Thursday, September 26, 2013

Editorial: Death Panel’s Last Stand?


In his professed crusade to derail Obamacare, Sen. Ted Cruz, the Canadian-American charlatan who is seeking to broaden his base from Texas to the nationwide Tea Party, played to the rubes Sept. 24-25 with his fake filibuster that, ironically, was supposed to block Senate consideration of the House bill that would defund Obamacare.

Cruz stayed on the Senate floor for more than 21 hours, delivering a rambling spiel that at one point included a reading from Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham. He apparently was oblivious to the irony that the children’s story is about someone who says he does not like a food he has never tried, until he tries it and finds that he likes it. In the end, after declaring that “a vote for cloture is a vote to fund Obamacare,” Cruz ended up voting with the rest of the Senate, 100-0 for cloture.

Cruz and other Republicans went through this charade in a last-ditch attempt to prevent the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, which was signed into law in May 2010 over unanimous GOP opposition and, among other things, required insurance companies to actually make good on their promised coverage while helping lower- and middle-income Americans get affordable health coverage when their skinflint employers refuse to provide it.

Of course, some of us were unhappy in 2010 that the Democrats didn’t go ahead and expand Medicare to cover everybody, or at least provide a public option for Americans who don’t want to be forced to buy private insurance. But Vice President Joe Biden congratulated President Obama at the May 23, 2010, signing ceremony, telling him in what he thought was a private aside that the health care reform “is a big f***ing deal.” The ferocity of Republican opposition to the law, and the lies they have told about the reforms over the past three years in order to scare the working people the law was designed to help ought to validate Obamacare for progressives.

The reforms already have required insurance companies to provide free preventive care and annual health exams, allowed parents to include their children in their insurance plans until the kids are 26 and required insurance companies to provide rebates when their administrative costs and profits amount to more than 20% of premiums. Insurers also no longer can cancel policies if you get sick or made an honest mistake on your application; consumers can appeal insurance company decisions to an independent reviewer; and insurance companies no longer can limit an individual’s medical benefits. In 2014, insurers also no longer will be able to deny coverage to applicants with pre-existing conditions.

When Republicans were unable to come up with a Senate majority to repeal the reforms, they resorted to sabotage and now hostage-taking. As Tara Culp-Ressler noted at ThinkProgress, Republican governors at the state level have refused to extend health coverage to the working poor by rejecting the law’s optional Medicaid expansion, which is supposed to cover people below the poverty level (including those working at minimum wage), with the federal government paying more than 90% of the costs.

Republicans have undermined national public outreach efforts to teach Americans about their options under the law, and they have slashed the state-level budgets dedicated to marketing the new insurance plans. They’ve attempted to slow down enrollment by placing unnecessary restrictions on the people who are supposed to help Americans sign up for new Obamacare coverage. For example, in Texas, where 25% of workers are uninsured — the highest uninsured rate in the country — and health insurance is practically unregulated by the state, Gov. Rick Perry has chosen to impose draconian regulations on the health marketplace “navigators.”

Republicans have disseminated misinformation about the law and confused people about what it actually does. Some states have even simply refused to implement Obamacare’s provisions altogether. And as the state health insurance exchanges prepare for their debut on Oct. 1, Republicans are even advising young people to break the law by refusing to get insurance.

If you already have insurance through your employer, are enrolled in a government program like Medicare or if you purchase insurance on your own, the “individual mandate” won’t affect you — though if you buy your own insurance you might find a better deal on the exchange. If your employer cuts your insurance benefits or increases your share of the cost, it probably is because your company is run by a skinflint using Obamacare as an excuse to cut costs, but mom-and-pop businesses with 25 or fewer employees qualify for tax credits to help them offer health insurance to their employees. Small businesses with up to 100 employees can shop for health plans in the exchange. And if health care costs continue to rise, as some Obamacare critics predict, well, they were rising for a decade before the health reform was enacted, but at least the rate of increase has been reduced.

Democrats should work with labor unions to allow tax credits for union-sponsored multi-employer plans, also known as Taft-Hartley plans, that are bargained by unions and jointly administered with employers, usually for low-income, part-time and seasonal workers who might work for several employers during a year.

The mandate will affect 48 million Americans who are uninsured — 15.4% of the general population, according to the Census Bureau, but 25% of people in households with an annual income of less than $25,000. Many of those households will now qualify for Medicaid coverage — unless their Republican state officials have left them adrift by refusing Medicaid expansion. Families living in poverty won’t be required to pay for insurance, but they won’t get health care either, because of the Republican obstinance. Families above the poverty level are required to be insured but they will qualify for subsidies to help them buy insurance if they make less than $94,200 for a family of four (or $45,960 for a single person).

You can find out the truth about the Affordable Care Act and how to find your state’s health insurance marketplace online at healthcare.gov or by calling toll-free 1-800-318-2596, where help is available 24/7. Signup starts Oct. 1 for coverage starting Jan. 1.

And if the program is implemented without the disruptions that Republicans are predicting, Ted Cruz likely will claim the credit.

Republicans might not get Obama and the Senate Democrats to agree with dismantling the Affordable Care Act, but Senate Democrats did agree to keep the job-killing austerity budget going into the new fiscal year with previously scheduled sequesters. The Congressional Budget Office in July reported that keeping sequester cuts in place through 2014 would cost the economy as many as 1.6 million jobs.

In case the “deficit hawks” try to take another run at “entitlement reforms” — that is, cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits so the richest 1% of Americans don’t have to pay the taxes they deferred during the Bush II administration — Dems need to remind their representatives in Congress that they paid for Social Security and Medicare and they are entitled to those promised benefits.

Richard Eskow noted at OurFuture.org that leaders of “Fix the Debt,” a group of corporate executives who are trying to push the costs of budget cuts onto the working class, recently met to discuss the possibility of ramping up their campaign for a Grand Bargain to cut entitlements.

If expansion of the tax base is required to stabilize Social Security, that can be accomplished by lifting the cap on taxable income for the payroll tax from the current $113,700. Imposing a relatively small tax of 3 cents per $100 traded on Wall Street would be unnoticed by most investors but would curb market speculators and raise an estimated $352 billion over the next decade.

