the guy by the door …

It was Sunday. I wouldn’t have know about my sin, but for Amy.

More to come.

and more from Jason Pramas at OpenMediaBoston.

Attorney Barry Wilson and Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner at Moakley Court House.

Attorney John McNeil, Assistant to U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Michael Sullivan, argued for a ‘protective order’ against Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner. If granted, the order will forbid Turner to publically rebut evidence and insinuations of evidence previously released to the press by the FBI. Attorney Barry Wilson characterized this as “closing the barn door after the horse is gone.”

U.S. Attorney Sullivan’s Record: A history of prosecutorial misconduct?

“The egregious failure of the government to disclose plainly material exculpatory evidence in this case extends a dismal history of intentional and inadvertent violations of the government’s duties to disclose in cases assigned to this court,” Chief Judge for Massachusetts Max Wolf Jan. 21, 2009.

Turner pointed to the recent rebuke of U.S. Attorney Micheal Sullivan by Chief Judge for Massachusetts Max Wolf.  While focussed on a single case, the judge mentioned nine other cases. Turner asked the press, “Where were you?”

[Previously on ‘the guy by the door’ Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark Joins Chuck Turner Denounces Political Targeting by Federal Attorney Sullivan.]

Turner had more. I’ll give links when I find them. They are not easy to find.

“You are as responsible for the corruption of the justice system as the U.S. attorney is,” Turner told reporters before leaving to chants of “Chuck! Chuck!”

At least as far back as the Harvard Living Wage Campaign, Boston City Councilor and Harvard Alum (’62) Chuck Turner has stood for Harvard Labor. Since his arrest on corruption charges the key prosecution witness is “no longer cooperating.” [See next post.]

The Boston Globe wrote the following:

“‘Chuck is naive,’ Wilburn said in an interview at the Globe. ‘The only thing I said to him was, ‘Take your wife out to dinner.’ It’s conceivable that it could have been a gift or a campaign contribution.’

“He went on to further distinguish between the two cases, saying: ‘Dianne [Wilkerson] is a thief. Chuck isn’t. Dianne knew better. Chuck is a victim of circumstance.'”

Jack Pramas¹ of Open Media Boston has more.

The Support Chuck Turner website announced a teach-in Tuesday February 24, 6:30 – 8:00 PM Cafeteria Roxbury Community College Student Center. About 100 people attended. It was a Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Honkie Holdover Hippie crowd. Charles Clemons, co-founder of Boston’s only Black owned radio station Touch 106.1 FM announced his Walk for Power. Chuck was characteristically electric. Lady Enchantress performed her song Changes [Video on her site].

¹Jack quite properly includes a full disclosure of his relationship with Chuck. My own is nowhere near as extensive. I will just tell one brief story.

We had gathered at Faneuil Hall to confront the government scientists and PR hacks^I about the proposed construction of a Bio Safety Level 4 Lab in Boston’s South End neighborhood. After the gummint made its presentation there was a public testimony. People lined up to get to the microphone. It was a racially mixed crowd, but unified in opposition to the lab. Nonetheless, the black people ended up at the back of the bus – except for State Representative Gloria Fox who went first. Chuck Turner was in the back of the line with his constituents. The gummint had a young under assistant twit in charge of trying to limit public testimony constantly cutting people off. I worried that they would close the place down before Chuck had a chance to speak. Claire Allen, co-chair of Safety Net, thought it would be OK to try to move Chuck up the line, but Gloria told me, “He won’t come. He won’t leave his constituents.” He finally did speak with fire the under assistant twit had no hope of putting out.

^IIt was very hard to tell the difference between the scientists and the PR hacks.

Doctors from the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School gave free consultations to students¹ to improve the quality of their sleep. WGBH staff gave out free “Got Sleep?” T shirt’s and staffers from the University Health Service Wellness Center gave Free backrubs ¹. I’m told they plan to take this show on the road throughout the University, but in the meantime, their website is:

http://understandingsleep.org/

¹at least one staff member participated.

Jenna Mellor in the 2006 production of ‘The Vagina Monologues’ at Harvard/Radcliffe Aggassiz Theater.

