Thank God It’s Monday

01Dec08

Caitlin Howarth, National Policy Director

Workaholics around the world started the day with those four words.  They say that the first step is to admit you have a problem.  I say to embrace the fact that there’s so much going on – like in Poznan, where the UN’s Convention on Climate Change kicked off today.  Which means that I’m already 6 hours behind.  Crap.

You might also feel like you’re behind on your understanding of the economic crisis.  And let’s face it, you probably are.  To catch up, I recommend Paul Krugman’s updated book, The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008.  At less than 200 pages, it reads like an extended lecture, sans economist jargon.  It’ll help you understand the dynamics at work in the current crisis, the policies that got us from the Great Depression to where we are today, and includes recommendations for what to do next.  Spoiler alert: we need to reverse our current mindset and take far more aggressive actions to get ourselves out of this mess.  Also, Krugman makes the argument for the use of whimsy, which puts him on top of my Wonks to Love list.  (Note: There’s a much more complex argument to be made here, so if you’re on top of your modern economic history, this text may frustrate you.  Just read Krugman’s blog if you’re interested in his take on the crisis.)

p.s. If you want to follow more up-to-date posts, go to the Policy Farm Team – the official blog of the Roosevelt Institution.  It’s more frequently updated than this one, since I don’t always remember to cross-post.

Filed under: Economic Development   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: climate change, financial crisis, Krugman, Poznan

Grid and a Gas Tax, Two Bits

26Nov08

Caitlin Howarth, Washington, DC

Nobody is going to be 100% happy with these suggestions.  But they should still be made.

Over a month ago, the G7 nations were making noises that they would be pulling back on carbon emission reduction goals.  President Elect Obama’s announcement of a comprehensive economic strategy that highlighted investment in alternative energy seemed to quell concerns for a time, or at least indicate that the US would be a leader of clean energy investment and generate new job growth to stimulate the economy.  But today, those noises from the G7 and other European nations – ostensibly the most progressive and aggressive on clean energy investment to date – have become shouts.  

As the economic crisis continues, the cost of alternative energy investment has risen while the prices of coal and oil have dropped.  T. Boone Pickens’ wind farm plans have been reduced as the marginal costs shifted in oil’s favor, and the proponents of ‘clean coal’ will be quick to push their late-election gains (remember the VP debate?) into 100 Day expansions.  (Though it won’t be for investing in carbon sequestration technology, which is still at least 10 years and billions of tons of CO2 away from even existing.  My bet: the coal industry will fight to keep the Bush administration’s midnight regulations that roll back environmental protections and allow mountaintop removals for mining – and because Democrats are too eager to build on election momentum in the South, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, they won’t organize to overrule these regulations.  The new Obama administration will then get stuck with bad policy, environmentally disastrous changes, and campaign pledges they made too loudly too ignore.  This cake is baked.)

There is one thing to keep in mind: investing in a green collar economy is not necessarily the same thing as shutting down jobs in fossil fuels.  This is not an either-or proposition, particularly not as the Obama team framed it.  Nor have proponents of building a green collar economy been particularly vocal about shutting down those dirty energy jobs; you’ll hear plenty about “no new coal plants,” but not a peep about shutting down existing operations.  Jobs come first.

Unfortunately, there’s a snag here.

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  1 Comment

Putting It Out There

29Feb08

When did being smart and political stop being fun? In this election year, we should be putting ourselves out there as a source of substance in the progressive movement. We can be witty without being shallow, irreverent without being insulting. We’ve got some game. But too much of the time, we’re hitting the snooze button.

Here’s what I suggest: let’s make some claims.

Let’s pick some battles.

And let’s not apologize for having ideas we believe in.

There’s more going on in these postings than you might think. I’ll give you an example – This past fall, Rob Nelb wrote a series of blogs and op-eds about how to reach a compromise in the mire that was the battle over the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). He had a cool idea, and I helped him promote it. But I also some issues with it, specifically with the way that he had glossed over the fact that both sides of the aisle had kicked non-documented children to the curb and denied them access to the program.

Why did I have a problem with that? Because disease doesn’t care if you’re a citizen or not. So although I was definitely interested in how we can find a compromise that makes both sides happy (a minor political miracle in itself), I wasn’t satisfied with Rob’s response to the situation. I simply thought that he wasn’t going far enough.

Maybe I was – and am – wrong. Maybe there’s something to be said for focusing on finding that vital center and leaving other battles for other days. But I should have said something about the problem I saw, rather than just letting it go.

After all, isn’t that the point of blogging – to not have to be as polished and politic as you have to be in other arenas? And let’s be honest – my words probably weren’t going to be read by a lot of currently influential people. (And by a lot, I mean even 1.) So I should at least put it out there, make my claim, and see if any of you disagree with me.

