Massey Energy has a bad reputation even in the dirty coal business and it's getting worse. A coalition of environmental groups is trying to get the company to come clean on over 12,000 violations of the Clean Water Act and surface mining laws in West Virginia.

This is an outrage. Where's the state and federal oversight?

The Sierra Club reported:

Massey has a long history of environmental and social irresponsibility-including one of the largest slurry spills ever to take place in the United States and a $1.5 million fine from the Mine Safety and Health Administration. In 2008 the company was fined $20 million for Clean Water Act violations, similar to those cited by the coalition, after the federal government documented over 4,600 cases of pollution being illegally dumped into local waters by Massey and its subsidiaries. Incredibly, Massey's violations have increased in frequency since its settlement with the federal government.

This comes just weeks after leading scientists determined that no amount of remediation could ever be enough to make up for the damage done by mountain top removal mining and the practice should be banned.

Dr Margaret Palmer of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science is quoted as saying:

California's financial unraveling has prompted a long-overdue debate about taxes, regulation, and government spending, but the state's media and government continue to ignore what could be an even greater problem: the irreparable damage to California's human capital that nearly 30 years of unrestrained illegal immigration has achieved.

This is not an immigration problem, or even an illegal-immigration problem, per se. A strong case could be made that, in terms of educational achievement, industriousness, and entrepreneurial acumen, Asian immigrants to California have proven superior to white natives of the state. Therefore, if California were to experience a wave of mass immigration from Asia, its long-term economic prospects would be improved. Today's Hispanic immigrants would probably have the same effect if they came from the top 10 to 20 percent of their society according to those same measures of human capital rather than from its bottom rungs. But the influx has instead been composed mainly of the poorly educated, the unskilled, and the illiterate. Such immigrants will likely soon dominate the state's overall population and politics.

In 2005, the California K12 school system was 48.5 percent Hispanic, compared with 30.9 percent white. By now it is above 50 percent Hispanic. Two-thirds of kindergarten students were Hispanic, most of them unable to speak English.

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For a closer glimpse of what's in store for California, look at the Los Angeles Unified School District, the largest in California and the second largest in the country. Of its roughly 700,000 students, almost three-quarters are Hispanic, 8.9 percent are white, and 11.2 percent are black. More than half of the Latino students (about 300,000) are "English learners" and, depending on whether you believe the district or independent scholars, anywhere between a third and a half drop out of high school, following significant attrition in middle school. A recent study by UC Santa Barbara's California Dropout Research Project estimates that high-school dropouts in 2007 alone will cost the state $24.2 billion in future economic losses.

Even those who graduate aren't necessarily headed to success. According to one study, 69 percent of Latino high-school graduates "do not meet college requirements or satisfy prerequisites for most jobs that pay a living wage." It is difficult to see how the majority-Hispanic labor force of the future can provide the skills that the sophisticated Los Angeles economy demands. Already studies show that as many as 700,000 Los Angeles Latinos and some 65 percent of the city's illegal immigrants work in L.A.'s huge underground economy.

The unhappy picture in Los Angeles is replicated to one degree or another across much of California and is taking a huge toll on the state's economic competitiveness and long-term prospects. California's educational system, once easily the best in the country, is today mired in mediocrity near the bottom among the 50 states as judged by National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests in math, science, reading, and writing. And for the first time in its history, California is experiencing an increase in adult illiteracy. In 2003, it had the highest adult illiteracy in the United States, 23 percent nearly 50 percent higher than a decade earlier. In some counties (Imperial at 41 percent, Los Angeles at 33 percent) illiteracy approaches sub-Saharan levels.

Perhaps even more important than the collapse of educational achievement among the lower strata is a deterioration of the higher education that was for decades the basis of California's preeminence in science and technology. California currently ranks 40th among the 50 states in college-attendance rates, and it already faces a significant shortage of college graduates. Studies have shown that the economy will need 40 percent of its workers to be college-educated by 2020, compared with today's 32 percent. Given the aging white population (average age, 42), many of these new graduates will have to come from the burgeoning Latino immigrant population (average age, 26). By one estimate, this would require tripling of the number of college-educated immigrants, an impossibility if current trends hold. The state's inability to improve the educational attainment of its residents will result in a "substantial decline in per capita income" and "place California last among the 50 states" by 2020, according to a study by the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems.

