Competition For The "Sustainability" Award: New York City?

Mayor de Blasio must have heard about Manhattan Contrarian winning the "World's Most Sustainable Web Site" award, because from the moment that award was announced on Tuesday (April 21) literally ever second word out of the guy's mouth has been "sustainable."  But can New York City actually compete with the Manhattan Contrarian for coveted "sustainability" brownie points?  Not a chance!  In fact, de Blasio seems to be making a ridiculous parody of himself as he tries to compete on the elite "sustainability" battlefield.  (Or was he already a ridiculous parody of himself and just made it a little more ridiculous by tacking the word "sustainable" on to every sentence he utters?  You be the judge!)

So as reported in the New York Times here, on Wednesday April 22 de Blasio announced his new "OneNYC" plan for the next several decades for New York City.  The speech announcing the plan can be summarized as ". . . sustainable . . . sustainability . . . sustainable . . . sustainability . . . blah, blah, blah, blah, blah . . . ."  Or, to take an actual quote from the Times article:

“Environmental sustainability and economic sustainability have to walk hand in hand,” he said. “Some of my brothers and sisters in the environmental movement don’t get that yet.”  He added, “A beautifully sustainable city that is the playground of the rich doesn’t work for us.”

"Economic sustainability" -- Wait a minute, that's a new one.  You ask, what the heck is it?  The very fact that you ask the question indicates that you don't understand the first thing about "sustainability."  Obviously, it means whatever the cool people want it to mean at any given moment.  But maybe can we get a clue what he's talking about by taking a look at the OneNYC document?

Good luck with that.  The Times article discusses the document as if it's something real, like with actual text and paragraphs and things like that.  Not so much.  Here it is.  I'd say it's a lot of bright colors with a few sentences or phrases consisting of the most banal of possible clichés scattered around each page.  It's not quite as low as kindergarten level, but maybe second grade.  A few snippets from the first page will give you some flavor: "We must act boldly to build on our strengths and confront our challenges."  "The goals we envision and the actions we take today will define our city's future."  "Our Growing, Thriving City" "Our Just And Equitable City" "A Sustainable City."  (You knew the word "sustainable" would be there at least once!)

But still no clues on what "economic sustainability" might mean.  For that, try the link called "Our Just And Equitable City." Go there and you'll find exactly two sentences that give some idea what they're talking about:

When combined with OneNYC anti-poverty initiatives, we will move 800,000 people (10% of the city's population) out from poverty or near poverty over the next decade. This is transformative change.

So does "economic sustainability" mean "moving people out of poverty"?  The concept doesn't seem to bear a relationship to any meaning of the word "sustainability" that you were previously familiar with.  But anyway, didn't Lyndon Johnson promise to end poverty 50 years ago, only to see the percentage of people said to be in poverty in this country remain flat ever since, even as the taxpayers threw $20 trillion or so at the project?

Permit me for a moment to examine critically this idea that a New York City governed by de Blasio and his progressive pals is actually going to "move 800,000 people out of poverty" over the next decade.  This is the New York City that already spends more on anti-poverty programs than anywhere else, and what do we have to show for it?  The City's official "poverty rate" is right there on the same page as that last link.  It's 21.3% according to this very document.  That's a solid 6+ points above the average for the rest of the country, where they don't come close to our smorgasbord of anti-poverty programs.  Can't we see that something here is not working?

And then take a look at the proposals here that are supposedly going to accomplish the goal.  It's just doubling down on the exact same stuff that got us where we are.  "Raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour would be a powerful force in reducing poverty."  How so exactly?  There's not a word of analysis here as to whether that is true or not.  I think it is highly likely that raising the minimum wage, particularly by such a dramatic amount, would increase measured poverty.  Why?  Because very few minimum wage workers are in poverty now (in a small family full time minimum wage work is sufficient to put you above the poverty line, and in larger families with minimum wage workers there are usually other workers too), and because some workers at the current minimum will lose their jobs and go into poverty.  It's just how the numbers work: no job is poverty; full time minimum wage work is not poverty.  Are they too uninformed to know this?  While you're puzzling over that one, consider the other proposal on this page that supposedly will help get 800,000 people out of poverty over the next decade: "Pre-K for All."  Do they think we don't know that nobody who attends their new universal pre-K within the next decade will be older than 15 when the decade is up?

