Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 122

As Trump targets immigrants, elderly brace to lose caregivers

FILE - In this Nov. 6, 2015 file photo, an elderly couple walks down a hall in Easton, Pa. It's not too late to get moving: Simple physical activity, mostly walking, helped high-risk seniors stay mobile after disability-inducing ailments even if, at 70 and beyond, they'd long been couch potatoes. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File) (Credit: AP)

BOSTON — After back-to-back, eight-hour shifts at a chiropractor’s office and a rehab center, Nirva arrived outside an elderly woman’s house just in time to help her up the front steps.

Nirva took the woman’s arm as she hoisted herself up, one step at a time, taking breaks to ease the pain in her hip. At the top, they stopped for a hug.

“Hello, bella,” Nirva said, using the word for “beautiful” in Italian.

“Hi, baby,” replied Isolina Dicenso, the 96-year-old woman she has helped care for for seven years.

The women each bear accents from their homelands: Nirva, who asked that her full name be withheld, fled here from Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. Dicenso moved here from Italy in 1949. Over the years, Nirva, 46, has helped her live independently, giving her showers, changing her clothes, washing her windows, taking her to her favorite parks and discount grocery stores.

Now Dicenso and other people living with disabilities, serious illness and the frailty of old age are bracing to lose caregivers like Nirva due to changes in federal immigration policy.

Nirva is one of about 59,000 Haitians living in the U.S. under Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a humanitarian program that gave them permission to work and live here after the January 2010 earthquake devastated their country. Many work in health care, often in grueling, low-wage jobs as nursing assistants or home health aides.

Now these workers’ days are numbered: The Trump administration decided to end TPS for Haitians, giving them until July 22, 2019, to leave the country or face deportation.

In Boston, the city with the nation’s third-highest Haitian population, the decision has prompted panic from TPS holders and pleas from health care agencies that rely on their labor. The fallout offers a glimpse into how changes in immigration policy are affecting older Americans in communities around the country, especially in large cities.

Ending TPS for Haitians “will have a devastating impact on the ability of skilled nursing facilities to provide quality care to frail and disabled residents,” warned Tara Gregorio, president of the Massachusetts Senior Care Association, which represents 400 elder care facilities, in a letter published in The Boston Globe. Nursing facilities employ about 4,300 Haitians across the state, she said.

“We are very concerned about the threat of losing these dedicated, hardworking individuals, particularly at a time when we cannot afford to lose workers,” Gregorio said in a recent interview. In Massachusetts, 1 in 7 certified nursing assistant (CNA) positions are vacant, a shortage of 3,000 workers, she said.

The country faces a severe shortage in home health aides. With 10,000 baby boomers turning 65 each day, an even more serious shortfall lies ahead, according to Paul Osterman, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. He predicts a national shortfall of 151,000 direct care workers by 2030, a gap that will grow to 355,000 by 2040. That shortage will escalate if immigrant workers lose work permits, or if other industries raise wages and lure away direct care workers, he said.

Nursing homes in Massachusetts are already losing immigrant workers who have left the country in fear, in response to the White House’s public remarksand immigration proposals, Gregorio said. Nationally, thousands of Haitians have fled the U.S. for Canada, some risking their lives trekking across the border through desolate prairies, after learning that TPS would likely end.

Employers are fighting to hold on to their staff: Late last year, 32 Massachusetts health care providers and advocacy groups wrote to the Department of Homeland Security urging the acting secretary to extend TPS, protecting the state’s 4,724 Haitians with that special status.

“What people don’t seem to understand is that people from other countries really are the backbone of long-term care,” said Sister Jacquelyn McCarthy, CEO of Bethany Health Care Center in Framingham, Mass., which runs a nursing home with 170 patients. She has eight Haitian and Salvadoran workers with TPS, mostly certified nursing assistants. They show up reliably for 4:30 a.m. shifts and never call out sick, she said. Many of them have worked there for over five years. She said she already has six CNA vacancies and can’t afford to lose more.

“There aren’t people to replace them if they should all be deported,” McCarthy said.

Nirva works 70 hours a week taking care of elderly, sick and disabled patients. She started working as a CNA shortly after she arrived in Boston in March 2010 with her two sons.

She chose this work because of her harrowing experience in the earthquake, which destroyed her home and killed hundreds of thousands, including her cousin and nephew. After the disaster, she walked 15 miles with her sister, a nurse, to a Red Cross medical station to try to help survivors. When she got there, she recounted, the guards wouldn’t let her in because she wasn’t a nurse. Nirva spent an entire day waiting for her sister in the hot sun, without food or water, unable to help. It was “very frustrating,” she said.

“So, when I came here — I feel, people’s life is very important,” she said. “I have to be in the medical field, just to be able to help people.”

“At the beginning, it was very tough for me,” Nirva said, especially “when I have to clean their incontinence. … Some of them, they have dementia, they are fighting. They insult you. You have to be very compassionate to do this job.”

A few months ago, Nirva was injured while tending to a 285-pound patient who was lying on her side. Nirva said she was holding the patient up with one hand while she washed her with the other hand. The patient fell back on her, twisting Nirva’s wrist.

Injury rates for nursing assistants were more than triple the national average in 2016, federal labor statistics show. Common causes were falling, overexertion while lifting or lowering, and enduring violent attacks.

Nirva works with a soft voice, a bubbling laugh and disarming modesty, covering her face with both hands when receiving a compliment. She said her faith in God — and a need to pay the bills to support her two sons, now in high school and college — help her get through each week.

She started caring for Dicenso in her Boston home as the older woman was recovering from surgery in 2011. Like many older Americans, Dicenso doesn’t want to move out of her home, where she has lived for 63 years. She is able to keep living there, alone, with help from her daughter, Nirva and another in-home aide. She now sees Nirva once a week for walks, lunch outings and shopping runs. The two have grown close, bonding in part over their Catholic faith. Dicenso gushed as she described spending her 96th birthday with Nirva on a daylong adventure that included a Mass at a Haitian church. At home, Dicenso proudly displays a bedspread that Nirva gave her, emblazoned with the word LOVE.

On a recent sunny winter morning, Nirva drove Dicenso across town to a hilltop clearing called Millennium Park.

“What a beautiful day!” Dicenso declared five times, beholding the open sky and views of the Charles River. As she walked with a cane in one hand and Nirva’s hand firmly clasped in the other, Dicenso stopped several times due to pain in her hips.

“Thank God I have her on my arm,” Dicenso said. “Nirva, if I no have you on my arm, I go face-down. Thank God I met this woman.”

In addition to seeing Dicenso, Nirva works three shifts a week at a chiropractor’s office as a medical assistant. Five nights a week, she works the overnight shift, from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., at a rehabilitation center in Boston run by Hebrew SeniorLife. CEO Louis Woolf said Hebrew SeniorLife has 40 workers with TPS, out of a total of 2,600.