The mediocre education system, along with the unfriendly business climate and confiscatory tax regime, is driving educated, middle-class Californians out of the state. Between 2000 and 2005, more people with college degrees left California than came in, according to research by the Hewlett Foundation. Since then this trend has accelerated, and the state lost 2.2 million members of its young, educated, tax-paying middle class between 2004 and 2007. IRS data show that of recent migrants from the Golden State to places like Texas and Oklahoma, who average 29 years of age, 58 percent have received at least some college education and 53 percent own their homes.

In short, we are witnessing a highly advanced and prosperous state, long endowed with superior human capital, turning into the exact opposite in just one generation. What can be done to stop this race to the bottom? The answer is simple: California and Washington need to enforce existing immigration law. Unfortunately, it is difficult to convince the public that this is necessary, so deeply entrenched are myths about illegal immigration.

One myth is that because America is a country of immigrants and has successfully absorbed waves of immigration in the past, it can absorb this wave. But the argument neglects two key differences between past waves and the current influx. First, the immigrant population is more than double today what it was following the most massive previous immigration wave (that of the late 19th century). Second, and much more important, as scholars from the Manhattan Institute have shown, earlier immigrants were much more likely to bring with them useful skills. Some Hispanic immigrants certainly do integrate, but most do not. Research has shown that even after 20 years in the country, most illegal aliens (the overwhelming majority of whom are Hispanic) and their children remain poor, unskilled, and culturally isolated they constitute a new permanent underclass.

Perhaps the most disingenuous myth about illegal immigrants is that they do not impose any cost on society. The reality is that even those who work and half do not, according to the Pew Hispanic Center cannot subsist on the wages they receive and depend on public assistance to a large degree. Research on Los Angeles immigrants by Harvard University scholar George J. Borjas shows that 40.1 percent of immigrant families with non-citizen heads of household receive welfare, compared with 12.7 percent of households with native-born heads. Illegal immigrants also increase public expenditures on health care, education, and prisons. In California today, illegal immigrants' cost to the taxpayer is estimated to be $13 billion half the state's budget deficit.

The state should stop providing welfare and other social services to illegal aliens as existing statutes demand and severely punish employers who break the law by hiring illegal immigrants. This would immediately remove powerful economic incentives for illegal immigration, and millions of illegal aliens would return to their countries. Instead, with President Obama in the White House and the Democrats controlling Congress, an amnesty for the country's 13 million illegal immigrants may be soon to come.

Milton Friedman once said that unrestrained immigration and the welfare state do not mix. Must we wait until California catches up with Mexico to realize how right he was?

It’s been two weeks since I started “Take Back the Beep,” a campaign to flood the four big wireless companies with complaints. I want them to eliminate (or make optional) those time-wasting, redundant, airtime-eating, 15-second recorded instructions that you hear every time you leave a message for someone (or call to retrieve your own).

To my delight, the campaign has taken on a life of its own. It’s been written up on 28,032 blogs; I’ve done a number of radio and podcast interviews; and the carriers report that “thousands and thousands” of complaints have poured in.

As a reminder, here’s where to direct your complaints (Sprint already lets you remove the message):

* Verizon: Post a complaint here: http://bit.ly/FJncH.

* AT&T: Send e-mail to: customerissues@attnews.us.

* T-Mobile: Post a complaint here: http://bit.ly/2rKy0u.

So how is the campaign doing? Has it had any effect on the carriers? Is there any hope of making those ridiculous, infuriating instructions optional?

Yes. Here’s where it stands, carrier by carrier.

* AT&T: “We are going to make some changes.”

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AT&T supplied an actual e-mail address for reader complaints, and apparently it was flooded. The huge majority of e-mail notes were emphatic but polite. (For those of you who sent abusive notes, a tip: that’s not the way to get things done.)

Anyway, here’s the big news of the day: it worked. Mark Siegel, AT&T’s executive director of media relations, wrote with some very encouraging news:

David: All the messages we got from customers really made us look again at how we handle voice mail, and we are going to make some changes. I commend you for raising the issue.

– First, we really appreciate hearing from the thousands of customers who have contacted us.

– As I know you know, any customer with our Visual Voicemail service does not listen to an upfront voicemail message. Today, our iPhone customers enjoy Visual Voicemail. In the near future, we will make Visual Voice Mail available on other devices.

– In the meantime, we are actively exploring how to shorten the voicemail message on our other handsets.

(He also reminded us that when you call an AT&T customer, you can always “hit pound to get around” the instructions recording. Problem is, of course, that you’d need some way to know when you’re calling an AT&T customer, because the keystroke that bypasses the message is different on each carrier—it’s * on Verizon, 1 on Sprint, # on T-Mobile and AT&T.)