Since early Christianity, V has stood for Valentine. Since 1996 it has also stood for Vagina, and Victory celebrated world wide by:

The centerpiece of these celebrations is play by Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues.

For those of you in Boston/Cambridge, MA, Harvard’s last performance started minutes ago. [Sorry. 🙁 ]

But there are four other college performances tomorrow February 14.

Boston University, Tsai Performance Center, 685 Comm. Ave. 2:00 PM and 7:00 PM

Lesley College, Marran Theater 8:00 PM.

MIT 10-250 8:00 PM.

In other areas and for other days in the two months see the V-Day site event finder.

Do they have ethical investing standards or is return on investment the only concern? Is it real money? If a big chunk of it evaporates, is the University too poor to pay its workers?¹ Do portfolio managers have to give back $Multi-million commissions?²

Should it be that way?

The Harvard Student Labor Action Movement

and

The Yale Responsible Endowment Project

have looked into the matter and are looking for people interested in furthering the project.

Keynote Session: Saturday February 7th Emerson Hall 305

7:00-8:30 PM How University Endowments are Managed.

Full Day Session: Sunday February 8th Ticknor Lounge, Boyleston Hall

10:00-5:00 PM Stay tuned for schedule.³

¹Harvard Administrations campaign to break the Unions was in full swing when the Progressive Student Labor Movement was active 1996-2001. The endowment at that time was booming at the time of the Mass Hall Sit In – Spring of 2001.

²In 2002, a group of alums in the investment industry complained about the super-sized compensation Harvard’s portfolio managers – most of them employees of Havard Management Corporation. The president of HMC, Jack Meyer, took a bunch of his people and a bunch of Harvard’s money off and formed their own investment company. They continued to rake in bales of hay, but ta-da they were not Harvard employees. The current HMC bunch raked in enough to rile the alums and with the “deleveraging” of the market demanded that they give it back.

³Both SLAM and YREP have nascent websites. YREP has theirs hosted on Blogger which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the near monopoly Google. SLAM, on the other hand, has a drupal site hosted by The Harvard Computer Society. Since Drupal is free software. it makes more sense to post the schedule on SLAM than YREP. GAME ON! 🙂

Congress is about to take up Obama’s “economic program”. It will have line items which at least sound progressive and/or populist. We should remember the Bush administration ‘ethanol debacle’ in evaluating these. Ecology is about economy and conversely^1,2. But the current “plan” seems to include a second “bailout” of the financial services industry. Hedge fund manager, the Late³ Larry Summers was on the TV machine assuring us that this time it will be different. Will it?⁴

What, exactly, will the $1 Trillion this will end up costing us save? If we give money to the banks to keep them afloat, do people get to stay in their homes? Or do they foreclosed anyway? Do we save the banks and do nothing for the borrowers? Do we save an abstraction, The Economy, and do nothing for the people who are it’s reality?

David Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World and The Great Turning, appeared on Democracy Now this morning to discuss an alternative economic plan described in his new book, Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth. Korten argues convincingly that it is possible to have an economy, i.e. a tool of our own creation, which serves the people who compose and create it, rather than the reverse. One of the ingredients, he suggests, is letting banks that deserve to fail, fail. In fact the teaser above the title is, Why Wall Street Can’t Be Fixed and How to Replace It. A video clip of his interview with David Brancaccio on PBS.

Holy Schumpeter’s Ghost, Batman!

If, on the other hand, The Late Larry succeeds in saving the “too big to fail” banks while the “too little to bother with” homeowners undergo ‘creative destruction’ into homelessness, even the Ghost of Schumpeter will rise up and smite him, yet again.

Some thoughts from me, but hopefully not inconsistent with David’s ideas:

$1 Trillion, that’s the projected cost of all the rounds of bailout planned. That would buy 4 million homes at $250,000 a crack. If the gummint, [i.e. “we the people”] just paid the ‘bad’ mortgages and gave people their homes, it would prevent a serious housing crisis from becoming a diaspora. But it would still reward the financial services industry for bad behaviour. How about if we the people, just write down the value of the mortgages to a point where a people can afford them? Coincidentally, they might then be more in line with “economic fundamentals” than the value determined by the “free market” on speculative steroids. We might have to nationalize the banks to do that. Krugman, this year’s Bank of Sweden Prize winner, thinks that would be a good idea.

