House Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned Tuesday that every dollar President Obama decides to spend on the war in Afghanistan is one less that's available to help bring about an economic recovery, improve the jobs situation and bank away political capital for Democrats leading up to the midterm elections.
"I think we have to look at that war with a green eyeshade on," Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Tuesday on a conference call with financial reporters and economists who blog. "There is unrest in our caucus about: Can we afford this war?"
Pelosi qualified her remarks by noting that cost is not the top concern. "I think the American people believe that if it's something that's in our national security interest," she said, then the investment is worth it.
But it still has to be paid for, she said. "Everything else has to be paid for. It must be fiscally sound. We have to hold it to the same standard, as well."
Most Americans, however, do not believe that the war is worth waging any longer, according to polls. Under President Bush, wars and occupations were paid for with long-term debt; Obama campaigned under the principle that war should mean shared sacrifice.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey (D-Wisc.) warned Obama recently that he would hold him to that promise.
"There ain't going to be no money for nothing if we pour it all into Afghanistan," he said. "If they ask for an increased troop commitment in Afghanistan, I am going to ask them to pay for it."
Pelosi backed him up.
"As you know, the chairman of our appropriations committee, Mr. Obey, as well as Mr. Murtha, have both said the war must be paid for," she said, referring to Rep. Jack Murtha (D-Pa.), a Pelosi ally who chairs the subcommittee overseeing war spending. "It is obviously part of the debate, as Mr. Obey insists that it be."
In the 1960s, Democratic President Lyndon Johnson oversaw a full-scale war in Vietnam and, simultaneously, an expansive domestic project at home known as the Great Society -- the so-called "Guns and Butter" approach.
The war took the lives of nearly 60,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese. It also sapped enough government treasure and Democratic political capital that the Great Society foundered, Johnson dropped his reelection bid and Richard Nixon was elected, finally smashing the New Deal coalition that had dominated American politics for generations.
Even if Obama attempts to repeat history with a troop escalation in Afghanistan, Democrats in Congress, as Pelosi and Obey's comments indicate, might be there to save him from himself by withholding funds.
The lesson from Johnson's example was that Democrats can't have guns and butter at the same time. Pelosi lamented the trillions of dollars wasted in the failed Iraq war and suggested the lesson should be remembered this time around.
"What did we decide, that Iraq was at least $2 trillion? And for what? I mean, God bless our soldiers for their courage and their sacrifice and that of their families. But $2 trillion for what?" said Pelosi. "Think of the opportunity cost when you break it down, when we talk about cancer, for example. We spent in two weeks in Iraq what we spent in a year on cancer research. With all that scientific opportunity that was available to us, we couldn't afford to do more. But we certainly could afford -- or so they told us -- to be in Iraq."
Ultimately, she said, taking cost into consideration should make for a more sober decision-making process.
"We need to know what the mission is, how this is further protecting the American people and is this the best way to do that, especially at a time when there's such serious economic issues here at home," Pelosi said.
November 24, 2009
Washington Times Depends On $40M Subsidy From Unification Church, Says Ex-Editor
As previously noted, TPM's Justin Elliott has been regularly reporting on the ongoing insanity over at The Washington Times, which is going through its own internal version of a 2012 disaster movie. Firings! Recriminations! Armed guards roaming the hallways! All of this is actually happening, as the family of owner Sun Myung Moon stages its own bizarre version of King Lear.
Adding to all of these woes is a lawsuit filed by ex-editorial page editor Richard Miniter, who accuses his former employer of discrimination.
Elliott obtained Miniter's affidavit in the case and it is every bit as awesome as you would imagine. Of particular interest is the revelation that the newspaper "relies on a roughly $40 million annual subsidy from the Unification Church and cannot survive without that subsidy, which is paid in weekly amounts."
By means of comparison, Miniter states that the Times receives less than $37 million in revenue from advertising and circulation, while laying out $70 million annually. So, that weekly Moonie allowance is pretty important!
But you've probably come here for the weird religious stuff, right? OKAY, THEN:
21. McDevitt told me that "It would be good for you to go." I took this to mean that if I didn't go, it would count negatively against my prospects at The Washington Times and of being offered permanent executive employment there.
22. I knew that McDevitt was a member of the Unification Church and that his religion was important to him. A large, Mao-like portrait of Rev. Moon hung above his desk and a billboard-sized Korean-language calligraphy, written by Rev. Moon, hung in the executive conference room. While these Moon relics were only seen by senior executives, I knew they had personal significance to McDevitt. At first, I considered this artwork to be a sign of personal and private religious devotion, like an Advent calendar tacked to someone's cubicle, and not a sign that the Church would interfere in the "editorial independence" that editors were promised.
Ha ha, no. Actually, after Miniter "joked to his deputy about Moon's long, flowing garb in a church brochure," the paper launched an internal investigation, and subsequently "asked him to work from home."
I have to imagine that Justin Elliott's new TPM colleague, the late-of-the-Washington Times Christina Bellantoni, is going to have a particularly meaningful Thanksgiving holiday!
[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not? Also, please send tips to tv@huffingtonpost.com -- learn more about our media monitoring project here.]
Adding to all of these woes is a lawsuit filed by ex-editorial page editor Richard Miniter, who accuses his former employer of discrimination.
Elliott obtained Miniter's affidavit in the case and it is every bit as awesome as you would imagine. Of particular interest is the revelation that the newspaper "relies on a roughly $40 million annual subsidy from the Unification Church and cannot survive without that subsidy, which is paid in weekly amounts."
By means of comparison, Miniter states that the Times receives less than $37 million in revenue from advertising and circulation, while laying out $70 million annually. So, that weekly Moonie allowance is pretty important!
But you've probably come here for the weird religious stuff, right? OKAY, THEN:
21. McDevitt told me that "It would be good for you to go." I took this to mean that if I didn't go, it would count negatively against my prospects at The Washington Times and of being offered permanent executive employment there.
22. I knew that McDevitt was a member of the Unification Church and that his religion was important to him. A large, Mao-like portrait of Rev. Moon hung above his desk and a billboard-sized Korean-language calligraphy, written by Rev. Moon, hung in the executive conference room. While these Moon relics were only seen by senior executives, I knew they had personal significance to McDevitt. At first, I considered this artwork to be a sign of personal and private religious devotion, like an Advent calendar tacked to someone's cubicle, and not a sign that the Church would interfere in the "editorial independence" that editors were promised.
Ha ha, no. Actually, after Miniter "joked to his deputy about Moon's long, flowing garb in a church brochure," the paper launched an internal investigation, and subsequently "asked him to work from home."
I have to imagine that Justin Elliott's new TPM colleague, the late-of-the-Washington Times Christina Bellantoni, is going to have a particularly meaningful Thanksgiving holiday!
[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not? Also, please send tips to tv@huffingtonpost.com -- learn more about our media monitoring project here.]
Reaching Women Around the World
It is tradition to celebrate Thanksgiving with family, food, and thanks. Like many families, mine starts the holiday meal by going around the table so everyone can say what they are most thankful for. For me, I am thankful that as a woman, I live in the peace and security of the United States.
Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times has said that "in the 19th century, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape." There is a growing understanding that "focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism."
But how? How do we help women who live so far away and face atrocities we can't even imagine? How does an individual sitting at a Thanksgiving table in the United States provide any real assistance to a woman who will never have a meal like this in her entire life?
The best program I have found is Women for Women International, an international development and humanitarian organization that helps women survivors of war move from crisis to self-sufficiency. Through the organization's sponsorship program, you can be matched with a woman in need and help her receive financial assistance, job skill training, leadership and rights awareness training and microcredit loans. A monthly contribution of $27 provides your sponsored "sister" with the keys to rebuilding her life after war. By sponsoring a woman, you not only provide her with the financial assistance she needs to get back on her feet, but you can also be a critical source of support by writing letters, which Women for Women International will translate and exchange on your behalf.
Many of the women report that the letters they receive from their sponsors in the United States and around the world provided the kind of confidential emotional support they needed most to fully recover. This year-long experience is a journey that will bring women from victim to survivor to active citizen.
As a board member for Women for Women International, I have witnessed firsthand the direct and personal impact of connecting with a woman who has lost everything in war and yet is able to rebuild her life, her family and her community with my support. So far, Women for Women International has helped over 250,000 women globally and distributed more than $79 million in direct aid, micro credit loans, and other program services. Because women reinvest up to 90% of their resources back into the family, we know that these women are helping rebuild their families and communities in a proven model of economic development. Stronger women build stronger nations.
Women are uniquely vulnerable to violence -- they are the majority of the world's displaced and refugee populations and are subjected time and again to rape and sexualized violence as tools of war. Yet women also represent enormous opportunity to rebuild families and communities. We work with rape survivors in the Democratic Republic of Congo, site of the deadliest war since WWII where hundreds of thousands of women have been raped. These same women are now learning to manufacture ceramic tiles that will build, literally and figuratively, the foundation of peace and development after war. In Afghanistan, we help illiterate mothers put their girls and boys through school amidst a conflict that has produced over a million widows, many of whom are uneducated and poverty-stricken. In Sudan, we assist poor women farmers who are then able to double their income through new techniques for commercial markets.
In a time of global financial crisis that is estimated will plunge another 22 million women into poverty, these women are on a precipice. For these women, even $27 a month can change the world and open new opportunities for them and their families to thrive. As I await my turn to give my thanks at the family supper table this Thursday, I know just what I will say.
Sheryl Sandberg is Chief Operating Officer of Facebook and sits on the board of directors of Women for Women International. For more on Women for Women International, visit womenforwomen.org or contact Lyric Thompson at lthompson@womenforwomen.org.
Read more HuffPost Thanksgiving coverage and commentary
Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times has said that "in the 19th century, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape." There is a growing understanding that "focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism."
But how? How do we help women who live so far away and face atrocities we can't even imagine? How does an individual sitting at a Thanksgiving table in the United States provide any real assistance to a woman who will never have a meal like this in her entire life?
The best program I have found is Women for Women International, an international development and humanitarian organization that helps women survivors of war move from crisis to self-sufficiency. Through the organization's sponsorship program, you can be matched with a woman in need and help her receive financial assistance, job skill training, leadership and rights awareness training and microcredit loans. A monthly contribution of $27 provides your sponsored "sister" with the keys to rebuilding her life after war. By sponsoring a woman, you not only provide her with the financial assistance she needs to get back on her feet, but you can also be a critical source of support by writing letters, which Women for Women International will translate and exchange on your behalf.
Many of the women report that the letters they receive from their sponsors in the United States and around the world provided the kind of confidential emotional support they needed most to fully recover. This year-long experience is a journey that will bring women from victim to survivor to active citizen.
As a board member for Women for Women International, I have witnessed firsthand the direct and personal impact of connecting with a woman who has lost everything in war and yet is able to rebuild her life, her family and her community with my support. So far, Women for Women International has helped over 250,000 women globally and distributed more than $79 million in direct aid, micro credit loans, and other program services. Because women reinvest up to 90% of their resources back into the family, we know that these women are helping rebuild their families and communities in a proven model of economic development. Stronger women build stronger nations.
Women are uniquely vulnerable to violence -- they are the majority of the world's displaced and refugee populations and are subjected time and again to rape and sexualized violence as tools of war. Yet women also represent enormous opportunity to rebuild families and communities. We work with rape survivors in the Democratic Republic of Congo, site of the deadliest war since WWII where hundreds of thousands of women have been raped. These same women are now learning to manufacture ceramic tiles that will build, literally and figuratively, the foundation of peace and development after war. In Afghanistan, we help illiterate mothers put their girls and boys through school amidst a conflict that has produced over a million widows, many of whom are uneducated and poverty-stricken. In Sudan, we assist poor women farmers who are then able to double their income through new techniques for commercial markets.