In any case, this is fantastic news, and it came so fast! Congratulations to AT&T for sacrificing millions of dollars in revenue in order to make life easier and more efficient for the rest of us. This, clearly, is a company that really does listen to its customers. And at least on this issue, it’s putting its money where its mouth is.

* T-Mobile: “This issue has our attention”

T-Mobile has also gotten the message loud and clear; at last count, there were 38 pages of complaints on the “Take Back the Beep” forum the company created for this purpose.

When I asked if the campaign was reaching T-Mobile’s decision makers, this statement is as far as company would go:

T-Mobile is always looking for ways to improve our customers’ experience, and this issue has our attention. We appreciate the feedback we’ve received from our customers, and these comments are being taken into consideration in our planning.

The wheels of progress turn slowly in cellular companies—we can’t expect instant results—but I take this statement as a good sign.

* Sprint: Change it yourself

Sprint already lets you eliminate those instructions. It’s not simple, and it’s not publicized, but it’s possible. If you’re a Sprint customer, I encourage you to make this change right away:

Access your voicemail box. Press 3 for personal options.
 Press 2 for greetings.
 Press 1, to change your personal greeting.
 Press 3 to add or remove the caller instructions.
 Follow the prompts to turn instructions on or off.

* Verizon: “—”

Verizon’s PR contact, Tom Pica, hasn’t responded to my request for a progress report.

He’s probably still irritated at me. When ABC News interviewed him about this campaign, he told them that customers can already turn off the instructions. Which isn’t true. So that night on Twitter, I said that he was lying.

He called me to let me know that he wasn’t lying—he was misquoted. What he said was that you can turn off *voicemail altogether* if you don’t like the 15-second instructions.

Well, O.K., but…huh?

Isn’t that like saying, “My son bites his nails, so let’s chop off his hands”?

In the meantime, Verizon is the only company who’s been responding to every single reader complaint. Its customer-service reps are sending out a canned reply, which insists that “The voice mail instructions are there to assist the many callers who may be unfamiliar with the correct prompts.”

Oh, give me a break. You’d have to search very, very hard to find somebody who hasn’t, in the last 40 years, ever heard the concept of speaking at the beep.

The canned response goes on to point out that you can press * to bypass the instructions (if, again, you know that you’re calling a Verizon customer, which you can’t possibly know), and that you can also shut off voicemail altogether (the baby-with-bathwater approach).

I also heard from a manager at Verizon who asked to remain anonymous, but he or she did share this much: “Your blog about the take back the beep is a major success and thorn in the side of the cell phone company I work for.”

So that’s something.

Thanks to everyone who’s helped to join this campaign. It looks as though, by focusing our unhappiness and organizing our resistance, we’re going to wind up creating real change in the world. And it’s a great feeling.

Federal Debt Approaches 100% of GDP

Federal Debt Approaches 100% of GDP

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Even when The End of the American Century went to press in early 2008, the U.S. federal debt was reaching alarming levels, and was a central element of my forecasts of U.S. economic decline. At that point, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget projected the gross federal debt to expand to $10.6 trillion by 2009, constituting 72% of GDP.

Since then, the federal red ink has become a tidal wave. The OMB now expects the debt at the end of this year to be $12.7 trillion, and to expand to over $15 trillion by 2011, which would then be (at 97% of GDP) almost as large as the entire economy (see chart).

David Leonhardt of the New York Times, one of the few economists to have been tracking and raising concerns about the deficits, writes that erasing the deficits “will be one of the great political issues of the coming decade.” In his article “Sea of Red Ink” in the June 10 issue, he reports on a New York Times analysis of the composition of the debt accumulation over the last decade, “with the aim of understanding how the federal government came to be far deeper in debt than it has been since the years just after World War II.”

The analysis finds that the growth in the federal debt since 2001 comes from four main sources. The first, the business cycle (especially the 2001 recession and the current downturn) is the largest component, accounting for 37%. Another 33% of the recent debt comes from legislation signed by President Bush, including his tax cuts. Another 20% derives from President Obama’s continuation of several Bush policies, including spending on the Iraq War and the Wall Street bailouts. Only about 10% comes from new Obama policies, including the stimulus bill, and news spending on health care, education, energy and other areas.

Leonhardt sees little hope that the Obama administration can reduce or eliminate the deficits with “pay-as-you-go” government spending plans. The solution, he writes, “is no mystery” and involves inevitable tax increases and government spending cuts. These are political tinderboxes, of course, and pose a huge challenge to President Obama’s leadership skills.