Anybody who professes concern about the federal deficit, then turns the discussion to “fixing” Social Security and/or Medicare without the option of lifting the cap on the payroll tax and/or the financial transaction tax is a fraud. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2013

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Selections from the October 15, 2013 issue














Turning healthy vegetables into unhealthy chips symbolic of cultural homogenization

By Marc Jampole
 
What could be healthier than starting dinner with a seaweed salad, then moving on to brown rice and black beans with a side of kale? What a rich balance of delicious tastes and colorful foods, and how healthy. Lots of cancer fighters, cholesterol reducers, plus no salt, sugar or chemical additives. Perfect for a vegan, and even good for a meat-eater who might add a small piece of chicken, fish, beef or lamb and still have a healthy meal.

But what a lot of work. It might take as much as a half hour to dress the seaweed, boil the rice, heat the chickpeas, sauté the kale and broil the meat.

How much easier to open a few bags and munch brown rice crackers, dried kale leaves, black bean chips and roasted seaweed snacks.  All meat-eaters have to do is add some beef jerky.

Yes, there are now chip versions of all these foods and others, too—cabbage, chickpeas, peas. In fact, American food processors have created snack chip versions of virtually every hot “super food” fad of the last few decades. For example, manufacturers have introduced 16 new versions of seaweed chips this year alone.

As readers may have already suspected, all of these chips are loaded with salt and many have sugar and chemical additives. All involve processing the life out of the original fruit or vegetable. An ounce of all these snacks delivers many more calories than an adult serving of the unprocessed food.

While 71% of all U.S. snack foods now make health claims, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article, no one really believes that eating this stuff is healthy. It certainly is not as healthy as eating a serving of brown rice or kale.

People prefer the chips because of convenience and flexibility. It’s much easier to carry a bag of spiced dried chickpeas around than a plastic tub of chickpeas. And many people prefer the taste of salt and sugar to the bitterness of kale or the tang of cabbage. (Yes, there are also cabbage chips!).  They’re used to process food.

There is no doubt that chips bear a major part of the responsibility for the epidemic of obesity and obesity-related disease we face. But beyond health, the proliferation of faux-healthy chips represents another example of the homogenization of reality that we see everywhere. Instead of authentic Italian or Mexican food, Americans go to themed versions that use a few stylistic elements from the authentic cuisine to dress up American fare. These ethnic-themed restaurants tend to load down healthy traditional recipes with unnecessary frying and extra sauces laden with so much sugar and salt that they taste more like some standard muck than like Italian or Mexican. Check out how many chain restaurants serve the very same menu: hamburgers, fajitas, chicken strips, blackened meat.  And doesn’t it seem as if pizza dough and bagels now share the same consistency and overly sweet taste in most chain restaurants and packaged versions?

And it’s not just food. National chains for auto supplies, clothing, movie theatres, fabrics, toys, sporting goods, furniture, jewelry, hair stylists, urgent care facilities, drug stores, convenience stores, fitness clubs, massage studios and consumer electronic stores make every mall in every suburb and most smaller cities look virtually the same. Many of us prefer taking a phony riverboat at a Disney resort to a real one in New Orleans or viewing the faux Eiffel Tower and Statue of Liberty in a Las Vegas casino to the real deals in Paris and New York.  One theme—a landmark—associated with New York or Paris is placed in a homogenized environment, like a vegetable dehydrated and encased in salt, chemical additives and binders.

On another level, the concentration of media has led to homogenization of the information we receive, too, as more media run the same stories with the same point of view.

One could make the case that this homogenization is a good thing, because it turns the disparate cultures and nationalities of the United States into a unified whole—the melting pot that produces the cookie-cutter suburbs.  I prefer a vision of the United States as a rainbow of beliefs, practices, customs and cuisines, each retaining its own authenticity while also contributing its own richness to a glorious American mosaic. 

Monday, September 23, 2013

Let’s not be lulled by a lull in global warming

By Marc Jampole
 
A few news stories don’t make a trend, but it seems as if the mass media are misreading some short term trends to present a more optimistic view of our future on earth than we really face.

Much of the news media has covered the news that the average global temperature has failed to rise over the past 15 years, despite the soaring levels of greenhouse gases we have been pumping into the atmosphere.  While no reporter has quoted Desi Arnaz yet, the tone of the articles could clearly be captured by his stock phrase, “Lucy, you have some 'splaining to do.”

The argument that treading water for 15 years disproves or calls into question the theory of human-induced climate change is absurd for several reasons. First of all, the earth is still much hotter than it was 150 years ago, much of the icecaps have already melted and we still have dangerously high levels of carbon dioxide in our oceans.  And while the average temperature on earth may have remained the same over the past 15 years, some parts of the earth have grown warmer, including the United States and most of Europe and China. 

Secondly, those who only look at the last 15 years make the mistake of trend localization: They are judging changes that take centuries on the basis of a few years. The earth goes through natural cycles of warming and cooling. Most phenomena act that way—the stock market doesn’t go up every day even during a raging bull market and children don’t grow the same amount every month or even every year, but grow by spurts. The important question is whether the average temperature on earth would be lower during the current cycle without the impact of all that additional carbon we are generating. I’m betting the answer is yes.

There is also the issue of the complexity of life on earth—our ecosystem comprises a number of cycles and smaller interlocking ecosystems. It’s possible that the earth has made a partial adjustment, but if we keep burning fossil fuels at the current rate, sooner or later, the earth will become less flexible. The increase in drought areas, the thriving of jellyfish in the oceans, the extinction or threatened extinction of so many species—so much is happening that tells us we have to change our ways or risk destroying our planet. By all means, scientists should continue to study the models that predict global warming. But we shouldn’t use a misinterpretation of short-term facts as an excuse for keeping our heads in the sand about climate change.

One environmental challenge—and I see it as the main one—is the sheer number of human beings walking the planet, about seven billion right now. It’s very convenient to ignore population control. The religious issues aside, most economists and politicians love an increasing population because it’s an easy way to grow the economy and they are addicted to growth. Any campaign to stabilize or reduce the population requires a plan to address how an economy may thrive without growth—in a solid state or even shrinking. My idea of thriving clearly doesn’t mean “growing bigger” but rather producing a high quality of life and economic opportunities for all its members.

Like the end of easy oil, reaching a population level that is unsustainable is the unspoken fear. It’s the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about.  Many people, then, must have breathed a sigh of relief to learn the news that the standard forecast for population growth may be too high.