If we do major write downs of mortgage values, we probably should qualify them by making the homes purchased “limited equity”. That is, a regulation on the price of a future sale of the home. We do not want them to become instruments of speculation in a future housing bubble. Perhaps consideration should be given to the amount of equity a given borrower has acrued. I don’t know the details.

[back after i get my broken nose looked at]
¹See for example, the work of former Harvard Crimson President, Bill McKibben’s, Deep Economy.

²I met Steven Chu when he gave a talk at MIT about energy and Abrupt Climate Change^A. At the beginning of his talk, he mentioned briefly that there is a lot of room to address carbon emission in the area of conservation, but he wasn’t going to talk about it. he was going to talk about controlling carbon emission of energy generation^B. He was then the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He was going to talking to people seeking careers in science and engineering research, i.e. usable results 10 or more years away. His appointment as Energy Secretary is very luke warm good news. It’s up to us to move his planning horizon in and his strategy towards conservation. His most amazing remark was after the talk. He turned to me with stunning earnestness. “These things are all really about money.” Well, that may be news to someone who worked for Bell Labs at the height of its monopoly [and the height of the Cold War], but if you got your PhD at Harlem’s CCNY, you pretty much know that. 🙂 🙂

³Obviously, I don’t believe that slinking off to be a hedge fund manager after being busted out of the Harvard Presidency amounts to resurrection. His appointment as Lamont University Professor, smells an awful lot like a deal to placate The Fellows^C. Not resurrection. Not even close.

⁴One bit of good news. His mentor/co-conspirator, Harvard Fellow Robert Rubin, having lined his pockets with a chunk of taxpayer money for misguiding Citigroup, has resigned from Citigroup. But, I did not hear of him giving the money back.

^AAbrupt Climate Change is much more descriptive of what matters to human life than global warming. It is the change of climate too rapidly for human societies to adapt that is the danger. I did not invent this phrase. I stole it from climate scientist Dr. Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State university. His talk before the 2007 meeting of the American Geophysical Union, recorded by Maria Gilardin of TUC Radio, is well worth listening to [lowband].

^BAll of us non-Nobel physicists know that energy is not created or generated. It is converted. More accurately, we siphon off the flow of entropy. It is ‘free energy’ that really matters.

^CHow much influence Summers’ mentor/co-conspirator Fellow Robert Rubin had I cannot say with precision. I can only say, “too much.”

With the ceasefire “holding”¹, it might be useful for a longer view:

——

The Outreach Center at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Middle East Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School are announcing a panel that will address the recent events in Gaza.

Gaza In Context: Background and Prospects From the Current Crisis

Wednesday, January 21st
12 Noon – 1:30 pm
Harvard Kennedy School, Littauer Building, Room 280
79 JFK Street, Cambridge MA 02138 (click here for a map)

Speakers: Duncan Kennedy, Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence, Harvard Law School

Naz K. Modirzadeh, Senior Associate, International Humanitarian Law Research Initative, Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research, Harvard University

^——

[Photo: Wikmedia foundation.²]

Prof Duncan is one of the stars of Harvard’s legal left. I heard him give a paper – “Three Globalizations of Law and Legal Thought: 1850-2000” – at the Workshop on the Political Economy of Modern Capitalism. I am totally bereft of clue as to what he said. Egyptian Eyes tells me that it was a very hard paper. Hopefully, this talk will be human understandable and/or his colleagues and/or students will be able to translate and/or elaborate for him.³

I don’t know Prof Naz, but you can read his paper, Taking Islamic Law Seriously: INGOs and the Battle for Muslim Hearts and Minds for The Harvard Human Rights Journal.

¹In the war biz, a ceasefire “holding” doesn’t mean “nobody dying.” There are, of course always deaths due to unrelated causes. There are deaths due to “holdover effects” like children killed playing with unexploded munitions. And there are always “isolated incidents” that lead to a “small’ number of deaths – relatively speaking. The calculus of ceasefire compliance ignores the first two categories and indicates “holding” if the third category is “negligible”.