6,000-year-old tombs found next to Stonehenge

A prehistoric complex, including two 6,000-year-old tombs, has been discovered by archaeologists in Hampshire.

The Neolithic tombs, which until now had gone unnoticed under farmland despite being just 15 miles from Stonehenge, are some of the oldest monuments to have been found in Britain.

Archaeologists say they will hold valuable clues about how people lived at the time and what their environment was like.

The discovery is also close to Cranborne Chase, one of the most well researched prehistoric areas in Europe.

“It’s one of the most famous prehistoric landscapes, a Mecca for prehistorians, and you would have thought the archaeological world would have gone over it with a fine tooth comb,” Dr Helen Wickstead, the Kingston University archaeologist leading the project, said.

From examining similar sites, archaeologists know that complex burial rituals were common at the time. Typically bodies would be left in the open air until the flesh had decayed, leaving only a skeleton. Then bones were put in special arrangements in the tombs.

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“The tombs were like bone homes for important people in the community,” Dr Wickstead said.

The tombs were discovered by Damian Grady, an English Heritage photographer, who flew over the area in a light aircraft taking aerial photographs of the land, looking for marks or features on the landscape suggestive of ancient monuments. One photograph showed two long mounds.

After discussions with colleagues, Mr Grady was left in little doubt that the mounds were the site of ancient tombs. He contacted Dr Wickstead inviting her to investigate.

After carrying out a survey of the land using electromagnetic detectors and ultrasound, Dr Wickstead created a map of what lay beneath the fields. She was able to identify the two tombs with troughs on each side, known as long barrows, typical of Neolithic burial sites.

Her team was also found artefacts, including fragments of pottery, flint and stone tools, close to the surface.

So far Dr Wickstead’s team have only used non-invasive techniques to figure out what lies inside the tombs, which are located on the land of a local female farmer.

Because the original surface of the land has been preserved beneath the mound, scientists will be able to examine it for traces of pollen and identify which plants and trees were common at the time.

Whether they are excavated will depend on local feeling, she says.

“We’re treading very carefully on the excavation issue,” Dr Wickstead said.

“We want to be sure that it’s what people living in Damerham village want. It’s their heritage.”

The Kingston University team are due to publish preliminary findings of their research in the journal Hampshire Studies.

_ GDP: North Korea’s gross domestic product was estimated at about $20.2 billion in 2007, according to a report last year by South Korea’s central bank. That was about 2.6 percent the size of neighboring South Korea’s. The Bank of Korea will release its estimate for 2008 later this month. North Korea does not publish economic statistics.

_ STEADY DECLINE: North Korea’s economy over the past two decades has steadily declined. The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s deprived the country of a key source of trade and aid. Subsequent mismanagement, periodic bouts of severe flooding, crop failures, a famine and a standoff with the international community over its nuclear development that led to sanctions have also hurt the economy.

_ TRADE: North Korea’s top trade partners are China, South Korea, Singapore, India, Russia and Brazil. Japan once was but commercial ties rapidly deteriorated after Tokyo imposed sanctions and restrictions over the North’s abductions of Japanese nationals and its nuclear and missile tests.

_ ILLICIT ACTIVITIES: North Korea has long been accused of engaging in illicit economic activities to supplement its economy and support the ruling regime, including counterfeiting cigarettes and U.S. currency, and drug-smuggling. A U.N. report in 2007 said North Korea makes an estimated $500 million to $1 billion annually from criminal enterprises.

_ CHINESE INFLUENCE: China has become the biggest foreign economic player in North Korea. The Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency, a South Korean trade agency, said in a report in May that Chinese exports to North Korea in 2008 totaled $2.03 billion, while North Korea’s exports to China totaled $750 million. North Korea’s main imports from China were oil and textiles. The North’s key exports were coal and iron ore.

_ RELATIONS WITH SOUTH KOREA: Economic ties with the South flourished throughout much of this decade as Seoul pursued closer political ties with Pyongyang. Joint projects in manufacturing and tourism boosted trade. Relations, however, have deteriorated since South Korean President Lee Myung-bak took office early last year with a vow to get tough with the North. Tourism projects have been suspended and a joint industrial zone has been adversely affected by tightened border controls.

_ NATURAL RESOURCES: North Korea’s resources, which include coal, gold, graphite, iron ore, magnesite, silver, tungsten, zinc have drawn the interest of investors. South Korea’s state-owned Korea Resources Corp. is involved in mining projects in the North.

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Sources: The Bank of Korea, Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency, AP reports.