Fair Use Notice

FAIR USE NOTICE

OCCUPY THE COMMONS


This site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in an effort to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. we believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml

If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

FAIR USE NOTICE FAIR USE NOTICE: This page may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This website distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for scientific, research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107.

Read more at: http://www.etupdates.com/fair-use-notice/#.UpzWQRL3l5M | ET. Updates
FAIR USE NOTICE FAIR USE NOTICE: This page may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This website distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for scientific, research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107.

Read more at: http://www.etupdates.com/fair-use-notice/#.UpzWQRL3l5M | ET. Updates

All Blogs licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0


Friday, April 29, 2011

America's Terminal Decline

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Republican and Democratic Plans for Medicare and Medicaid Misguided: Push for Privatization Will Accelerate Costs and Deaths

CommonDreams.org


Leadership in Washington recognizes the damage our soaring health care spending is doing to our entire economy. Although their rhetoric differs, recent budget proposals from both Republicans and Democrats mistakenly place the blame on Medicare and Medicaid. Cuts to and privatization of these important public insurances will place us on a dangerous path that will leave health care costs soaring and more patients unable to afford necessary care.

Medicare and Medicaid must be left out of the discussion entirely until leadership has the courage to address the real reasons why our health care costs are rising, the toxic environment created by investor owned insurances and the profit-driven health care industry.

Health care spending in the United States is the highest in the world and in some cases is two times higher than spending in other industrialized nations, which achieve nearly universal coverage with better health outcomes than the U.S. Our soaring health care costs outpace our growth in GDP, inflation and wages. By any measure it is an unsustainable situation.

If we look at the various health care models in the United States, we find that the rise in spending is lower for traditional (non-privatized) Medicare and Medicaid than it is for the private sector. Our public insurances are our most efficient insurances with administrative costs of around 3%, despite the fact that they cover our most vulnerable and least healthy populations. Administrative and marketing costs for private plans are 15% or more, and the plethora of private plans further increase cost and complexity as patients and health professionals try to navigate their arbitrary and ever-changing rules.

Medicare and Medicaid are the victims of our current fragmented and profit-driven model of paying for health care which has resulted in high prices for health services and medications.

Private health insurers are financial institutions designed to create profit by obstructing, denying and restricting access to health care. They add no value to our health and in fact their business practices have polluted health care financing causing all insurances to adopt their practices in order to ‘compete’. They have also fragmented the health care market and thus the ability to negotiate for fair prices for goods and services leading to the highest prices for pharmaceuticals and procedures.

The commonsense solution is to eliminate wasteful and costly private health insurance and adopt a universal health care system modeled on the strengths of Medicare and given the power to negotiate for reasonable prices.

It is counterproductive to even discuss cuts to Medicare and Medicaid before addressing the fundamental reasons for rising costs. Yet, both Democrats and Republicans have focused on cuts to Medicare and Medicaid in their budget proposals.

The Ryan budget proposal, the Path to Prosperity, would fully privatize Medicare by moving to a voucher system in 2022 forcing all seniors to purchase private insurance. The vouchers are not designed to keep up with the rate at which health care costs are increasing so that over time seniors will either have to pay more out of pocket for health insurance premiums or will choose skimpier insurance plans that leave them unprotected should they have a serious illness or accident. Nearly half of Medicare enrollees have an income that is less than twice the federal poverty level and so have little room to absorb an increased share of health care costs.

Medicaid is significantly limited under the Ryan budget proposal which plans to cut overall Medicaid spending by $800 billion over ten years and change to block grants for each state. Block grants will mean that individual states will continue to be under economic pressure to limit who and what services are covered. As fewer are covered by Medicaid, they will have to either purchase private insurance through the exchanges or either seek a waiver from or be penalized for not purchasing insurance.

The Obama administration supports cuts to Medicare through the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) which is tasked with keeping per capita Medicare spending below a target level which is set to be lower than the current rate of health care cost inflation. Rather than blatantly privatizing Medicare as called for in the Ryan proposal, the President’s plan will slowly strangle Medicare leaving seniors struggling to find physicians able to care for them.

The IPAB was actually created in the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The President’s budget proposal would increase the power of the IPAB to cut Medicare costs. Medicaid spending is also capped under the President’s budget.

Sadly, the Peoples Budget put forth by the Congressional Progressive Caucus rubberstamps the President’s approach to cutting Medicare and Medicaid spending.

Underneath cuts to Medicare and Medicaid is a dangerous trend of increasing privatization of health care in the U.S.

There is a growing trend to put more of our population into private insurances and a growing privatization of our public health insurances. Over the past few years as the number of people able to afford employer sponsored health insurance has fallen, private health insurance profits have continued to grow as they move into providing insurance to or administering plans for the Medicare and Medicaid populations.

The ACA puts more people into the private insurance market by mandating that all uninsured who do not qualify for public health insurance purchase private insurance through the exchanges starting in 2014 and subsidizes the purchase of private insurance using public dollars.

Half of the newly insured under the ACA are eventually supposed to come from an expansion of Medicaid eligibility. However, the Department of Health and Human Services has already allowed state expansions in Medicaid coverage to lapse. A recent White House Fact Sheet also supported allowing states to place their Medicaid population into private insurance through the health insurance exchanges.

Privatization of health care is a failed experiment in the United States.

The United States differs from other nations in allowing investor-owned corporations to profit at the expense of human suffering and lives. After decades of experience with this unique privatized model of financing health care, the results are clear and startling.

The United States has the highest per capita health care costs, the highest prices for medical goods and services (and lower overall usage rates) and no control over health care spending. Despite attempts to patch the current health care situation, the number of uninsured and those with skimpy health insurance that leaves them unable to afford health care or at risk of medical bankruptcy continues to grow. Suffering and preventable deaths are higher in the U.S. than in other industrialized nations.

In addition, there have been no significant gains in important measures of health such as life expectancy and infant and maternal mortality rates. Our health disparities continue to grow, especially for those who have chronic conditions. And our health care workforce continues to be inadequate as health professionals quickly burn out from trying to practice in our complex and irrational health care environment.

It is time to recognize the failure of the market model of paying for health care and embrace comprehensive and effective health reform. The model for our ‘uniquely American’ solution lies in traditional Medicare, a single payer health system for those who are 65 years of age and over. Since its inception 45 years ago, Medicare has lifted seniors out of poverty and improved their health status.

Physicians for a National Health Program advocates for an improved Medicare for all health system, one that builds on the strengths of Medicare such as its universality, administrative efficiency and the patient’s freedom to choose a health provider, and also corrects the weaknesses of Medicare such as the lack of comprehensive benefits, out of pocket costs and low reimbursement rates.

Both Democrats and Republicans are missing the point by putting the emphasis on controlling Medicare and Medicaid costs without effectively addressing the reasons for our rising health care costs. Rather than embracing the Republican rhetoric which blames our public insurances, Democrats would do well to call out the real reason for our health care spending crisis, our current fragmented and profit-driven model, and advocate for a national improved Medicare for all.

Margaret Flowers

Dr. Margaret Flowers is a congressional fellow with Physicians for a National Health Program and a pediatrician based in Baltimore. She is also a board member of Healthcare-Now. She can reached by email at: margaret@pnhp.org

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Regressive America Trumped





TRUMPS BEATS ALL

Every once in a while you get a development that nicely symbolizes the present state of American culture (or, perhaps, “culture”).

Like Madonna, for example.

Or Jersey Shore.

Presently, it’s the rise of Donald Trump, who has lately been sitting at the top of polls conducted among Republican voters as to their presidential choice for 2012.

It’s worth remembering – as a rather not inconsequential side note – that this is a person who could be the next president of the United States. Clear thinking people scoff when I say that, as they did when I used to argue that Sarah Palin could be the next president. But in so doing, they forget three rather significant points quite to the contrary.

First, lots of Americans not only don’t think the way progressives do, they don’t think at all. Instead, they fear. Emotion – and especially fear – is their salient approach to politics.