In truth they have zero interest in reducing the number of people said to be in poverty.  Any reduction in poverty will be in spite of, and not because of, their policies.  The shimmering distant mirage of 800,000 fewer people in poverty ten years from now is just the sales tool to convince the public to spend yet additional billions on things that obviously will not improve the designated metrics, not to mention the lives of the people in question.  

Compare this to the actual, real accomplishments of the Manhattan Contrarian.  For example, at Manhattan Contrarian we always eat locally-sourced food, except when we don't.  Now that's real sustainability! 

Manhattan Contrarian Named World's Most "Sustainable" Web Site

And who, you may ask, gave us that prestigious honor?  We gave it to ourselves, of course!  Why not?

If you've been having an actual life and plodding away at a real job lately, you may have missed that "sustainability" is the latest obsession in the precincts of the Left, particularly academia.  But what does it actually mean?  That's the great thing about it -- nobody knows!

For example, the big thing now if you are an academic institution is that you must divest your endowment from investments in companies in the fossil fuel business.  If you have ever taken an economics course, or even thought about the subject for a few minutes, you will realize that divestment from fossil fuels by a few or even many academic institutions will have exactly zero effect on the production and consumption of fossil fuels, although it might slightly raise the returns on investments in fossil fuels for those still willing to make them, of which there will assuredly be plenty.  So this is just a completely futile symbolic gesture.  Then why divest?  Because it's "sustainable"!

George Will has a great column a few days ago making fun of the campus "sustainability" movement, titled "Sustainability Gone Mad On College Campuses."  Will in turn refers to a report just out from the National Association of Scholars calling the "sustainability" movement "higher education's new fundamentalism."  Why fundamentalism?  Here's Will's take:

Like many religions’ premises, the sustainability movement’s premises are more assumed than demonstrated. Second, weighing the costs of obedience to sustainability’s commandments is considered unworthy. Third, the sustainability crusade supplies acolytes with a worldview that infuses their lives with purpose and meaning. Fourth, the sustainability movement uses apocalyptic rhetoric to express its eschatology. Fifth, the church of sustainability seeks converts, encourages conformity to orthodoxy and regards rival interpretations of reality as heretical impediments to salvation.

And he hasn't even gotten to the wonderful feeling of superiority over the lesser humans that you can get from engaging in completely futile symbolic gestures.  But he does get to the real point, which is promoting socialism and bureaucratic control:

 The unvarying progressive agenda is for government to supplant markets in allocating wealth and opportunity. “Sustainability” swaddles this agenda in “science,” as progressives understand it — “settled” findings that would be grim if they did not mandate progressivism. 

Don't believe that sustainability has gone mad on campuses?  Check out the endless breastbeating issuing from my own degree-granters, Yale and Harvard.  Here is Yale's "sustainability" web page, and here is Harvard's.  Would you think that these seemingly prestigious institutions would be capable of at least a smidgeon of critical thinking?  Forget it. Just today I got an email from Yale reporting that a task force had recommended that Yale adopt its very own carbon charge "as an incentive to reduce Yale's carbon emissions."  Do they even know that China and India between them plan to build 1000 or so new coal power stations over about the next decade?  But of course, facts like that are irrelevant.  This is about performing meaningless gestures to demonstrate that you are part of the cool group.

So of course, performing meaningless gestures is exactly what the Manhattan Contrarian has done to win its prestigious "most sustainable web site" award.  For example, we live in Manhattan!  Here in Manhattan, we always eat locally produced food, except when we don't.  Hey, it's cold here half the year -- you can't expect us to eat nothing but potatoes and carrots all winter!  We save huge amounts on heat and air conditioning by having our home be right adjacent to the neighbors.  We drive a fraction as much as you guys in the hinterlands.  And that's just the start.  For example, unlike climate campaigner Barack Obama, we didn't take a flight on Air Force One to Florida to make a speech for Earth Day!  And unlike Leonardo di Caprio, we didn't take six flights on private jets in the past month! Think of the thousands of gallons of evil fossil fuel we have saved.  Clearly the Manhattan Contrarian is a worthy recipient of the "world's most sustainable web site" award. 