In a time of global financial crisis that is estimated will plunge another 22 million women into poverty, these women are on a precipice. For these women, even $27 a month can change the world and open new opportunities for them and their families to thrive. As I await my turn to give my thanks at the family supper table this Thursday, I know just what I will say.
Sheryl Sandberg is Chief Operating Officer of Facebook and sits on the board of directors of Women for Women International. For more on Women for Women International, visit womenforwomen.org or contact Lyric Thompson at lthompson@womenforwomen.org.
Read more HuffPost Thanksgiving coverage and commentary
Remembering People Power In Seattle In 1999 And Berlin In 1989
Next month, at the climate change summit in Copenhagen, the wealthy nations that produce most of the excess carbon in our atmosphere will almost certainly fail to embrace measures adequate to ward off the devastation of our planet by heat and chaotic weather. Their leaders will probably promise us teaspoons with which to put out the firestorm and insist that springing for fire hoses would be far too onerous a burden for business to bear. They have already backed off from any binding deals at this global summit. There will be a lot of wrangling about who should cut what when, and how, with a lot of nations claiming that they would act if others would act first. Activists -- farmers, environmentalists, island-dwellers -- around the world will try to write a different future, a bolder one, and if anniversaries are an omen, then they have history on their side.
A decade ago, and a decade before that, popular power turned the tide of history. November 30, 1999, was the day that activists shut down a World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle and started to chart another course for the planet than the one that corporations and their servant nation-states had presumed they’d execute without impediment. Since then, events have strayed increasingly far from the WTO’s road map for global domination and the financial scenarios that captains of industry once liked to entertain.
Until that day when tens of thousands of protestors poured into the streets of Seattle (as well as other cities from Winnipeg to Athens, Limerick to Seoul), the might of the corporations made their agenda seem nothing short of inevitable -- and then, suddenly, it wasn’t. Disrupted by demonstrators outside its door and, on the inside, by dissent from poor nations galvanized by the ruckus, the meeting collapsed in confusion. Today, the WTO is puny compared to its ambitions only a decade ago.
The mass civil disobedience in the streets was, in a way, an answer to another landmark day a decade earlier: November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and tens of thousands of Germans swarmed across the forbidden zone splitting their once and future capital city to celebrate, and eventually to reunite their nation. The fall of the Wall is now often remembered as if the gracious acquiescence of officialdom brought it about. It was not so.
“I announced the wall would open, but it was only the pressure by the people that made it possible” said Günter Schabowski, then-East German Communist Party central committee spokesperson, earlier this year. Had those East Germans not shown up and overwhelmed the guards at the Wall, nothing would have changed that night. In fact, popular will toppled several regimes that season. Thanks to creative civil-society organizing, steadfastness, astonishing courage, and imagination, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary also slipped out of the Soviet bloc and so out of a version of communism tantamount to totalitarianism as well.
There was a lot of triumphalism in the West thereafter. From the White House to business magazines and newspapers came a drumbeat of pronouncements that communism had failed and capitalism had triumphed. As it happened, those weren’t the binaries at stake in the astonishing uprisings that season in Eastern Europe, or in the failed uprising in Tiananmen Square in the Chinese capital Beijing that spring. People certainly wanted freedom, but it wasn’t the freedom to trade mysterious debt instruments and buy Double Whoppers, exactly. Nor was it capitalism, but civil society, very nearly its antithesis, that had risen up and brought down the Wall. The real binary then was: civil society versus top-down authoritarianism -- and framed that way, our situation didn’t look quite as good as Washington and the media then made out.
Nevertheless, for a decade afterward, it wasn’t that easy to argue with the logic of capitalism’s triumph, since even China was making a beeline for a market economy and, in the process, doing an especially good job of proving that capitalism and democracy were separate phenomena. It was also the decade of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the first of a series of broad international treaties meant to secure the terms of corporate power for a long time to come. Its implementation on January 1, 1994, prompted the Zapatistas, the indigenous peasants of southern Mexico’s jungle, to rise up against the treaty, which promised -- and has now delivered -- a grim new chapter in the deprivation and dispossession of Mexico’s majority. Like the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of the Zapatistas came as a great shock.
The Sucking Sound and the Turning Tide
Few remember how dissent against NAFTA was dismissed and even mocked in the era when the treaty was debated, signed, and ratified. In his debate with Bill Clinton and the elder George Bush during the 1992 presidential campaign, Ross Perot was ignored when he said, “We have got to stop sending jobs overseas.” He was ridiculed for describing the “giant sucking sound” of those jobs heading south. Which, of course, they did -- and then on to China in a financial “race to the bottom,” while cheap corn raised by Midwestern agribusiness also went south where it bankrupted Mexico’s small farmers.
Cheap food, cheap labor, cheap products turned out to be very, very expensive for the majority of us. It’s a sign of how much things have changed that Hillary Clinton felt compelled to lie in last year’s presidential campaign, claiming she had long been against NAFTA. In that, she was just a weathervane for changing times. After all, in the decade since Seattle, most of South America liberated itself not just from a legacy of American-supported dictators and death squads, but from the economic programs those instruments existed to enforce.
Venezuela lent Argentina enough money to pay off its debts to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), that earlier instrument for imposing free-market ideology and corporate profit. Various other countries did the same, and the continent largely freed itself from the imposition of neoliberal policies that mainly benefited Washington and international corporations. The IMF was so impoverished by Latin American divestment -- which went from 80% of its loans to about 1% -- that it’s been reduced to selling off its gold reserves. The World Bank is doing well only by comparison. By 2005, the tide had clearly turned, and the power of these institutions and of the so-called Washington Consensus that went with them was on the wane.
That tide had just begun to turn 10 years ago, when New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman referred to the people in the streets of Seattle as “a Noah's ark of flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions and yuppies looking for their 1960's fix.” He charged, “What's crazy is that the protesters want the W.T.O. to become precisely what they accuse it of already being -- a global government. They want it to set more rules -- their rules, which would impose our labor and environmental standards on everyone else.”
Nice though our labor and environmental standards might have been elsewhere too, most of us didn’t want the WTO to do anything or to have any power. As the Direct Action Network organizing leaflet from August 1999 put it, the WTO’s “overall goal is to eliminate ‘trade barriers,’ frequently including labor laws, public health regulations, and environmental protection measures.”
That day in Seattle a crane dangled a pair of gigantic banners shaped like arrows: the first, inscribed “Democracy,” pointed one way; the second, labeled “WTO,” pointed the other. The leaflet and banners were pieces of a carefully organized resistance, and it’s important to remember that events like the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia 20 years ago or the shutdown of the WTO weren’t just spontaneous uprisings; they were the fruit of long toil. While the right and too many American media outlets like to remember a fictitious Seattle that was nothing but a cauldron of activist violence (while ignoring serious police violence), too many on the left wanted to think of it as a miraculous convergence rather than the result of careful coalition-building, strategizing, outreach, and all the usual labors.
Straying Far from the Blueprint for Our Era
In the twenty-first century, free-trade agreements came down with their own version of swine flu, a disease likely generated on a gigantic Smithfield Farms hog-raising operation in Veracruz, Mexico, and nicknamed the NAFTA flu. NAFTA itself has been widely reviled. Presidential candidate Manuel Lopez Obrador campaigned in Mexico’s 2006 election on promises to renegotiate it; Hillary disowned it. The plan for a hemisphere-wide Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) was met with massive opposition in Miami in 2003. It crashed and burned in Argentina in 2005 and has since been abandoned.
Latin America went its own way while the Bush Administration locked its attention on the Middle East. Indigenous peoples in Ecuador and Bolivia had a particularly rousing set of victories, while the people of Cochabamba, Bolivia, astonishingly, defeated U.S.-based Bechtel Corporation's privatization of their water, and Ecuadorans are suing Chevron for environmental devastation in what could be the biggest corporate settlement in history -- $27 billion.
Meanwhile, the WTO lurched from one meeting to another, safe in the Doha round from pesky protesters, if not from the dissent of developing nations. It was again besieged by activists in 2003 in Cancún, Mexico -- in scale and impact another Seattle -- and then further battered in 2005 in Hong Kong. The next ministerial conference of the WTO actually convenes in Geneva on November 30th, a decade to the day since the Seattle shutdown, still attempting to resolve issues that arose in Doha. Of course, in the meantime, sneakier bilateral trade agreements have taken the place of big multilateral ones, but this has hardly been the triumphant era predicted a decade earlier. Even Iraq hardly proved the hog trough the big oil and contracting corporations had anticipated.
In fact, for the corporations nothing much has turned out as planned. Capitalism itself failed a little more than a year ago. Or rather the bizarrely rigged corporate-run market economies that determine at least some portion of nearly everyone’s life on Earth imploded in a frenzy of deregulated fecklessness and weirdly disassociative procedures. Then, they were propped up by governments in a way that made the phrase “socialism for the rich” truer than ever. For a while, the same business newspapers that had celebrated capitalism’s triumph in 1999 were proclaiming “the end of American capitalism as we knew it” and the “collapse of finance.”
It was as though the world economy had been a car driven by a drunk. Even if we have now let that drunk back behind the wheel, at least his credibility and the logic of what he claimed to be doing have been irreparably harmed. On the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Time Magazine’s cover story was: “Why Main Street Hates Wall Street” and it told readers in its opening passage that they should be furious. The fall of Wall Street, you could call it, if you want to hear the echo from Berlin.
Oil-price hikes, the misadventures in turning food into biofuels, and economic meltdowns have had other consequences. Michael Pollan wrote in the New York Times more than a year ago:
"In the past several months more than 30 nations have experienced food riots, and so far one government has fallen. Should high grain prices persist and shortages develop, you can expect to see the pendulum shift decisively away from free trade, at least in food. Nations that opened their markets to the global flood of cheap grain (under pressure from previous administrations as well as the World Bank and the I.M.F.) lost so many farmers that they now find their ability to feed their own populations hinges on decisions made in Washington... and on Wall Street. They will now rush to rebuild their own agricultural sectors and then seek to protect them by erecting trade barriers. Not only the Doha round, but the whole cause of free trade in agriculture is probably dead..."
Another death knell for the sunny corporate vision of globalization had nothing to do with ideology; it was about oil, since the more it cost to ship things around the world the less financial sense it made to do so. As the New York Times put it this August:
“Cheap oil, the lubricant of quick, inexpensive transportation links across the world, may not return anytime soon, upsetting the logic of diffuse global supply chains that treat geography as a footnote in the pursuit of lower wages. Rising concern about global warming, the reaction against lost jobs in rich countries, worries about food safety and security, and the collapse of world trade talks in Geneva last week also signal that political and environmental concerns may make the calculus of globalization far more complex.”
The passages cited above came from the New York Times, not the Nation or Mother Jones. Which is to say that if communism failed 20 years ago, then capitalism staggered 10 years ago in Seattle, and fell to its knees a year ago. The crises of petroleum and food costs only augment this reality. But the crisis of climate change matters more than all the rest.