But like the report of a stable temperature over 15 years, “not as bad as” still doesn’t mean “good.” Instead of predicting that the world’s population will reach 10.9 billion by 2100, the latest statistical model says our population will peak at 8.7 billion by around 2055 and then decline to 8 billion by the turn of the next century. The models are based on the theory that as nations develop their citizens have fewer children. It’s a corollary of the idea that animals follow one of two reproductive strategies—have a lot of offspring and pay them no attention, or have a few and put a lot of energy into helping them to survive. In human terms, when people get wealthier, they tend to have fewer children.  The experience of Europe, the United States (except our immigrants) and Japan seems to support this idea.

The only problem is that even our current population of seven billion is too high. Half that amount is too high. The earth cannot carry so many humans on a long-term basis. We use too many of the earth’s non-renewable resources and leave too many messes in our wake. And imagine if most of the world raised its standard of living to the levels of Japan or Western Europe—they might produce fewer offspring but each person would be using a lot more resources!

I doubt that we will be able to formulate an adequate response to global warming and resource shortages without lowering the population on earth substantially.

Historically there have been three ways that human populations have decreased: war, famine or epidemics.  Let’s hope that instead of riding these three horses of the Apocalypse, most countries will instead decide to pursue aggressive policies to reduce our population in a more peaceful way: birth control. More people must make the decision to have one child in their lifetime, be it by following a new social norm or a draconian law.

So don’t believe that there’s good news about global warming and populations trends. These recent optimistic news reports are the equivalent of learning that you won’t die in six weeks, but in eight weeks—if the trends stay lucky.

 

Thursday, September 19, 2013

Moving in retirement to avoid school taxes is the epitome of the politics of selfishness

By Marc Jampole

Last time we cited Tom Sightings, self-proclaimed retirement expert, he was conjuring images of the various dream retirements to which he assumed the American public might aspire.  His catalogue of utopias reflected the pro-suburban ideology that dominates the mass media: golf communities, small university towns, beach fronts and suburban houses. Not one of Sighting’s dream retirements involved living in a city with great mass transit, an abundance of public spaces, cultural activities and entertainment, top-rated healthcare systems, the exciting buzz of cultural diversity and tremendous resources for seniors. In Sightings’ world, cities just don’t exist.

The latest view from Sightings highlights an ideological principle that has dominated U.S. public discourse since the election of Ronald Regan in 1980: the politics of selfishness, the idea that everyone should pursue his or her own private agenda, no matter how harmful it might be to others or to the community at large. Symbolic of the politics of selfishness is Reagan’s favorite joke about not having to outrun a bear, just one’s companion (who will then get ripped to shreds by the bear).  

Sightings doesn’t come out and explicitly say, “Care only about yourself” in his recent U.S. News & World Report article.  What he proposes, in a soft-shoe, gently prodding kind of way, is that retired people move out of their communities to avoid paying high school taxes.

After all, their kids have long graduated from high school, so who cares about the next generation!

Sightings employs the increasingly irritating rhetorical device of building the story around himself (the writer) and his situation. The article begins when he receives the school tax bill which has increased by four percent. He grumbles that his income has not increased by that much.  Continuing the article as a first person narration, Sightings tells us of a dinner his wife and he shared a few days later with a couple who had just moved to a new town to avoid high school taxes.  Sightings quotes the husband: “Who needs to pay those high school taxes, he ventured, when your kids are grown up and gone away?” Sightings continues: “Left unsaid was the other question: Who can afford those school taxes when you're no longer pulling in a paycheck, and instead living on a fixed income?”

After some wishy-washy discussion of the pros and cons of moving to avoid school taxes and a spackling of information about states that reduce property taxes for seniors, Sightings ends the column fully on the side of moving: “But then I see that school tax bill sitting over there on the corner of my desk. It's due by the end of September. And our youngest child graduated from the local school system four years ago. Maybe it's time to start looking for our place in the sun, after all.”

What Sightings doesn’t see, or doesn’t want to see, is that when he sent his children to school, large numbers of his fellow townspeople were paying property taxes to fund public schools who had already sent their children through schools and many more who hadn’t had children yet or never were going to have any. Even parents who sent their children to private schools contributed to educating Sightings’ children. Now it’s his turn and he wants selfishly to shrug his responsibility.  After all, he got his.

There are many great reasons to move in retirement: to be near grown children or to live one’s dream, be it on a quiet shore or in a high rise co-op overlooking the hustle and bustle of Manhattan. “Chacun sa chimère,” as Baudelaire once said (which translates into “To each, his or her illusion.”) It’s also true that some people move to smaller homes in retirement or are forced to move to cut expenses.

But to move just to avoid taxes is as anti-social as robbing a convenience store or embezzling from a nonprofit organization.

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Latest mass shooting shows need for stiffer gun purchase laws and better national database

By Marc Jampole

The Washington Naval Yard mass murder has produced a macabre good news/bad news story:

The good news is that a week before the shooting a Virginia gun dealer didn’t sell an AR-14 assault rifle to the shooter, Aaron Alexis, because Alexis wasn’t a resident of the state, a requirement under Virginia state law.

The bad news is that the dealer did sell Alexis the pump-action shot gun he used to kill 12 innocent people. 

What if Virginia had tougher laws and only permitted sales of all kinds of guns to residents? Or what if gun purchase standards were higher everywhere and we had a robust database of gun offenders and persons with documented behavior that should preclude gun ownership, behavior like hearing “voices speaking to him through the wall,” as Alexis heard?

It should be tragically clear to everyone that stiffened gun control laws would have prevented Alexis from just walking into a store and buying a lethal weapon.  Those who argue that a criminal will find a way to get a gun forget that Alexis, Lanza and most of our mass murderers are not criminals. Something else they all have in common: all manifested behavioral problems that should have precluded legal gun ownership or use.

We now seem to have these national days of mourning and hand-wringing about every six months. The public discourse following these tragedies almost always follows a classic formula: Gun control advocates point out the obvious lesson that we need to tighten gun control, while gun industry toadies and factotums create tortuous arguments to show that the mass murder really proves we need more guns in the street and less gun control.  Major political figures say they will renew efforts to pass gun control laws, but “momentum” peters out in days or weeks.  There’s a spike in both gun sales (out of fear of gun control) and articles in the mass media analyzing the impossibility of getting any gun control legislation passed. Nothing happens.