Second, the American presidential selection process occurs in two distinct stages, and this routine creates outcomes that would not be possible under other scenarios. In the first stage, Republican voters – and only Republican voters – will select their nominee. Remember, these are people for whom both John McCain and Mitt Romney are considered too liberal. In the second stage voters (now the entire electorate) will have two – and only two – viable choices to pick from: whomever the Republicans nominate, and an incumbent president likely at that point to have haplessly presided over four years of economic disaster. However much swing independent voters might find the Republican nominee to be noxious or embarrassing, a lot of them will see Oval Office turnover of any kind as a chance worth taking given the alternative four more years of ineffectiveness and economic stasis. Kinda like... uh, well, the last election! Does the slogan “Change you can believe in” sound at all familiar?

Finally, to anyone who says “It can’t happen here”, I have two simple one-word responses: “Reagan” and “Bush”. That George W. Bush was a buffoonish character straight from slapstick central casting is incontrovertible, though the degree to which he has been left off the hook for the crime of his presidency is both nauseating and frightening. It is also as predictable as sunrise that the Ann Coulters of this world will, sufficient time having passed, seek to rehabilitate his image, just as she literally tried to do a few years ago for Joe McCarthy (yes, that Joe McCarthy, and no, I’m not kidding).

And just as has been done for decades now by a whole cottage industry on the right, which has turned another president who by conventional standards was mediocre, and by honest standards would be considered fully treasonous, into some great deity in the consciousness of the American public. No room on Rushmore? No worries, why not give Reagan his own entire mountain? Indeed, why not a whole state? Reaganland sounds so much better than South Dakota, doesn’t it? In any case, whatever Reagan has become today, people forget what a total joke he was before he won the presidency (under political and economic conditions very much like the present). I can remember, during the 1970s, when comedians could literally get a laugh just by saying the words “President Reagan”. I’m not kidding. The concept was that ludicrous.

Who is the joke on now? And, more importantly, who would be foolish enough to insist that Donald Trump or Sarah Palin – or anyone whom Republican voters are gaga enough to choose as their standard-bearer, and who would be the only viable alternative available to a nation full of really dissatisfied voters – couldn’t be president? Definitely not me.

But, more importantly, what does this say about America in the 21st century (assuming that ‘contemporary America’ isn’t too oxymoronic a notion on its very face)?

I have often noted that it isn’t like the disconnect these days between the vast majority of Americans and the elites of the political right is simply a matter of two sets of honest-to-goodness patriots who just happen to have rather different ideas about how to make America a better place. That is an extremely naive view, in its most generous form, and I am positively slayed when I hear the president articulate it, because I sometimes think he actually believes what he’s saying. In reality, the difference between these two camps is the difference between victim and criminal. It is an entirely false premise upon which to base any analysis of American politics to believe that the plutocrats and their Republican and Democratic marionettes have any interest whatsoever in the bettering of the country and its citizens. Indeed, their interests are quite to the contrary. Of course, they cannot market themselves that way, so instead do so by pretending to be hyper-patriots, and marching out a series of bogus enemies of the state du jour, whether those are Saddam or Castro or homosexuals or immigrants. Anything to keep the hoi polloi distracted from the fingers rummaging around in their pockets.

Similarly, the disconnect between the likes of Donald Trump and, say, a Mutt Romney or a Mike Huckabee represents a new sort of low for a large segment of the American body politic that had already been very much feeding off the bottom of the ocean floor. Think about who Trump is and what an astonishing commentary on that part of the country – and on the direction the rest of us may inevitably wind up taking – his popularity represents. Trump is a circus act, a blustering blowhard who regularly makes a fool of himself in that most disheartening of venues, ‘reality’ TV, a man whose hair is the perfect metaphor for his overstuffed suitcase chock full of transparent insecurities masked by faux arrogance, an overt philanderer, a serial divorcee, a bailed-out, bankrupt, gambling mogul, a likely moderate on social issues such as gay rights, an advocate for universal health care, a contributor to the campaigns of Ted Kennedy, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, a cryptic Catholic, and a New Yorker to boot. What more could there be for Billy Bob Bumpkin from the hollows of Arkansas to not like in the person of Donald Trump?

And yet he leads in the polls. How can that be? Of course, Trump offers fervent and requisite prayers to the tax cutting gods, just like any other regressive vying for the Republican nomination. And he certainly won’t be an advocate for progressive social or environmental values (whatever his actual positions on abortion or gay rights – if he has any – might be). And he’s shown himself every bit as capable of chauvinistic American jingoism as any John “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” McCain or George W. “Bring it on” Bush.

But so what? They all do the same. What’s the attraction to Trump over the other goobers in the running who do all that and more, plus have been active in Republican politics all their adult lives, which Trump has not?

The answer to that question is as obvious as it is grim. The Donald is winning the hearts of the Troglodyte set because he’s turned Obama’s supposed foreign birth into his central campaign issue.

From his perspective, of course, this is the height of cynicism. Trump no more cares about minor provisions of the Constitution than he does about fighting poverty. But what does it say about the tens of millions of Americans who like what they’re hearing from this guy, and what does it say about this country that such a segment of our society is so powerful, and probably about to get a lot more so?

It says that this is an empire in steep decline. It says that some of us – particularly those who are older, whiter and maler than the general population – liked it better the way things used to be. And it says that that group is willing to cling on to any seeming handrail they can grasp – even those that look suspiciously like the drowning bodies of other people – as the earth trembles below their feet. These are the same people for whom racism and sexism have traditionally served a similar function, that of distraction, that of dividing and conquering a potentially angry underclass. These are the folks for whom providing the perverse psychological satisfaction of a false sense of social superiority is more than adequate to facilitate their own looting.

Of course, the great irony here is that they remain among the most privileged of Americans, yet they are by far and away the most likely to bitch about their condition. Nobody is better off as a group than older white males, and nobody foams at the mouth more about how screwed up the country is. Nobody gets more assistance from government programs than those who receive Social Security and Medicare benefits, and nobody races faster to the front of the barricades to rant about the evils of socialism. Nobody receives more in transfers of wealth than deeply red states like Alaska and those of the Bible Belt, and nobody complains more about having government on their backs. Enough, already. Y’know, as somebody who pays for that evil and oppressive government, I’d be quite happy to make an exception to my rigid socialist tendencies and volunteer to remove my tax dollars from off of their backs (not to mention their very distended fronts), and stick that money back into my pocket. Hey, how about this for a new motto?: “From those according to their ability, to those according to their needs, skip those according to their ingratitude”.

The rise of Trump is surely the latest pointed indicator of the fall of Western civilization, or at least the stuff on this side of the Atlantic. Maybe I was just asleep at the switch, but the America of my misspent youth – which was a very wild and violent place in many ways, ostensibly far more so than now – seems so tame compared to the politics of our era. And so much more hopeful. We were nearly as stupid then, but there seemed much more reason to believe things could get better.

People are dumber now, certainly about politics. That’s the reason why the notion of “President Reagan” was a laugh-out-loud joke in 1975 but a source of reverence in 2005. That’s why George W. Bush is regarded as a basically benign-but-not-so-brilliant president, as opposed to a walking crime against humanity. That’s why people continue to vote for politicians who will assist them in their own looting, and who have successfully carried out the greatest transfer of wealth in all of human history, while pretending to serve the public interest instead. And that’s the reason why a Donald Trump kind of buffoon could actually lead in the polls for the presidential nomination of one of the country’s two major parties.

It isn’t so much a core civics education that is missing, though reading poll data on the public’s comprehension of the most basic facts regarding their supposedly revered system of governance will positively singe your eyeballs. (What, senators have six-year terms? No! The Bill of Rights applies to us? Get outta here!) It’s more of a kind of street smarts that’s missing. More of a sense that people don’t any longer have the ability to recognize their enemies – including, all too often, themselves.