It’s not clear how many direct care workers rely on TPS, but PHI calculates there are 34,600 who are non-U.S. citizens from Haiti, El Salvador, Nicaragua (for which TPS is ending next year) and Honduras, whose TPS designation expires in July. In addition, another 11,000 come from countries affected by Trump’s travel ban, primarily from Somalia and Iran, and about 69,800 are non-U.S. citizens from Mexico, PHI’s Espinoza said. Even immigrants with secure legal status may be affected when family members are deported, he noted. Under Trump, non-criminal immigration arrests have doubled.

The “totality of the anti-immigrant climate” threatens the stability of the workforce — and “the ability of older people and people with disabilities to access home health care,” Espinoza said.

Asked about the impact on the U.S. labor force, a DHS official said that “economic considerations are not legally permissible in TPS decisions.” By law, TPS designation hinges instead on whether the foreign country faces adverse conditions, such as war or environmental disaster, that make it unsafe for nationals to return to, the official said.

The biggest hit to the immigrant workforce that cares for older patients may come from another program — family reunification, said Robyn Stone, senior vice president of research at LeadingAge, an association of nonprofit groups that care for the elderly. Trump is seeking to scrap the program, which he calls “chain” migration, in favor of a “merit-based” policy.

Osterman, the MIT professor, said the sum of all of these immigration policy changes may have a serious impact. If demand for workers exceeds supply, he said, insurers may have to restrict the number of hours of care that people receive, and wages may rise, driving up costs.

“People aren’t going to be able to have quality care,” he said. “They’re not going to be able to stay at home.”

But since three-quarters of the nation’s direct care workers are U.S. citizens, then “these are clearly not ‘jobs that Americans won’t do,’” argued David Ray, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which supports more restrictive immigration policies. The U.S. has 6.7 million unemployed people, he noted. If the health care industry can’t find anyone to replace workers who lose TPS and DACA, he said, “then it needs to take a hard look at its recruiting practices and compensation packages. There are clearly plenty of workers here in the U.S. already who are ready and willing to do the work.”

Angelina Di Pietro, Dicenso’s daughter and primary caretaker, disagreed. “There’s not a lot of people in this country who would take care of the elderly,” she said. “Taking care of the elderly is a hard job.”

“Nirva, pray to God they let you stay,” said Dicenso, sitting back in her living-room armchair after a long walk and ravioli lunch. “What would I do without you?”

KHN’s coverage of end-of-life and serious illness issues is supported in part by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Why it’s so hard to #DeleteFacebook: Constant psychological boosts keep you hooked

(Credit: Shutterstock)

Here we go again: another Facebook controversy, yet again violating our sense of privacy by letting others harvest our personal information. This flareup is a big one to be sure, leading some people to consider leaving Facebook altogether, but the company and most of its over 2 billion users will reconcile. The vast majority will return to Facebook, just like they did the last time and the many times before that. As in all abusive relationships, users have a psychological dependence that keeps them hooked despite knowing that, at some level, it’s not good for them.

Decades of research has shown that our relationship with all media, whether movies, television or radio, is symbiotic: People like them because of the gratifications they get from consuming them — benefits like escapism, relaxation and companionship. The more people use them, the more gratifications they seek and obtain.

With online media, however, a consumer’s use provides data to media companies so they can serve up exactly what would gratify her most, as they mine her behavior patterns to tailor her online experiences and appeal to her individual psychological needs.

Aside from providing content for our consumption, Facebook, Twitter, Google — indeed all interactive media —provide us with new possibilities for interaction on the platform that can satisfy some of our innate human cravings.

Interactive tools in Facebook provide simplified ways to engage your curiosity, broadcast your thoughts, promote your image, maintain relationships and fulfill the yearning for external validation. Social media take advantage of common psychological traits and tendencies to keep you clicking — and revealing more of yourself. Here’s why it’s so hard, as a social network user, to pull the plug once and for all.

Buoying your ‘friend’ships

The more you click, the stronger your online relationships. Hitting the ‘Like’ button, commenting on photos of friends, sending birthday wishes and tagging others are just some of the ways in which Facebook allows you to engage in “social grooming.” All these tiny, fleeting contacts help users maintain relationships with large numbers of people with relative ease.

Molding the image you want to project

The more you reveal, the greater your chances of successful self-presentation. Studies have shown that strategic self-presentation is a key feature of Facebook use. Users shape their online identity by revealing which concert they went to and with whom, which causes they support, which rallies they attend and so on. In this way, you can curate your online self and manage others’ impressions of you, something that would be impossible to do in real life with such regularity and precision. Online, you get to project the ideal version of yourself all the time.

Snooping through an open window

The more you click, the more you can keep an eye on others. This kind of social searching and surveillance are among the most important gratifications obtained from Facebook. Most people take pleasure in looking up others on social media, often surreptitiously. The psychological need to monitor your environment is deep-rooted and drives you to keep up with news of the day — and fall victim to FOMO, the fear of missing out. Even privacy-minded senior citizens, loathe to reveal too much about themselves, are known to use Facebook to snoop on others.

Enhancing your social resources

The more you reveal, the greater your social net worth. Being more forthcoming can get you a job via LinkedIn. It can also help an old classmate find you and reconnect. Studies have shown that active use of Facebook can enhance your social capital, whether you’re a college student or a senior citizen wanting to bond with family members or rekindle ties with long-lost friends. Being active on social media is associated with increases in self-esteem and subjective well-being.

Enlarging your tribe

The more you click, the bigger and better the bandwagon. When you click to share a news story on social media or express approval of a product or service, you’re contributing to the creation of a bandwagon of support. Metrics conveying strong bandwagon support, just like five stars for a product on Amazon, are quite persuasive, in part because they represent a consensus among many opinions. In this way, you get to be a part of online communities that form around ideas, events, movements, stories and products — which can ultimately enhance your sense of belonging.

Expressing yourself and being validated

The more you reveal, the greater your agency. Whether it’s a tweet, a status update or a detailed blog post, you get to express yourself and help shape the discourse on social media. This self-expression by itself can be quite empowering. And metrics indicating bandwagon support for your posts — all those “likes” and smiley faces — can profoundly enhance your sense of self worth by appealing to your ingrained psychological need for external validation.

In all these ways, social media’s features provide us too many important gratifications to forego easily. If you think most users will give all this up in the off chance that illegally obtained data from their Facebook profiles and activities may be used to influence their votes, think again.

Algorithms that never let you go

While most people may be squeamish about algorithms mining their personal information, there’s an implicit understanding that sharing personal data is a necessary evil that helps enhance their experience. The algorithms that collect your information are also the algorithms that nudge you to be social, based on your interests, behaviors and networks of friends. Without Facebook egging you on, you probably wouldn’t be quite as social. Facebook is a major social lubricant of our time, often recommending friends to add to your circle and notifying you when a friend has said or done something potentially of interest.

Consider how many notifications Facebook sends about events alone. When presented with a nudge about an event, you may at least consider going, probably even visit the event page, maybe indicate that you’re “Interested” and even decide to attend the event. None of these decisions would be possible without first receiving the nudge.