Futures that Work
There are endless questions and conundrums about the largely unforeseen situation in which we now find ourselves, all six billion of us. One of them is: if capitalism and communism both failed, what’s the alternative? The big tent of subversions and traditions called the left hasn’t, in recent times, done a very good job of providing pictures of the possibilities available to us. Still, perhaps the answer to what the political and social alternatives might be will prove very close to what a sustainable world in the face of climate change might look like: small, local, smart, flexible economies and technologies, democracy as direct as possible, an elimination of excess wealth as part of a leveling that might also eliminate dire poverty.
Some of our hope for the future has to be that, one day, the ecological and the economic can be aligned so that, among other things, petroleum and coal become increasingly expensive, as well as increasingly offensive, ways to run our machines. Will we be creative enough to embrace change before crashing systems and wild weather force change on us in the form of an unbearable crisis? Decisions about the nature of that change to come must be made by the citizenry, which seems to be fairly willing to face change when it gets its facts straight, rather than by wealthier nation-states and their leaders who seem, at this juncture, more interested in protecting business than life on Earth.
To survive the coming era, we need to re-imagine what constitutes wealth and well-being and what constitutes poverty. This doesn’t mean telling the destitute not to hope for decent housing, adequate food, and some chance at education, as well as some pleasures and power. It means paring back on the mad consumption machine that has been the engine of the global economy, even though what it produces is often enough entirely distinct from what’s actually needed. American life as it is now lived is poor in security, confidence, connectedness, agency, contemplation, calm, leisure, and other things that you aren’t going to buy at Wal-Mart, or at Neiman Marcus for that matter. If we can see what’s poor about the way we are, we can see what would be enriching rather than impoverishing about change.
Anniversaries of a whole host of revolutions seem to fall in years ending in nine -- from 1789 in France to 1959 in Cuba and 1979 in Nicaragua. And then, in our calendar of nines, there was the fall of the Wall and the Battle of Seattle. The “revolution” that got us into this era of climate change, however, can’t be dated that way. It was the industrial revolution, a gradual shift to an era of mechanization made possible by, and paralleled by, the rise of fossil-fuel consumption. We can’t, and shouldn’t, undo this revolution, but we need to reject some of its premises and recognize some of its costs, including alienation, degradation, and commodification.
We need a postindustrial revolution of appropriate technologies, both in the developed world and in the developing one, so that, for example, kerosene lanterns and wood-burning stoves will be replaced not by conventional appliances but by elegant solar technologies.
There needs to be another revolution in addition to these, one that finishes decolonizing the world so that Europe and the United States are no longer using the lion’s share of resources and emitting the lion’s share of carbon per capita. The WTO, the IMF, and other instruments of neoliberalism existed to keep that world-as-it-was going; the revolt in Seattle was against their ideology as well as their impact, and the decade-old graffiti that said, “We are winning,” had a point.
The “we” that could win and needs to win in the climate change wars isn’t the United States itself. As Bill McKibben recently wrote of President Obama, “The announcement yesterday from the APEC meeting in Singapore that next month’s Copenhagen climate talks will be nothing more than a glorified talking session makes it clear that he has, at least for now, punted on the hard questions around climate. The world won’t be able to get started on solving our climate problem, and the obstacle is -- as it has been for the last two decades -- the United States.” The citizens of the U.S. need to revolt, again, against their nation’s failure of vision and responsibility, in solidarity with the rest of the people of the world, and the animals, and the plants, and the coral reefs, and the coastlines, and the rivers, the glaciers, the ice caps, and the weather as we now know it, or once knew it. That's why November 30th is going to be a global day of action.
Everything is going to change either as runaway climate change takes hold, with its concomitant destruction and suffering, or because a set of programs will be embraced that forestall the worst and return our planet to an atmospheric carbon level of 350 parts per million, now considered the necessary standard to avoid environmental catastrophe. We’re already at 390 parts per million. Unfortunately, a lot of the nations in the key Copenhagen negotiations have fixed on an outdated notion that the world as we know it can survive at 450 parts per million, which would conveniently mean that relatively moderate adjustments are needed.
Remembering how dramatically -- and unexpectedly -- things have changed in the recent past is part of the toolbox for making a deeper, far more necessary change possible. Surely, the extraordinary power of ordinary people in Berlin and Seattle provides us with the kinds of history lessons, the riches we need, to start learning to count.
Rebecca Solnit is the author of A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster and co-author with her brother David of The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle, a short anthology looking at how that watershed event has been misrepresented and reproducing some of the original documents. She's signed beyondtalk.net’s pledge to take action on climate change and she'll be out in the streets again this November 30th.
Copyright 2009 Rebecca Solnit
A decade ago, and a decade before that, popular power turned the tide of history. November 30, 1999, was the day that activists shut down a World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle and started to chart another course for the planet than the one that corporations and their servant nation-states had presumed they’d execute without impediment. Since then, events have strayed increasingly far from the WTO’s road map for global domination and the financial scenarios that captains of industry once liked to entertain.
Until that day when tens of thousands of protestors poured into the streets of Seattle (as well as other cities from Winnipeg to Athens, Limerick to Seoul), the might of the corporations made their agenda seem nothing short of inevitable -- and then, suddenly, it wasn’t. Disrupted by demonstrators outside its door and, on the inside, by dissent from poor nations galvanized by the ruckus, the meeting collapsed in confusion. Today, the WTO is puny compared to its ambitions only a decade ago.
The mass civil disobedience in the streets was, in a way, an answer to another landmark day a decade earlier: November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and tens of thousands of Germans swarmed across the forbidden zone splitting their once and future capital city to celebrate, and eventually to reunite their nation. The fall of the Wall is now often remembered as if the gracious acquiescence of officialdom brought it about. It was not so.
“I announced the wall would open, but it was only the pressure by the people that made it possible” said Günter Schabowski, then-East German Communist Party central committee spokesperson, earlier this year. Had those East Germans not shown up and overwhelmed the guards at the Wall, nothing would have changed that night. In fact, popular will toppled several regimes that season. Thanks to creative civil-society organizing, steadfastness, astonishing courage, and imagination, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary also slipped out of the Soviet bloc and so out of a version of communism tantamount to totalitarianism as well.
There was a lot of triumphalism in the West thereafter. From the White House to business magazines and newspapers came a drumbeat of pronouncements that communism had failed and capitalism had triumphed. As it happened, those weren’t the binaries at stake in the astonishing uprisings that season in Eastern Europe, or in the failed uprising in Tiananmen Square in the Chinese capital Beijing that spring. People certainly wanted freedom, but it wasn’t the freedom to trade mysterious debt instruments and buy Double Whoppers, exactly. Nor was it capitalism, but civil society, very nearly its antithesis, that had risen up and brought down the Wall. The real binary then was: civil society versus top-down authoritarianism -- and framed that way, our situation didn’t look quite as good as Washington and the media then made out.
Nevertheless, for a decade afterward, it wasn’t that easy to argue with the logic of capitalism’s triumph, since even China was making a beeline for a market economy and, in the process, doing an especially good job of proving that capitalism and democracy were separate phenomena. It was also the decade of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the first of a series of broad international treaties meant to secure the terms of corporate power for a long time to come. Its implementation on January 1, 1994, prompted the Zapatistas, the indigenous peasants of southern Mexico’s jungle, to rise up against the treaty, which promised -- and has now delivered -- a grim new chapter in the deprivation and dispossession of Mexico’s majority. Like the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of the Zapatistas came as a great shock.
The Sucking Sound and the Turning Tide
Few remember how dissent against NAFTA was dismissed and even mocked in the era when the treaty was debated, signed, and ratified. In his debate with Bill Clinton and the elder George Bush during the 1992 presidential campaign, Ross Perot was ignored when he said, “We have got to stop sending jobs overseas.” He was ridiculed for describing the “giant sucking sound” of those jobs heading south. Which, of course, they did -- and then on to China in a financial “race to the bottom,” while cheap corn raised by Midwestern agribusiness also went south where it bankrupted Mexico’s small farmers.
Cheap food, cheap labor, cheap products turned out to be very, very expensive for the majority of us. It’s a sign of how much things have changed that Hillary Clinton felt compelled to lie in last year’s presidential campaign, claiming she had long been against NAFTA. In that, she was just a weathervane for changing times. After all, in the decade since Seattle, most of South America liberated itself not just from a legacy of American-supported dictators and death squads, but from the economic programs those instruments existed to enforce.
Venezuela lent Argentina enough money to pay off its debts to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), that earlier instrument for imposing free-market ideology and corporate profit. Various other countries did the same, and the continent largely freed itself from the imposition of neoliberal policies that mainly benefited Washington and international corporations. The IMF was so impoverished by Latin American divestment -- which went from 80% of its loans to about 1% -- that it’s been reduced to selling off its gold reserves. The World Bank is doing well only by comparison. By 2005, the tide had clearly turned, and the power of these institutions and of the so-called Washington Consensus that went with them was on the wane.
That tide had just begun to turn 10 years ago, when New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman referred to the people in the streets of Seattle as “a Noah's ark of flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions and yuppies looking for their 1960's fix.” He charged, “What's crazy is that the protesters want the W.T.O. to become precisely what they accuse it of already being -- a global government. They want it to set more rules -- their rules, which would impose our labor and environmental standards on everyone else.”
Nice though our labor and environmental standards might have been elsewhere too, most of us didn’t want the WTO to do anything or to have any power. As the Direct Action Network organizing leaflet from August 1999 put it, the WTO’s “overall goal is to eliminate ‘trade barriers,’ frequently including labor laws, public health regulations, and environmental protection measures.”
That day in Seattle a crane dangled a pair of gigantic banners shaped like arrows: the first, inscribed “Democracy,” pointed one way; the second, labeled “WTO,” pointed the other. The leaflet and banners were pieces of a carefully organized resistance, and it’s important to remember that events like the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia 20 years ago or the shutdown of the WTO weren’t just spontaneous uprisings; they were the fruit of long toil. While the right and too many American media outlets like to remember a fictitious Seattle that was nothing but a cauldron of activist violence (while ignoring serious police violence), too many on the left wanted to think of it as a miraculous convergence rather than the result of careful coalition-building, strategizing, outreach, and all the usual labors.
Straying Far from the Blueprint for Our Era
In the twenty-first century, free-trade agreements came down with their own version of swine flu, a disease likely generated on a gigantic Smithfield Farms hog-raising operation in Veracruz, Mexico, and nicknamed the NAFTA flu. NAFTA itself has been widely reviled. Presidential candidate Manuel Lopez Obrador campaigned in Mexico’s 2006 election on promises to renegotiate it; Hillary disowned it. The plan for a hemisphere-wide Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) was met with massive opposition in Miami in 2003. It crashed and burned in Argentina in 2005 and has since been abandoned.
Latin America went its own way while the Bush Administration locked its attention on the Middle East. Indigenous peoples in Ecuador and Bolivia had a particularly rousing set of victories, while the people of Cochabamba, Bolivia, astonishingly, defeated U.S.-based Bechtel Corporation's privatization of their water, and Ecuadorans are suing Chevron for environmental devastation in what could be the biggest corporate settlement in history -- $27 billion.
Meanwhile, the WTO lurched from one meeting to another, safe in the Doha round from pesky protesters, if not from the dissent of developing nations. It was again besieged by activists in 2003 in Cancún, Mexico -- in scale and impact another Seattle -- and then further battered in 2005 in Hong Kong. The next ministerial conference of the WTO actually convenes in Geneva on November 30th, a decade to the day since the Seattle shutdown, still attempting to resolve issues that arose in Doha. Of course, in the meantime, sneakier bilateral trade agreements have taken the place of big multilateral ones, but this has hardly been the triumphant era predicted a decade earlier. Even Iraq hardly proved the hog trough the big oil and contracting corporations had anticipated.
