Live Not By Lies is thought to be the last thing that Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote before he was arrested for the last time. As such, it is a bit of history. But it also addresses an issue that is timeless.
Over the past several years, nursing homes have become dumping grounds for young and middle-age people with mental illness, according to Associated Press interviews and an analysis of data from all 50 states. And that has proved a prescription for violence, as Jackson’s case and others across the country illustrate.
Younger, stronger residents with schizophrenia, depression or bipolar disorder are living beside frail senior citizens, and sometimes taking their rage out on them.
“Sadly, we’re seeing the tragic results of the failure of federal and state governments to provide appropriate treatment and housing for those with mental illnesses and to provide a safe environment for the frail elderly,” said Janet Wells, director of public policy for the National Citizens’ Coalition for Nursing Home Reform.
Numbers obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and prepared exclusively for the AP by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services show nearly 125,000 young and middle-aged adults with serious mental illness lived in U.S. nursing homes last year.
That was a 41 percent increase from 2002, when nursing homes housed nearly 89,000 mentally ill people ages 22 to 64. Most states saw increases, with Utah, Nevada, Missouri, Alabama and Texas showing the steepest climbs.
Younger mentally ill people now make up more than 9 percent of the nation’s nearly 1.4 million nursing home residents, up from 6 percent in 2002.
The good news is that the two largest corporate credit unions — cesspits of toxic waste which loaded up on mortgage-backed securities for no good reason and in violation of their raison d’etre — have been “conserved” (taken over) by the NCUA, the credit-union equivalent of the FDIC, which has finally woken up to the fact that the current management at these shops is utterly incompetent and can’t be trusted.
The bad news is that the NCUA is still committed to the disastrous decision it made back in January, to whack 56 basis points off the net worth of every federal credit union in the country, as well as reducing those credit unions’ return on assets by 62 basis points, in an attempt to bail out these selfsame untrustworthy corporates.
I don’t know enough about the issue to have any opinion. But the rest of Felix’s post goes on to make some interesting points about how this will affect credit unions. If he is right, healthy credit unions are going to take a hit in order to rescue the big irresponsible credit unions that just went under.
Two top advisers to Alan G. Hevesi, the former state comptroller, were charged Thursday in a 123-count grand jury indictment that said they had turned New York’s $122 billion pension fund into a criminal enterprise. The scheme netted them and other Hevesi associates tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks from firms investing the fund’s money, the indictment said.
The Labor Department reported Wednesday that consumer inflation rose 0.4 percent in February, the biggest one-month jump since a 0.7 percent rise in July. Two-thirds of last month’s increase, which was slightly more than analysts expected, reflected a big jump in gasoline pump prices.
Core inflation, which excludes food and energy, rose 0.2 percent in February, also slightly higher than the 0.1 percent rise economists expected.
I wanted to highlight one trend that I glossed over on Monday, namely that foreign demand for long-term Treasuries has disappeared over the last few months.
This is a problem. But the Fed is going to solve it. From a Federal Reserve press release….
To provide greater support to mortgage lending and housing markets, the Committee decided today to increase the size of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet further by purchasing up to an additional $750 billion of agency mortgage-backed securities, bringing its total purchases of these securities to up to $1.25 trillion this year, and to increase its purchases of agency debt this year by up to $100 billion to a total of up to $200 billion. Moreover, to help improve conditions in private credit markets, the Committee decided to purchase up to $300 billion of longer-term Treasury securities over the next six months.
Buying agencies is old hat. The Federal Reserves started doing that around the same time foreign central banks stopped buying them. It is the long dated treasuries that are new. The Belmont Club has a round up of how various newspapers are reacting to this news.
What will the effects of this be? The Times reports in a different context….
The Bank of England believes that it may take “many months” before the full benefits of its radical strategy of creating new money to boost the economy will be felt, it emerged today.
The same could be said for any negative effects.
Huge news for real-life ray guns: Electric lasers have hit battlefield strength for the first time — paving the way for energy weapons to go to war.
In recent test-blasts, Pentagon-researchers at Northrop Grumman managed to get its 105 kilowatts of power out of their laser — past the “100kW threshold [that] has been viewed traditionally as a proof of principle for ‘weapons grade’ power levels for high-energy lasers,” Northrop’s vice president of directed energy systems, Dan Wildt, said in a statement.
The Feb. 21 attack on police headquarters in coastal Zihuatanejo, which injured four people, fit a disturbing trend of Mexico’s drug wars. Traffickers have escalated their arms race, acquiring military-grade weapons, including hand grenades, grenade launchers, armor-piercing munitions and antitank rockets with firepower far beyond the assault rifles and pistols that have dominated their arsenals.
The title is sarcastic for those who have trouble with such things.
The Federal Reserve reported that industrial production fell 1.4% in February, and output in February was 11.2% below February 2008. The capacity utilization rate for total industry fell to 70.9%, matching the historical low set in December 1982.
He also has a post on the record lows set by New York’s manufacturing index.