What if Facebook never nudged you? What if algorithms never gave you recommendations or suggestions? Would you still perform those actions? According to nudge theory, you’d be far less likely to take action if you’re not encouraged to do so. If Facebook never nudged you to attend events, add friends, view others’ posts or wish friends Happy Birthday, it’s unlikely you would do it, thereby diminishing your social life and social circles.

Facebook knows this very well. Just try deleting your Facebook account and you will be made to realize what a massive repository it is of your private and public memory. When one of us tried deactivating her account, she was told how huge the loss would be — profile disabled, all the memories evaporating, losing touch with over 500 friends. On the top of the page were profile photos of five friends, including the lead author of this article, with the line “S. Shyam will miss you.”

This is like asking if you would like to purposely and permanently cut off ties with all your friends. Now, who would want to do that?

S. Shyam Sundar, Distinguished Professor of Communication & Co-Director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory, Pennsylvania State University; Bingjie Liu, Ph.D. Student in Mass Communications, Pennsylvania State University; Carlina DiRusso, Ph.D. Student in Mass Communications, Pennsylvania State University, and Michael Krieger, Ph.D. Student in Mass Communications, Pennsylvania State University

Criminality, madness, bad taste and danger in the Trump White House

Joseph DiGenova; Roy Moore; John Bolton (Credit: AP/Getty/Shutterstock/Salon)

I have accumulated three stacks of notebooks sitting to the left of my keyboard on my desk that I’ve filled with scribbled notes as I’ve tried to stay abreast of the criminality, madness, bad taste, venality, sexual peccadillos and danger emanating from the Trump White House, and they’re not helping at all.

It’s a rabble, really; an assortment of facts and impressions. A yellow legal pad that dates back to the 2016 election topped with khaki colored reporters’ notebooks, and couple of little square “memobook” things I picked up down in Washington, and a pile of loose scraps of paper and old clippings from the Times and peoples’ business cards and god-only-knows what else.

Just yesterday I was flipping madly looking for something I had jotted down recently . . . what was it? There’s a page . . .

Every day, something that’s never happened before . . . they’re not asking questions about nothing . . . overseas contingency account

11 bases in N. Africa . . . spec. ops, drones, surveillance . . .

And another page . . .

December 1 – Trump Tower, Kushner, Kislyak, Flynn

December 13

December 15 Crown Prince

Vnesheconombank

And still another page — Arkady Dvorkovich

Dimitry Peskov

Kirill Dimitriev

Nah . . . that’s not it. Jeez, I had it in my head just a minute ago . . .

Was it Kushner and the Emeratis and that guy the FBI picked up at Dulles and searched and seized all of his personal electronics and then marched over to a grand jury in Washington? What was his name? George Nader! What the hell was that about? Oh yeah, I remember now. Something about setting up that meeting in the Seychelles with Erik Prince and the Crown Prince of the UAE. Or was it the Russian banker who runs the investment fund for Putin? I’ve got it! The half-billion that Kushner’s real estate company received in loans from the two bankers he met with in his White House office! He sat down with the president of Citigroup and Apollo Global Management LLC, and presto! One of them loans Kushner Companies! 184 million, and the other okays a loan for $325 million. Turns out the Office of Government Ethics has Kushner under investigation, trying to figure out if Kushner violated any federal laws or ethics regulations, you know, when he met with big-time New York money guys in the White House who then suddenly decided to lend a half billion dollars to his nearly bankrupt family business.

Or was it Hope Hicks and the thing about her meeting with Trump on Air Force One trying to generate some story that would explain the meeting at Trump Tower between Don Jr., Kushner, Paul Manafort and the four Russians with links to Kremlin intelligence?

What the hell was that about? There was a guy, Mark Corallo, who was something or another with Trump . . .  here it is! He was a spokesman for the “Trump legal team,” and he was on the phone to Trump and Hope Hicks when they were on Air Force One, and he was helping them come up with the bullshit line they put out that Don Jr. and the rest of them were having a meeting with the Russians about “adoption,” because, you know, right in the middle of campaigns for the presidency, the representatives of most candidates for president are sitting down with Russians talking about “adoption.” Or maybe he was against them putting out the “adoption” line.

That was it!

But how is it that Corallo’s name is back in front of us, anyway? Oh, yeah. Turns out he’s a client of Fox News Conspiratorialist-in-Chief Joe DiGenova, the lawyer Trump was thinking about putting on his legal team, but now that can’t happen because DiGenova has a conflict representing Corallo, who is cooperating with Special Counsel Robert Mueller and might turn out to be a witness against Trump because he heard Hope Hicks say Don Jr.’s emails with the Russians “will never get out.”

Let me flip through another notebook here for a minute . . . Rex Tillerson! Was it him I was looking for? Rex, who just got fired as Secretary of State because Trump didn’t like him anymore. Or was it because he called Trump a “fucking Moron” last summer? Or was it because he just said something about the Russians trying to kill the guy in Great Britain with the nerve gas, and Trump didn’t want any of his people denouncing Russian nerve gas? Or maybe it was because Trump decided to shake up his “national security team” and threw out Tillerson along with his national security adviser General McMaster, because McMaster gave briefings that were too long and boring, and he wanted another guy in there who was more “fun,” like John Bolton, who wants to bomb Iran to keep them from developing nuclear weapons, and North Korea, because they already have them?

Wow! Look! I just found my notes on Rob Porter, and what do you know but, he’s baaaaack! You remember Rob, don’t you? He was another one of Trump’s Golden Boys, the “Staff Secretary” who was apparently in charge of all the paperwork that crossed Trump’s desk. Not the paperwork that Trump actually read, mind you, but the paperwork that was destined for Trump’s desk to be signed, or passed off to another factotum, or whatever they do with Trump paperwork.

Porter was in his important White House position, working directly under White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, despite the fact that he didn’t have a proper Top Secret security clearance. And why was that? Well, I’ve got it right here in my notes: he failed the FBI security clearance procedure because he had been involved in domestic violence with both of his ex-wives. One of them he beat up and gave a black eye, and the other he man-handled and pushed around to the point that she had to get an emergency protective order  from a court against him. All of that was fine in the Trump White House until it hit the papers, and then Trump had to let him go. But now the New York Times tells us that Trump has been talking to Porter on the phone frequently in recent days, consulting the Harvard graduate and Oxford Scholar on such weighty issues as which countries we should give a waiver from the recent tariffs he imposed on steel and aluminum. Because, you know, former wife beaters are up on stuff like international trade and tariffs and stuff like that.

I had another bunch of notes somewhere . . . or here they are! . . . Gary Lantrip and Bert Davi, the two goofballs down in Alabama who tried to pay $10,000 to the attorney of one of Roy Moore’s accusers to get him to denounce his client? Did you see that story? It wouldn’t surprise me if you didn’t, because it kind of blew by in the dust of all the other crap that we’ve been hit by recently.