In fact, for the corporations nothing much has turned out as planned. Capitalism itself failed a little more than a year ago. Or rather the bizarrely rigged corporate-run market economies that determine at least some portion of nearly everyone’s life on Earth imploded in a frenzy of deregulated fecklessness and weirdly disassociative procedures. Then, they were propped up by governments in a way that made the phrase “socialism for the rich” truer than ever. For a while, the same business newspapers that had celebrated capitalism’s triumph in 1999 were proclaiming “the end of American capitalism as we knew it” and the “collapse of finance.”
It was as though the world economy had been a car driven by a drunk. Even if we have now let that drunk back behind the wheel, at least his credibility and the logic of what he claimed to be doing have been irreparably harmed. On the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Time Magazine’s cover story was: “Why Main Street Hates Wall Street” and it told readers in its opening passage that they should be furious. The fall of Wall Street, you could call it, if you want to hear the echo from Berlin.
Oil-price hikes, the misadventures in turning food into biofuels, and economic meltdowns have had other consequences. Michael Pollan wrote in the New York Times more than a year ago:
"In the past several months more than 30 nations have experienced food riots, and so far one government has fallen. Should high grain prices persist and shortages develop, you can expect to see the pendulum shift decisively away from free trade, at least in food. Nations that opened their markets to the global flood of cheap grain (under pressure from previous administrations as well as the World Bank and the I.M.F.) lost so many farmers that they now find their ability to feed their own populations hinges on decisions made in Washington... and on Wall Street. They will now rush to rebuild their own agricultural sectors and then seek to protect them by erecting trade barriers. Not only the Doha round, but the whole cause of free trade in agriculture is probably dead..."
Another death knell for the sunny corporate vision of globalization had nothing to do with ideology; it was about oil, since the more it cost to ship things around the world the less financial sense it made to do so. As the New York Times put it this August:
“Cheap oil, the lubricant of quick, inexpensive transportation links across the world, may not return anytime soon, upsetting the logic of diffuse global supply chains that treat geography as a footnote in the pursuit of lower wages. Rising concern about global warming, the reaction against lost jobs in rich countries, worries about food safety and security, and the collapse of world trade talks in Geneva last week also signal that political and environmental concerns may make the calculus of globalization far more complex.”
The passages cited above came from the New York Times, not the Nation or Mother Jones. Which is to say that if communism failed 20 years ago, then capitalism staggered 10 years ago in Seattle, and fell to its knees a year ago. The crises of petroleum and food costs only augment this reality. But the crisis of climate change matters more than all the rest.
Futures that Work
There are endless questions and conundrums about the largely unforeseen situation in which we now find ourselves, all six billion of us. One of them is: if capitalism and communism both failed, what’s the alternative? The big tent of subversions and traditions called the left hasn’t, in recent times, done a very good job of providing pictures of the possibilities available to us. Still, perhaps the answer to what the political and social alternatives might be will prove very close to what a sustainable world in the face of climate change might look like: small, local, smart, flexible economies and technologies, democracy as direct as possible, an elimination of excess wealth as part of a leveling that might also eliminate dire poverty.
Some of our hope for the future has to be that, one day, the ecological and the economic can be aligned so that, among other things, petroleum and coal become increasingly expensive, as well as increasingly offensive, ways to run our machines. Will we be creative enough to embrace change before crashing systems and wild weather force change on us in the form of an unbearable crisis? Decisions about the nature of that change to come must be made by the citizenry, which seems to be fairly willing to face change when it gets its facts straight, rather than by wealthier nation-states and their leaders who seem, at this juncture, more interested in protecting business than life on Earth.
To survive the coming era, we need to re-imagine what constitutes wealth and well-being and what constitutes poverty. This doesn’t mean telling the destitute not to hope for decent housing, adequate food, and some chance at education, as well as some pleasures and power. It means paring back on the mad consumption machine that has been the engine of the global economy, even though what it produces is often enough entirely distinct from what’s actually needed. American life as it is now lived is poor in security, confidence, connectedness, agency, contemplation, calm, leisure, and other things that you aren’t going to buy at Wal-Mart, or at Neiman Marcus for that matter. If we can see what’s poor about the way we are, we can see what would be enriching rather than impoverishing about change.
Anniversaries of a whole host of revolutions seem to fall in years ending in nine -- from 1789 in France to 1959 in Cuba and 1979 in Nicaragua. And then, in our calendar of nines, there was the fall of the Wall and the Battle of Seattle. The “revolution” that got us into this era of climate change, however, can’t be dated that way. It was the industrial revolution, a gradual shift to an era of mechanization made possible by, and paralleled by, the rise of fossil-fuel consumption. We can’t, and shouldn’t, undo this revolution, but we need to reject some of its premises and recognize some of its costs, including alienation, degradation, and commodification.
We need a postindustrial revolution of appropriate technologies, both in the developed world and in the developing one, so that, for example, kerosene lanterns and wood-burning stoves will be replaced not by conventional appliances but by elegant solar technologies.
There needs to be another revolution in addition to these, one that finishes decolonizing the world so that Europe and the United States are no longer using the lion’s share of resources and emitting the lion’s share of carbon per capita. The WTO, the IMF, and other instruments of neoliberalism existed to keep that world-as-it-was going; the revolt in Seattle was against their ideology as well as their impact, and the decade-old graffiti that said, “We are winning,” had a point.
The “we” that could win and needs to win in the climate change wars isn’t the United States itself. As Bill McKibben recently wrote of President Obama, “The announcement yesterday from the APEC meeting in Singapore that next month’s Copenhagen climate talks will be nothing more than a glorified talking session makes it clear that he has, at least for now, punted on the hard questions around climate. The world won’t be able to get started on solving our climate problem, and the obstacle is -- as it has been for the last two decades -- the United States.” The citizens of the U.S. need to revolt, again, against their nation’s failure of vision and responsibility, in solidarity with the rest of the people of the world, and the animals, and the plants, and the coral reefs, and the coastlines, and the rivers, the glaciers, the ice caps, and the weather as we now know it, or once knew it. That's why November 30th is going to be a global day of action.
Everything is going to change either as runaway climate change takes hold, with its concomitant destruction and suffering, or because a set of programs will be embraced that forestall the worst and return our planet to an atmospheric carbon level of 350 parts per million, now considered the necessary standard to avoid environmental catastrophe. We’re already at 390 parts per million. Unfortunately, a lot of the nations in the key Copenhagen negotiations have fixed on an outdated notion that the world as we know it can survive at 450 parts per million, which would conveniently mean that relatively moderate adjustments are needed.
Remembering how dramatically -- and unexpectedly -- things have changed in the recent past is part of the toolbox for making a deeper, far more necessary change possible. Surely, the extraordinary power of ordinary people in Berlin and Seattle provides us with the kinds of history lessons, the riches we need, to start learning to count.
Rebecca Solnit is the author of A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster and co-author with her brother David of The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle, a short anthology looking at how that watershed event has been misrepresented and reproducing some of the original documents. She's signed beyondtalk.net’s pledge to take action on climate change and she'll be out in the streets again this November 30th.
Copyright 2009 Rebecca Solnit
Why Is Congress Mute On Afghanistan?
Within the next few days the President will announce his decision about the the strategy America will pursue in Afghanistan. However, the actor intended by the founders to be the lead and be loud in questions of war -- the United States Congress -- has and continues to remain almost entirely silent. Article I of our Constitution states that Congress is given enumerated powers to speak loudly over questions of war.
Our founders did not intend for central questions of war to be discussed behind closed doors, within private meetings of envoys, ambassadors, generals and the executive, but in the halls of Congress. The father of the Constitution, James Madison stated, "In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause that confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department." And the unanswered question for Afghanistan is not one of troop levels, but of the first principle of war--the objective.
The U.S. Army's Field Manual 3-0 states, "every military operation toward a clearly defined, decisive and attainable objective." Denial of sanctuary to Al Qaeda, protecting the Afghan people, building Afghan security forces -- our nation cannot accomplish any of these objectives on the cheap. Achieving these objectives would require a generational commitment of billions, a substantial and permanent growth of the military, and sacrifice of our options elsewhere through a commitment of blood and treasure in Afghanistan -- all tasks given to the Congress in the Constitution.
These objectives must be debated in Congress, not left to the executive. Madison warned, "Those who are to conduct a war cannot in the nature of things, be proper or safe judges whether a war ought to be commenced, continued or concluded."
With all the issues facing the current Congress, a Congress with the lowest number of veterans since WWII, some may say that these decisions are best left behind closed doors between the commander-in-chief, his envoys and his troops. Many believe Congress is too busy, too partisan, or too focused on issues that will perpetuate their own reelection.
A debate in Congress on objectives in Afghanistan would be open, perhaps ugly, with compromises and politics at play. Yet the definition of objectives, especially when they involve questions of war and peace, is not a question of style or convenience but one of duty so that our voice, through Congress, could be heard loud and clear.
Eight years in, we deserve more than another executive debate of resources behind closed doors. We deserve a Congress willing to do their constitutional duty -- define an objective or bring our troops home.
Tommy Sowers is a former Green Beret and Assistant Professor of American Politics, Policy and Strategy at the United States Military Academy. He now lectures at the Missouri University of Science and Technology and is a Democratic candidate for Congress in Missouri's 8th Congressional district.
Our founders did not intend for central questions of war to be discussed behind closed doors, within private meetings of envoys, ambassadors, generals and the executive, but in the halls of Congress. The father of the Constitution, James Madison stated, "In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause that confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department." And the unanswered question for Afghanistan is not one of troop levels, but of the first principle of war--the objective.
The U.S. Army's Field Manual 3-0 states, "every military operation toward a clearly defined, decisive and attainable objective." Denial of sanctuary to Al Qaeda, protecting the Afghan people, building Afghan security forces -- our nation cannot accomplish any of these objectives on the cheap. Achieving these objectives would require a generational commitment of billions, a substantial and permanent growth of the military, and sacrifice of our options elsewhere through a commitment of blood and treasure in Afghanistan -- all tasks given to the Congress in the Constitution.
These objectives must be debated in Congress, not left to the executive. Madison warned, "Those who are to conduct a war cannot in the nature of things, be proper or safe judges whether a war ought to be commenced, continued or concluded."
With all the issues facing the current Congress, a Congress with the lowest number of veterans since WWII, some may say that these decisions are best left behind closed doors between the commander-in-chief, his envoys and his troops. Many believe Congress is too busy, too partisan, or too focused on issues that will perpetuate their own reelection.
A debate in Congress on objectives in Afghanistan would be open, perhaps ugly, with compromises and politics at play. Yet the definition of objectives, especially when they involve questions of war and peace, is not a question of style or convenience but one of duty so that our voice, through Congress, could be heard loud and clear.
Eight years in, we deserve more than another executive debate of resources behind closed doors. We deserve a Congress willing to do their constitutional duty -- define an objective or bring our troops home.
Tommy Sowers is a former Green Beret and Assistant Professor of American Politics, Policy and Strategy at the United States Military Academy. He now lectures at the Missouri University of Science and Technology and is a Democratic candidate for Congress in Missouri's 8th Congressional district.
Obama Turkey Pardon: Thanksgiving At The White House (UPDATED, VIDEO)
"You know, there are certain days that remind me of why I ran for this office," President Obama declared while standing outside the White House on Wednesday morning. "And then there are moments like this -- where I pardon a turkey and send it to Disneyland."