How To Tell News From Propaganda

Mike Bloomberg makes no secret about his being a climate campaigner, including a letter to the editor in today's WSJ justifying his efforts to close coal power plants.  On the other hand, Bloomberg News purports to be an objective news source that puts out reliable factual information.  But somehow the climate campaign corrupts everything it touches.

Within the past week two different stories on recent temperatures have occupied prominent positions on the front page of the Bloomberg News website.  On April 10 there was "California's New Era Of Heat Destroys All Previous Records"; and then yesterday we had "Global Temperature Records Just Got Crushed Again."  This stuff can sound pretty scary.  From the California story:

What's happening in California right now is shattering modern temperature measurements—as well as tree-ring records that stretch back more than 1,000 years. It's no longer just a record-hot month or a record-hot year that California faces. It's a stack of broken records leading to the worst drought that's ever beset the Golden State. . .The last 12 months were a full 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit (2.5 Celsius) above the 20th century average.

As scary as that sounds, the problem they have is that some of us have read a few other things.  For example, how about that "worst drought that's ever beset the Golden State"?  Really?  Here's something from the San Jose Mercury News last year:

Through studies of tree rings, sediment and other natural evidence, researchers have documented multiple droughts in California that lasted 10 or 20 years in a row during the past 1,000 years -- compared to the mere three-year [now four] duration of the current dry spell. The two most severe megadroughts make the Dust Bowl of the 1930s look tame: a 240-year-long drought that started in 850 and, 50 years after the conclusion of that one, another that stretched at least 180 years.

And how about that "4.5 degrees above average"?  Scary or no?  Glancing at the weather page in today's New York Times I find that the recorded temperature in New York City for 2015 year to date is -- ready for this? -- 4.7 degrees  F below normal!  Over at the ICECAP website Joe D'Aleo reports that January to March 2015 was the coldest January to March during the entire period of the thermometer record (going back to the late 1800s) for the ten Northeast U.S. states plus D.C.  Also that the trend for the last 20 years for that area is down 1.5 degrees F per decade.  Somehow this story didn't make the front page of Bloomberg News.

What we've proved so far is that there is always a record for heat and a record for cold being set somewhere, if you just get to pick your boundaries and your time period to get the result you want.  So how about the worldwide picture?  Bloomberg's version is in that second story:

It just keeps getting hotter.  March was the hottest month on record, and the past three months were the warmest start to a year on record, according to new data released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It's a continuation of trends that made 2014 the most blistering year for the surface of the planet, in to records going back to 1880. 

But wait -- that's NOAA, run by known climate campaigners.  The story also mentions the NASA version of temperatures, which showed that March was not a record high, but close.  But they're also climate campaigners.  Don't the Bloomberg people realize that we know about the satellite measurements from UAH and RSS, going back to 1979?  They cover the whole world much more completely and accurately than the scattered thermometers in the NOAA and NASA sets.  What do the satellites show?  

Below is the latest UAH chart from Roy Spencer's website.  And the answer is that March 2015 is not close to a record for anything.  The March anomaly was +.26 deg C.  The record high anomaly was back in January to March 1998, when it hit +.68 deg C.  I count easily 40 months with an anomaly higher than the +.26 deg C of March 2015, including at least one in the 80s and one in the 90s.  RSS tracks UAH extremely closely.  They have the exact same +.26 deg C anomaly for March 2015 -- and a list of the hottest Marches that shows March 2015 as the tenth hottest in a 35 year record.  Warmer Marches include 1991 and 1983.

Sorry, Bloomberg, but in the age of the internet we know the other data that is out there.  We also know that NOAA and NASA have been aggressively altering their data to lower earlier temperatures to make the latest temperatures appear warmer by comparison.  You just can't put out stories trying to scare people without discussing this well-known adverse information.  If you try, it's immediately recognizable as propaganda rather than real news.  You're not fooling anybody.

What Does Hillary Stand For?

The lead editorials from The Economist over the weekend and from the Wall Street Journal this morning ask exactly the same question.  Actually, not quite exactly the same:  In The Economist it's "What does Hillary stand for?", while in the Wall Street Journal it's "What does Mrs. Clinton stand for?"  Close enough.

Neither thinks we have much of a clue what the answer might be.  The Economist guesses that you might be able to get an inkling of Hillary's plans for the economy by looking at the current proposals of the Center for American Progress, the activist organization long headed by former Bill Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta.  Not that she's actually said that, of course.  Meanwhile the Journal speculates that she will use her status as the first female major-party candidate for President to push supposedly "women's" issues like universal pre-K and government funding for childcare.  But it's all just guesswork, and these guesses don't even get to the biggest issues.