Let’s see  . . . the two guys in Alabama . . . they tried to get the lawyer for Leigh Corfman to put out a statement before the election for Senate last winter saying he didn’t believe his own client’s story that when she was 14 year old, and Roy Moore was 32, he got her in a room and removed her clothing and sexually assaulted her. The story was kind of a classic of the genre for Alabama, the state where three of its last six governors have been convicted of crimes and removed from office. Roy Moore, you’ll recall, was the “family values” Republican candidate for the Senate who had been twice elected Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court and twice removed for refusing to follow federal court orders overturning decisions he had made that were declared unconstitutional. Moore was accused by nine women of either sexually abusing them when they were minors or “pursuing” them for “dates” when they were teenagers

Trump, of course, ignored the allegations of abuse of minors surrounding Moore and endorsed his candidacy and appeared for him at a rally in Alabama during the campaign. What we didn’t know was that behind the scenes, two of Moore’s supporters were trying to buy-off Leigh Corfman’s lawyer. They offered him $10,000 and introductions to Steve Bannon, a big supporter of Moore who was then running Breitbart News. Bert Davi was a former Hell’s Angel who had done time in prison for auto theft, forgery felonious possession of a firearm by a felon, and dealing methamphetamine. Both Davi and Lantrip attended a big fundraiser for Moore in Washington given by Rand Paul at a Capital Hill townhouse and attended by Steve Bannon, some other Republican Senators and major Republican Party donors, because, you know, in Donald Trump’s Washington, it’s a regular thing to raise money for child abusers supported by former Hell’s Angels who have done serious time for drugs, stealing cars, kiting checks and guns.

You can’t make this stuff up. You also can’t keep track of it, which is why I keep filling notebook after notebook trying to get straight in my mind which Trump-involved scandal we’re in the middle of at the moment, which one we just left. But you know what? You never really leave the scandals, do you? Just when you think one of them is finished and all that’s left to do is for Mueller and his team to put it through the legal grinder, it’s back. They never go away: Kushner, Flynn, Manafort, Papadopoulos, Porter, Sessions, Page — you might think you’re finished hearing from them, but you’re not. They’ll get indicted, or they’ll make deals, or something brand new they tried to pull will pop up. Trump is the gift that keeps on giving, especially for the companies that make reporters’ notebooks. Buy some stock in a paper company, or better still, look into Portage, the Ohio company that makes my notebooks. It’ll go up. I’m buying so many of the damn things, I can guarantee it.

From Russia, not in love: How will “The Americans” play out?

Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys in "The Americans" (Credit: FX/Patrick Harbron)

By the end of the season 6 premiere of “The Americans,” one gets the feeling that Philip and Elizabeth Jennings’ relationship has an even lower survival probability than when the undercover Soviet spies paired up in the first place.

With each passing season their professional marriage grows further entangled with their feelings for each other — or, really, Philip’s (Matthew Rhys) feelings for Elizabeth (Keri Russell). For Elizabeth the mission and the Motherland always come first, even before their children Paige (Holly Taylor) and Henry (Keidrich Sellati).

Vowing allegiance is different from honoring it, and the chilliness of this final season, set in motion Wednesday at 10 p.m. on FX, takes on a fatalistic clarity within the three episodes sent to critics. There’s an old saying about mothers loving their sons and raising their daughters, and this takes on a twisted new meaning as Elizabeth further indoctrinates Paige into the family trade.

While mother and daughter venture deeper into the dark, Philip more fully embraces the American dream through the travel agency that serves as a cover but has blossomed into a legitimately successful enterprise. Elizabeth’s heart remains Russia as Philip’s is pledged to his family. How can this possibly end well?

The marriage, we mean. From all evidence “The Americans” appears to be on course to close up this story in a way that satisfies its fans if, indeed, it doesn’t blow us away. The wise viewer is familiar enough with television history to keep all premature hyperbole in check until we’ve seen the final edit.

One can be forgiven for wondering, too, whether a kind of halo effect of the electorate’s focus on all matters Russian will benefit the series. Its creators Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg have to have known when and presumably how the drama would end since May 2016, before a reality star became president and declared any negative coverage about him to be “fake news.” Or, for that matter, before investigations into the extent of Russian interference in our elections commenced, and said reality star’s campaign officials and family members came under investigation for possible collusion and obstruction of justice.

Besides, this final season takes place in 1987; back then the man who would become our president (with or without assistance from the Kremlin) was symbol of ostentatious wealth and playboy privilege, everything Elizabeth is fighting against.

“We’re not interested in what’s going on right now. We close ourselves off to it,” declared Weisberg in a recent interview with Salon. “I don’t mean we don’t follow it. We do. But it’s not a part of our storytelling because when you look at the series and what it is, what’s happening now just isn’t relevant.”

Where there are parallels, Weisberg concedes, is when the show plays with the definitions of patriotism and loyalty. These are characters whose identities have been molded by politics and who put individual desires secondary to the needs of their country. The Jennings have exploited innocent lives and killed people who made the mistake of getting in the way of fulfilling what is demanded of them, occasionally in a sinisterly maternal way by their handler Claudia (Margo Martindale).

But even as Elizabeth has accepted this indoctrination, Philip has doubts. And though Paige feels the tug between her American life and the reality of her Russian heritage, the most harrowing elements of these episodes are based in her desire to please a mother who is teaching her to divorce herself from familial affection.

“By the way, it’s not untrue of people in America either — certain feelings we have about democracy and freedom are also just intimately connected with who we are,” Weisberg added. “But in the Soviet Union, it came with kind of an overt, constant, dogmatic language. . . . It’s a little [easier] to see it when it’s not you. But they were very proud of thinking about that being political. They didn’t hide from that. That’s who these people are, so that’s what this show is.”

Thematically the story of the Jennings has circled back to where the show began in 2013, with Elizabeth and Philip occupying separate corners of a professionally arranged marriage. The producers and its stars frequently remind viewers that this is the soul of “The Americans.”

“One of the most attractive things about this show is that I read the pilot and [I] go, ‘How are they gonna resolve? How is this gonna resolve itself?’,” Rhys said. “That’s where I think this season begins. I’m asking myself the same question, because, once again, they’re just polar opposites.”

“It is such a relatable marriage moment,” Russell added. “Where they’re just so distant from each other, where it’s not even the fire and the closeness of being mad at each other. They’re just far. They’re really far, which is a far sadder moment in a long-term relationship. There are moments when you’re trying, you let the other person change to survive, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s gonna work for the other person.”

That point of relatability may be what the drama’s fans will miss most of all, real world anxiety notwithstanding. The edge of these final episodes is that reminder bubbling just below the surface that Philip and Elizabeth’s superiors require each of them to take the ‘til death do us part of the pledge very seriously. That, more than any breaking news, keeps the audience guessing and continues to earn the show’ status as one of the smartest series on television.

Still, the coincidence of life imitating art is especially stunning right now.