At this year's official Turkey Pardon, President Obama mixed jokes in with a serious message about giving thanks for our blessings. With Sasha and Malia at his side, he noted how delicious the turkey looked (at 40-plus pounds, the North Carolina-raised bird named Courage did look pretty juicy). Obama claimed he wanted to eat the turkey, but Sasha and Malia prevailed upon him to pardon it, sparing it "a terrible and delicious fate." Courage will now head to Disneyland for their Thanksgiving Day parade.
Watch to the end of the video when Malia says the turkey looks like a big chicken, and Obama makes a little food policy joke when he asks if the turkey received performance enhancing drugs.
WATCH:
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
To watch a hilarious spoof video about the White House Turkey Pardoning, click here.
Obama's full remarks:
Now, the National Turkey Federation has been bringing its finest turkeys to the White House for more than 50 years. I'm told Presidents Eisenhower and Johnson actually ate their turkeys. You can't fault them for that; that's a good-looking bird. (Laughter.) President Kennedy was even given a turkey with a sign around its neck that said, "Good Eatin', Mr. President." But he showed mercy and he said, "Let's keep him going." And 20 years ago this Thanksgiving, the first President Bush issued the first official presidential pardon for a turkey.
Today, I am pleased to announce that thanks to the interventions of Malia and Sasha -- because I was planning to eat this sucker -- (laughter) -- "Courage" will also be spared this terrible and delicious fate. Later today, he'll head to Disneyland, where he'll be grand marshal of tomorrow's parade. And just in case "Courage" can't fulfill his responsibilities, Walter brought along another turkey, "Carolina," as an alternate, the stand-in.
Now, later this afternoon, Michelle, Malia, Sasha and I will take two of their less fortunate brethren to Martha's Table, an organization that does extraordinary work to help folks here in D.C. who need it the most. And I want to thank Jaindl's Turkey Farm in Orefield, Pennsylvania, for donating those dressed birds for dinner. So today, all told, I believe it's fair to say that we have saved or created four turkeys. (Laughter.)
You know, there are certain days that remind me of why I ran for this office. And then there are moments like this -- (laughter) -- where I pardon a turkey and send it to Disneyland. (Laughter.) But every single day, I am thankful for the extraordinary responsibility that the American people have placed in me. I am humbled by the privilege that it is to serve them, and the tremendous honor it is to serve as Commander-in-Chief of the finest military in the world -- and I want to wish a Happy Thanksgiving to every service member at home or in harm's way. We're proud of you and we are thinking of you and we're praying for you.
When my family and I sit around the table tomorrow, just like millions of other families across America, we'll take time to give our thanks for many blessings. But we'll also remember this is a time when so many members of our American family are hurting. There's no question this has been a tough year for America. We're at war. Our economy is emerging from an extraordinary recession into recovery. But there's a long way to go and a lot of work to do.
In more tranquil times, it's easy to notice our many blessings. It's even easier to take them for granted. But in times like these, they resonate a bit more powerfully. When President Lincoln set aside the National Day of Thanksgiving for the first time -- to celebrate America's "fruitful fields," "healthful skies," and the "strength and vigor" of the American people -- it was in the midst of the Civil War, just when the future of our very union was most in doubt. So think about that. When times were darkest, President Lincoln understood that our American blessings shined brighter than ever.
This is an era of new perils and new hardships. But we are, as ever, a people of endless compassion, boundless ingenuity, limitless strength. We're the heirs to a hard-earned history and stewards of a land of God-given beauty. We are Americans. And for all this, we give our humble thanks -- to our predecessors, to one another, and to God.
So on this quintessentially American holiday, as we give thanks for what we've got, let's also give back to those who are less fortunate. As we give thanks for our loved ones, let us remember those who can't be with us. And as we give thanks for our security, let's in turn thank those who've sacrificed to make it possible, wherever they may be.
Now, before this turkey gets too nervous that Bo will escape and screw up this pardon -- (laughter) -- or before I change my mind, I hereby pardon "Courage" so that he can live out the rest of his days in peace and tranquility in Disneyland.
And to every American, I want to wish you, on behalf of myself, Malia, Sasha, and Michelle, the happiest of Thanksgivings. Thank you very much, everybody. (Applause.)
-----
The year, The president of PETA, Ingrid Newkirk has written in a blog for HuffPost:
On behalf of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and our more than 2 million members and supporters, I am writing to ask three things: 1) that you please send this year's pardoned turkeys to a credible sanctuary; 2) that in your speech at the pardoning ceremony, you acknowledge the millions of compassionate Americans who personally pardon turkeys every year by choosing a vegetarian Thanksgiving meal; and 3) that you invite PETA's chef to present a delicious cruelty-free Thanksgiving meal for you and your family, including Tofurky with all the trimmings, from corn bread to cranberries, and an all-American vegan apple pie with vanilla soy ice cream on top. The vegan meal would provide some balance to all the free publicity given to the turkey industry on this occasion.
Get HuffPost Green On Facebook and Twitter!
At this year's official Turkey Pardon, President Obama mixed jokes in with a serious message about giving thanks for our blessings. With Sasha and Malia at his side, he noted how delicious the turkey looked (at 40-plus pounds, the North Carolina-raised bird named Courage did look pretty juicy). Obama claimed he wanted to eat the turkey, but Sasha and Malia prevailed upon him to pardon it, sparing it "a terrible and delicious fate." Courage will now head to Disneyland for their Thanksgiving Day parade.
Watch to the end of the video when Malia says the turkey looks like a big chicken, and Obama makes a little food policy joke when he asks if the turkey received performance enhancing drugs.
WATCH:
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
To watch a hilarious spoof video about the White House Turkey Pardoning, click here.
Obama's full remarks:
Now, the National Turkey Federation has been bringing its finest turkeys to the White House for more than 50 years. I'm told Presidents Eisenhower and Johnson actually ate their turkeys. You can't fault them for that; that's a good-looking bird. (Laughter.) President Kennedy was even given a turkey with a sign around its neck that said, "Good Eatin', Mr. President." But he showed mercy and he said, "Let's keep him going." And 20 years ago this Thanksgiving, the first President Bush issued the first official presidential pardon for a turkey.
Today, I am pleased to announce that thanks to the interventions of Malia and Sasha -- because I was planning to eat this sucker -- (laughter) -- "Courage" will also be spared this terrible and delicious fate. Later today, he'll head to Disneyland, where he'll be grand marshal of tomorrow's parade. And just in case "Courage" can't fulfill his responsibilities, Walter brought along another turkey, "Carolina," as an alternate, the stand-in.
Now, later this afternoon, Michelle, Malia, Sasha and I will take two of their less fortunate brethren to Martha's Table, an organization that does extraordinary work to help folks here in D.C. who need it the most. And I want to thank Jaindl's Turkey Farm in Orefield, Pennsylvania, for donating those dressed birds for dinner. So today, all told, I believe it's fair to say that we have saved or created four turkeys. (Laughter.)
You know, there are certain days that remind me of why I ran for this office. And then there are moments like this -- (laughter) -- where I pardon a turkey and send it to Disneyland. (Laughter.) But every single day, I am thankful for the extraordinary responsibility that the American people have placed in me. I am humbled by the privilege that it is to serve them, and the tremendous honor it is to serve as Commander-in-Chief of the finest military in the world -- and I want to wish a Happy Thanksgiving to every service member at home or in harm's way. We're proud of you and we are thinking of you and we're praying for you.
When my family and I sit around the table tomorrow, just like millions of other families across America, we'll take time to give our thanks for many blessings. But we'll also remember this is a time when so many members of our American family are hurting. There's no question this has been a tough year for America. We're at war. Our economy is emerging from an extraordinary recession into recovery. But there's a long way to go and a lot of work to do.
In more tranquil times, it's easy to notice our many blessings. It's even easier to take them for granted. But in times like these, they resonate a bit more powerfully. When President Lincoln set aside the National Day of Thanksgiving for the first time -- to celebrate America's "fruitful fields," "healthful skies," and the "strength and vigor" of the American people -- it was in the midst of the Civil War, just when the future of our very union was most in doubt. So think about that. When times were darkest, President Lincoln understood that our American blessings shined brighter than ever.
This is an era of new perils and new hardships. But we are, as ever, a people of endless compassion, boundless ingenuity, limitless strength. We're the heirs to a hard-earned history and stewards of a land of God-given beauty. We are Americans. And for all this, we give our humble thanks -- to our predecessors, to one another, and to God.
So on this quintessentially American holiday, as we give thanks for what we've got, let's also give back to those who are less fortunate. As we give thanks for our loved ones, let us remember those who can't be with us. And as we give thanks for our security, let's in turn thank those who've sacrificed to make it possible, wherever they may be.
Now, before this turkey gets too nervous that Bo will escape and screw up this pardon -- (laughter) -- or before I change my mind, I hereby pardon "Courage" so that he can live out the rest of his days in peace and tranquility in Disneyland.
And to every American, I want to wish you, on behalf of myself, Malia, Sasha, and Michelle, the happiest of Thanksgivings. Thank you very much, everybody. (Applause.)
-----
The year, The president of PETA, Ingrid Newkirk has written in a blog for HuffPost:
On behalf of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and our more than 2 million members and supporters, I am writing to ask three things: 1) that you please send this year's pardoned turkeys to a credible sanctuary; 2) that in your speech at the pardoning ceremony, you acknowledge the millions of compassionate Americans who personally pardon turkeys every year by choosing a vegetarian Thanksgiving meal; and 3) that you invite PETA's chef to present a delicious cruelty-free Thanksgiving meal for you and your family, including Tofurky with all the trimmings, from corn bread to cranberries, and an all-American vegan apple pie with vanilla soy ice cream on top. The vegan meal would provide some balance to all the free publicity given to the turkey industry on this occasion.
Get HuffPost Green On Facebook and Twitter!
Hillary Clinton Vice President Rumors Flare Up Again
Lest you think that these days before the Thanksgiving holiday are just a series of interminably slow turns at the news teat, here's Paul Bedard with some "Washington Whispers" that are TOTAL GAMECHANGERS:
The hot rumor in Washington: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could replace Vice President Joe Biden on the 2012 Obama re-election ticket. It would be a reward for her work at State and ready her for a 2016 run, as some strategists think Biden would be too old then to run for president.
Oooh, yes! So HOT, those rumors are! And they're almost as hot as they were about fourteen months ago!
Back then, Hillary was going to come on board as Veep in an awesome "October Surprise," because it was never more clear at that point that Joe Biden was going to get straight up decimated by the awesome debating skills of Sarah Palin, making John McCain's sweep of the entire electoral college all but certain. And now, look: health care reform is not going absolutely perfectly, so it's time to reshuffle the 2012 ticket!
Let's spend all day Sunday, talking about this as if it were actually happening.
Another hot rumor for you: On the Friday after Thanksgiving, people will be making delicious turkey-and-gravy sandwiches! You can, too, with the same microwave that reheated this rumor from September 2008!
[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not? Also, please send tips to tv@huffingtonpost.com -- learn more about our media monitoring project here.]
The hot rumor in Washington: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could replace Vice President Joe Biden on the 2012 Obama re-election ticket. It would be a reward for her work at State and ready her for a 2016 run, as some strategists think Biden would be too old then to run for president.
Oooh, yes! So HOT, those rumors are! And they're almost as hot as they were about fourteen months ago!