It’s time to pick some fights and show our passion. It’s time to fuse our values and our insights. It’s time to care enough about these issues that we aren’t afraid of saying the wrong thing.

Game on.

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Leave a Comment

CIA Director Confirms Use of Waterboarding

05Feb08

The CIA has confirmed, in testimony to Congress, the use of waterboarding and other ‘enhanced interrogation techniques.’  According to director Michael Hayden, the CIA has used such techniques on “less than a third” of its detainees.

“Hayden said the technique, the use of which has drawn harsh criticism, has not been used in almost five years because the agency has more knowledge to bring to bear in questioning detainees.”

Hayden has also asserted that, to the best of his knowledge, the use of torture techniques is legal under certain circumstances, and that “You have to know the circumstances to be able to make the judgment.”

I wonder what circumstances Hayden is talking about.  Since he asserts that the techniques were used more frequently when interrogators had less information and fewer resources to bring to bear (in other words, when interrogators couldn’t do a proper, legal, and infinitely more valuable interrogation), I assume that the circumstances he’s talking about are those when the CIA is feeling desperate and down on its luck.  It’s not surprising – that’s when torture is usually used.  And that’s why it doesn’t yield results.

Quotes taken from coverage by Congressional Quarterly:

http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=cqmidday-000002666099

Filed under: human rights   |  Leave a Comment

Mapping Violence and Probability in Kenya

03Feb08

In today’s New York Times online, in an article buried beneath front page stories on the U.S. primaries, the Super Bowl, and the use of DNA to find lost World War II soldiers, you can read an AP piece about the continuing violence in Kenya.

Beyond the obvious lack of attention being paid to the crisis in the U.S. media, a lack not shared by more internationally aware counterparts like the BBC or Le Monde, U.S. coverage of the violence in Kenya has abated in scope and depth since Kofi Annan and other international figures have stepped into the fray and begun negotiations between President Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga. Violence has been a part of daily life in Kenya since its highly disputed presidential election took place at the end of December.

According to the Associate Press, “Former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan brokered a deal between Kibaki and Odinga on Friday laying out a plan to end the violence before moving onto the tougher political issues at the root of the fighting. Annan said it should take two weeks to decide the immediate crisis and up to a year for the deeper problems.”

Some thought that the relative lack of violence during the opposition’s Nairobi rally in early January showed that the violence was lessening while a democratic negotiation process was growing. Yet several days later, the opposition tried again, this time with three days of planned protests. Violence swept through the city and its slums again as the police fired live rounds into the crowds and hundreds of homes and businesses burned; international agencies called the site “a massacre” in which over 30 people died from the excess use of force. A rally intended to protest the deaths was called off, however, by request of Kofi Annan.

“Two weeks to end the immediate crisis and up to a year for the deeper problems” – though the timetable seems clear and even somewhat possible if a full-fledged peacekeeping force is allowed into the country, the statement treats the violence as a superficial symptom of deeper, more entrenched political problems. Given the past month of violence throughout Kenya, and the growing organization among those perpetuating it, a two week period seems unlikely to bring the necessary peace.

Filed under: International Conflict, Kenya   |  2 Comments

A Tense Parliament, and a Fresh Attempt at Talks

15Jan08

As Kenya’s parliament convened, supporters for both sides exchanged heated remarks and fought over the legitimacy of the votes they cast for parliamentary seats. Supporters of opposition candidate Raila Odinga, whom many believe to have been robbed of the presidential election, challenged the use of the secret ballot and claimed that results were easier to falsify using the traditional democratic voting method. When president Mwai Kibaki entered the chamber – marking the first time he and Mr. Odinga have been in the same room since the contested Dec 27th election – no one from the opposition stood to recognize him. It seems that reconciliation is still a long way from coming, though Kofi Annan’s arrival may compel more discussion than departing African Union president, John Kufuor, was able to generate. Kufuor was unable to bring the two sides to the negotiating table to even begin talks.

Eventually, secret ballots were cast into a transparent box; the method, although still unsatisfactory to some, was probably the best solution available. To deny a secret ballot at this point may set a precedent for a new general election, which would in turn make tribal-political affiliations far more apparent than they could otherwise be. Threats and the use of force under such circumstances would certainly delegitimate yet another election and create grounds for further ethnic violence.