“When we started making the show, this notion of Russia as our enemy seemed so nostalgic,” Fields observed. “That there was an era 30 years prior when we all lived under the threat of global thermonuclear annihilation because we had these missiles poised at one another. And now here we are, five years, six years later, and we’ve been the victim of a recent Russian attack on our democracy that we’re still dealing with, figuring out, in some ways still reeling from that.

“The very fact of . . . purposefully not thinking about it all, that we’re living in a bubble, provokes this notion that, while we’re living when we’re living, and we’re feeling either under threat of global thermonuclear attack, or under the rattling effects of having had our election attacked, it’s easy to forget that history moves and perspectives change. Thirty years from now, if all goes well, we’ll all look back on this moment and there’ll be nostalgia for it.”

Under the spell of far-right nonprofit, Walmart stops selling Cosmopolitan at checkout line

(Credit: AP/Mark Lennihan)

Walmart announced Tuesday that it will be removing Cosmopolitan magazines from checkout lines across the country — a decision influenced by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), a nonprofit run by Patrick Trueman, a pro-life hardliner with quizzical views on human sexuality. While the NCOSE tried to link Walmart’s decision positively to the #MeToo movement, the company’s actions will only serve to isolate young women from literature that may empower them to embrace their sexuality. Indeed, Walmart’s decision unfortunately appears to be spurred by conservative social dogma.

“As with all products in our store, we continue to evaluate our assortment and make changes,” Walmart said in a statement. “Walmart will continue to offer Cosmopolitan to customers that wish to purchase the magazine, but it will no longer be located in the checkout aisles. While this was primarily a business decision, the concerns raised were heard.”

Most stores have already moved the magazines or are in the process of doing so, Tara Aston, Walmart’s senior manager of national media relations, told Salon. The retail conglomerate isn’t the first to make a similar move after engaging in “collaborative dialogue” with the NCOSE either: an Ohio chain, Marsh Supermarkets, also removed the women’s magazine from checkout shelves in 2016. 

Previously known as Morality in Media, the NCOSE claims to advocate for (in their own words) “a world free from all forms of sexual exploitation.”

“This is what real change looks like in our #MeToo culture, and NCOSE is proud to work with a major corporation like Walmart to combat sexually exploitative influences in our society. Women, men, and children are bombarded daily with sexually objectifying and explicit materials, not only online, but in the checkout line at the store,” said Dawn Hawkins, Executive Director at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, in a statement about Walmart’s move.

Hawkins also thanked Walmart for their “cooperation,” and applauded the company for doing their part as a corporation to change the “#MeToo culture.”

Anyone with access to a search engine can observe that NCOSE is run by conservatives with regressive social views about women. Indeed, in their attempt to combat sexual exploitation, they are merely preserving gender stereotypes and stigmatizing female sexuality. The idea that Cosmo targets young girls, exploits them and objectifies them on their covers — and the push to censor the public from this — is just as preposterous as a conservative Missouri senator claiming that the 1960s sexual revolution perpetuated human trafficking.

Trueman, the organization’s CEO and president, once said in an interview that there should be surgeon general’s warnings before porn. He also previously served as the Executive Director and General Counsel to Americans United for Life — an anti-abortion nonprofit law and policy organization. Hawkins has long been advocating for reform on the “growing public health crisis resulting from pornography” too — and the attack against Cosmopolitan is just another part of that which the organization has been championing for years.

But as most readers know, Cosmo isn’t a porn magazine. It’s a women’s magazine that empowers women to embrace their sexuality and frequently encourages women to enjoy sex because it’s pleasurable and because women are deserving of that pleasure — sending the message that sex is not merely an act done to please men. Yes, Cosmo has been criticized for its suggestive and sometimes oblivious headlines. The magazine does not have clean hands when it comes to the way in which it depicts women’s bodies. Still, as a women’s magazine, the heart of Cosmo is women’s empowerment, as it has been since iconic editor-in-chief Helen Gurley Brown took the helm in 1965.

Once criticized by prominent feminists such as Betty Friedan in the 1960s, the current iteration of Cosmo is far more sex-positive and feminist. The modern magazine doesn’t only offer advice on how to have good sex, it also offers health advice (like stories about having endometriosis) and shares intimate stories about the female experience — like what it’s like being sexually harassed as a flight attendant, or the experience of getting an abortion.

Perhaps the most disconcerting part of this saga is how NCOSE claimed the mantle of the #MeToo movement in an attempt to convince the public that Walmart’s move was in the best interest of women. If you thought the #MeToo movement was immune to being weaponized, think again: the movement was spurred by the left, intent on bringing to light the magnitude of sexual harassment and assault in the workplace faced by women of all political stripes. This move by Walmart and NCOSE corrupts #MeToo’s purpose to the right’s advantage.

When asked if Walmart agrees with NCOSE’s argument, Aston, the aforementioned Walmart spokesperson, said the company didn’t have “anything further to add.”

If Walmart really wanted to do its part in the #MeToo movement, it could promote more women to executive positions, pay women and men equal wages, provide healthcare for working mothers, and perhaps support and protect its women employees who experience harassment — rather than advocate against a magazine that gives women sex advice. It amounts to an attack on a woman’s right to have good sex, which is sadly par for the course for the American right these days.

Why accountants of the future will need to speak blockchain and cryptocurrency

(Credit: Getty/Philippe Lopez)

If you haven’t already heard of Bitcoin, you either haven’t been paying attention or you’re a time traveller who just touched down in 2018. Because by now, most of us will have heard of Bitcoin and some of us have even jumped on the bandwagon, investing in cryptocurrencies.

But despite its popularity, many people still don’t understand the technology that underlines it: blockchain. In very simple terms, blockchain technology is an open access shared ledger that keeps a record of all the transactions between parties and allows all users to agree on its contents. New information is added in blocks linked to the previous blocks, resulting in a chain of blocks being built.

This ledger is verified by “miners” to make sure it’s true — and so creating an audit trail. Past records can be viewed but not altered without the consent of the majority. And it is this technology that is behind cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin — the value of which rose almost 1400% in the past year, but has at times, also fallen massively too.

Crypto is here to stay

It can certainly be anticipated that this evolutionary technology is set to spark a huge revolution in the business world. It’s already being trialled at governmental level, from the Sweden Land Registry, to the Big Four accountancy firm such as E&Y — who accept Bitcoin as payment for its consultancy services.

The Australian Securities Exchange is also considering the use of blockchain technology to replace the current clearing and settlement system of share trading. And even the Bank of England is planning its own Bitcoin-style virtual currency.

Major governments around the world have acknowledged and further legitimised the use of Bitcoins as payment vehicles. In fact, more and more major companies are accepting Bitcoins — Microsoft, Virgin Galactic and Subway to name a few. It seems certain then that blockchain technology has a wide appeal. And although it may be a rocky road ahead, with countries such as India and China banning or restricting the use of cryptocurrencies, crypto is here to stay.

Wider implications

A recent report from the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales on blockchain, claims it is fundamentally an accounting technology. In its simplest of definitions, accounting is a process of keeping records, and this is precisely what blockchain offers in a more “modern” and “foolproof” way. As once the records are agreed upon and validated, the records are bundled into blocks that are virtually impossible to change, making the technology tamper-proof.