Back then, Hillary was going to come on board as Veep in an awesome "October Surprise," because it was never more clear at that point that Joe Biden was going to get straight up decimated by the awesome debating skills of Sarah Palin, making John McCain's sweep of the entire electoral college all but certain. And now, look: health care reform is not going absolutely perfectly, so it's time to reshuffle the 2012 ticket!
Let's spend all day Sunday, talking about this as if it were actually happening.
Another hot rumor for you: On the Friday after Thanksgiving, people will be making delicious turkey-and-gravy sandwiches! You can, too, with the same microwave that reheated this rumor from September 2008!
[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not? Also, please send tips to tv@huffingtonpost.com -- learn more about our media monitoring project here.]
San Francisco D.A. Kamala Harris Talks To Kimberly Marteau About Her New Book Smart On Crime
Q: You dedicated Smart on Crime to your mother, Shyamala G. Harris, calling her "the toughest, smartest and most loving person I have ever known." She died this year. Tell me about your relationship and why she inspired you.
My mother was and will always remain my greatest hero. She was a woman who gave herself to my sister and me unconditionally, and was the most inspiring and courageous person in my life. She was active in the Civil Rights Movement, where she met my father. My mother was also the consummate professional, a world-renowned breast cancer researcher and teacher whose work took her to universities all around the world. Despite her 5-foot stature, she had a commanding presence and a sharp wit, a keen sense of humor and endless depth of knowledge.
Q: What does it mean to be "smart on crime?" Are we not being smart now? Why and how does your book address this idea?
This book is predicated on one main premise, which is that all Americans have the right to live in safe communities. Having spent nearly two decades as a courtroom prosecutor, I know that it simply is not enough to just talk tough about crime. I want us to be what I call "smart on crime." That means in order to make our communities safer, we have to take a strategic approach to changing the status quo -- because our current system is failing all of us.
In the book, I first address some of the myths and outdated approaches that I believe are failing. In the second half of the book, I outline the ways in which I believe we can chart a new course for tackling these long-standing problems. My hope is that this book helps to elevate the discussion of how we as a state and nation approach the criminal justice system. I believe it is absolutely possible for us to create a future with safer streets, lower re-offense rates, and a better-educated workforce.
Q: In the book, you talk about how important it is to look at the criminal justice system through economic eyes. In a time of extremely limited public resources, how do we justify allocating those resources to anything other than investigating crimes and prosecuting criminals, especially violent crimes?
Getting smart on crime does not mean reducing sentences or punishments for crimes. It does mean using the time and resources we now spend on offenders more productively to reduce their odds of re-offending. Remember, for decades we have spent billions of dollars on ineffective solutions that have not improved public safety. I believe that especially in these tough economic times, it is critical that we evaluate the cost of action versus the cost of inaction. I strongly believe that for serious and violent criminals, we must absolutely hold them accountable for their crimes and send them to prison. But as I discuss in the book, we must take a smarter approach when it comes to combating nonviolent crime. And it is also essential that when we look at investing in innovative ways to fight crime before it occurs, we must weigh the short-term costs of action versus the long-term costs of inaction.
Q: Can you please explain the "crime pyramid" and what it reveals about the weaknesses in crime prevention? Why are our harsh sentences not deterring some kinds of crimes?
I have found that the "crime pyramid" is an effective way to visualize the totality of crimes committed in our society, and an effective way to communicate about how we can best fight crime -- because as you know "crime" is not monolithic. Visualizing this pyramid, at the top are the very worst crimes: murder, rape, violent assaults, crimes that so rightly command our attention. While these crimes are so horrific and threatening, they form the very top of the pyramid because they constitute the minority of crimes. Did you know that only one fourth of all offenders sentenced to prison are violent offenders?
One of the main reasons we haven't been able to effectively prevent nonviolent crime is that we have been using only the tools best suited to combating the offenders at the top of the pyramid. For several decades, the passage of tough laws and long sentences has created an illusion in the public's mind that public safety is best served when we treat all offenders pretty much the same way: arrest, convict, imprison, parole, and hope they learn their lesson. But the numbers paint the true story, which is that most nonviolent offenders are learning the wrong lesson, and in many cases, they are becoming more hardened criminals during their imprisonment.
Q: In Smart on Crime, you take aim at several myths about crime, including that the only thing the criminal justice system and education have in common is that they both need reform. Why do you believe that fighting truancy might be the most significant step we can take in crime prevention?
I believe that a child going without an education is a crime. As San Francisco District Attorney, I have seen firsthand what too frequently happens to habitually and chronically truant school kids: young lives are lost to street violence or prison at an appalling rate, our state loses more resources and our communities are less safe. A recent report from UC Santa Barbara concluded that high school dropouts account for a disproportionate amount of juvenile crime, crimes that cost the state of California $1.1 billion every year. Add in social and medical costs, lost income taxes, and associated economic losses, and the report estimates that dropouts cost the state more than $24 billion per year.
The warning bells keep on ringing. In California, two-thirds of prison inmates are high school dropouts. I believe that this is one of those critical issues where we can either pay attention now, or pay the price later.
Q: You are very proud of "Back on Track," a re-entry program that you started out of the San Francisco DA's office in 2005. How does it fit into your Smart on Crime ideas?
The old approach to fighting crime is well-known. Police and prosecutors are deluged with low-level drug cases, and the public spends billions on prisons to house these offenders. And, every year, prisons release hundreds of thousands of these offenders back into our communities. They have no plan, no skills, nowhere to go, and they pick up right where they left off. Within three years of release, 70 percent of California prisoners will re-offend and return to prison.
That is why in 2005, I created an initiative called Back On Track. Back on Track is a reentry program designed for nonviolent, first-time drug offenders. These are young people who are mostly in their early 20's, have no prior criminal records and were caught for low-level drug offenses. None of their cases involves gangs, guns, or weapons.
We give them a choice: they can go through a tough, year-long program that will require them to get educated, stay employed, be responsible parents, drug test, and transition to a crime-free life, or they can go to jail. Those who choose Back On Track plead guilty to their crime, and their sentence is deferred while they appear before a judge every two weeks for about a year. They must obtain a high-school-equivalency diploma and hold down a steady job. Fathers need to remain in good standing on their child-support payments, and everyone has to take parenting classes. For people who hit all of these milestones, the felony charge is going to be cleared from their records.
The results speak for the wisdom of investing in reentry programs. For this population, the recidivism (or re-offense rate) is typically 50 percent or higher. Four years into this initiative, recidivism has been less than 10 percent among Back On Track participants. And the program costs only $5,000 per person, compared to over $35,000 a year for county jail. That saves our city roughly $1 million per year in jail costs alone. When you add in the total expense of criminal prosecutions to taxpayers, including court costs, public defenders, state prison, and probation, the savings are closer to $2 million. And we cannot even begin to quantify the value of these individuals' future productivity, taxes and child support payments, or the brightened prospects for their families.
That is why both Governor Schwarzenegger and the US Department of Justice have recognized Back on Track as a model for both our state and nation.
My mother was and will always remain my greatest hero. She was a woman who gave herself to my sister and me unconditionally, and was the most inspiring and courageous person in my life. She was active in the Civil Rights Movement, where she met my father. My mother was also the consummate professional, a world-renowned breast cancer researcher and teacher whose work took her to universities all around the world. Despite her 5-foot stature, she had a commanding presence and a sharp wit, a keen sense of humor and endless depth of knowledge.
Q: What does it mean to be "smart on crime?" Are we not being smart now? Why and how does your book address this idea?
This book is predicated on one main premise, which is that all Americans have the right to live in safe communities. Having spent nearly two decades as a courtroom prosecutor, I know that it simply is not enough to just talk tough about crime. I want us to be what I call "smart on crime." That means in order to make our communities safer, we have to take a strategic approach to changing the status quo -- because our current system is failing all of us.
In the book, I first address some of the myths and outdated approaches that I believe are failing. In the second half of the book, I outline the ways in which I believe we can chart a new course for tackling these long-standing problems. My hope is that this book helps to elevate the discussion of how we as a state and nation approach the criminal justice system. I believe it is absolutely possible for us to create a future with safer streets, lower re-offense rates, and a better-educated workforce.
Q: In the book, you talk about how important it is to look at the criminal justice system through economic eyes. In a time of extremely limited public resources, how do we justify allocating those resources to anything other than investigating crimes and prosecuting criminals, especially violent crimes?
Getting smart on crime does not mean reducing sentences or punishments for crimes. It does mean using the time and resources we now spend on offenders more productively to reduce their odds of re-offending. Remember, for decades we have spent billions of dollars on ineffective solutions that have not improved public safety. I believe that especially in these tough economic times, it is critical that we evaluate the cost of action versus the cost of inaction. I strongly believe that for serious and violent criminals, we must absolutely hold them accountable for their crimes and send them to prison. But as I discuss in the book, we must take a smarter approach when it comes to combating nonviolent crime. And it is also essential that when we look at investing in innovative ways to fight crime before it occurs, we must weigh the short-term costs of action versus the long-term costs of inaction.
Q: Can you please explain the "crime pyramid" and what it reveals about the weaknesses in crime prevention? Why are our harsh sentences not deterring some kinds of crimes?
I have found that the "crime pyramid" is an effective way to visualize the totality of crimes committed in our society, and an effective way to communicate about how we can best fight crime -- because as you know "crime" is not monolithic. Visualizing this pyramid, at the top are the very worst crimes: murder, rape, violent assaults, crimes that so rightly command our attention. While these crimes are so horrific and threatening, they form the very top of the pyramid because they constitute the minority of crimes. Did you know that only one fourth of all offenders sentenced to prison are violent offenders?
One of the main reasons we haven't been able to effectively prevent nonviolent crime is that we have been using only the tools best suited to combating the offenders at the top of the pyramid. For several decades, the passage of tough laws and long sentences has created an illusion in the public's mind that public safety is best served when we treat all offenders pretty much the same way: arrest, convict, imprison, parole, and hope they learn their lesson. But the numbers paint the true story, which is that most nonviolent offenders are learning the wrong lesson, and in many cases, they are becoming more hardened criminals during their imprisonment.
Q: In Smart on Crime, you take aim at several myths about crime, including that the only thing the criminal justice system and education have in common is that they both need reform. Why do you believe that fighting truancy might be the most significant step we can take in crime prevention?
I believe that a child going without an education is a crime. As San Francisco District Attorney, I have seen firsthand what too frequently happens to habitually and chronically truant school kids: young lives are lost to street violence or prison at an appalling rate, our state loses more resources and our communities are less safe. A recent report from UC Santa Barbara concluded that high school dropouts account for a disproportionate amount of juvenile crime, crimes that cost the state of California $1.1 billion every year. Add in social and medical costs, lost income taxes, and associated economic losses, and the report estimates that dropouts cost the state more than $24 billion per year.
The warning bells keep on ringing. In California, two-thirds of prison inmates are high school dropouts. I believe that this is one of those critical issues where we can either pay attention now, or pay the price later.
Q: You are very proud of "Back on Track," a re-entry program that you started out of the San Francisco DA's office in 2005. How does it fit into your Smart on Crime ideas?
The old approach to fighting crime is well-known. Police and prosecutors are deluged with low-level drug cases, and the public spends billions on prisons to house these offenders. And, every year, prisons release hundreds of thousands of these offenders back into our communities. They have no plan, no skills, nowhere to go, and they pick up right where they left off. Within three years of release, 70 percent of California prisoners will re-offend and return to prison.
That is why in 2005, I created an initiative called Back On Track. Back on Track is a reentry program designed for nonviolent, first-time drug offenders. These are young people who are mostly in their early 20's, have no prior criminal records and were caught for low-level drug offenses. None of their cases involves gangs, guns, or weapons.