More troubling are recent rumors that those who burned and slaughtered over the last few weeks have been receiving payment for their crimes. The going rate, according to the BBC, is $14 per kill and $7 per burned home (USD). [When searching for the original source of this information, which some gained from Kenya's Human Rights Commission, nothing could be found. With luck, this is because of a simple server malfunction, but it may be that the site has been taken down by the government for providing such potentially incendiary information.] Evidence of premeditated murders occurring along ethnic lines, sponsored by the political parties, would be seriously damaging to Kenya’s reconciliation and could earn both sides a date with an international court.

Mr. Odinga’s party is also planning to launch new rallies to protest the election results, although both Odinga and others in parliament point to their participation in the political process as a sign of their willingness to peacefully resolve the conflict. Whether the rallies will spark the kind of violence that the ‘million person protest’ failed to generate two weeks ago remains to be seen, and Mr. Annan’s arrival & high police presence around Nairobi may mitigate that potential. The death toll is estimated around 500, with over 250,000 displaced persons, according to Kenya’s Red Cross.

Filed under: human rights, International Conflict, Studying Violence & War   |  Leave a Comment

Protest Ends as Kenya’s Violence Ripples through the Economy

03Jan08

10.05 am EST

Odinga’s opposition protest went on as planned in Nairobi earlier today, but without the level of bloodshed expected by journalists and observers. This, combined with a relative slowdown of deaths over the past 24 hours, may be good news for an overall decrease in the violence. A major police buildup prior to the rally may have contributed to the relative calm seen in some parts of the country; armed with riot gear and tear gas, the police pushed back as protesters spread through the city and gradually dispersed. Some protesters were also heard to shout for calm, telling others to put down their rocks and arms.

The day was not without violence, however. As protesters spread around the city and rallied in other parts of the country, doing their best to evade the police, they set homes and businesses on fire. The New York Times‘s Jeffrey Gettleman reports that in one Nairobi slum, a gang of men tore through, attacking, burning, and raping as they went. One of the gang was apparently caught by the residents of the slum, and hacked to death, his body remaining in the street. Police say the area is too tense for them to recover the body.

Since Tuesday, the death toll has risen to 300.

Intense pressure is being applied by diplomats from several nations, and the UN, EU, and African Union have all been using their resources to bring an end to the violence and resolve the hotly contested election results. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a revered figure throughout Africa and the world, arrived in Kenya earlier today with calls for peace. At 3.00 pm local time, Mr. Odinga’s opposition party ended the protest; although chants of “No Odinga, no peace” continue to raise alarm, Odinga’s opposition party seem to have shifted toward referring to President Mwai Kibaki, and not to the Kikuyu people, as the sole source of their discontent. The Kikuyu, who are the largest tribe within Kenya, were the privileged class in the days of British colonialism and maintain more influence over politics and business than most other tribes (among approximately forty around the country). Other tribes have banded together with the Luo (Odinga’s tribe) during the recent violence, their enmity apparently shared against the Kikuyu.

What may be the bigger story today is the disruption of trade and the ramifications this violence has for Kenya’s economy, one of the most important and stabilizing factors in the continent. Roads are considered too dangerous for travel, and looting & damage to businesses has severely disrupted the markets. After opening for only one hour, the Kenyan stock exchange closed again. With Kenya’s roads as a major conduit for trade between several nations, including Congo, Uganda, and Sudan, this disruption is having an immediate impact and causing shortages of basic goods in other countries. Uganda has already raised concerns about the shortages along its border, where hundreds of Kenyan refugees have crossed over within the last few days. The trucks that normally bring supplies have not crossed with them.

For an very useful hour-by-hour breakdown of events, along with photos and eyewitness accounts from inside Kenya, go directly to the BBC’s coverage.

For those following the forms of violence at hand, the use of rape and the growing use of machetes continues to raise alarms. The gratuitous violence engendered by these means spells trouble, for it creates more lasting grounds for stronger retaliation. Whether this and the church fire on Tuesday, whose victims are said to have been 50% children, will have further ramifications in the coming days remains to be seen.

Filed under: human rights, Kenya, violence   |  Leave a Comment

Kenya Unraveling

01Jan08

Every dispatch from Nairobi for the past two weeks has gone from bad to worse. A summary of the situation:

Dec 30, 2007 – Allegations of election fraud intensify around the country as President Mwai Kibaki is sworn in. Violence begins to erupt in small pockets, and has an ethnic component from the beginning. President Kibaki is from the ruling elite, the Kikuyu tribe; the Kikuyu make up approximately 22% of the general population and have controlled the state in terms of politics, business, and other measures of socioeconomic power since the early 1960s.