Essentially, as the business world adopts the use of accounting systems that use blockchain technology, accountants will spend less time doing the mundane tasks of bookkeeping and reconciliations, and will instead focus their energy and time on the interpretation of information and decision making.

Blockchain technology will also make it easier for accountants to measure the accuracy of data. Meaning that the technology should effectively cut down on fraud and make accounting errors disappear.

The new accountants

A report by the World Economic Forum suggests that 10% of global GDP will be stored on blockchain-related technology by 2025. This implies that the way transactions are recorded and communicated will completely transform between now and then.

It it easy to see then, why accountants of the future will need to educate themselves about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies if they are to account for transactions denominated in it. The profession will evolve and adapt massively over the coming years. And in fact, auditors have already started auditing transactions in the blockchain.

Universities around the world have already begun offering blockchain-related courses. Even the professional accountancy bodies now feature blockchain technology in their qualification syllabus.

But of course while all this might sound a bit futuristic to some readers, the evolution of money is something that has been going on for centuries. From a barter system to gold bars, metal coins to paper money, to plastic cards. All we are looking at now, is simply the next cycle in evolution — from electronic money to cryptocurrencies.

Anwar Halari, Lecturer in Accounting and Finance, The Open University

The sun is spitting out strange patterns of gamma rays — and no one knows why

(Credit: NASA/SDO/Goddard)

Our closest star remains an enigma. Every 11 years or so its activity crescendos, creating flares and coronal mass ejections — the plasma-spewing eruptions that shower Earth with charged particles and beautiful auroral displays — but then it decrescendos. The so-called solar maximum fades toward solar minimum, and the sun’s surface grows eerily quiet.

Scientists have studied this ebb and flow for centuries, but only began understanding its effects on our planet at the dawn of the space age in the mid-20th century. Now it is clear that around solar maximum the sun is more likely to bombard Earth with charged particles that damage satellites and power grids. The solar cycle also plays a minor role in climate, as variations in irradiance can cause slight changes in average sea-surface temperatures and precipitation patterns. Thus, a better understanding of the cycle’s physical drivers is important for sustainable living on Earth.

Yet scientists still lack a model that perfectly predicts the cycle’s key details, such as the exact duration and strength of each phase. “I think the solar cycle is so stable and clear that there is something fundamental that we are missing,” says Ofer Cohen, a solar physicist at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. One obstacle to figuring it out, he says, is that crucial details of the apparent mechanisms behind the cycle — such as the sun’s magnetic field — are largely hidden from our view. But that might be about to change.

Tim Linden, an astronomer at The Ohio State University, and his colleagues recently mapped how the sun’s high-energy glow dances across its face over time. They found a potential link between these high-energy emissions, the sun’s fluctuating magnetic field and the timing of the solar cycle. This, many experts argue, could open a new window into the inner workings of our nearest, most familiar star.

In their upcoming study, so far published on the preprint server arXiv and submitted to Physical Review Letters, Linden and his colleagues examined a decade’s worth of data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope to better analyze the sun’s emission of gamma rays — the universe’s most energetic form of electromagnetic radiation. To their surprise, the researchers found the most intense gamma rays appear strangely synced with the quietest part of the solar cycle. During the last solar minimum, from 2008 to 2009, Fermi detected eight high-energy gamma rays (each with energies greater than 100 giga–electron volts, or GeV) emitted by the sun. But over the next eight years, as solar activity built to a peak and then regressed back toward quiescence, the sun emitted no high-energy gamma rays at all. The chances of that occurring at random, Linden says, are extremely low. Most likely the gamma rays are triggered by some aspect of the sun’s activity cycle, but the details remain unclear.

The team speculates these gamma rays are likely emitted when powerful cosmic rays — produced throughout the universe by violent astrophysical events like supernovae and colliding neutron stars — slam into the sun’s surface. If a single cosmic ray collides with a particle in the solar atmosphere, it creates a shower of secondary particles and radiation, including gamma rays. Such showers would usually be wholly absorbed by the sun, however. But according to a hypothesis dating back to the 1990s, some of these secondary showers can be bounced out and away from our star by strong fluctuations in its magnetic field. If this is happening, the gamma rays Fermi has been detecting are likely some of those high-energy escapees.

If this interpretation is correct, says Randy Jokipii, a retired astronomer from the University of Arizona who was not involved in the study, it is no surprise high-energy gamma rays are more likely to be emitted during solar minimum. When the solar cycle is at low ebb, he says, there is a reduction in its outgoing “winds” of charged particles — which act as a shield to deflect incoming cosmic rays. This reduction allows more cosmic rays to enter our solar system, and our star itself. So an uptick in cosmic rays should lead to an uptick in gamma rays.

But Linden and his colleagues also discovered another curiosity entirely unpredicted by earlier ideas: During solar minimum, most gamma rays above 50 GeV are emitted near the sun’s equator, but throughout the rest of the cycle they tend to come from the polar regions. That means the sun’s total gamma-ray emission is most intense along its equator at solar minimum and at its poles during maximum. To visualize this, imagine looking at a swarm of fireflies in a frosted glass jar. If the brightest fireflies converge near the center of the container, its glow will be most vivid there, even if a higher number of dimmer fireflies populate the container’s perimeter. This situation is somewhat analogous to the sun’s gamma-ray emission during solar minimum. But if the brightest fireflies instead converge at the jar’s bottom and top, its glow will peak at those points instead. That would be analogous to solar max.

The cause of this pole/equator shift in gamma-ray emission remains unknown. “I tried to find an interpretation and I came up — one of the few times in my life — totally without any explanation,” Jokipii says. But Cohen, who was also not involved in the study, points out the shift does correspond with observed motions of sunspots. These dark splotches on the sun’s surface mark intense inner magnetic activity, and much like the newly observed gamma-ray emissions they move from the equator toward the poles as the sun progresses toward solar max. Cohen notes these trends might match, but says he cannot currently explain why. Igor Moskalenko, an astronomer at Stanford University who was not involved in the study, agrees that there is no obvious explanation.

One clue might come from an odd correlation: Although eight high-energy gamma rays greater than 100 GeV were observed in just over a year, two of them were detected within just hours of each other, and at the same time as a coronal mass ejection — “a startling coincidence,” Linden says. When he realized this, he decided to prioritize looking at the last few months of available Fermi data, only to find yet another high-energy gamma ray that had been emitted at the same time as another coronal mass ejection. “It was definitely a ‘wow’ moment,” he says, even though it does not prove the two phenomena are related. Six other high-energy gamma rays did not coincide with ejections, which mostly occur at solar max. So the fact they might only emit high-energy gamma rays when they do occur during a solar minimum would present quite a puzzle. Linden says, however, this potential link could only be part of a solution — much more work remains to be done to clarify such speculations.