To choose just the most obvious example, we live in a world in which unregulated private sector actors, greedily pursuing their boundlessly rapacious instincts, have crashed an entire global economy around our – not their – heads, then turned to governments in order to bail them out. And even though the whole notion of the capitalist system they so vehemently espouse is rooted in the idea of risk, they in fact came to believe retrospectively that they should take none, receiving in many cases full coverage for their obligations from the governments they so often and so vociferously deride, when their bets went south. Keep that in mind as I ask you to ponder when was the last time your heard anyone in American politics say, “Businesses should be run more like the government!”? Wouldn’t that make a whole lot of sense, given the very recent history just chronicled? I mean who screwed up royally and who didn’t? Who got bailed out and who did the bailing?

Of course that would make sense. Instead, however, you’d be more likely to locate Dick Cheney’s pulse before you’ll ever hear anyone say that. In fact, you will be constantly barraged with politicians saying just the opposite, talking about how government should be run just like businesses are. Really? Does that mean that government should take wild risks and let the public pay the bill when those risks come a cropper? Does that mean that government should pay elites at the top of the system five hundred times what the average federal worker makes? Does that mean that America should export the jobs of letter carriers and Army corporals to the nice folks sitting in Bangalore call centers? Does that mean that we should give to Social Security and education and the US military all the gifts that bringing a business ethos to medicine has bequeathed us these last three decades?

That worked out really well, didn’t it? Who wants to visit the family doctor when you’re sick, if you can now instead visit a corporation? A health maintenance organization. That is, in reality, a revenue extraction organization. A feat which is often performed precisely by not maintaining people’s health. Oh, I get it now! This is like the old Twilight Zone episode where the aliens are continually consulting their handbook entitled “To Serve Man”, which turns out to be a cookbook. Health maintenance organization means maintaining the health of the organization!

In any sane world, these ideas would be laughed off the theater stage at the conceptual level. Moreover, given the real world pain they have inflicted on the audience just in the last three years alone, a rather darker response than laughter might be expected on the basis of people’s very tangible, very proximate, empirical experience. But not in America, of course. We are going all in. More of the same. “Waiter, another round for the house, please!” Good money after bad. Trump casinos.

Truly, we are in a very bad way. But is it a devastated economy which has raised the ire of the angry regressive electorate? Is it the fear of environmental devastation caused by climate change which is animating the tea party set? Does the prospect of America’s third concurrent and endless Middle Eastern war in Libya (or is fourth, counting Pakistan? or fifth, counting Yemen?) have them so agitated that they’re screaming at members of Congress during constituent town-hall meetings?

No, no and no. Truth be told, what’s really got them upset is that things are moving a bit too fast for them, which is to say that they are moving at all. Now there is a black man in the white house. And even though this nice negro is pleasant enough, and never speaks about race, and is every bit as fully corporate-owned as his predecessor, well, that just can’t be right.

So, prolly he’s not really American. Prolly he’s the product of some 1950s Indonesian plot to take over America by infiltrating the country with sleeper presidential candidates. You know, The Jakartan Candidate. Like that. And weren’t those Indonesians (where the hell is that, by the way?) especially clever, too? Using an underprivileged black kid from Hawaii as their secret, subversive plant, somebody especially well positioned to win the presidency fifty years later.

No, this is not right. This must be stopped. We have to take our country back.

Trump 2012.

Exposed Literary Fraud Reveals Lengths Americans Take to Deceive Themselves to Justify War and Intervention

AlterNet.org

WORLD

Exposed Literary Fraud Reveals Lengths Americans Take to Deceive Themselves to Justify War and Intervention


Greg Mortenson's wild Pakistan tale exposes more than just a literary BS artist – it reveals Americans' delusion about their 'civilising' mission in Af-Pak.

In the mid-90s an American nurse, Greg Mortenson, was sleeping in his car to save rent so he could fulfil a promise he made to build a school in remote northern Pakistan. Fifteen years later, his book of his epic journey, Three Cups of Tea, has been in the US bestseller list for more than four years; thousands attend his speaker events; he has raised millions for his charity, and built hundreds of schools in the Gilgit-Baltistan region. His book was top of the reading list for US troops deploying to Afghanistan.

It was an extraordinary story – until this week, when it was dismantled in the US programme 60 Minutes and in an ebook by one of Mortenson's former supporters, Jon Krakauer. Mortenson has admitted to "some omissions and compressions" while largely defending his work. But his myth has fallen apart with such astonishing speed that every- one is left wondering how on earth it persisted for so long.

Mortenson's feet of clay expose far more than one fantasist: they also reveal a lot about the naivety of Americans concerning the world and their role in it. No one questioned him too closely, and, more importantly, no one listened closely enough to what the Pakistanis themselves had to say: the unravelling of the Mortenson fable has come as no surprise there. Even in such a highly connected world, some forms of information still don't travel and certainly make no headway against the word of an American hero. Americans swallowed his tale because they wanted to. What empires – particularly those involved in violent conflict – need, above all, is heroes.

Making Mortenson a credible hero means traducing the whole region of Gilgit-Baltistan which, in his script, becomes a wild region of extremist Islamism drawn to violent terrorism. Time and again, he braves personal danger to follow his dream. His big pitch for the last 15 years is that schooling will divert potential terrorists: a "one-man peace mission" in the war on terror. By this account, the insurgency in Afghanistan/Pakistan is not political opposition to foreign intervention but a form of false consciousness inculcated in the madrassas. Get to the child early enough and they will grow up good democrats. It's ludicrously naive given that all the 9/11 bombers were highly educated.

Even more importantly, it has no relevance in Gilgit-Baltistan, which is a peaceful, predominantly Ismaili region whose inhabitants see the Paris-based Aga Khan as their spiritual leader. There is a strong Tibetan Buddhist influence.

Rather than Mortenson waging a lonely battle against ignorance, the Aga Khan Development Network has been building hundreds of schools in the region and has a track record of staffing them and keeping them open. As the Pakistani journalist, Rina Saeed Khan, points out, Gilgit-Baltistan has one of the highest literacy rates in Pakistan. She asks, quite rightly, why Mortenson didn't join forces with the network given their experience and expertise, instead of struggling desperately to work it all out for himself.

But an American putting money into a foreign-sounding aid foundation doesn't quite have the same marketing appeal as the "one-man mission" line that captures perfectly the boom in DIY aid: a new wave of fledgling agencies driven by individuals frustrated and impatient with bureaucracies and politics, who launch their bid to "make a difference". A myth which turns development into an amateur's hobby.

To every age, their own type of hero: the British empire had Gordon of Khartoum in the 1880s, and the Americans have Mortenson. He is the gentle giant of a man who stumbles into exotic and dangerous locations of which he knows little, and makes friends. This is the innocent abroad – an image of America in the world that is also evident in Mortenson's rival in the New York Times bestseller lists in the last few years, Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love.

These hugely popular tales portray a deeply consoling myth of how the US engages with the world as these adventurous individuals wander through foreign climes, and in their expansive, endearing way want only to bring as much delight in their interactions with the locals as they experience themselves. Both books share the personal crisis/failure which is resolved by finding a new self (through a new sense of meaning or love) abroad: in both, the individual's emotional quest is the starting point and provides the narrative thread. These are knowable characters who effectively explain the exotic to home audiences. They offer homely, charming myths for an empire currently embroiled in deadly protracted wars, rather as Rudyard Kipling's fables delighted a previous age of imperialists.

But perhaps the most intriguing – and most serious – aspect of the Mortenson myth is that his "one-man mission to bring peace" is a continuation of a western drive to "civilise" the world. His parents were Lutheran missionaries in Tanzania. Mortenson describes grinding poverty and ancient tribal customs: it's a patronising form of orientalism.

Above all, Mortenson has talked about women's empowerment and his pledge to get girls into schools. Women need liberating from the oppressive tribal patriarchy. There is nothing original here – US foreign policy is now stuffed with the rhetoric of women's rights – but Mortenson has helped popularise one of the most astonishing conundrums: feminism has been co-opted as a rationale for the US war on terror. It dangerously justifies and confirms an American self-righteousness in central Asia.