Jan 1, 2008 – The UN and other nations question the validity of Kenya’s elections; the UN calls for an investigation, which President Kibaki rejects. The Kenyan Red Cross reports that “over 100,000 people have been affected/displaced countrywide”; the New York Times notes that some now seek refuge in Uganda, a country that would have been considered far less stable and peaceful than Kenya only 2 weeks ago. On December 13th, the New York Times was reporting on Uganda’s worries that the increasing violence and threat of war in Congo might push neighboring countries like Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi back into violence.

Jan 2, 2008 – Violence spreads and intensifies. At approximately noon on Tuesday January 1st, the estimate of the dead is at 100. By midnight on the 2nd, it has risen to 250. Kikuyu are fleeing their homes and gathering in and around police stations and churches. One church where hundreds of Kikuyu gathered in the Eldoret area was set on fire with gasoline; although many escaped, 50 are reported to have died, and many more have suffered severe injuries. Women and children are said to make up the majority of the dead.

Filed under: election fraud, Kenya, violence   |  2 Comments

Drought Scorches Southeast in Record Levels

16Oct07

When you think of the worst drought in the Southeastern region of the U.S., you tend to think of the Dust Bowl and Depression. You wouldn’t think it was happening today.

But that’s exactly what’s going on. In Atlanta, the city’s main reservoir at Lake Lanier will be completely dry within 4 months without significant, sustained rainfall to replenish it. Alabama and Mississippi sounded the call three months ago when crops began to fail – including the corn crop that promised such lucrative returns in the growing ethanol market. Instead of a South revitalized by new markets for agricultural products and other resources demanded to combat climate change, these cities and states are finding themselves suddenly caught in one of the energy crisis’ biggest problems.

Unlike the hurricanes and tornadoes featured in An Inconvenient Truth, drought is the kind of crisis that people tend to ignore until they get nothing out of the tap one morning. In fact, a hurricane or two would have provided the heavy rainfall to refill reservoirs. Moreover, drought spawns even more problems for the environment than some shorter, more dramatic disasters: major soil erosion (again, think Dust Bowl and the loss of invaluable top soil) and the increased use of disposable paper & plastic goods (to conserve water that would be used for washing) are just two of many. And unlike the Southwest, where water is always at a premium and conservation is a way of life, the Southeast’s self-image of a wet, sultry landscape belies the reality of parched fields and dry creek beds. But people need to open their eyes and get serious about conservation today if they’re going to avert disaster.

People along the Mid-Atlantic region and Midwest shouldn’t consider themselves free of these problems, either. Virginia and Maryland are already caught up in the drought; my own city of Washington, DC has yet to issue a serious call for water conservation despite the problems creeping in from the nearby suburbs. Just miles outside the city, fires spark easily from a casually flicked cigarette – and lest we forget, the District has already undergone several problems with fires that can’t be put out quickly because of non-functioning fire hydrants. Those problems were attributed to long-standing issues with faulty water mains, but while fixing the pipes of the city’s outdated infrastructure we should also remember just how crucial the conservation issue is.

It’s time to start thinking about climate change in immediate terms: what will we do to avert disaster within the next month? Two months? Three? Each day needs to bring significant progress and a much more proactive mentality. Otherwise, we’ll soon know what it feels like to be in the bigger, drier version of the Dust Bowl.

Filed under: climate change, Community Development & Housing, drought, environment   |  1 Comment

The Idea Generation

15Oct07

When Thomas Friedman asks my generation for our idealism, activism, and outrage, I ask: What about our ideas?

If we gave Mr. Friedman what he wanted, we could produce a mass movement fueled by passion, believing in the good and marching ahead with vigor. But we would have no clue where we were going.

Outrage gets people out of bed so they come to the table demanding answers. Passion is vital, because once you start demanding answers, you find yourself deflated by the blank looks and empty promises. And it’s our heads, not our bodies, which will make the difference.

We are the Idea Generation. That quiet you hear is the sound of people thinking. We could shout demands for our leaders to produce solutions, but since they haven’t yet, we’ve gone ahead and started doing it ourselves. Because we have no political debts, no cemented allegiances to party or platform, and no problem with sharing information, we have unlimited freedom to innovate and create.

We can solve the most baffling problems because we actually think it can be done. That kind of fire is what Mr. Friedman wants, but what he doesn’t realize is the true value of our methods. The relatively quiet click of keys sounds the path of lightning-speed, real-time debates happening around the country among thousands of people. Our brand of rapid response doesn’t just create a happening – it posts evidence of the problems and solutions for them with a transparency all should appreciate.

So if we are quiet, it’s because we aren’t trying to shout people down; we engage them in real dialogue. If we are quiet, it’s because we fight to win, not just to fight. If we are quiet, the world should join us and listen for a change to the testimony of all the things that need to be heard.

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  1 Comment