²I tried to take his picture for Wikipedia. He may have questions about the political economy of Wikipedia, but they can be ignored because nobody has really worked it out with any richness of detail. It’s a cheap way to reach some unknown number of people. But being miffed about Cambridge’s other village idiot badgering him for free legal advice makes more sense. Especially since he was represented by one of Prof. Duncan’s graduates who is known to be able to speak human.

³my snarkiness notwithstanding. But seriously folks, communication between the legal left and the artsy fartsy left could be, it seems to me, better. I am part of the later and a bit self snarky.

Young demonstrator holding the Palestinian flag in Harvard Square, December 29, 2008.

Democracy Now has a lot of coverage of the latest from Gaza.

[This link is now 15 days old. Fortunately and unfortunately, it is still accurate.]

*It was not my intent to be enigmatic. As we used to say in the 60’s, I’ve had “a heavy head.”^! I refer to Rachel Corrie who was killed by an armored D9R bulldozer as she tried to prevent the destruction of a Palestinian home on the Gaza Strip. Cindy and Craig Corrie spoke at Christ Church Cambridge last summer. Craig was asked, “Did you try to prevent Rachel from going?” “Of course, I asked her questions. I wanted to be sure she understood … , but when your child tells you that her conscience demands that she do something you cannot prevent her from doing it.”

^!My only regret about being homeless is that it takes time away from saving the world, which is after all what I ‘do’.

Ramsey Clark at the White House [Photo: Wikimedia Foundation]

An interesting idea.

I’ll be back with my own ideas. Nov. 6ish.

Photo: Peter Payack via Wicked Local

The Cambridge Page of Wicked Local has multiple reports of voting irregularities, including, “Youville House polling location line snakes out the door”– pictured above.

*New to ‘the guy by the door’? Harvard which hosts this blog is in Cambridge, Massachusetts a city of 100,000 people 40,000 of whom are registered. A municipal election turns out about 20,000. In 1995, I turned out about 200.

Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, Green Party Presidential Candidate [Photo Wikimedia]	Ralph Nader in 2007, Independent Presidential Candidate [Photo Wikimedia]	Democratic Party Presidential Candidate Barack Obama in Abington, PA [Photo: Wikimedia]

As mentioned in Beyond Vietnam, Beyond Iraq; on matters of war, Barack Obama cannot be taken as heir to the political legacy of Martin King. Obama is getting his economic advice from Harvard Fellow¹ and CitiGroup Director Robert Rubin, the man who engineered the exportation of millions of U.S. jobs. As Nader points out Obama is a centrist. Michael Moore is basing his support of Obama on the hope that Obama will break his campaign promise and get out of Iraq sooner than advertised. Yet there is the specter of John McCain who is many ways like a Specter character from the James Bond movies.

Today’s Democracy Now! has extensive reporting of voter disenfranchisement and voting machine irregularities. McCain could steal the 2008 election just as 2000 and 2004 were. This is easiest to due in a state where the vote is close. Those of us who live in a blue state can afford to vote our conscious at the risk of it being a symbolic gesture. but a good showing at the polls can be used in lobbying efforts after the election. To protect agains the risk of a McCain presidency, call your relatives and friends in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia. You mush encourage them not just to vote, but to be on the watch for disenfranchisement and fraud. They must be prepared to take action.

¹There are Harvard Fellows and there are Harvard Fellows. There are Junior Fellows who are top shelf post docs. There are faculty members who are Senior Fellows. But a Fellow, is a member of The Corporation. Rubin was the Fellow who lent the rest of the Fellows the subprime President recently departed.

Tenant Activists outside McCain HQ, Downtown Crossing, Boston MA [Photo: OpenMediaBoston]

Jason Pramas of OpenMediaBoston reports.

The Arredondos – Alex, Melida, and Carlos – of Uphams Corner, MA leading the march Oct. 11, 2008.

A year to the day before he was assassinated, Martin King¹ delivered the broadest critique of American foreign policy and political economy of his career. Not only was it accurate to the time, it was remarkably prescient. Read/listen to the speach and you will understand why electing Obama is nowhere near enough. We must do more – much, much more.

Among them…

or outside the Boston area.