We give them a choice: they can go through a tough, year-long program that will require them to get educated, stay employed, be responsible parents, drug test, and transition to a crime-free life, or they can go to jail. Those who choose Back On Track plead guilty to their crime, and their sentence is deferred while they appear before a judge every two weeks for about a year. They must obtain a high-school-equivalency diploma and hold down a steady job. Fathers need to remain in good standing on their child-support payments, and everyone has to take parenting classes. For people who hit all of these milestones, the felony charge is going to be cleared from their records.
The results speak for the wisdom of investing in reentry programs. For this population, the recidivism (or re-offense rate) is typically 50 percent or higher. Four years into this initiative, recidivism has been less than 10 percent among Back On Track participants. And the program costs only $5,000 per person, compared to over $35,000 a year for county jail. That saves our city roughly $1 million per year in jail costs alone. When you add in the total expense of criminal prosecutions to taxpayers, including court costs, public defenders, state prison, and probation, the savings are closer to $2 million. And we cannot even begin to quantify the value of these individuals' future productivity, taxes and child support payments, or the brightened prospects for their families.
That is why both Governor Schwarzenegger and the US Department of Justice have recognized Back on Track as a model for both our state and nation.
Give Thanks To Kathleen Sebelius For Saving 47,000 Women From Death By Cost-Benefit Analysis
Cost-benefit analysis can kill. The failure to distinguish statistics from arithmetic can kill. In the current debate over mammograms, the number of women projected to be at risk of death due to cost-benefit analysis is about 47,000.
That is the approximate number projected to die by the United States Preventative Task Force if their recommendations on scaling back mammograms had been accepted. It is their number, if you do the arithmetic, which they apparently did not.
Their statistics say that the life of "only" one woman in 1900 will be saved if mammograms start at age 40 instead of age 50. In other words, a 40-year-old woman's "risk" of dying from breast cancer in the next ten years is only 1 in 1900. That seems like no risk at all. 1 divided by 1900 equals .000526. About half a woman per thousand. Miniscule, right?
Now, how many women in America would be affected?
The most recent (July, 2008) census figures say there are about 304,000,000 Americans, of which 50.7 percent are female. That's about 154,000,000 females. Roughly 80,000,000 of them are under forty and about another 20,000,000 between 40 and 50. Of the 80,000,000 under 40, each one, under the proposed guidelines, would not get a mammogram until age 50. If "only" 1 in 1900 die as a result, that would be .000526 times 80,000,000, which equals about 42,000.
In short, moving the mammogram age from 40 to 50 would result in the deaths of 42,000 women now 40 or under, according to the statistics of the United States Preventative Task Force. Of the 20,000,000 between 40 and 50, it could mean the deaths of as many as 10,500 women, though the figure may be somewhat lower because half are more than halfway through the critical period. There might be as few as half, say, 5,000 deaths. Adding 42,000 and 5,000, we get a ballpark figure of 47,000 of currently alive American females who would die needlessly under the proposed task force restriction on mammograms. Of course, as more are born, the absolute numbers would go up.
What is at issue is called "framing." The Preventive Task Force chose the probability of risk frame: only 1 in 1900. But the arithmetic frame reveals the more important truth.
Framing, in this case as in so many others, is a matter of life and death. Take the framing in the NY Times (November 18, 2009) in the front-page news analysis by Kevin Sack and in the op-ed by Robert Aronowitz. Sack frames the mammogram debate as the "science of medicine" versus "medical consumerism." Aronowitz calls it "wishful thinking" that early mammograms could help and speaks of "the very small numbers of lives potentially saved."
You can see why cost-benefit analysis can kill. Its use isn't science. Real scientists do arithmetic as well as statistics. Medical science is about real people, not percentages or statistics, especially when large numbers of real people are involved and small differences in risk can produce large numbers of deaths.
The Preventive Task Force also uses the "harm" frame. The task force observes that more mammograms mean more false positives and claims that false positives do "harm." But no science is presented showing that the "harm" done is greater than the deaths of 47,000 women.
What is the "harm?" Anxiety and unnecessary biopsies from false positives are listed as the "harms." My wife had such a false positive. The anxiety came for economic reasons: she had to wait for a biopsy because no one who could perform one was present when the mammogram was done, due to economic restrictions. The biopsy when it came was simple: a needle inserted to withdraw fluid, like taking a blood sample. No harm. If the biopsy had been done immediately, there would have been no need for anxiety. But the task force does not recommend immediate biopsies as a way to eliminate such "harm."
Aronowitz also claims that the figures show that mammograms haven't helped prevent breast cancer. He observes that the rate of 28 breast cancer deaths per 100,000 people has not changed substantially since the 50's, despite more mammography and better treatments. But that could mean, and probably does mean, that there has been an increase in breast cancer offset by earlier detection and better treatment, saving tens of thousands of lives, but not affecting the overall rate. But he did not consider the possibility that the occurrence of breast cancer might have increased, while the rate of deaths did not change because of earlier detection due to mammograms.
I suspect that the real "harm" intended is economic harm - the costs of the "unnecessary" mammograms and biopsies. But the task force gives no figures weighing the economic costs versus the human "cost" of the deaths of 47,000 women. Now, in cost-benefit analysis, a commonly cited figure for the value of an American life is $6.5 million. 47,000 times 6.5 million is $305, 500,000,000. That is, 305 billion five hundred million dollars. Of course, that would be spread over the next forty years, but it's not clear that such a cost-benefit analysis would make this less than the cost of mammograms and biopsies, all moral issues and human costs aside. Unfortunately, the Preventive Task Force doesn't do the calculation, so my figures may be off. The exact figures are not the point. The point is to go beyond rates to numbers.
In the present debate over health care, economics has become the main issue, but the Preventive Task Force hides it by framing. "Cost-benefit analysis" has been reframed as "risk-benefit analysis," as if the Preventive Task Force were not concerned with "cost" to insurance companies and tax-payers, but rather with "risk" to women. But "risk-benefit analysis" is just cost-benefit analysis, which in turn is what corporations use to maximize profit in the short term. Both cost-benefit analysis and the Preventive Task Force were introduced as government institutions by the Reagan administration. They were right-wing moves - part of the strategy to privatize government.
As the Obama administration shifted the health care debate from morality to economics, cost-benefit analysis entered in the form of "evidence-based medicine," where the "evidence" comes from statistics. This is seen as a major way to reduce the cost of health care. This is where "risk-benefit analysis" is cost-benefit analysis publicly and proudly discussed.
Is such an application of cost-benefit analysis always immoral? Hardly. It can be very useful. But it has to be looked at carefully, as the mammogram example shows. In the mammogram example, low probability events can have major effects!
When is a case of "evidence-based medicine" that uses cost-benefit analysis an instance of low probability events that can have major effects, effects serious enough to far outweigh the cost-benefit analysis? This is a serious and difficult question.
It is also a question of concern in the Obama White House. There are three high-powered experts there committed to such questions. One is Ezekial Emanuel, Rahm Emanuel's brother, who is perhaps the best-known advocate of evidence-based medicine. He is an advisor to Peter Orszag, Budget Director, who sees medicine as an economic problem. The third is Cass Sunstein, Obama's Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, also known as the cost-benefit czar. Sunstein is known for specializing in low probability events that have major effects. Political observers should watch how such issues are handled by the administration as they arise.
The official administration reaction is so far against the Preventive Task Force recommendation. Health and Human Services Secretary Sebelius has rejected it and said to make no change.
Hooray for Kathleen Sebelius! Tens of thousands of women owe her their lives.
The political fallout has been instructive. Business columnist for the Washington Post Steve Pearlstein (November 20, 2009) attacked Sebelius as not wanting to save money, but rather promoting waste. This is pretty much what the NY Times position (both front-page analysis and op-ed) seems to be. Most voices on the right have ignored Sebelius' official response and instead attributed the Reagan-era Preventive Task Force's recommendations to official Obama Health care policy, calling it "rationing" health care, while ignoring the fact that most rationing of health care is actually done by insurance companies. As expected, the most radical conservatives have seen this not only as an Obama move, but have likened it to mythical "death panels."
I stand with Sebelius, and I take it to be the official Obama administration view. When arithmetic is added to statistics, this is a clear case of a low probability event with major life-and-death consequences for tens of thousands of people. The overly simplistic framings -- either accepting or rejecting the cost-benefit analysis without looking further -- are dangerous. Just accepting the task force's recommendation is dangerous to the women of this country, now and in the future. Calling it "rationing" and using it to argue against the health care bills in Congress is dangerous to us all.
As we sit down to Thanksgiving dinner, let us thank Kathleen Sebelius.
That is the approximate number projected to die by the United States Preventative Task Force if their recommendations on scaling back mammograms had been accepted. It is their number, if you do the arithmetic, which they apparently did not.
Their statistics say that the life of "only" one woman in 1900 will be saved if mammograms start at age 40 instead of age 50. In other words, a 40-year-old woman's "risk" of dying from breast cancer in the next ten years is only 1 in 1900. That seems like no risk at all. 1 divided by 1900 equals .000526. About half a woman per thousand. Miniscule, right?
Now, how many women in America would be affected?
The most recent (July, 2008) census figures say there are about 304,000,000 Americans, of which 50.7 percent are female. That's about 154,000,000 females. Roughly 80,000,000 of them are under forty and about another 20,000,000 between 40 and 50. Of the 80,000,000 under 40, each one, under the proposed guidelines, would not get a mammogram until age 50. If "only" 1 in 1900 die as a result, that would be .000526 times 80,000,000, which equals about 42,000.
In short, moving the mammogram age from 40 to 50 would result in the deaths of 42,000 women now 40 or under, according to the statistics of the United States Preventative Task Force. Of the 20,000,000 between 40 and 50, it could mean the deaths of as many as 10,500 women, though the figure may be somewhat lower because half are more than halfway through the critical period. There might be as few as half, say, 5,000 deaths. Adding 42,000 and 5,000, we get a ballpark figure of 47,000 of currently alive American females who would die needlessly under the proposed task force restriction on mammograms. Of course, as more are born, the absolute numbers would go up.
What is at issue is called "framing." The Preventive Task Force chose the probability of risk frame: only 1 in 1900. But the arithmetic frame reveals the more important truth.
Framing, in this case as in so many others, is a matter of life and death. Take the framing in the NY Times (November 18, 2009) in the front-page news analysis by Kevin Sack and in the op-ed by Robert Aronowitz. Sack frames the mammogram debate as the "science of medicine" versus "medical consumerism." Aronowitz calls it "wishful thinking" that early mammograms could help and speaks of "the very small numbers of lives potentially saved."
You can see why cost-benefit analysis can kill. Its use isn't science. Real scientists do arithmetic as well as statistics. Medical science is about real people, not percentages or statistics, especially when large numbers of real people are involved and small differences in risk can produce large numbers of deaths.
The Preventive Task Force also uses the "harm" frame. The task force observes that more mammograms mean more false positives and claims that false positives do "harm." But no science is presented showing that the "harm" done is greater than the deaths of 47,000 women.
What is the "harm?" Anxiety and unnecessary biopsies from false positives are listed as the "harms." My wife had such a false positive. The anxiety came for economic reasons: she had to wait for a biopsy because no one who could perform one was present when the mammogram was done, due to economic restrictions. The biopsy when it came was simple: a needle inserted to withdraw fluid, like taking a blood sample. No harm. If the biopsy had been done immediately, there would have been no need for anxiety. But the task force does not recommend immediate biopsies as a way to eliminate such "harm."