That’s sad, but what’s even sadder is that these occasional mass murders collectively represent a drop in the bucket of all the U.S. deaths and injuries annually from guns—from accidents, disputes among family and friends, suicides and murder.  If we use a base figure of 32,000 deaths by guns a year, that works out to almost 88 a day. We typically have national days of mourning when a crazed killer takes the lives of 12 or 24 people.  Perhaps we should declare every day a day of mourning.  

The gun lobby has tried to sell us the bill of goods that more people packing will make the streets safer, because the bad guys will be frightened of retaliation. A study released today shows that argument is completely bogus: The study, published Wednesday in the American Journal of Medicine (AJM), compares the rate of firearms-related deaths in countries where many people own guns with the gun death rate in countries where gun ownership is rare. The US, with the most guns per head in the world, has the highest rate of deaths from firearms, while Japan, which has the lowest rate of gun ownership, has the least. The study concludes that guns make a nation less safe. AJM published the study early because of the shootings at the Washington Naval Yard.

Nothing proves the collective self-serving venality of our state and federal legislators like the gun issue. All too many lawmakers have been bought and sold by the gun (and the weapons) industry or are too frightened of the gun lobby’s money to speak up on the issue of gun control. And so the needless death of innocents continues.

Monday, September 16, 2013

Editorial: Breakthrough for Cooler Heads


Can President Obama declare victory and bring the cruise missiles home? After a week and a half of saber rattling by the only President we’ve got, the Russian sponsors of Syria’s dictatorship responded to the ultimatum by Secretary of State John Kerry that Syria could avoid an attack by the United States by handing its chemical weapons over to international authorities. And Syria welcomed the initiative, defusing the crisis.

As much as it frustrates conservative talking pointers, President Obama did not make a mistake in calling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to account for his military allegedly using chemical weapons in that nation’s civil war, nor did Obama show weakness in deferring to Congress on authorizing a punitive strike against the Syrian government. Obama followed the Constitution, which gives Congress the authority to declare war. If Syria reneges on its commitment to put its chemical weapons under international control but Congress still declines to authorize a strike against Syria, it probably will be for the wrong reason — Republicans in the House and Senate simply won’t go along with anything the President proposes — but in calling for Congress to delay the vote to see if the Russian peace initiative succeeds, President Obama wisely put on hold the proposed American attack on Syria, which could have caused more damage than it would solve.

Corporate news media, who were looking forward to a quick air war to fill in the dead space around the Labor Day holiday, were noticeably disappointed when President Obama announced on Aug. 30 that he would consult Congress before launching the attack. For the next week, the corporate pundits were practically taunting Obama to get on with it, charging that if he failed to follow through with the attack it would be seen as a sign of weakness.

As for the predictions that a failure to attack Syria would result in a loss of respect for the United States, enemies of the world’s Last Remaining Superpower must realize that the President still has plenty of cruise missiles, satellite-guided bombs and radar-deflecting stealth bombers which he can order into the air in a New York minute if a belligerent nation actually posed a threat to the US or one of its allies (and all it would take is a call from Ankara to give Obama the cover to launch missiles and bombers at Syria in defense of our NATO ally Turkey).

Neither does a failure to follow through with the attack result in a loss of credibility for President Obama. Some wags called Obama “Bush Lite” when he threatened the action against Syria. They ignored the fact that Obama was proposing a limited air strike on Syria in response to an actual chemical attack, not the threat that was imagined by then-President George W. Bush and his war-mongering advisers, which was only proved false after they invaded and occupied Iraq. Also, Obama held off on the attack, which allowed diplomats to get to work. It was particularly galling to watch former defense secretary Don Rumsfeld, the architect of the preemptive invasion of Iraq, criticizing President Obama’s “lack of leadership” as the “so-called commander in chief.” At least George W. Bush has the sense and/or decency to keep his mouth shut.

Nor would a congressional rejection of Obama’s request for an authorization to attack be a turning point in his relations with Congress. Many Democrats balked at the war vote because they thought it was a bad idea, which their constituents were overwhelmingly opposed to, but they’ll be back with Obama when it comes to his domestic priorities. As Kevin Drum noted at MotherJones.com Sept. 9, “Presidents suffer defeats all the time. Obama lost on cap-and-trade. He’s lost on plenty of judicial and executive branch nominations. He couldn’t get agreement for a grand bargain. He lost on gun control. What’s more, Republicans have been opposing him on virtually everything from the day he took office. In what concrete way would a defeat on Syria change this dynamic in even the slightest way?”

If anything, the failure of the world at large to react to the Syrian gas attack questioned the credibility of the United Nations Security Council, which so far has been unable to even debate the issue. But the diplomatic initiative that has gone on while Obama was making his case for intervention bore fruit as Russians called for the Syrian government to turn over its chemical weapons to the control of international authorities. Syria’s Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem quickly welcomed the Russian proposal, acknowledged for the first time that Syria possesses chemical weapons and said Syria was willing to cooperate fully with the UN and sign the Chemical Weapons Convention.

That could be the best result of this complicated situation. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is a dictator, but he runs a secular regime that among other things is protecting Christian minorities who comprise as much as 14% of the population in Syria (3 million out of 22 million), as well as refugees from Iraq, many of whom are Christians and moderate Muslims who were driven out of Iraq by fundamentalist Sunnis and Shi’ites after the downfall of Saddam Hussein.

Assad also cooperated with the Bush administration after 9/11. As part of its “extraordinary rendition” program, the Bushies sent Arabs who were suspected of al-Qaeda ties to Syria to be tortured by Assad’s secret police. (At least one, Maher Arar, a Canadian Arab who was arrested at JFK Airport in New York in September 2002 when he was in transit back to Canada, was instead sent to Syria and tortured for 10 months before he was found to be innocent.)

Assad’s opponents include al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadists who are fighting Assad in part because his brand of Islam is too moderate for their tastes. They already have been engaging in reprisals against moderate rebel groups, and some rebel groups have been engaging in war crimes of their own, such as summarily executing captured Syrian soldiers. We have no guarantee that the moderate Muslims who Sen. John McCain and other hawks want us to support in the Syrian civil war would win the power struggle after Assad is toppled; we could end up clearing the way for a fundamentalist, al-Qaeda-affiliated government in Damascus, with access to the chemical weapons that Assad has stockpiled. That’s the reason that President Obama, while he will go ahead with arming some of the moderate rebels, is in no hurry to press for regime change. That’s also why he only proposed a limited air attack.