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

America: Leading the World Into Oblivion



March 26, 2011 at 10:48:26

Tracking Our Downward Spiral: the Ways in Which America Still 'Leads' the World





We’re Number One!

Americans are number one in quite a few areas—but they’re not all accomplishments to be proud of.

by

From President Obama to Sarah Palin, our politicians are constantly invoking America’s superiority and exceptionalism or exhorting us to be Number 1. Yet from health care to education to environmental performance, we’re more often found at the bottom of the list of developed countries. It’s a good idea to set aside the rhetoric of national greatness and ask ourselves how we dropped to the basement on so many important issues—and what we should do to climb out.

To see where America stands not so proud, consider the advanced, well-to-do democracies of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the rich countries’ club. To focus on America’s peers, I am excluding the former Soviet bloc countries as well as Mexico, Turkey, Korea, Iceland, Luxembourg, and Greece. In the remaining group of 20 affluent countries, America is, indeed, Number 1 or close to it in a number of categories: the 26 indicators of poor performance listed below.

It’s a good idea to set aside the rhetoric of national greatness and ask ourselves how we dropped to the basement on so many important issues—and what we should do to climb out.

To our great shame, America now has:

  • The highest poverty rate, both generally and for children;
  • The greatest inequality of incomes;
  • The lowest government spending as a percentage of GDP on social programs for the disadvantaged;
  • The lowest number of paid holiday, annual and maternity leaves;
  • The lowest score on the UN’s index of “material well-being of children”;
  • The worst score on the UN’s gender inequality index;
  • The lowest social mobility;
  • The highest public and private expenditure on health care as a portion of GDP, 
yet accompanied by the highest:
    • Infant mortality rate
    • Prevalence of mental health problems
    • Obesity rate
    • Portion of people going without health care due to cost
    • Low birth weight children per capita (except for Japan)
    • Consumption of anti-depressants per capita
  • The shortest life expectancy at birth (except for Denmark and Portugal);
  • The highest carbon dioxide emissions and water consumption per capita;
  • The lowest score on the World Economic Forum’s Environmental Performance 
Index (except for Belgium), and the largest Ecological Footprint per capita 
(except for Belgium and Denmark);
  • The highest rate of failing to ratify international agreements;
  • The lowest spending on international development and humanitarian 
assistance as a percentage of GDP;
  • The highest military spending as a portion of GDP;
  • The largest international arms sales;
  • The most negative balance of payments (except New Zealand, Spain and 
Portugal);
  • The lowest scores for student performance in math (except for Portugal and Italy) (and far down from the top in both science and reading);
  • The highest high school drop out rate (except for Spain);

This is exceptionalism we don’t need. Thankfully, America is also Number 1 or near the top in a number of positive indicators, including in the overall Human Development Index. But we are also far down the rankings, though not (yet) at the bottom, on others also not listed here. For example, the U.S. ranks only 13th on The Economist’s Democracy Index, right below the Czech Republic.

Since we’re Number 1 in both low taxes and military spending, it is clear where we can find the money we need to invest in our future.

Many observers find these results troubling for what they portend for U.S. competitiveness in the world economy and our national influence abroad—our so-called “soft power.” But the results are even more telling for what they say about our care for each other and for future generations of Americans and, even more, for what they say about our political leaders.

These deplorable consequences did not just happen as the result of economic and technological forces over which we have no control. They are the results of conscious political decisions made over several decades by both Democrats and Republicans who have had priorities other than strengthening the well-being of American society and our environment. Many countries, notably in Europe, took a different path, one that was open to us also. America may have invented the middle class, but while others improved on our grand idea, we let it slip away.

It’s not too late to begin climbing out of the basement on these issues, but sweeping them under the rug in celebration of American exceptionalism won’t allow that. And since we’re Number 1 in both low taxes and military spending, it is clear where we can find the money we need to invest in our future.


James Gustave Speth author picJames Gustave Speth wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical solutions for a just and sustainable world. Gus is Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos and Professor of Law at the Vermont Law School.

Interested?

YES! Magazine encourages you to make free use of this article by taking these easy steps. Speth, J. G. (2011, March 10). We’re Number One!. Retrieved April 19, 2011, from YES! Magazine Web site: http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/on-american-superiority. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License Creative Commons License

Monday, April 18, 2011

Senate’s “Privacy Bill of Rights” Exempts the Government, Short Sells Consumers

Dissident Voice: a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and social justice

Senate’s “Privacy Bill of Rights” Exempts the Government, Short Sells Consumers

Call it another virtual “defense” of privacy rights by U.S. lawmakers.

Last week, senators John Kerry (D-MA) and John McCain (R-AZ) introduced legislation in the U.S. Senate, the “Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act of 2011,” they claimed would “establish a framework to protect the personal information of all Americans.”

During a D.C. press conference, McCain told reporters that the proposed law would protect a “fundamental right of American citizens, that is the right to privacy.”

While Kerry and McCain correctly state that “The ease of gathering and compiling personal information on the Internet and off, both overtly and surreptitiously, is becoming increasingly efficient and effortless due to advances in technology which have provided information gatherers the ability to compile seamlessly highly detailed personal histories of individuals” (p. 4), there’s one small catch.

CNET’s Declan McCullagh reported that the bill “doesn’t apply to data mining, surveillance, or any other forms of activities that governments use to collect and collate Americans’ personal information.”

While the measure would apply to “companies and some nonprofit groups,” CNET disclosed that “federal, state, and local police agencies that have adopted high-tech surveillance technologies including cell phone tracking, GPS bugs, and requests to Internet companies for users’ personal information–in many cases without obtaining a search warrant from a judge” would be exempt.

As we know, a gaggle of privacy-killing agencies inside the secret state, the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as well as offices and subunits sprinkled throughout the Pentagon’s sprawling bureaucracy, including U.S. Cyber Command, all claim authority to extract personal information on individuals from still-secret Office of Legal Counsel memoranda and National Security Presidential Directives.

As the American Civil Liberties Union reported in March, what little has been extracted from the Executive Branch through Freedom of Information Act litigation is heavily-redacted, rendering such disclosures meaningless exercises.

For example, the bulk of the November 2, 2001 21-page Memorandum for the Attorney General, penned by former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John C. Yoo, which provided the Bush administration with a legal fig-leaf for their warrantless wiretapping programs, is blank. That is, if one ignores exemptions to FOIA now claimed by the Obama administration. (B1, b3, b5, exemptions relate to “national security,” “inter-departmental communications” and/or programs labelled “TS/SCI”–Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information, the highest classification).

And, as of this writing, the American people still do not have have access to nor even knowledge of the snooping privileges granted securocrats by the Bush and Obama administrations under cover of the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI).

As Antifascist Calling previously reported, CNCI derives authority from classified annexes of National Security Presidential Directive 54, Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23 (NSPD 54/HSPD 23) first issued by our former “decider.”

Those 2008 presidential orders are so contentious that both the Bush and Obama administrations have even refused to release details to Congress, prompting a 2010 Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) demanding that the full text, and underlying legal authority governing federal cybersecurity programs be made public.

McCullagh points out that the bill “also doesn’t apply to government agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Social Security Administration, the Census Bureau, and the IRS, which collect vast amounts of data on American citizens.”

Nor are there provisions in the bill that would force federal or state agencies to notify American citizens in the event of a data breach. No small matter considering the flawed data security practices within such agencies.

Just last week, InformationWeek revealed that the “Texas comptroller’s office began notifying millions of people Monday that their personal data had been involved in a data breach. The private data was posted to a public server, where it was available–in some cases–for over a year.”

“The posted records,” we’re told, “included people’s names, mailing addresses, social security numbers, and in some cases also dates of birth and driver’s license numbers.”

None of the data was encrypted and was there for the taking by identity thieves or other shady actors. InformationWeek pointed out although “most organizations that experience a serious data breach” offer free credit monitoring services to victims, “to date, Texas has not said it will offer such services to people affected by the comptroller’s breach.”