Aronowitz also claims that the figures show that mammograms haven't helped prevent breast cancer. He observes that the rate of 28 breast cancer deaths per 100,000 people has not changed substantially since the 50's, despite more mammography and better treatments. But that could mean, and probably does mean, that there has been an increase in breast cancer offset by earlier detection and better treatment, saving tens of thousands of lives, but not affecting the overall rate. But he did not consider the possibility that the occurrence of breast cancer might have increased, while the rate of deaths did not change because of earlier detection due to mammograms.
I suspect that the real "harm" intended is economic harm - the costs of the "unnecessary" mammograms and biopsies. But the task force gives no figures weighing the economic costs versus the human "cost" of the deaths of 47,000 women. Now, in cost-benefit analysis, a commonly cited figure for the value of an American life is $6.5 million. 47,000 times 6.5 million is $305, 500,000,000. That is, 305 billion five hundred million dollars. Of course, that would be spread over the next forty years, but it's not clear that such a cost-benefit analysis would make this less than the cost of mammograms and biopsies, all moral issues and human costs aside. Unfortunately, the Preventive Task Force doesn't do the calculation, so my figures may be off. The exact figures are not the point. The point is to go beyond rates to numbers.
In the present debate over health care, economics has become the main issue, but the Preventive Task Force hides it by framing. "Cost-benefit analysis" has been reframed as "risk-benefit analysis," as if the Preventive Task Force were not concerned with "cost" to insurance companies and tax-payers, but rather with "risk" to women. But "risk-benefit analysis" is just cost-benefit analysis, which in turn is what corporations use to maximize profit in the short term. Both cost-benefit analysis and the Preventive Task Force were introduced as government institutions by the Reagan administration. They were right-wing moves - part of the strategy to privatize government.
As the Obama administration shifted the health care debate from morality to economics, cost-benefit analysis entered in the form of "evidence-based medicine," where the "evidence" comes from statistics. This is seen as a major way to reduce the cost of health care. This is where "risk-benefit analysis" is cost-benefit analysis publicly and proudly discussed.
Is such an application of cost-benefit analysis always immoral? Hardly. It can be very useful. But it has to be looked at carefully, as the mammogram example shows. In the mammogram example, low probability events can have major effects!
When is a case of "evidence-based medicine" that uses cost-benefit analysis an instance of low probability events that can have major effects, effects serious enough to far outweigh the cost-benefit analysis? This is a serious and difficult question.
It is also a question of concern in the Obama White House. There are three high-powered experts there committed to such questions. One is Ezekial Emanuel, Rahm Emanuel's brother, who is perhaps the best-known advocate of evidence-based medicine. He is an advisor to Peter Orszag, Budget Director, who sees medicine as an economic problem. The third is Cass Sunstein, Obama's Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, also known as the cost-benefit czar. Sunstein is known for specializing in low probability events that have major effects. Political observers should watch how such issues are handled by the administration as they arise.
The official administration reaction is so far against the Preventive Task Force recommendation. Health and Human Services Secretary Sebelius has rejected it and said to make no change.
Hooray for Kathleen Sebelius! Tens of thousands of women owe her their lives.
The political fallout has been instructive. Business columnist for the Washington Post Steve Pearlstein (November 20, 2009) attacked Sebelius as not wanting to save money, but rather promoting waste. This is pretty much what the NY Times position (both front-page analysis and op-ed) seems to be. Most voices on the right have ignored Sebelius' official response and instead attributed the Reagan-era Preventive Task Force's recommendations to official Obama Health care policy, calling it "rationing" health care, while ignoring the fact that most rationing of health care is actually done by insurance companies. As expected, the most radical conservatives have seen this not only as an Obama move, but have likened it to mythical "death panels."
I stand with Sebelius, and I take it to be the official Obama administration view. When arithmetic is added to statistics, this is a clear case of a low probability event with major life-and-death consequences for tens of thousands of people. The overly simplistic framings -- either accepting or rejecting the cost-benefit analysis without looking further -- are dangerous. Just accepting the task force's recommendation is dangerous to the women of this country, now and in the future. Calling it "rationing" and using it to argue against the health care bills in Congress is dangerous to us all.
As we sit down to Thanksgiving dinner, let us thank Kathleen Sebelius.
Reid Sees More Problems Than Solutions In Using Reconciliation
Despite mounting pressure to pass health care legislation through a parliamentary maneuver that would allow portions to be considered by an up-or-down vote, Democratic leadership in Congress insists that its best option remains regular order.
After several conservative Democrats in the Senate signaled their support for a Republican filibuster of reform that includes a public option for insurance coverage, a growing chorus of progressives called on Majority Leader Harry Reid to use reconciliation to get the provision passed.
The logic is simple: because the public option affects the budget it can be considered under reconciliation, which allows legislation to pass by a 51-vote majority.
The politics, however, are more complex. A Democratic Senate aide, speaking more candidly about strategy on condition of anonymity, said that the party still thinks its best shot to pass health care reform -- and, to a lesser extent, a public option -- remains through the use of normal parliamentary procedures.
For starters, leadership believes that more senators will be persuaded to vote for an entire health care package rather than individual bits and pieces. If Reid settles on the route of reconciliation, it would mean separating other aspects of reform, including caps on insurance premiums, the promotion of health and wellness and the elimination of pre-existing conditions as a reason for denying coverage.
"Right now the best thing we can do is to do everything at once, score everything at once, and build momentum for the bill," said the aide.
Maybe so. But such reasoning doesn't fly for advocates of reconciliation who argue that splitting up the health care bill actually makes political sense. The public option, after all, is the most hotly-contested part of the legislation. So an up-or-down vote may be the one avenue to ensure its passage. The private industry reforms, meanwhile, are largely non-controversial. So putting those provisions in a separate bill and passing them through regular order shouldn't be too difficult.
Again, however, aides insist that the devil is in the details. "The parliamentarian might tell us that, even if we have data on the public option being a budget utility, they might say we can't do it," warned the Senate Democratic aide. "Because you still have to create the exchange, you still have to have the force of law. And you may have to scale the public plan back for it to qualify."
There are other complications, added the aide. The House of Representatives, for instance, would have to go back to the drawing board after passing a full health care bill several weeks ago. And the concern on the Senate side of the aisle is that Speaker Nancy Pelosi could lose votes if she has to split up the legislation (though, if it meant ultimate passage, this seems unlikely).
The calendar presents another challenge. The White House has been pushing to get a bill to the president's desk before the new year. But reconciliation would likely push that time line back weeks, if not months, interfering with efforts to take up climate change and regulatory reform, running into the start of the 2010 campaign. "Where is the Senate floor time?" the aide asked.
Finally, the aide says, there is a question of votes. While leadership would have the flexibility to let ten Democratic senators vote against health care reform considered via reconciliation, there is enough parliamentary purism within the party to put its passage in doubt. Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) has repeatedly spoken out against the use of reconciliation. On Tuesday, meanwhile, Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) told MSNBC that his preference was for regular order. Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.), one of the party's foremost champions of progressive reform, has stated a similar preference. Though, an aide tells the Huffington Post, "he has not made any statements about how he would vote on the bill if that were the case."
Most important of all, Reid himself has said rather definitively that he is "not using reconciliation." And an aide says that leadership has not had conversations with the Senate parliamentarian "in a while" to discuss what it can and can't do through reconciliation.
And yet, for all the hurdles, the push for Reid to go down this path just won't die. Jane Hamsher, a progressive health care activist who runs the site, FireDogLake, has put heavy pressure on the Majority Leader in recent days, writing: "It comes down to a simple question: will Harry Reid allow for majority rule? Or will he let corrupt members of his own caucus block a majority of the public and Congress who want a public option?"
Meanwhile, in an interview on Monday with the Huffington Post, Howard Dean insisted that, with the public option debate at a veritable stalemate, the use of reconciliation "looks better every time."
"Someone has to say, at some point, we need to pass a bill," concluded the former DNC Chair.
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After several conservative Democrats in the Senate signaled their support for a Republican filibuster of reform that includes a public option for insurance coverage, a growing chorus of progressives called on Majority Leader Harry Reid to use reconciliation to get the provision passed.
The logic is simple: because the public option affects the budget it can be considered under reconciliation, which allows legislation to pass by a 51-vote majority.
The politics, however, are more complex. A Democratic Senate aide, speaking more candidly about strategy on condition of anonymity, said that the party still thinks its best shot to pass health care reform -- and, to a lesser extent, a public option -- remains through the use of normal parliamentary procedures.
For starters, leadership believes that more senators will be persuaded to vote for an entire health care package rather than individual bits and pieces. If Reid settles on the route of reconciliation, it would mean separating other aspects of reform, including caps on insurance premiums, the promotion of health and wellness and the elimination of pre-existing conditions as a reason for denying coverage.
"Right now the best thing we can do is to do everything at once, score everything at once, and build momentum for the bill," said the aide.
Maybe so. But such reasoning doesn't fly for advocates of reconciliation who argue that splitting up the health care bill actually makes political sense. The public option, after all, is the most hotly-contested part of the legislation. So an up-or-down vote may be the one avenue to ensure its passage. The private industry reforms, meanwhile, are largely non-controversial. So putting those provisions in a separate bill and passing them through regular order shouldn't be too difficult.
Again, however, aides insist that the devil is in the details. "The parliamentarian might tell us that, even if we have data on the public option being a budget utility, they might say we can't do it," warned the Senate Democratic aide. "Because you still have to create the exchange, you still have to have the force of law. And you may have to scale the public plan back for it to qualify."
There are other complications, added the aide. The House of Representatives, for instance, would have to go back to the drawing board after passing a full health care bill several weeks ago. And the concern on the Senate side of the aisle is that Speaker Nancy Pelosi could lose votes if she has to split up the legislation (though, if it meant ultimate passage, this seems unlikely).
The calendar presents another challenge. The White House has been pushing to get a bill to the president's desk before the new year. But reconciliation would likely push that time line back weeks, if not months, interfering with efforts to take up climate change and regulatory reform, running into the start of the 2010 campaign. "Where is the Senate floor time?" the aide asked.
Finally, the aide says, there is a question of votes. While leadership would have the flexibility to let ten Democratic senators vote against health care reform considered via reconciliation, there is enough parliamentary purism within the party to put its passage in doubt. Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) has repeatedly spoken out against the use of reconciliation. On Tuesday, meanwhile, Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) told MSNBC that his preference was for regular order. Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.), one of the party's foremost champions of progressive reform, has stated a similar preference. Though, an aide tells the Huffington Post, "he has not made any statements about how he would vote on the bill if that were the case."
Most important of all, Reid himself has said rather definitively that he is "not using reconciliation." And an aide says that leadership has not had conversations with the Senate parliamentarian "in a while" to discuss what it can and can't do through reconciliation.
And yet, for all the hurdles, the push for Reid to go down this path just won't die. Jane Hamsher, a progressive health care activist who runs the site, FireDogLake, has put heavy pressure on the Majority Leader in recent days, writing: "It comes down to a simple question: will Harry Reid allow for majority rule? Or will he let corrupt members of his own caucus block a majority of the public and Congress who want a public option?"
Meanwhile, in an interview on Monday with the Huffington Post, Howard Dean insisted that, with the public option debate at a veritable stalemate, the use of reconciliation "looks better every time."
"Someone has to say, at some point, we need to pass a bill," concluded the former DNC Chair.
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