Nevertheless, Linden was thrilled to see the first high-energy gamma ray emitted since the eight-year lull created throughout the latest solar max, which occurred in 2013 and 2014. He notes, “That probably indicates that the next few years are going to be really exciting for this sort of science.” He plans to scour the Fermi data every day to search for further bursts, and to work with collaborators to obtain new data from the HAWC Observatory in Mexico and NASA’s upcoming Parker Solar Probe (which will fly closer the sun than ever before). “There’s really a lot of hope that we’re going to get more data and see new physics here,” he says.

So as the sun meanders back toward solar minimum, astronomers are gearing up to study its gamma rays with the hope they might shed light on its mysterious interior. Although Linden and his colleagues cannot yet explain exactly why or how gamma-ray emission shifts in step with the sun’s magnetic field, it is increasingly clear the two are somehow linked. Moskalenko argues gamma-ray emissions could be used to trace the sun’s deep magnetic fields — and potentially to at last solve the lingering mysteries of the solar cycle.

“This is a puzzle that we’ve known about for centuries, but we do not know how to solve it,” Moskalenko says. “Maybe this paper and future studies will provide a hint as to how it can be explained.”

Trump will end deportation protection for Liberians

(Credit: AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta/Getty/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Salon)

President Donald Trump is once again implementing an immigration policy that targets non-white immigrants — on this occasion, Liberians who are staying in the United States with Deferred Enforced Departure status.

Trump said that he will allow the Deferred Enforced Departure status to expire for Liberians who currently reside in the United States to stay out of the violent political situation in their country, according to Axios. Liberian migrants were first granted this legal status in 1999 due to the outbreak of a bloody civil war in their country, and Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama made a point of extending it every year. Trump, on the other hand, argued through a White House statement that Liberia “has made significant progress in restoring stability and democratic governance,” as well as in containing Ebola outbreaks, and as a result can join the status of other countries whose residents have had their protections yanked in this country, including El Salvador, Sudan, Nicaragua and Haiti.

As a result of Trump’s decision, Liberians in the country as a result of the program will have their status expire on March 31st, giving them until March 2019 before they are compelled to leave the United States. Liberia itself is a nation founded by freed American and Caribbean slaves in the 19th century, although only 5 percent of its current population is believed to be descended from them. Libera’s ongoing civil war has claimed the lives of 250,000 of that nation’s residents, with thousands more fleeing from the violence to nations like the U.S.

Trump’s decision regarding Liberia, though justified on the grounds that the special legal status they had enjoyed was no longer necessary, is part of a larger set of policies that have been notably hostile toward non-white foreign residents of the United States. Three other African countries — Chad, Libya and Sudan — were initially listed among those whose citizens were barred from entering the United States, according to The Guardian. Liberia is also in Africa, a continent whose nations Trump is alleged to have referred to “shithole countries” in January. That comment triggered a wave of international condemnation and protests.

Another country that Trump supposedly referred to as a “shithole” during those remarks was Haiti, whose residents have been similarly targeted by the president’s policies. In January Trump’s Department of Homeland Security announced that it was going to remove Haiti, along with Belize and Samoa, from the list of countries whose citizens could be eligible for H-2A and H-2B visas, according to ABC News. Those visas are usually given to seasonal workers in agriculture and other industries.

To justify its decision, the Trump administration argued that Haitians “have historically demonstrated high levels of fraud and abuse and a high rate of overstaying the terms.” Belize brought with it concerns about human trafficking and Samoa would often not accept back citizens who had been ordered to leave America, according to the Trump administration.

This is also not the first time that Trump has challenged citizens from individual countries whose residents have stayed in the United States to escape tragedy in their homelands.

In January he announced that he was revoking the Temporary Protected Status of roughly 200,000 Salvadoran immigrants. The migrants had been granted this status after El Salvador was devastated by an earthquake in 2001, and as with the Liberians, the Salvadorans had their status periodically renewed by subsequent presidents and Congress. Although Trump revoked the status for Salvadorans on the grounds that conditions had improved in their country, the Department of Homeland Security added that “only Congress can legislate a permanent solution addressing the lack of an enduring lawful immigration status of those currently protected by TPS who have lived and worked in the United States for many years. The 18-month delayed termination will allow Congress time to craft a potential legislative solution.”

Of course, Trump’s very political career is rooted in hostility toward non-white foreigners. When he kicked off his presidential campaign in 2015, he included a controversial statement that stereotyped Mexican immigrants in order to justify stricter anti-immigration policies.

“They are not our friend, believe me. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people,” Trump told a rally at the time.

Joe Arpaio vows to bring back “birtherism” if elected to U.S. Senate

(AP Photo/Matt York, File)

If elected to the U.S. Senate,  disgraced former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio said he would bring back his racist and debunked theory that former President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.

“I don’t talk about it anymore until I become the US senator … It has something to do with a document,” Arpaio said during the Western Conservative Conference in Phoenix, Arizona, according to CNN. “One-hundred percent we proved that’s a fake document,” he said of Obama’s birth certificate.

He suggested that “scientific” evidence would make his case. “We had to go to Italy to get expert advice. It’s a very interesting story,” he teased.

Arpaio also said in January that he still stands by his “birtherism” crusade against Obama, something that was championed by President Donald Trump for years.

“No doubt about it. No doubt about it,” Arpaio said of Obama’s birth certificate, as Salon has previously reported. “We have the evidence. I’m not going to go into all the detail, but yes, it’s a phony document.”

Of course, Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961 and released copies of his birth certificate in April 2011.

Arpaio, who was convicted of criminal contempt in federal court last year for ignoring a judge’s order to stop immigration raids, was quietly pardoned by Trump late on a Friday night last August amid deadly hurricanes slamming into the nation’s southern coast.

Arpaio has strongly aligned himself with Trump’s agenda, specifically on immigration. As a former sheriff of Maricopa County, he forced inmates to live in brutal conditions and “uninsulated outdoor tent cities and wear pink underwear to humiliate them,” Salon has previously reported. He was sued for racial profiling and defied a court order that rule he had repeatedly violated the fourth amendment.

Hw is running for the Senate seat being vacated by retiring Republican Sen. Jeff Flake.

Watch Arpaio’s remarks below:

Warren Buffett recommends investing in index funds — but many employees don’t have that option

FILE - In this Monday, May 4, 2015, file photo, Berkshire Hathaway Chairman and CEO Warren Buffett speaks during an interview with Liz Claman on the Fox Business Network in Omaha, Neb. Buffett has a high-class problem: cash is piling up at Berkshire Hathaway faster than he can invest it. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik, File) (Credit: AP)

Warren Buffett, the most successful investor of our time, is a huge fan of low-cost index funds — funds that replicate a market index rather than try to outperform it — as the way for the average investor to succeed in the stock market. “By periodically investing in an index fund … the know-nothing investor can actually outperform most investment professionals,” he wrote in his 1993 letter to shareholders of his Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate. “Paradoxically, when ‘dumb’ money acknowledges its limitations, it ceases to be dumb.”