CNET reminds us that the “Department of Veterans Affairs suffered a massive security breach in 2006 when an unencrypted laptop with data on millions of veterans was stolen.”

McCullagh avers that “a government report last year listed IRS security and privacy vulnerabilities” and that “even the Census Bureau has, in the past, shared information with law enforcement from its supposedly confidential files.”

The limited scope of the Kerry and McCain proposal is underscored by moves by the Obama Justice Department to actually increase the secret state’s already formidable surveillance powers and short-circuit anemic privacy reforms that have been proposed.

In fact, as Antifascist Calling reported last week, during hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Associate Attorney General James A. Baker warned the panel that granting “cloud computing users more privacy protections and to require court approval before tracking Americans’ cell phones would hinder police investigations.”

But even when it comes to reining-in out-of-control online tracking by internet advertising firms, the Kerry-McCain bill comes up short.

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, the Kerry-McCain bill won’t stop online tracking by advert pimps who hustle consumers’ private details to the highest bidder.

The civil liberties’ watchdogs aver, “the privacy risk is not in consumers seeing targeted advertisements, but in the unchecked accumulation and storage of data about consumers’ online activities.”

“Collecting and retaining data on consumers can create a rich repository of information,” EFF’s legislative analyst Rainey Reitman writes, one that “leaves consumer data vulnerable to a data breach as well as creating an unnecessary enticement for government investigators, civil litigants and even malicious hackers.”

Additionally, the proposal is silent on Do Not Track, “meaning there is no specific proposal for a meaningful, universal browser-based opt-out mechanism that could be respected by all large third-party tracking companies,” and consumers “would still need to opt-out of each third party individually,” a daunting process.

Worst of all, consumers “won’t have a private right of action in the new Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights. That means consumers won’t be granted the right to sue companies for damages if the provisions of the Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights are violated.” In other words, even when advertising firms and ISPs violate their users’ privacy rights, the bill would specifically prohibit individuals from seeking relief in the courts.

Moving in for the Cybersecurity Kill

While the Kerry-McCain bill would exempt government agencies from privacy protections, the Defense Department is aggressively seeking more power to monitor civilian computer networks.

NextGov reported that General Keith Alexander, the dual-hatted commander of U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency said that his agency “cannot monitor civilian networks” and that congressional authorization will be required so that CYBERCOM can “look at what’s going on in other government sectors” and other “critical infrastructures,” i.e., civilian networks.

Mendacity aside, considering that NSA already vacuums-up terabytes of America’s electronic communications data on a daily basis, reporter Aliya Sternstein notes that Alexander “offered hints about what the Pentagon might be pushing the Obama administration to consider.”

“Civil liberties and privacy are not [upheld] at the expense of cybersecurity,” he said. “They will benefit from cybersecurity,” available only, or so we’ve been led to believe, from the military, well-known for their commitment to civil liberties and the rule of law as the case of Pfc. Bradley Manning amply demonstrates.

Cyberspace, according to Alexander, is a domain that must be protected like the air, sea and land, “but it’s also unique in that it’s inside and outside military, civilian and government” domains.

Military forces “have to have the ability to move seamlessly when our nation is under attack to defend it … the mechanisms for doing that have to be laid out and agreed to. The laws don’t exist in this area.”

While Cyber Command currently shares network security duties with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, as I reported last year, a Memorandum of Agreement between DHS and NSA, claims that increased “interdepartmental collaboration in strategic planning for the Nation’s cybersecurity, mutual support for cybersecurity capabilities development, and synchronization of current operational cybersecurity mission activities,” will be beneficial.

We were informed that the Agreement “will focus national cybersecurity efforts, increasing the overall capacity and capability of both DHS’s homeland security and DoD’s national security missions, while providing integral protection for privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties.”

But as Rod Beckström, the former director of Homeland Security’s National Cybersecurity Center (NCSC), pointed out in 2009 when he resigned his post, he viewed increased control by NSA over national cybersecurity programs a “power grab.”

In a highly-critical letter to DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, Beckström said that NSA “effectively controls DHS cyber efforts through detailees [and] technology insertions.”

Citing the agency’s role as the secret state’s eyes and ears that peer into America’s electronic and telecommunications’ networks, Beckström warned that handing more power to NSA could significantly threaten “our democratic processes…if all top level government network security and monitoring are handled by any one organization.”

Those warnings have gone unheeded.

National Defense Magazine reported that retired Marine Corps General Peter Pace, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “would hand over the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity responsibilities to the head of the newly created U.S. Cyber Command.”

Seconding Pace’s call for cybersecurity consolidation, under Pentagon control, Roger Cressey, a senior vice president with the ultra-spooky Booz Allen Hamilton firm, a company that does billions of dollars of work for the Defense Department, “agreed that putting all the responsibility for the federal government’s Internet security needs would help the talent shortage by consolidating the responsibilities under one roof.”

“The real expertise in the government,” Cressey told National Defense, “capable of protecting networks currently lies in the NSA.”

Cressey’s is hardly an objective opinion. The former member of the National Security Council and the elitist Council on Foreign Relations, joined Booz Allen after an extensive career inside the secret state.

A military-industrial complex powerhouse, Booz Allen clocks-in at No. 9 on Washington Technology’s list of 2010 Top 100 Contractors with some $3.3 billion in revenue.

As Spies For Hire author Tim Shorrock pointed out for CorpWatch, “Among the many services Booz Allen provides to intelligence agencies … are data-mining and data analysis, signals intelligence systems engineering (an NSA specialty), intelligence analysis and operations support, the design and analysis of cryptographic or code-breaking systems (another NSA specialty), and ‘outsourcing/privatization strategy and planning’.”

With “data mining, surveillance, or any other forms of activities that governments use to collect and collate Americans’ personal information” off the Kerry-McCain “privacy” bill table, as CNET reported, enterprising security firms are undoubtedly salivating over potential income–and lack of accountability–which a cybersecurity consolidation, Pentagon-style, would all but guarantee.

Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His articles are published in many venues. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press. Read other articles by Tom, or visit Tom's website.

This article was posted on Monday, April 18th, 2011 at 8:00am and is filed under Civil Liberties, Consumer Advocacy, Democracy, Espionage/"Intelligence", Military/Militarism, Obama, Privacy, Security.

The American Underclass



The American Underclass

Monday, Aug. 29, 1977

Destitute and desperate in the land of plenty

"Pretty soon the lights won't have to go out for trouble to start. "

—Cherry Crist, Miami welfare mother of six

"If the cities erupt again, we will find no safe place on either side of the barricades."

—James W. Compton, Chicago

Urban League director

Girl looking through screen door in Georgia

The barricades are seen only fleetingly by most middle-class Americans as they rush by in their cars or commuter trains—doors locked, windows closed, moving fast. But out there is a different world, a place of pock-marked streets, gutted tenements and broken hopes. Affluent people know little about this world, except when despair makes it erupt explosively onto Page One or the 7 o'clock news. Behind its crumbling walls lives a large group of people who are more intractable, more socially alien and more hostile than almost anyone had imagined. They are the unreachables: the American underclass.

Poverty-13

The term itself is shocking to striving, mobile America. Long used in class-ridden Europe, then applied to the U.S. by Swedish Economist Gunnar Myrdal and other intellectuals in the 1960s, it has become a rather common description of people who are seen to be stuck more or less permanently at the bottom, removed from the American dream. Though its members come from all races and live in many places, the underclass is made up mostly of impoverished urban blacks, who still suffer from the heritage of slavery and discrimination. The universe of the underclass is often a junk heap of rotting housing, broken furniture, crummy food, alcohol and drugs. The underclass has been doubly left behind: by the well-to-do majority and by the many blacks and Hispanics who have struggled up to the middle class, or who remain poor but can see a better day for themselves or their children. Its members are victims and victimizers in the culture of the street hustle, the quick fix, the rip-off and, not least, violent crime.