President Obama has agreed to take the proposal to secure Syria’s chemical weapons to the UN Security Council, though Russia is objecting to a French proposal to back up the proposal with the threat of force if Syria fails to comply. Obama and Congress are wise to give the diplomats time to secure those chemical weapons. If Russia is serious about securing the weapons — and Russian President Vladimir Putin also is concerned about Islamic terrorists getting their hands on poison gas — they may be able to get the job done. Good for them. Good for all.

In the meantime, Republicans in Congress are still threatening to take the US government hostage if Obama does not agree to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, which will start enrolling customers on the new healthcare exchanges Oct. 1. Maybe Obama should invite the Russians to try to mediate a deal with the GOP jihadists. Unfortunately, we trust Bashir al-Assad to turn over his chemical weapons more than we trust Republican leaders to negotiate in good faith to resolve the federal budget and debt obligations for the coming year.

Assuming that President Obama does not negotiate with the hostage takers to do away with the Affordable Care Act, people who do not get insurance coverage through their job but who live in one of the states where Republican governors aremaking it difficult to find out about the new insurance marketplaces can get the information on the plans and subsidies that are available at healthcare.gov. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2013

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Selections from the October 1, 2013 issue




LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 










New book shows that poverty affects brain and makes it harder to think, work, learn

By Marc Jampole

Thanks to Cass Sunstein for reviewing Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much in the latest New York Review of Books. In Scarcity, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir collect and analyze an impressive amount of research to demonstrate that those who suffer a scarcity of a resource—say food or money—dedicate more of their brain to addressing that scarcity, thereby degrading their ability to attend to their daily tasks, in school or on the job.

According to Mullainathan and Shafir, scarcity “puts people in a kind of cognitive tunnel, limiting what they are able to see. It depletes their self-control. It makes them more impulsive and sometimes a bit dumb. What we often consider a part of people’s basic character—an inability to learn, a propensity to anger or impatience—may well be a product of their feeling of scarcity,” to quote Sunstein. The book cites a ton of empirical research that shows that the effects of scarcity cut across all possible types of scarcity. 

The most striking study mentioned in the review tested Indian sugar cane workers before the harvest when they were broke and after the harvest when they had lots of money. The difference in scores amounted to 9 or 10 points on an I.Q. test, which measures certain intellectual capabilities correlated with success in school and in professional employment.  On an I.Q. test, ten points means a lot: for example, about 28% of the population scores between 106-115, while only 9% of the population scores between 116-125.

In other words, not only do rich and upper middle class children have the advantages of classes and lessons, summer camps, trips abroad, private tutors, SAT prep courses and the doors that money and business contacts can offer. The wealthy also have an inherent advantage in that their brains are not drained by scarcity concerns as the brains of poor children are.  The easiest way to improve our educational system would be to end poverty, which would enable formerly poor children to focus their brain on learning and not on the anxiety of not knowing when the next meal will be.

A few years back, the mainstream media and politicians were completely enamored by an article titled “Growth in a Time of Debt” by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, which concluded that countries with public debt greater than 90 percent of GDP suffered measurably slower economic growth. In This Time Is Different, the two right-wing economists ostensibly fleshed out the theory with examples across the centuries.  Mainstream politicians and journalists throughout the world embraced this “new discovery,” using it to bolster assertions that we had to deal with the debt instead of pumping money into the economy.

The problem was that Reinhart and Rogoff miscalculated in a number of places and even made typographical errors. When their bad math was corrected, it was found that there was no correlation between levels of debt and economic growth.

Many people wanted to believe Reinhart and Rogoff were right because they wanted to cut the budget, regardless of the pain and the economic havoc it caused. Of course it didn’t work out—Europe’s austerity program backfired and the U.S. limited “rescue” of its economy produced uneven and weak results. Through it all, inequality continued to grow, especially in the United States. The distribution of wealth in this country is now less equitable than it has been in more than in a century.

As of this writing, a Google key word search yields about 3,000 mentions of Scarcity, which is not even a drop in the ocean of web pages floating around cyberspace.  It’s still too early to tell, but I’m betting the mainstream news media is going to ignore Scarcity for the most part and few politicians outside maybe Bill de Blasio will reference it. 

But imagine if Scarcity captured the imagination of politicians and pundits the way that Reinhart & Rogoff’s bogus research did, or the way Michael Harrington’s poignant expose of poverty, The Other America, did in the early 1960s?

What if our various governments started to create public policies and new laws to address the implications of Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much? If Scarcity is true (and the Sunstein’s extensive review makes we want to read it as soon as I can), that puts a whole new light on Republican efforts to decrease funding for food stamps and unemployment benefits. The very nature of poverty distorts and weakens the thinking process, so that once people fall into poverty it is very hard to escape.  It makes sense then to be as generous as possible with these benefits in times of economic distress, to keep as many people out of poverty as possible.

Widespread knowledge of the findings by Mullainathan and Shafir would lean the debate over minimum wage and health care decidedly to the left, as think tank pundits and government policy makers quoted the book to assert the need to protect Americans from the negative effect of scarcity in general, and of medical care in particular.

Scarcity also serves as an epiphany for the great challenge facing the United States in the area of education. Rich people are spending more to educate their children while their state and federal representatives continue to cut budgets for public schools.  Meanwhile, a college education has become a major drain on the finances of most families.  Equal opportunity movements focused on voting and jobs in the 20th century. In the 21st century, the real battle ground for equal opportunity may be over education. 

For the past 30 years, we have passed laws and followed policies that increase the number of people facing scarcities of money, food, health care and now education. We have in effect degraded our intellectual stock by putting more panic into more people.  Creating a more unequal society has weakened our collective ability to learn and to work. If our leaders believed the message of Scarcity they would pursue an entirely different set of policies that would resemble the policies our nation pursued in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. You know, when we had general prosperity, a lower rate of poverty, a more equal distribution of the wealth, strong unions, mostly great public schools—and, not coincidentally, much higher taxes on the wealthy.

