (Video/Transcript)

Remarks of President Barack Obama

 Weekly Address 

The White House 

June 1, 2013

Hi, everybody. Over the past four and a half years, we’ve been fighting our way back from an economic crisis and punishing recession that cost millions of Americans their jobs, their homes, and the sense of security they’d worked so hard to build.

And thanks to the grit and determination of the American people, our businesses have now created nearly 7 million new jobs over the past 38 months.

An auto industry that was flatlining is once again the heartbeat of American manufacturing – with Americans buying more cars than we have in five years.

Within the next few months, we’re projected to begin producing more of our own crude oil at home than we buy from other countries – the first time that’s happened in 16 years.

Deficits that were growing for years are now shrinking at the fastest rate in decades. The rise of health care costs is slowing, too.

And a housing market that was in tatters is showing new signs of real strength. Sales are rising. Foreclosures are declining. Construction is expanding. And home prices that are rising at the fastest rate in nearly seven years are helping a lot of families breathe a lot easier.

Now we need to do more.

This week, my administration announced that we’re extending a program to help more responsible families modify their mortgages so they can stay in their homes.

But to keep our housing market and our economy growing, Congress needs to step up and do its part. Members of Congress will be coming back next week for an important month of work. We’ve got to keep this progress going until middle-class families start regaining that sense of security. And we can’t let partisan politics get in the way.

Congress should pass a law giving every responsible homeowner the chance to save about $3,000 a year on their mortgage by refinancing at historically low interest rates.

Congress should put more Americans to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, like the one that collapsed last week in Washington state. We’d all be safer, and the unemployment rate would fall faster.

And Congress should fix our broken immigration system by passing commonsense reform that continues to strengthen our borders; holds employers accountable; provides a pathway to earned citizenship; and also modernizes our legal immigration system so that we’re reuniting families and attracting the highly-skilled entrepreneurs and engineers who will help our economy grow.

So there are a lot of reasons to feel optimistic about where we’re headed as a country – especially after all we’ve fought through together. We’ve just got to keep going. Because we’ve got more good jobs to create. We’ve got more kids to educate. We’ve got more doors of opportunity to open for anyone who’s willing to work hard enough to walk through those doors.

And if we work together, I’m as confident as I’ve ever been that we’ll get to where we need to be.

Thanks and have a great weekend.