Their bleak environment nurtures values that are often at radical odds with those of the majority—even the majority of the poor. Thus the underclass minority produces a highly disproportionate number of the nation's juvenile delinquents, school dropouts, drug addicts and welfare mothers, and much of the adult crime, family disruption, urban decay and demand for social expenditures. Says Monsignor Geno Baroni, an assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development: "The underclass presents our most dangerous crisis, more dangerous than the Depression of 1929, and more complex."

Poverty-5

Rampaging members of the underclass carried out much of the orgy of looting and burning that swept New York's ghettos during the July blackout. (In all, 55% of the arrested looters were unemployed and 64% had been previously arrested for other offenses.) They are responsible for most of the youth crime that has spread like an epidemic through the nation (TIME cover, July 11). Certainly, most members of this subculture are not looters or arsonists or violent criminals. But the underclass is so totally disaffected from the system that many who would not themselves steal or burn or mug stand by while others do so, sometimes cheering them on. The underclass, says Vernon Jordan, executive director of the National Urban League, "in a crisis feels no compulsion to abide by the rules of the game because they find that the normal rules do not apply to them."

Poverty-17

That disaffection is doubly distressing because the nation is in its third year of a strong economic recovery, an advance that has created 6 million new jobs since the end of the 1973-75 recession. No fewer than 90.5 million Americans are now at work. The underclass remains a nucleus of psychological and material destitution despite 20 years of civil rights gains and 13 years of antipoverty programs that were only temporarily slowed, but never really hobbled, during the Nixon era. Tens of billions of dollars are spent every year by the Federal Government, states and cities to eliminate drastic poverty. In addition, special hiring drives, private job-training programs, university scholarships and affirmative-action programs are aimed at aiding the motivated poor. Yet by most of society's measures—job prospects, housing, education, physical security—the underclass is hardly better off, and in some cases worse off, than before the War on Poverty.

photo by david sutherland

The war, of course, has not been lost. The proportion of the nation officially listed as living in poverty has dropped since 1959 from 22% to 12%. One of America's great success sagas has been the rise of many blacks to the secure middle class. Today 44% of black families earn $10,000 or more a year. More than 45% of black high school graduates now go on to college. Though some discrimination persists, more and more nonwhites are seen in at least the junior management ranks of banks and corporations and government, where they are moving up.

But the new opportunities have splintered the nonwhite population. The brightest and most ambitious have rapidly risen, leaving the underclass farther and farther behind—and more and more angry. While the number of blacks earning more than $10,000 is expanding and the number earning $5,500 to $10,000 is shrinking, almost a third of all black families are still below the poverty line, defined as $5,500 for an urban family of four (only 8.9% of white families are below the line). Says Harvard Sociologist David Riesman: "The awareness that many blacks have been successful means that the underclass is more resentful and more defiant because its alibi isn't there."

photo by david sutherland

Others echo those sentiments in gutsier language. Says Naomi Chambers, a Detroit social worker, who is black: "Now that some black people have cars, dresses and shoes, there is jealousy. Jealousy can make me hate you and take what you have." Indeed, the blacks who looted during the New York blackout were totally nondiscriminatory, emptying out stores owned by blacks and whites alike. There is a strong feeling among social experts and politicians, both black and white, that much the same rampage could have struck any U.S. city in similar circumstances—and that next time it will be worse.

Humble houses on an Appalachian hillside, with coal train in foreground

Concerned officials from the White House to the humblest city hall are grappling with questions about the underclass. How big is it? Who is in it? What motivates its members? Most important, how can this minority within a minority be reduced?

For many of the deprived, poverty is a transitory condition that can—and will—be overcome by education, ambition or the sheer refusal to stay down. Similarly, most of the unemployed are only temporarily out of jobs; more than 86% have been unemployed for less than 26 weeks. But the underclass is made up of people who lack the schooling, skills and discipline to advance, and who have succumbed to helplessness—a feeling of being beaten.

A young girl fingerpainting outside her Appalachian home

Long-term unemployment is a factor in that. Many members of the underclass come from the ranks of the 1,061,000 workers who are listed as "discouraged" because they have given up even looking for jobs. To that number can be added the entrenched welfare mothers: at least 2.4 million have been enrolled for one year or longer. Then there are their many children, a few million kids who are growing up without a heritage of working skills or of employed society's values. In addition, many of the chronically unemployed in the 18-to-21 age group have had—and will have—a desperate time landing and keeping their first regular jobs. A portion of the 4.4 million disabled who are receiving welfare also belong. Allowing for the overlaps in those groups, the underclass must number at least 7 million to 8 million Americans—perhaps even 10 million.

Though this subculture is predominantly black, many Hispanics and more than a few poor whites belong to the underclass. Among the most glaring subgroups: the Appalachian migrants to dilapidated neighborhoods of some cities, the Chicanos of the Los Angeles slums, the Puerto Ricans of Spanish Harlem. But the Hispanics appear to be moving ahead somewhat faster; 55% of the nation's blacks, v. 49% of the Spanish-speaking minorities, still live in the mostly depressed areas of central cities. The black concentration in the cities seems fated to increase because the birth rate among blacks is 51% higher than among whites. There are other reasons for this continuing concentration: lingering discrimination on the part of the white majority, a crippling absence of education, training and opportunity among the black minority. Says Randolph Taylor, a Presbyterian minister who works among the underclass in Charlotte, N.C.: "How one feels about society depends on whether one thinks that door may some day open. The whites are generally staying with the system on the basis of hope."

It is the weakness of family structure, the presence of competing street values, and the lack of hope amidst affluence all around that make the American underclass unique among the world's poor peoples. Reports TIME Atlanta Bureau Chief Rudolph Rauch, who until recently was stationed in Latin America: "Almost anyone who has lived in or near the crowded barrios of South America knows that looting on the scale that occurred in New York could almost never happen there—and not because the army would be standing by to shoot looters. Family structure has not broken down in South America. Nor has the idea of a neighborhood. A child usually feels that he lives in both in a Latin American city. In a U.S. urban ghetto, he often belongs to neither."

TIME Chicago Correspondent Robert Wurmstedt, once a Peace Corps volunteer, reports: "The poverty in the black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods on the West Side of Chicago is worse than any poverty I saw in West Africa. The people there are guided by strong traditional values. They do not live in constant fear of violence, vermin and fire. You don't find the same sense of desperation and hopelessness you find in the American ghetto."

Hopelessness is a home in a fetid ghetto flat, where children make morbid sport of chasing cockroaches or dodging rats. There may never be hot water for bathing or a working bathtub to put it in—or any other functioning plumbing. Under these conditions, afflictions such as lead poisoning (from eating flaking paint) and severe influenza are common. Siblings often sleep together in the same bed, separated by a thin wall or a blanket from parents (though frequently there is no man around). Streets are unsafe to walk at night—and, often, so are halls. Nobody starves, but many people are malnourished on a diet of hot dogs, Twinkies, Fritos, soda pop and, in rare cases, whatever can be fished out of the garbage can. Alcoholism abounds; heroin is a favorite route of escape. Another road to fantasy is the TV set. On it dance the images of the good life in middle-class America, visions that inspire envy and frustration.

Strutting pimps and pushers, cutting a sharp swath with their broad brims and custom-made suits, are often the local heroes and the successful role models for the kids. Schooling is frequently a sick joke: teachers conduct holding operations in the classroom, while gang leaders instruct. Inordinate numbers of the black young drop out of school before graduation, landing on street corners unskilled, undisciplined and barely literate. Those who finish high school are not much better off. Says Richard McNish, director of a manpower training program in Los Angeles' Watts neighborhood: "Kids aren't required to produce to get a diploma. Nothing is required except to be cool and not try to kill the teacher. They don't know how to read and write."