This is not, “Get out of Iraq in a decade rather than a century.” It is not, “Deploy over the horizon” or “Move the war back to Afghanistan.”

It is beyond Iraq, beyond Oil, beyond the continual war for primitive extraction of resources which Martin warned us about -most likely at the cost of his life.

¹I don’t doubt the value of his doctorate. Being named for the catalyst of the Protestant Reformation is not lost on me. But he was a man like me. I cannot evade responsibility by pretending he was of a higher order of being.

Crises are hard to count because they depend on point of view. To shareholders in the financial services sector there is an international finance crisis. To the newly homeless, there is a housing crisis. These two crises are joined at the bank – in this case Bank of America. Climate change meets at the bank too. Harvard Fellow Robert Rubin’s Citibank has a major stack in coal. The number of crises depends on the time scale you choose – global climate change being the most imminent. But bioaccumulation¹ assures a very long list of toxic pollutants each with it’s own environmental consequence. The current cost effective mining technique – mount top removal – assures that vegetation is obliterated, streams are filled in as well as polluted which translates to loss of habitat for species etc.

A two local groups and a local chapters of a national group met to confront these crises and shut down Citibank in Harvard Square. [Photo Open Media Boston]

Jason Pramas of Open Media Boston reports (in text and video) that Rising Tide Boston, City Life/Vida Urbana, and Rainforest Action Network² joined in non-violent civil disobedience shutting down Citibank in Harvard Square.

¹This wikipedia page is barely adequate. An important concept deserves much better. If you don’t have the stomach to go eye-ball to eye-ball with the ruling class, you can fix the “bioaccumulation” wikipedia page. It won’t make them made at you.

²Their report on the protest. I wanted you to see their home page. I’m green with envy, but trying to be the bigger man. 🙁 They were on Democracy Now to debate whether “Clean Coal” makes any sense.

… and when I get back from dinner, more on the International Forum on Globalization Teach-In; Confronting the Global Triple Crisis

This video features David Harvey, the Distinguished Professor Anthropology¹, at my alma mater – City University of New York.

I wish I had met him.² His A Brief History of Neoliberalism [University of Chicago Center for International Studies Beyond the Headlines Series. October 26, 2005. Audio ] includes the financial takeover of New York City after the bankruptcy of New York City in 1975.^3,4

So I was part of all this. I knew vaguely what was happening to me, but the clarity of Harvey probably would have helped. I remembered the Penn Central bailout. The most obvious affront to labor was yet to come in 1980. Republican President Richard Nixon authorized $1.5 Billion in loan guarantees to a deeply ailing Chrysler Coporation under CEO Lee Iacocca. Among the justifications was saving American jobs. Iacocca took the ‘fresh capital’ and bought Japanese manufactured robots that ‘controlled labor cost’ i.e. put American autoworkers out of work.

*”Dung Deal” I stole from Freddy’s Brooklyn Roundhouse. “Deja Vu All Over Again” is legendary New York Yankee catcher and later manager, Yogi Berra.

There is a lot of commentary on left that this bailout is bad. There is also significant commentary from the  right that it is bad. I suspect they differ in what they think should be done. Missing from what I have seen so far, is how this bailout will hurt an effective response to the largest single cause of increasing human misery – global climate change. Same cause as class war, but is the “solution” timely?

¹ Professor of Anthropology Maple Raza who, among other things was the vidoeographer during the Spring 2001 occupation of Harvard’s Massachusetts Hall, notes with considerable pride that the Anthropology Department was the most progressive of the faculty. I believe him. Anthropologists have the notion that people were earning a living throughout the world as opposed to just England and that they’ve been doing it for a very long time as opposed to waiting until the 18th century. More recently one Harvard Anthropologist [i.o.u. a link] noticed that subsistence economies are by definition sustainable.

²Once again, I am indebted to Adaner Usmani for acquainting me with David Harvey.

³ I was a graduate student then. There was, as you might expect, a great deal of anxiety associated with this event.

⁴For those interested in Latin America, he makes significant mention of the effect of the “Chicago Boys” on Pinochet’s Chile. His account agrees remarkably well with that in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

Protesting the proposed bailout – Wall St. Sept. 25, 2008. [IndyMedia]

More pictures from NYC IndyMedia.