Try Hillary's new campaign website and you won't get any more.  "Everyday Americans need a champion.  I want to be that champion."  That's nice.  What does it mean?  By the way, can I please opt out of having Hillary as my "champion"?  Really, no thank you.  But anyway, other than offering to be your "champion," the website gives no information as to what she stands for, and no specific proposals on anything.

But this is why you have the Manhattan Contrarian to help you peer into the future.  Hillary may be saying absolutely nothing and keeping it as vague as possible while she awaits her coronation, but here at MC we know how to take the little clues and turn them into deep insights.  People, what do we actually know about Hillary?  Here's what we know:  We know that she is the very most conventional of left-wing thinkers.  We know that she has no interest whatsoever in rocking the government gravy boat.  We know that she deeply believes in the main project of the Left, which is to bring social justice and equality to the world through government action and crony capitalism.  We know that she has taken tens of millions from oil states for her family "foundation."  We know that she believes in the efficacy and moral goodness of government programs to help the downtrodden, in large part because lots and lots of her acquaintances and supporters run all those things and they seem to her like nice people.

Take these basic bits of knowledge and apply them to the big questions of government policy, and all the answers suddenly seem obvious:

• Without doubt, Hillary supports the continuation and gradual expansion of every single thing that the federal government is currently doing.  $700 billion per year to "fight poverty" and nobody ever exits from poverty?  We'll just let that $700 billion increase on autopilot by 5 or 10% per year.  She will never propose a cut to anything.
• Obamacare?  She'll veto any attempt at repeal, revision or reform.
• Entitlements?  If you think Hillary could be bothered to propose any meaningful reform to get them on a sustainable path, you're kidding yourself.  She sees the entitlement issue not at all in terms of what is right for the country and instead entirely in terms of potential partisan advantage: we'll sit back and let the Republicans propose the reform, and then we'll accuse them of throwing grandma off a cliff!  Might she think it's some kind of a problem that the country will be borrowing $50 trillion or so by mid-century in a massive income transfer largely from relatively poor to relatively rich?  Well, math was never her strong subject, and anyway Paul Krugman says that the best thing a country can do for its economy is to borrow $50 trillion and waste it -- and he won the Nobel Prize in economics!  Actually, under Krugmanomics, borrowing $100 trillion would be even better.  And besides, all this is long after her term will be over.  Pass the problem on to the next guy -- it sure worked for Obama!
• New programs?  Sure she'll propose a few.  After all, if you become President you're entitled to some immortality from putting your name on something.  More spending on education and childcare are good bets.  Should something else be cut to fund it?  That's not her issue.
• Energy and climate?  Over at Climate Progress they collect various statements that Hillary has made over the years.  The short version is that she's a completely gullible believer in the idea that the weather can be improved by making your electricity a lot more expensive.  "[S]he has said the President’s use of the Clean Air Act to rein in carbon pollution from power plants, 'must be protected at all costs' during a speech last year to the League of Conservation Voters. She has been critical of fossil fuel subsidies and supported boosting renewables. To her, climate change represents 'the most consequential, urgent, sweeping collection of challenges we face as a nation and a world.'  'The science of climate change is unforgiving, no matter what the deniers may say, sea levels are rising, ice caps are melting, storms, droughts and wildfires are wreaking havoc,' she said. "   Does she understand that there may be some contradiction between pretending to be a "champion" of the middle class and trying to double everyone's electricity bill?  Again, math was not her strong subject.  Anyway, don't forget those tens of millions from the Arab petrostates to her foundation.  Energy policy is the perfect place to practice crony capitalism while at the same time claiming the moral high ground and never getting challenged on that by the government press.
• Foreign policy?  She was Obama's Secretary of State, for Chrissakes.  Sure there could be a few tweaks around the edges, but does anybody think anything major is going to change?

Pick any other issue, and you will see that Hillary's position can be predicted with near one hundred percent certainty.  It's easy!