Portraits from a gallery of despair: In Brooklyn's grimy Bedford-Stuyvesant ghetto, a welfare mother surveys her $195-a-month tenement apartment, an unheated, vermin-ridden urban swamp. The bathroom ceiling and sink drip water on the cracked linoleum floor. There are no lights, no locks on the doors. Disheveled and 35, the woman has been on welfare ever since her five-year-old son was born. She joined in the looting during July's traumatic blackout, and calls the episode "convenient. We saw our chance and we took it." Now she also worries: "We don't have any place to shop any more."

In Boston, Ana C., a Hispanic and a mother of seven, speaks no English and has no marketable skills. She draws $294 monthly from welfare. To this she adds the profits from selling heroin at $30 a "spoon" (dose). Ana disapproves of the drug, realizes that it is a major cause of street crime. Yet she rationalizes: "I didn't know how to put food on my table, buy clothes for the children and still pay my $95 rent and the gas bills."

In Watts, a wine-sipping ex-con in his 30s keeps vigil on his doorstep, staring at a cluster of shabby apartments across the street. "I've been looking for a job since I got out of the penitentiary in 1974," he says in a monotone. "I tried to get a job in the CETA [federal Comprehensive Employment and Training Act] program. They told me that if I don't have a telephone, I can't get one." He points at a chain-link fence around the neighboring apartments. "They put up those fences to show the people what they're getting ready for. They have two fences around the penitentiary."

In Harlem, Donald Williams, 29, an ex-junkie, scuffs the streets of New York City as a panhandler. A former student at North Carolina Central University, he says that he was thrown out because he took part in a student demonstration. Williams' lament: "My values are gone. You're looking at a weird dude, a dude on the borderline of insanity. Every day, it doesn't seem to get better—only worse."

In Chicago, hundreds of unemployed young blacks mill on the street where Albirtha Young, 29, lives with her welfare-supported family—twelve people in all. "I didn't want to pick cotton all my life," she says, explaining her move to the city's West Side from Mississippi nine years ago. She brought two children North, now has four more—along with two left to her care by an aunt, plus two younger brothers and a sister to tend. The extended family lives in a two-story frame house bracketed by vacant lots, gutted houses and apartment buildings. Albirtha has not held a job since 1968. One reason: her wage would be less than her $420.60 monthly welfare payment plus the $298.80 she receives in Social Security survivors' benefits—and she would have to pay the cost of a baby sitter besides. Says she: "It's no easy job just sitting here from one year to the next doing nothing."

From everywhere in the ghetto comes the cry for more jobs. The unemployment rate among blacks is 13.2%, v. 6.1% among whites. The rate for black teenagers is 39%, v. 14.3% for whites. A generation of young people is moving into its 20s—the family-forming years—without knowing how to work, since many have never held jobs.

To those who did have jobs, the 1973-75 recession was a severe blow. During its worst months, nonwhites were laid off at nearly twice the rate of whites (the unemployment rate for blacks grew from 10.4% in 1974 to 14.7% in 1975), and since then blacks have been called back to work more slowly. Consequently, some people who had begun to struggle out of the underclass were abruptly thrown back. The underclass has been hurt by the flight of manufacturing firms—many requiring only semiskilled or even unskilled labor—to the suburbs and the Sunbelt. Since 1969 Chicago has lost 212,000 jobs, while its suburbs have gained 220,000; in the same period, New York City has lost 650,000 jobs. From 1970 to 1975, 248 manufacturing plants left Detroit, including branches of the 16 biggest local companies.

"Poor blacks don't have mobility," says Roger Fox, an executive of the Chicago Urban League. "They just can't pick up and move on to where there are jobs." Among the many reasons: high rents in the suburbs (even compared with the extortionate sums charged by many slumlords), lack of cars and mass transit, and the resistance of many communities to low-income housing. Margie Figueroa, 21, typifies the problem. She had to commute two hours each way, on three buses and a train, from Chicago's Humboldt Park barrio to her job as a maid at the Hyatt Regency Hotel near O'Hare International Airport. The effort was too much; she quit, and remains unemployed.

By default, the underclass economy is a welfare economy. Nonwhites received 37% of the $11.4 billion in federal and state welfare payments last year. Blacks make up no less than 44.3% of enrollees in the $10.3 billion Aid to

Families with Dependent Children program (AFDC)—1.5 million welfare mothers.

Welfare dependency means that for many members of the underclass, the concepts of income and jobs are barely related, if at all. Says Michael Lemmons, 17, who is earning $2.50 an hour this summer as a janitor's assistant in a Watts federal manpower program: "If you keep giving people stuff, that's why they loot when the lights go out. Working is out of their minds. They think everything must be taken."

For many women in the underclass, welfare has turned illegitimate pregnancy into a virtual career. Says Barbara Wright, a welfare mother of four in Brooklyn: "A lot of young girls in the ghetto believe that the only way for them to get something in this society is by becoming pregnant and getting on welfare." One Harlem hustler makes the all-too-typical rationalization: "Everybody steals. Politicians steal. What's the use to bust my ass from 9 to 5 to get $100 a week?"

Of course, not everyone feels that way. In Harlem, hundreds of youths besieged city manpower offices to sign on as cleaners-up (at $30 a day) after last month's looting episode. In Chicago, nearly 2,000 applicants, most of them black teenagers, lined up last month to apply for some 300 jobs at a new South Side supermarket.

More jobs, of course, are the most obvious need of the underclass—not only economically, but also psychologically and culturally. In the world's most achievement-oriented society, work is more than a source of income. It is also a source of status and selfesteem, a point of identification with the system, and a second social environment, which aids in diffusing the accumulated tensions of day-to-day life. Says Stanford University Historian Clay Carson, a black: "Permanency of jobs, stability in an economic situation, is important. Even if someone is only a janitor, his job still means stability." On the basis of studies, he adds: "Typically, those who can get established with a job in an urban environment can pass this stability on to their kids. Those who can't are likely to pass on more than just poverty. They also transmit poor educational opportunities and a sense of hopelessness."

In attacking the basic problem of job creation, the first sound step is to recognize that the Government cannot and should not try to do it all. Given the public's dismay with inflation and high taxes, there is nothing close to the political consensus that would be needed to support liberal cries for massive job programs or a "Marshall Plan for the cities." Despite some successes, Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty is too well remembered as one in which benefits often trickled up to the so-called poverticians—the programmers, social workers and suppliers to the needy. Any massive program to stimulate the whole economy, in an attempt to bring down unemployment rapidly, would only give a rocket boost to inflation. The primary victim would be the underclass.

There is no all-embracing solution, at any price, for the complex malaise of the underclass. It would be more realistic—and much less inflationary—to press for a mix of endeavors, in which the Government would reorder some social spending and new efforts would be made by private business and by members of the underclass themselves.

A most crying long-range need is to improve public education. As the poorest of the poor have inundated inner-city schools, it has been easier for educators to concede the trappings of success—passing grades, graduating diplomas—than to teach the skills necessary for living and working. Ghetto school officials need to enforce their lax truancy rules, putting more pressure on parents to insist that their children attend, and need to concentrate rigorously on the reading, writing and math skills required to get ahead in an advanced industrial society.

One effective program is New York City's Auxiliary Services for High Schools. Started in 1969 by Educator Seymour Weissman, it is aimed at hard-core dropouts, problem students and those suspended from the school system, who become disillusioned out on the streets and volunteer to return to school. Most are age 16 to 21. Says Weissman: "The traditional high school has gym, music education, sex education. But for our kids, it is more important to learn the real basics of math and reading." Students learn at their own pace and are not promoted unless they are qualified. Discipline is strict, work is closely supervised, but at the same time an important goal is to instill self-reliant attitudes. Says Julian Washington, the program's assistant coordinator: "A lot of the youngsters, especially blacks, have a negative self-image. We try to make them believe in self-esteem and in getting a new and positive image of themselves." Some 14,000 students participate in the program each year, and about 2,000 pass the New York State high school equivalency test; better than 70% of these former dropouts go on to college. Though small in national terms, the program could be successfully expanded and imitated elsewhere.