Thursday, September 5, 2013

Study implies the American dream has been reduced to a series of financial goals

By Marc Jampole

Debt free and financially secure at retirement. That’s how people now define the American dream, according to a new study by Credit.com.

Here are all the results:

Define the American Dream
Retiring financially secure:  27.9%
Being debt-free:  23%
Owning a home: 18.2%
Graduating from college (paying off student loans):  6.0%
Joining the 1%:  3%
Other: 11.4%
None: .2%
Don’t know/no response: 8.5%

Only one problem with the survey: Credit.com gave these options to the participants, as opposed to asking the open-ended question, What is the American dream? Everything that Credit.com asked about has to do with money: Nothing aspirational or non-material. Just a bunch of financial objectives, each of which may require credit or other financial services.

The natural question is whether Credit.com’s selection of options reflects its natural concern for money matters or does it reflect the social ideals of the 21st century. In other words, is it more subtle propaganda from the financial industry or a true representation of how we now define the American dream?

The concept of the American dream sounds as if it has been around since Europeans rediscovered North America at the end of the 15th century. The actual term, however, can only be traced back to James Truslow Adams (1878-1949), born rich. Adams first use the term in his The Epic of America, written at the height of the depression in 1931. To Adams, the American dream is “of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement...It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.” (Thanks, Wikipedia!)

That pretty much sounds like the dream imagined by Martin Luther King 50 years ago, a dream that’s defined in public terms as a more perfect society. This American dream is defined by opportunity, fairness, democracy and the pursuit of happiness. King tinges the dream with social justice as well, the idea that we must not only create opportunity for everyone, but also make certain that everyone has a minimum living standard deserving of all human beings.

Once James created the concept, it didn’t take American industry, led by the advertising industry, long to privatize and commercial the American dream: Privatization involved making the dream a matter of an individual attaining success as opposed to society becoming just and equitable. Commercialization derived from the fact that industry defined this success solely in terms of material possessions. No wonder the media, entertainment and advertising industries have all been called the “great American dream machine.”

A perusal of the contents of the first few pages of a Google search of “the American dream” reveals that most people writing on the subject combine the public and the private versions of the American Dream.  Virtually every definition spoke of the American dream being the opportunity to work hard and achieve success.

For the most part since the Baby Boomer’s parents came home from World War II, the private part of the American dream has comprised owning a home and living a car-and-mall-centered life in the suburbs. We know the suburban dream has failed. We have created a society with a bottomless thirst for fossil fuels and a natural predilection to waste. It’s a social order that cannot be sustained over time, because of the twin demons of global warming and resource shortages.

I would assert that the suburban lifestyle isolates people and individuals, leading to a greater sense of privilege and self-satisfaction among the happy and successful, a greater sense of isolation and hopelessness among the unhappy or struggling. The privatization of the American dream has inured us to the suffering of others, so that many of us are only too willing to deny food stamps to the hungry and starve schools of funds because we send our kids to private schools or don’t have any.  By only including individual dreams and making them all the attainment of financial goals, Credit.com feeds into this isolating selfishness. 

The Credit.com study ends with a few questions about who will achieve the American dream. About 78% think that they will attain their dream—be it financial security at retirement or owning their own home—but only 41% think that others will attain the American dream. I infer from these twin answers that Americans do not believe that their own success or aspirations are tied to those of others or to society as a whole.  It’s every person for him- or herself as we each pursue our individual success in isolation from everyone else.  This approach will surely work for the wealthy captain of industry, but for the 99% without wealth it is a less sure path than working together and helping each other. Remember that in Martin Luther King’s dream, we all walk together, black and white, rich and poor.

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

NYC mayoral debate shows news media ignorance and focus on the irrelevant

By Marc Jampole

We saw what was wrong with political coverage in the last debate between the major contenders for the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City: the media is ignorant and creates irrelevant sideshows.

The very first question by a Wall Street Journal reporter was ridiculously irrelevant to the issues: share a recent example of each candidate or candidate’s family facing economic uncertainty.  None of the five candidates could answer the question, because all are well-off and all have been enjoying good times for at least a decade, something that the reporter should have known if he had done his homework.  Was he just stupid or did he want to make a point—that these folks are mostly rich or near rich? Or maybe he was trying to trap a candidate into making up a saccharine and unbelievable sob story?

After all the candidates—a very bright bunch if you ask me—all admitted that things were going pretty well for them lately and evoked childhood or parental struggles, the panel of reporters noted that none of the candidates answered the question.  But how could they talk about struggles if they weren’t having them? And why would they? Virtually everyone with a serious chance at a major office these days is doing well. Otherwise, others wouldn’t notice their leadership skills or give money to their campaigns. Some could be struggling with family or personal issues, some may have faced financial problems in the past, but most people running for a major office, be it governor or mayor of the nation’s largest city, are at least well-off.

The question was irrelevant and may have also revealed the reporter’s ignorance.

As part of his answer to this inessential question about financial hardship, John Liu, the only candidate who appeared to be rattled throughout the proceedings, accused the Election Board of setting up two of his aides as part of a vendetta to deny him matching contributions. Instead of ignoring this desperate plea from a desperate candidate, the reporters chose to ask the other candidates if they thought Liu was set up.  Inequitable distribution of the wealth, mass transit for the outer boroughs, the controversial “stop-and-frisk” policy—these issues stayed on hold while the candidates hemmed and hawed about Liu’s irrelevant accusations.

Later in the debate, another reporter ignorantly chided the frontrunner Bill DeBlasio for saying that he would keep confidential his negotiations with the unions covering New York City workers, who have been without a contract for six years now.  Doesn’t the reporter know that it is standard practice to keep collective bargaining negotiations confidential? Confidentiality allows both sides to explore areas that could be controversial, especially if taken out of the context of a full contract. Confidentiality allows either side to make statements and then back down. It allows either side to make accusations for which they can later apologize with no loss of face on either side.

This reporter has obviously never seen any news releases about collective bargaining, most of which include a statement that the party issuing the news release won’t negotiate in public.  Now, the average person in the street hasn’t seen these news releases either, but the average person in the street is not a reporter. A reporter is supposed to know a little bit about what he or she is covering.  This reporter was trying to create a controversy around DeBlasio, but one that is irrelevant because no matter what any of the candidates may say now, every single one of them will keep the union negotiations confidential, because that’s what their lawyers will tell them to do!