How Groupthink Works

A fascinating phenomenon in human affairs is how large groups of people in close or semi-close association with each other will claim to believe exactly the same thing about some large and complicated subject.  As Exhibit A, entire nations and peoples will proclaim belief in the same religion, not just the broad generalities, but all the details and particulars of doctrine and dogma.  How many Arabs, for example, will say they are not Muslims?  In some cases like that one, the official group belief may be enforced at times with highly coercive measures, up to and including beheadings and mass executions.  But there are less extreme enforcement techniques with remarkable levels of effectiveness.

Here in the U.S., and among the forces of the Left, we don't so much have religion in the traditional sense, but the closest substitute is the Church of Global Warming, to which most everyone associating with the Left claims to belong.  You often read about a supposed "consensus" that human activities contribute to global warming.  The methodology used to claim that consensus is rather bogus, but more interesting is that the dogmas of the Church extend far beyond the proposition that human activities have some impact on global temperature, and include increasingly dubious tenets such as: mandatory support for government subsidy of renewable energy, mandatory support for restrictions on use of fossil fuels, mandatory support for EPA efforts to ban the use of coal, mandatory support for transfer payments from rich to poor countries as climate reparations, and so forth.  There are even important Church tenets that are manifestly contrary to empirical data, like "the earth is warming" (actual best data from satellites show completely flat trend for 18+ years and declines in the most recent months) and "polar sea ice is disappearing" (actual best data from satellites show record high levels of Arctic plus Antarctic sea ice during 2014-15).  Sorry, but if you want to be accepted as a member into this Church, you must subscribe to all of the tenets, even the ones that are just false statements of fact.

And how do we deal with the apostates?  A fascinating example is playing out with the case of Larry Tribe, celebrity professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard, teacher of Con Law to the likes of Barack Obama, John Roberts, Elena Kagan and even to the Manhattan Contrarian (way back in 1974), arguer of many cases in the Supreme Court, seemingly stalwart icon of the Left, and even Al Gore's lead lawyer in the great Bush v. Gore controversy of 2000.  And now somehow this guy has done the unthinkable and signed on as lawyer for Peabody Coal in challenging pending EPA "clean power plan" regulations designed to shut down the use of coal to generate electricity in the United States.

The official excommunication got under way a little over a week ago with an op-ed in the New York Times by Ricky Revesz, recent ex-Dean of NYU Law School, covered at MC here.  That was only the start.  It is followed with a lengthy article on the front page of Tuesday's print edition,  "Harvard Professor vs. Star Pupil in Climate Case."     Key quote:

To many Democrats and professors at Harvard, Mr. Tribe is a traitor.

Ouch!  As examples, the article cites two of Tribe's fellow Harvard Law professors, Jody Freeman and Richard Lazarus, heaping scorn upon the Con Law arguments he has advanced in support of Peabody:

 “The administration’s climate rule is far from perfect, but sweeping assertions of unconstitutionality are baseless,” Jody Freeman, director of the environmental law program at Harvard Law School, and Richard Lazarus, an expert in environmental law who has argued over a dozen cases before the Supreme Court, wrote in a rebuttal to Mr. Tribe’s brief on the Harvard Law School website. “Were Professor Tribe’s name not attached to them, no one would take them seriously.”  Mr. Tribe’s legal claims, they concluded, are “ridiculous.”

The Times omits any discussion of the merits of Tribe's arguments, or evaluation of their strength.  Are they aware of lengthy concurrences by Justices Thomas, Alito and Scalia in two recent cases making many of the same points?

One of the last lines of the article is the best:

Mr. McKenna, the Republican lobbyist, said dryly, “He’s about to be banned from a lot of cocktail parties.”

McKenna may have said that in jest, but I have no doubt that it is true.  Mr. Tribe, you are now a traitor and a pariah.  That's what happens when you publicly dis the groupthink.  But there is an upside: you are suddenly allowed to think for yourself.  It's liberating!  Now that you have been cast out of the Church, who knows what other dogmas you may think to disagree with?

In other climate news:

• In an interview with ABC News yesterday, President Obama was asked why Americans should care about climate change, and he pointed to one of his daughters' childhood asthma attacks:  "[I]f we can make sure that our responses to the environment are reducing those incidents, that’s something that I think every parent would wish for.”  Huh?  Careful Larry, if you try to rejoin the Church you'll next be asked to buy into the idea that CO2 in the air causes asthma.   Did I hear somebody claim that Obama is "smart"?
• Meanwhile, over in Japan, where they have been short of power since the Fukushima nuclear accident a few years ago, there is now a solution at hand:  40+ new coal power plants!