 I lied …there’s a lot to say.

Where to begin? Adaner Usmani has posted this history of U.S. Govt. bailouts from Pro Publica.

Gathering in front of Holyoke Center after agreement between S.E.i.U. and Allied-Barton was announced March 2007.

Last Spring, thanks to wide community support:

S.E.I.U Local 615 got a contract agreement with the largest security company in the U.S. ¹ – Allied-Barton – the firm which is currently used by Harvard. One axiom of an individual seeking a job, is that your power in what is always an ‘asymmetric relationship’ is at it’s greatest just before you sign on the dotted line. This is also true of unions relative to employers. The job of the union over the duration of the contract is to oppose employers efforts chip away at – if not outright ignore – provisions of the contract.

S.E.I.U Local 615 members at Harvard are asking your support in bringing pressure to bear on Allied-Barton for violations of contract provisions:

• Failing to post job openings so that all eligible union members can bid on them.
• Awarding hours to new employees in unposted jobs.
• Ending all overtime.
• Posting new employees for ‘training’ without any supervision to train them.

These and other infractions are described by the union members themselves at Boston SOUL – Security Officers Union Local615.²

They are asking us to join a rally today in front of the Holyoke Center from 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM.

I respect and support what they are doing and I will join in their parade. However, I do think that Harvard’s Labor Left has not yet found the best path. For the Harvard community to pressure adminstration to perssure Allied-Barton management is at best oblique. Consider what the purpose of outsourcing is in the first place. But, Lest that be called rain, I will render it after the parade.

¹I have deliberately excluded from this, Blackwater, Dyncorp and their ilk who I would call private military organizations.

²We need to get these folks more in tune with the other part of SEIU615 i.e. Harvard’s Custodial Workers. One thing at a time I guess.

…it is difficult to have faith in the policy wherewithal of a government that oversaw the utter mismanagement of the war in Iraq and the response to Hurricane Katrina. If any administration can turn this crisis into another depression, it is the Bush administration.

Joseph E Stiglitz ***  “The fruit of hypocrisy,” The Guardian 9/16/08.

Harvard alum and employee Gustavo at Tanner Fountain, North Yard.

Despite all the posturing, do we really know what happened? Who was responsible? Was the U.S. response justified? Has it been useful?

I still remember, Sabrina Daniel, daughter of fallen NYC firefighter Vernon Cherry, on the day of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan¹.

It don’t make me feel no better, because I know that somewhere halfway around the world there is a daughter just like me, who just lost her father.

¹Firefighter Cherry was still missing at the time. Sabrina’s mother, Joanne Cherry, would not hear of the idea that he was lost. In early January 2009 his turnout coat was found at ground zero as well as the bodies of three other firefighters from the Brooklyn based Ladder 118 = “fire under the bridge.”

Ladder 118 enroute to the World Trade Center, Sept. 11, 2001

Ongoing inquiries:

911truth.org

Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth

Eliot Kamenitz/Times-Picayune

Three years ago today Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast of the United States. As it approached, people familiar with New Orleans knew that the devastation would be severe and fall most heavily on the poor mostly African-American II.¹ One dared call it genocide. When the wind had died down, Chris Rose of the Times-Picayune wrote ot the devastion in an article that later became a book,  1 Dead in Attic.

The Gulf Coast and New Orleans are only rebulit to a fraction of pre-Katrina vitality as they brace for the onslaught of Gustav. Cain Burdeau of the Associated Press reports that the levies are not even up to pre-Katrina strength. There is the prospect that Gustav might be more severe. An assortment of politicians from both parties is changing their convention plans to deal with the impending crisis. There is one small upside. Most of the people forced to leave by Katrina have not returned to be forced out by Gustav.

¹To my regular reader(s), I apologize. I’m campaigining for recognition of the Genome Project discovery that everybody in the Americas is African-???-American. I am mostly African-European-American.^a

^aIt’s more correct to say that all the known Human Genome originated in Africa so that people in the Orient are African-Asians. Also the result actually dates back to earlier work on Mitochondrial DNA, but is much more firmly established due to the HGP.