He returned to the subject in this 2016 letter, writing, “Both large and small investors should stick with low-cost index funds.” And in his newest shareholder letter, Buffett said that one reason he made a widely publicized bet (which he has now won) that a low-cost Vanguard index fund would outperform a group of hedge funds over a 10-year period was “to publicize my conviction that my pick — a virtually cost-free investment in an unmanaged S&P 500 index fund — would, over time, deliver better results than those achieved by most investment professionals, however well regarded and incentivized those ‘helpers’ may be.”

Given Buffett’s praise of index funds — specifically, those with low fees — you’d think that all the employees at Berkshire Hathaway companies would get to practice what the boss preaches by being able to invest their 401(k) money in such funds.

But you’d be wrong.

It turns out that employees of many Berkshire subsidiaries have the same problem — and it’s one that, as we’ll see, also affects millions of Americans outside of Buffett’s companies. To wit, your employer, not you, chooses your 401(k) investment options and your choices may be less than optimal either because your employer doesn’t know any better or because your employer’s interests are different from yours.

You wouldn’t expect to see this problem at a company run by a brilliant investor like Buffett, but it’s there. I’ve looked at the retirement plans of each Berkshire subsidiary whose investment options I could find on file at the Labor Department, which turned out to be about 50 of the 63 subsidiaries listed on Berkshire’s website.

Each offers its own investment options rather than having Buffett or someone else at headquarters pick a package of suitable company-wide investments. That’s not surprising in one sense: Buffett is famously hands-off in how he oversees the companies owned by Berkshire.

But the result is that many of the subsidiaries offer little or nothing in the way of index funds. And even when they do offer such funds, different Berkshire employees can end up paying wildly divergent fees for the same investment, depending on which operation they work for. Those differences can cost — or save — them tens of thousands of dollars over the course of decades.

Consider two examples that I got from a list assembled by Eli Fried, an investment consultant who advises pension and endowment funds and is the person who brought the Berkshire disparities to my attention. Fried told me he was looking at 401(k) investment options offered by the top companies on Fortune’s list of most admired companies and was surprised by what he found at Berkshire.

On the index fund front, there’s a big difference between the S&P 500 index funds that employees of Berkshire-owned NetJets, General Re, GEICO, FlightSafety, Clayton Homes and H.H. Brown Shoe Group can buy, and the one that BoatU.S. employees can buy. BoatU.S. employees pay a fee of 0.62 percent, or $62 a year for a $10,000 investment. That’s more than 15 times the 0.04 percent — $4 a year per $10,000 — that employees of the six other Berkshire companies pay.

There are also some big differences in fees among the actively managed funds that Berkshire companies make available. Employees of Business Wire pay a 0.5 percent ($50 per $10,000 invested) for shares in American Funds’ EuroPacific Growth Fund, while employees of Applied Underwriters, Jordan’s Furniture and MiTek pay 1.14 percent ($114 per $10,000).

As a longtime Berkshire shareholder, a contrarian from birth and someone who’s watched Buffett for more than 40 years, I was intrigued when Fried approached me. And I was shocked at the huge differences among the plans that emerged when I did my own digging.

For example, as of year-end 2016 — the most recent information the Labor Department has on file — Borsheim’s Fine Jewelry offered employees 71 investment options, virtually all of which (other than 10 Vanguard target date retirement funds) consisted of actively managed funds, while Precision Steel Warehouse and Nebraska Furniture Mart offered a relative handful of options, most of which were low-cost index funds. Precision and Nebraska Furniture also offered Berkshire common stock as an investment option, which only a handful of the plans did.

There are plenty of other examples of disparities among the plans, but by now, I think, you get the point. The most successful investor of our age, who advises average investors to buy low-cost index funds (which have become wildly popular at least in part because of his longtime advocacy of them) presides over a company where many employees don’t have a chance to invest as he suggests.

I would love to give you Buffett’s explanation for this — Berkshire is highly decentralized, as I told you, and it’s possible that until recently he might not have known about the big differences among the plans that its subsidiaries offer — but I can’t.

He wouldn’t respond to my detailed request for comment. Nor would Marc Hamburg, Berkshire’s chief financial officer.

The four Berkshire subsidiaries I asked to discuss their 401(k) choices wouldn’t respond, either. The four are BoatU.S., Borsheim’s, See’s Candy and Applied Underwriters.

Why am I taking you through all of this? Three reasons.

First, because when a plainspoken, widely admired investment god like Buffett proves to have feet of clay, I think people should know about it.

Second, because the investment choices offered in 401(k) plans are a big deal. Along with Social Security, they are almost certain to be the major retirement vehicles of the future, given the vast shrinkage of traditional pensions. About 63 million people have access to 401(k) plans. Some 87 percent of the retirement plans that serve them now offer at least one index fund, according to the Plan Sponsor Council of America. But the biggest portion of employees’ retirement investments still consists of actively managed domestic stock funds, according to the PSCA.

Third, because the Berkshire situation typifies the fact that when it comes to 401(k) plans, your employer’s interests may be different from yours.

Take target date funds, the big trend in retirement plans these days. You pick a year in which you’ll be old enough to retire — say 2035 — and buy into a fund that gradually changes over to a more conservative investment mix as the target date nears.

However, not all target date funds are the same. Vanguard’s consist entirely of low-cost index funds, as do Fidelity’s Freedom Index funds (though not its other target date funds). Their average management fee was 0.13 and 0.12 of one percent, respectively, as of year-end 2016, according to Morningstar. But most other target date funds are actively managed, with fees four or five times as high.

I think that a major reason for these differences and for the differences among Berkshire funds is that the more fees an employee pays for her 401(k) funds, the lower the recordkeeping, administrative, custodial and other costs her employer has to pay. In essence, some employers save money by having their employees pick up more of the tab.

I stumbled on this back in the day, when I was trying to figure out why an index fund that I owned in my personal Vanguard account carried a lower management fee than in my Washington Post Co. 401(k) account. Someone who shall remain nameless explained to me that this was the way of the world — if I paid less, my employer would pay more.

I suspect that if I could get someone at Berkshire or its subsidiaries to talk candidly with me, they’d say this phenomenon explains many if not most of the disparities among the Berkshire plans.

In order to get perspective on all this, I discussed the Berkshire situation with two experts — Ric Edelman of the Edelman Financial Services financial planning firm, and Teresa Ghilarducci, a retirement maven who teaches economics at the New School for Social Research in New York. Neither of them knew about the Berkshire situation until I told them about it. “In today’s marketplace, there’s no longer any excuse for saddling employees with high-cost retirement plans. Employers can offer low-cost investments while keeping their own costs very low,” Edelman told me.

“The practice of pushing the costs onto employees and offering dozens of funds doesn’t meet today’s standards,” Ghilarducci said.

So there you have it. Berkshire’s annual shareholder meeting is on May 5. With luck, someone will ask Buffett the questions about Berkshire’s 401(k) plans that he wouldn’t answer when I posed them. It would sure be interesting to hear what he says.