The reporter should have known that. In her ignorance, she tried to create a firestorm about an irrelevancy. Again, it didn’t work, because the other candidates except Weiner all agreed they would keep negotiations confidential. The candidates focused on the more important issues of their desire to negotiate a fair contract and whether the workers would receive retroactive pay increases for the full six years.

Next day coverage of the debate boiled down analyzing how the trailing candidates ganged up on DeBlasio. To my mind, the gang-up didn’t really occur. There were short side attacks on most of the candidates, plus several of the other candidates defended DeBlasio from what they said were unfair attacks. For the media to talk about a collectively imagined gang-up rather than the real differences between the candidates sets exactly the wrong standard for election campaigning.

Ignorance and irrelevancy seem to go hand and hand when the news media frame how they will cover the issues. We often blame politicians for making purposely ignorant statements. It is hard to believe, for example, that Chris Christie really has doubts about human-caused climate disruption or that several Republican U.S. Senators really believes that Obama acts from unpatriotic motives.

But last night’s debate among five highly intelligent and mostly competent candidates showed that the news media is also to blame for the deplorable state of political discourse.

Bloody civil war in Iraq should remind us what could go wrong in Syria

By Marc Jampole

Secretary of State John Kerry gave an impassioned rationale for attacking Syria. He tried to build the case for the absolute moral imperative to punish Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons on his own people and to prevent him from doing it again.

Kerry detailed the horror of the act for the listening world. Then he promised that U.S. military actions, with or without the support of allies, would be different from Iraq and Afghanistan, because it would not require “boots on the ground.” In other words, we’re going to do a little bombing, then leave Syria to continue its dance of death.

While I join Secretary Kerry and every other ethical and sane human being alive in condemning the Syrian government for using this weapon of mass destruction, I do not share his thirst for military action.

Kerry can list many reasons to bomb Syria, including the fact al-Assad used chemical weapons on his own people, the fact that we warned him not to do it (another version of the “let’s kill thousands to save face” strategy) and the assumption that failure to act will embolden al-Assad and other U.S. bêtes noire like Iran and North Korea to go farther. 

I can think of only one reason not to use force against al-Assad, but it trumps all of Kerry’s rationales: it will likely backfire and plunge Syria into an intensified cycle of violence between a weakened Ba’athist government and a splintered opposition that includes forces that truly despise the United States.

If you need to remind yourself what will happen in Syria, read the article titled “Bloodier than Ever” in the latest Economist.  I’ll state my case by excerpting the first paragraph:

”…the scale and scope of recent attacks have shaken even the most hardened Iraqis. More than 500 have been killed in bombings this month, after some 1,000 perished violently in July—the highest number since civil strife tailed off five years ago. Yet these figures, tallied by Iraq Body Count, an independent web-based monitoring organisation, are only the most visible cause for alarm. Car-bombings and suicide-bombers have been a fact of life in central and northern Iraq for most of the past decade, but recent attacks reveal a level of co-ordination not seen for several years.”

In other words, the civil war not only continues in Iraq, but is intensifying again. Later in the article, we find out that al-Qaeda launched an attack on prisons at Abu Ghraib and Taji last month, enabling 500 prisoners to escape. Still later, we learn that the violence is spreading to the south of Iraq, formerly one of the most peaceful parts of the country.

What a mess! And the Syrian mess will be just as bloody and violent and last just as long if we bomb Syria.

Let’s face it. With or without a violent U.S. response, the Syrian people are going to go through a lot of suffering over the coming years, certainly if al-Assad prevails and certainly during a continued civil war. It’s likely that the overthrow of the Syrian Ba’athists will produce a permanently fractured state like Iraq instead of the one strong (and hopefully pro-western) government for which we might all hope. It’s also possible that Syria may end up with another blood-thirsty strong man.

Maybe the Obama administration cynically figures that since things are going to be a mess in Syria anyhow, we might as well send a message to Iran and Russia and work off some of our excess weaponry, so we can buy some more from American arms manufacturers.  That Real Politik strategy would certainly be more consistent with the last 75 years of American foreign policy than the moral imperatives that Kerry evokes.  That Kerry was careful to tiptoe around international law lends proof to this supposition, as the United States doesn’t want to box itself into holding any other entity above its own sense of imperial entitlement, not even international law.

Thinking about the suffering of the 1,500 people who died of chemical poisoning makes me physically ill. It was a repulsive act that deserves to be met with world condemnation, economic boycott, increased support of those rebels willing to commit to a western-style democracy and a temporary rapprochement with Iran—anything we can do to destabilize the Ba’athists in Syria short of military action.

Sunday, September 1, 2013

Wrong Way

Graphic by Kevin Kreneck

Saturday, August 31, 2013

Editorial: Stand Up to Bullies / The First Amendment's Broad Reach


When we were children, we were told we had to stand up to schoolyard bullies, and sometimes the only thing that would cause a bully to back off was to bloody his nose.

Nowadays, many schools have zero tolerance for fighting, and would send home both the bully and the bullied after a fisticuffs. That probably makes sense in this age of “Stand Your Ground” laws that allow a bully to pick a fight and then, if the victim throws a punch, the bully can pull a gun and shoot his opponent in “self defense.” But good people still need to call out bullies. Blessed are the peacemakers, as Jesus said, but it doesn’t hurt to know how to defend yourself, in case peace is not at hand.

The bullies have been at work in the legislatures of our nation, as Southern conservatives have consolidated their hold on the Republican Party and made their top priorities attacks on labor unions and minority voting rights.

The attacks on unions helped Republicans cripple one of the bulwarks of the Democratic organizational base — organized labor — in northern states and now voter ID laws which have been passed or are being advanced in 31 states are designed to keep minorities, students and low-income voters — who are much more likely to vote Democratic — away from the polls.

Republicans claim that voter ID laws, which require voters to produce certain state-issued photo IDs — generally drivers licenses and sometimes concealed weapons permits but not state university IDs — are designed to stop voter fraud, but 1) there is very little actual voter fraud and 2) the laws obviously are designed to make it more difficult for students, low-income workers and minorities, particularly in cities, where they are less likely to have a car than Republican voters are. According to the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, 10% of the general voting public lacks an adequate photo ID, but those figures rise to 15% of voting-age citizens making less than $35,000 a year, 18% of Americans over 65 and 25% of African Americans.