Federal Student Loan Update: How Huge A Disaster?

While our federal government continues to chase many mortgage lenders for so-called "predatory lending" practices, perhaps we should check in on the situation of far and away the biggest predatory lender of all, the federal government itself.  Its most odious practices are in the area of student loans.  I find the term "predatory" a stretch when applied to a mortgage loan for a house, given that in the worst case the borrower got to live in the house, and even if he gets foreclosed and has a deficiency balance he can normally discharge that in bankruptcy.  Not a pleasant process, but sometimes life can be tough.  Compare that to federal student loans, where the government lends inexperienced 18 - 24 year-olds open-ended amounts, often for dubious and overpriced trade schools, and then flatly forbids discharge in bankruptcy.  Many borrowers' finances are ruined for life, and they don't even have marketable job skills to show for it.  Now that's predatory!

I first covered the student loan situation in November 2012.  That's less than two and a half years ago.  At the time total student loan debt outstanding had just hit $1 trillion, and the default rate reported by the Federal Reserve had just suddenly gone from 8.5% in Q2 2012 to 11% in Q3 2012.  I also pointed out that close to half of the outstanding trillion were loans in deferment, grace period, or forbearance -- meaning that the actual default rate on loans in repayment status could be as high as 22%.  And I asked: "Once the Federal credit card gets behind something, how far and fast can it blow up and explode?"

We are now seeing how fast this kind of pushing of "free" federal money can blow up and explode.  Two articles in the Huffington Post (March 27, 2015 here and August 20, 2014 here) collect the data.  First, the upward march of loans outstanding continues unabated, reaching $1.096 trillion as of June 30, 2014 (and undoubtedly well over $1.1 trillion today).

And how much of that will ever be paid back?  You almost can't believe how fast this is going south.  According to the August 2014 post (citing Education Department data as of June 30, 2014), the delinquency/default rate had reached 18%.  Oh, but with another 34% in deferment, forbearance or bankruptcy, meaning that of those supposed to be repaying, almost 27% were in default.  Then in late March 2015 the Department released a new set of numbers on the performance of its largest loan servicing contractors.  The new data are not completely comparable to the prior data, omitting about a quarter of the universe, and counting as delinquent anyone more than 5 days behind on payment, while the old data required 30 days to be counted as delinquent.  With that said, the new delinquency figure is 33%.  8.5% to 33% in barely two years!

And we haven't even gotten to the question of whether you can trust any number coming out of this crooked government.  In the student loan area a big issue is how many borrowers pay nothing and yet still qualify for "current" payment status.  How could that be possible?  Because the government has so-called "income-based" repayment options.  Show little or no income, and you qualify for a zero or near-zero monthly payment and yet you go in the "current" category.  And how many of such people are there?  Actually, they don't give out information on that.  From the August 2014 article:

At a December Education Department conference in Las Vegas, Brian Lanham, then an executive at student loan giant Sallie Mae, said that more than 40 percent of borrowers who enroll in so-called income-driven repayment plans have a zero monthly payment.  It's "something that's really boosted our income-driven repayment application rates," Lanham said, according to a recording of the event the department posted on YouTube. "If they're struggling," he said of borrowers, "it's an option."  The Education Department did not respond to inquiries regarding the number of borrowers enrolled in plans that require them to pay nothing to keep current on their loans.

In other words, a very large percentage of those counted as "current" are actually paying nothing.  But they won't say exactly how many.  So if you add "supposedly 'current' but paying nothing" to the officially delinquent, what's the percent then?  40%?  50%?  More?  (By contrast, delinquency rates on normal consumer debt like credit cards and car loans tend to be around 6%.)  In an April 2013 article I predicted that the government would be lucky to get back half of its trillion of student loan debt.  Today, that "half" is looking wildly optimistic, and the trillion has grown another 10+%.  Don't worry though -- none of this shows up on the federal balance sheet.

And those "supposedly 'current' but paying nothing" people have been put into a completely hopeless mess.  If they actually try to get ahead, they'll just find the government sucking away all their increased income to pay the loans.  How come I'm not reading about this outrage in the New York Times?