The underclass would also be better served by tougher law enforcement in the ghettos and swift and sure justice for offenders. Some of the reasons: 1) to suppress the near anarchic violence on many ghetto streets that terrorizes underclass members and leads some of their youngsters to believe that they too can be a law unto themselves; 2) to give the law-abiding poor a better chance in their increasingly hostile environment; 3) to motivate businessmen to return to the inner city. Local governments also have to work harder to recruit minority members for their police forces so that the cops are not viewed as occupying armies but as servants of the vast majority of law-abiding citizens in the underclass. The cost—for more police, judges and jails—will be high. But a serious attack on ghetto crime will drive a wedge between the poor who are struggling to get ahead and those who are preying upon them.

There is also a great need to tear down, or at least lower, the many barriers to employment that confront the unskilled, the unlettered and the immobile. One obvious bar is the overly strict and exclusionary union apprenticeship rules. They should be relaxed—despite the howls certain to come from trade unionists.

A still more controversial barrier to employment is the minimum-wage law. Now $2.30 an hour, the minimum will probably be raised by Congress to $2.65 next year and around $3.15 by 1980. Of course, the talents of many members of the underclass—particularly the unskilled young—are not worth that much off the street. Employers would rather hire someone who shows more evident promise of further promotion—or not hire at all. The minimum wage, says Sociologist Riesman, is the product of "an alliance of the better situated labor unions with the liberals against the deprived and the elderly, whom people would otherwise employ for household or for city work that now doesn't get done." Adds Stanford University Labor Economist Thomas Sowell, a black: "Talk about people being unemployable is just so much rubbish. Everybody is unemployable at one wage rate, and everybody is employable at another." Perhaps not quite everybody. In a free economy, there will always be some small fraction of people who lack the skills or discipline to work. But there is a lot of work that needs doing—cleaning up parks, repairing abandoned buildings, taking part in the burgeoning service trades—at reasonable wages.

Congress has been considering a proposal to reduce the minimum wage for all teen-agers to 75% of the adult minimum, but that might just inspire employers to hire well-schooled middle-class youth at the expense of older workers. A better compromise, suggested by Harvard Economist Martin Feldstein, would be for the Government to subsidize minimum-wage payments to the youthful unemployed. Directed specifically to the underclass, the program would allow businessmen to pay a fraction of the cost for jobs that they might otherwise refuse to fill. Another wise Government investment would be to shift some federal funds to more and better mass transit, which, beyond all its benefits to the environment, would give the underclass access to all the new job opportunities in the suburbs.

Without increasing the federal budget, the Government might sensibly redirect some of its stimulative spending—a bit less for the booming Sunbelt, a bit more for the Northern and Midwestern states, where the urban underclass is concentrated. In 1975, for every tax dollar sent to Washington from the Midwestern states, 760 returned; the Northeastern states got back 860; but the South collected $1.14 and the West $1.20. One reason for the disparity is that many corporations have their headquarters in the Northeast and Midwest, from which they pay taxe based on their total national sales. But there are other factors, including the success of persuasive Southern and Western Congressmen in winning defense funds and pork-barrel projects for the folks back home.

President Carter has struck to the root of one debilitating problem by proposing his "profamily, pro-work" welfare reform bill, which aims to get people off the dole and encourage them to work (TIME, Aug. 15). By offering cash grants to the so-called working poor, it encourages underclass fathers to stay in the home instead of leaving so that their families can collect welfare. The plan offers tax incentives for those who find jobs in the private sector instead of public service. For those who cannot, it proposes to create 1.4 million positions in training programs and in service jobs such as assisting teachers, providing child care, controlling rats and escorting the aged in high-crime areas. In all, the tax incentives and jobs provisions would cost $13.2 billion—and raise the Federal Government's overall welfare bill (now including cash payments, food stamps, etc.) from $28.9 billion to at least $30.7 billion. The change seems well worth the price.

The Federal Government this year will also spend about $13 billion on a bewildering variety of employment and training programs that will benefit an estimated 6 million people. Washington finances, among other things, 725,000 public service jobs in state and local governments, public works construction in depressed areas, and Job Corps residential training centers. Some programs are merely cosmetic; for example, the Administration's summer-job projects for 1.8 million kids are designed mainly to keep them off the streets during vacation.

With costs per participant that range from $600 to $4,000, the training programs have been widely criticized as boondoggles, although the Congressional Budget Office concluded this year that graduates boost their annual incomes by 5% to 15%. Most of the programs are administered without close federal supervision by 446 local governments, and Washington knows little about their effectiveness. Says Sar Levitan, director of George Washington University's Center for Social Policy Studies: "You end up throwing money away without anyone really knowing what is going to happen." At their best, the federal programs have room for only a fraction of the underclass, and most are designed for fairly experienced workers or the motivated poor.

The programs would work better if private business had a bigger voice in designing and managing them. Perhaps businessmen, who as a class are effective at solving problems and getting things done, could bid on projects to raze and rebuild sections of the underclass ghettos, providing shops, industries and services on a model—and ultimately profitmaking—basis. Business could also take over much of the job training now carried out in government centers under federal programs and probably do it better and cheaper and even profitably. Tax incentives, for example, could be designed to reward employers who hire the long-term unemployed and show results in upgrading their skills. Certainly, government-supported jobs of any kind are only a first, temporary step in lifting the underclass; the real solution is for members to get and hold private jobs.

To help prepare them for such jobs, government and private money have already come together in some encouraging projects. One of them, financed in part by the Ford Foundation and in part by the welfare payments of participants themselves, is Supported Work, which is aimed at longtime welfare mothers, ex-drug addicts and ex-convicts in 13 cities. Started in New York City in 1972, the program caught on in such cities as Atlanta and Oakland, Calif., and now enrolls 3,000 workers nationwide. It provides employment at about the minimum wage under rigid job discipline. After a year or so, managers help participants find private jobs.

A most successful Supported Work project is the $4.3 million Maverick Corp., which runs a tire-recapping operation in Hartford, Conn. Maverick employs 350 ghetto dwellers, including 100 people age 17 to 20. Typically, a worker is offered $2.50 an hour, and told that whoever shows up punctually will get $2.67 instead. Anyone who is so much as one minute late loses the bonus for the entire week.'" Morale is high, and last year 85 workers moved on to private jobs. Says Maverick President Dan MacKinnon: "Of that group, 25% have lost their jobs. That doesn't make me feel very good, but one thing I'm sure of is that 100% of them would not even have got their foot in the door had they not built up a work record with Maverick."

Another program partially bankrolled by private money is tenant management, in which residents, after receiving training, take charge of public housing projects and work actively to provide themselves with a better living environment (see box). The performance in seven cities is spotty, but the results are a definite improvement over the dismal record of many other subsidized housing communities.

More black leaders are beginning to make the point that in spite of the continuing racism that is still a barrier to opportunities, the underclass must help itself out of its morass. In his pulpit style, Chicago's the Rev. Jesse Jackson, head of the Operation PUSH self-help group, says: "It is bad to be in the slum, but it is worse when the slum is in you. The spiritual slum is the ultimate tragedy. The victimizer is responsible for us being down, but the victim is responsible for us getting up." Jackson has called for neighborhood volunteers to replace police in patrolling ghetto schools and street corners, has launched a drive for black parents to monitor strictly their children's homework and schooling, and has urged that voter registration cards be handed to each high school graduate along with a diploma. Says he: "Nobody will save us from us but us."

Nothing has yet replaced individual incentive in U.S. society, and nothing ever will. But more than a century ago, Nathaniel Hawthorne observed: "In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of social life, somebody is always at the drowning point." Ever since then, successive generations of aspiring Americans have lifted themselves well above that despairing level.

The underclass will find that harder to do, given its painful heritage. Encouraging incentive in the underclass, and overcoming the barriers of racism, could take just five or ten years; more likely, the tasks will require a generation or more. The entire society—business, government and ordinary citizens—will have to chip away at the problems. The alternative to progress would be more desperation, hostility, violence and disaffection within the underclass. That is something even the world's wealthiest country would find difficult to afford.