In Texas, the state estimated that as many as 796,000 registered voters lacked government-issued photo ID. To obtain those IDs, many would have to spend $22 to get a Texas birth certificate — and possibly more if they were born in other states. That could be considered a poll tax. Also, Texas has license offices in only 81 of 254 counties in the state; some voters would need to travel up to 250 miles to obtain a voter ID. Hispanic voters are twice as likely as whites not to have a car, so they wouldn’t have a driver license.

A federal court in Washington ruled in August 2012 that Texas’ voter ID law violated the Voting Rights Act because it discriminated against minority voters. But two hours after the Supreme Court struck down Section 5 of the law, which had required the state to submit electoral changes for review, the Texas attorney general announced that the illegal voter ID law would be implemented.

If Republicans sincerely wanted to keep the vote honest, they would make a good-faith effort to issue voter IDs in inner cities, where potential voters are more likely to go without a car. Instead, Texas is opening six “mega center” offices — all in suburbs — to make it easier for suburban residents to renew their driver licenses. In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker signed a strict voter ID law and then proposed to close DMV offices in Democratic areas, while increasing office hours in Republican areas.

North Carolina not only adopted a voter ID law; the legislature also eliminated same-day registration, reduced the early voting period and eliminated pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds. Republican-dominated local election boards have escalated attacks on student voting by shutting down polling places on college campus, preventing students from running for political offices and possibly challenging students’ rights to vote. A 1979 Supreme Court case, Symm v. US, affirmed the right of college students at historically black Prairie View A&M University, northwest of Houston, to vote in their campus communities. But Waller County officials still refuse to put a polling place on the Prairie View campus and there’s no telling whether today’s Supreme Court would uphold that 1979 reading of the law.

The US Department of Justice is moving to use the “bail-in relief” under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to bring Southern states with a history of interfering with voting rights, including Texas and North Carolina, back under judicial review.

In the meantime, civil rights groups should organize to make sure that black and Latino voters have photo IDs — making arrangements to transport them to the well-staffed suburban DMV offices, if necessary. While they’re at it, civil rights groups should help young voters also get concealed weapons permits, because nothing will get Republican lawmakers to reconsider Stand Your Ground laws like the prospect of a well-armed black and brown militia ready to respond with force.

But the best way to bloody the Republican bullies’ noses is with ballots, now that black and Hispanic and working-class voters know what is stake. Honest Republicans will make sure those ballots are allowed to be cast and counted — but the Voting Rights Act still empowers the Justice Department to look over their shoulders.

The First Amendment’s Broad Reach

There has been some debate as to whether Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald are journalists who should be protected by the First Amendment or spies who should be prosecuted — Assange for publishing then-Pvt. Bradley Manning’s leaks of hundreds of thousands of military and diplomatic messages, or Greenwald, the columnist for the London-based Guardian, for enabling Edward Snowden’s disclosure of the wide-ranging surveillance of telephone and Internet messages by the National Security Agency. The US has a strong tradition of press freedom, but that hasn’t stopped politicians from calling for prosecution of both Greenwald and Assange.

The Justice Department has revamped its policies on news media in response to complaints about its covert seizure of phone records of reporters, Faiza Patel and Amos Toh of the Brennan Center for Justice wrote, but the guidelines still include what has been dubbed the “WikiLeaks exception”: Persons and entities that “simply make information available” are excluded from protection.

Patel and Toh wrote that “any attempt to distinguish between press outlets based on how responsible they are perceived to be is well down the slippery slope leading to official censorship. The Supreme Court has understood this risk, making it clear that while ‘[a] responsible press is an undoubtedly desirable goal, press responsibility is not mandated by the Constitution and, like many other virtues, it cannot be legislated.’ Similarly, a news outlet’s agenda doesn’t affect its right to publish. Except in cases of defamation, libel and obscenity, the right to publish is protected regardless of ‘motivation, orthodoxy, truthfulness, timeliness or taste.’ The First Amendment does not protect Assange any less because some believe him to be a celebrity-seeking megalomaniac. Nor does it discriminate against Glenn Greenwald because he is anti-establishment and activist.”

We agree with Patel and Toh that the First Amendment protects the New York Times (which published so me of Manning’s disclosures) not because it is an American company, but because it provides a service to the nation: keeping people informed about the activities of their government so they can participate meaningfully in democratic decision-making. Foreign news sources [such as WikiLeaks and the Guardian] provide the same service and even enrich national debate in the US by providing an outside perspective, which the Internet makes as accessible to Americans as their hometown paper.

Assange and Greenwald may be arrogant, egocentric, narcissistic, stubborn and other terms of enragement in the eyes of authorities and other detractors, but these are not unusual attributes among investigative journalists. They are precisely the sort of troublemakers the Founders intended to protect, because they are the ones most likely to incur enemies in high places.

Call off your dogs, Attorney General Holder. Don’t make Justice Antonin Scalia school you on the First Amendment. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2013

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Selections from the September 15, 2013 issue


COVER/Aaron Kase
A public school system left behind

EDITORIAL
Stand up to bullies; First Amendment’s reach

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
The new food sovereignty prize emerges

DISPATCHES
Raising minimum wage is political goldmine;
White working-class voters up for grabs;
Ted Cruz — best NRSC vice chair Dems ever had;
Colorado, Montana join states announcing affordable insurance rates;
More medical students choosing family practice;
Cons’ new health plan: go to E.R;
Child hunger common in US, teachers say;
Kristol Klear on Syrian involvement;
Killing 'Obamacare' is killing the GOP;
26 states deny health coverage for working poor ....

DON ROLLINS
Florida tutoring under microscope

BOB BURNETT
Republicans and the Tea Party

RANDOLPH T. HOLHUT
Billionaires will not save journalism

WENONAH HAUTER
This isn’t the American way

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
New derring-do for risk-takers

SAM URETSKY
Education reform: It’s complicated

WAYNE O’LEARY
Irreconcilable differences

JOHN BUELL
The ecology of transportation and democracy

RICHARDESKOW
Cynicism is corporate America’s greatest weapon

BOOK REVIEW/Terence McDowell
Deciphering ‘The Fine Print’

ROB PATTERSON
A prayer for Pussy Riot

POPULIST PICKS
Gasland II; John D. Rockefeller; Harmony Game



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