Category: Uncategorized

Stephen Hadley’s Revisionism on Afghanistan

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Bush administration National Security Adviser Stephen HadleyStephen Hadley, George W. Bush’s national security advisor, has set forth some rather appalling revisionist history in this morning’s Washington Post. Though he supports President Obama’s surge, he effectively tries to wash his hands of any culpability for the entire Afghanistan mess.

Sorry Mr. Hadley, but that just won’t fly.

Hadley believes that everything was going just swimmingly until mid-2006, when those darned Pakistanis went and screwed the whole thing up:

As to security, the U.N. Security Council authorized an international military force in December 2001, put it under NATO command in August 2003 and expanded its writ to all of Afghanistan in October 2003. Afghan army and police forces were being recruited, trained and equipped. Most of the country was free of violence.

But in 2006, the situation deteriorated. Suicide bombings and attacks using improvised explosive devices spiked. Corruption and poppy production grew dramatically, and the central government failed to establish an effective presence in the provinces. The planned Afghan security force was simply too small to handle the escalating violence.

In September 2006, Afghanistan’s neighbor Pakistan embarked on a series of well-intentioned but ill-fated deals intended to entice local tribes to support the government in Kabul. The tribes were supposed to expel al-Qaeda and end Taliban attacks in exchange for economic assistance and the withdrawal of Pakistani troops. Instead, these badly executed agreements strengthened the terrorist havens.

Then, Hadley explains, Bush’s buddy Pervez Musharraf went and had himself a little constitutional crisis, which really put the well-meaning and allegedly competent Bush administration behind the eight ball:

Then Pakistan plunged into an 18-month political crisis, beginning in March 2007 when President Pervez Musharraf fired the country’s chief justice and ending with Musharraf’s resignation in August 2008. Consumed by political chaos, Pakistan could only watch as al-Qaeda terrorists and their Taliban allies launched attacks not only in Afghanistan but also in Pakistan — including the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

Some argue that America could not respond to the deteriorating situation because its attention and its troops were all focused on Iraq. Yet despite troop demands for Iraq, President George W. Bush and our coalition allies launched a “quiet surge” in Afghanistan to meet the new challenge.

See? Isn’t it amazing how well the Bush administration handled everything and we just never knew about it?

Spare me. What Hadley chooses to selectively ignore is his administration’s failure to capitalize on Afghanistan’s relative calm in the 2001-2006 time frame. True, the initial Afghanistan war plan was successfully executed, and violence was significantly down (compared to, say, 2009 levels) across the country.

But instead of building on that initial military success by focusing on enduring security, infrastructure, and civil service capacities, Hadley shares responsibility for diverting America’s attention to a war of choice in Iraq launched under thin pretexts. In the process, billions of dollars and countless man-hours at the Pentagon, State Department, and White House (including Mr. Hadley’s NSC) that should have been spent stabilizing Afghanistan in 2003 were shifted westward.

The 10,000 additional troops that Hadley crows about later in the article are an embarrassingly weak and tardy prescription for an aggressive viral problem that was getting out of hand.

Too little, too late, Mr. Hadley. You should be ashamed.

Food as a Centerpiece of Public Policy

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The following is an excerpt from Joel Berg’s “Good Food, Good Jobs: Turning Food Deserts into Jobs Oases,” a new policy report from PPI.

The former chair of the House Agriculture Committee, Rep. Kiki de la Garza (D-TX), used to quiz audiences with a riddle: “When does a nuclear submarine need to rise out of the water?” People would guess that it would rise when it needed air, but he explained that it could turn the water into oxygen. Others would guess that it would rise when it ran out of fuel, but he would then explain that the nuclear fuel would last for years. When no one could guess, he would answer the riddle: “When it ran out of food.”

Given that food is a basic human need, it is amazing that people almost always failed to figure out his riddle. More broadly, it is astonishing how often food is overlooked in so many vital policy discussions. (The neglect spills over into pop culture: In the earliest version of the classic computer simulation game SimCity, you could decide where to put a football stadium or museum but not where food stores or markets should be.) For most of U.S. history, urban planners have usually ignored food issues in their grand schemes.

We need an entirely different mindset. Food should be a central organizing principle for neighborhood development, uniting residents through community gardens, farmers’ markets, supermarkets, food cooperatives, and food-related small businesses. Community gardens can reclaim empty lots from drug pushers. Food businesses can create jobs and raise community income. Farmers’ markets can give neighborhoods central gathering spaces and nurture a feeling of the “public commons” that is so often lost in today’s society. This new mindset will benefit both our economy and public health.

For a community to have good nutrition, three conditions are necessary: food must be affordable; food must be available; and individuals and families must have enough education to know how to eat better. If you don’t have all three legs of this stool, it will collapse. Yet all too often, projects only focus on one of the three. Many provide nutrition education, lecturing people that they should eat better, but make food neither more available nor more affordable. Sometimes, food is brought into low-income neighborhoods, but at prices too high for most people to afford. That won’t work either. The only way to truly succeed is to focus on all three aspects of this problem at once.

To read the executive summary, click here. To download the report, click here.

The Year of Thinking Dangerously About Climate Change

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Year of Thinking Dangerously About Climate ChangeWhatever else happened politically in 2009 — and a lot obviously happened — one development that couldn’t quite have been anticipated was the erosion of public confidence in the case for doing something about global climate change.

Yes, recessions always diminish interest in environmental action, on the theory that it’s something we can only “afford” in prosperous times. But that’s not the half of it, as Chris Mooney explains at Science Progress:

Back in 2006, the year of the release of An Inconvenient Truth, it felt as though serious and irreversible progress had finally been made on the climate issue. The feeling continued in 2007, when Al Gore won the Nobel and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced that global warming was “unequivocal” and “very likely” human caused. Mega-companies like General Electric were burnishing new green identities, and the Prius was an icon. The Bush administration was widely suspected of having deceived the public about the urgency of the climate issue, and journalists were backing away from their previous penchant for writing “on the one hand, on the other hand” stories about the increasingly indisputable science.Then came the election of Barack Obama, boasting a forward-looking policy agenda to address global warming and a stellar team of scientists and environmentalists in his cabinet and circle of advisers, including climate and energy expert John Holdren and Nobel Laureate Steven Chu. The United States, it seemed, would finally deal with global warming—and just in the nick of time.

Who could have known, at the time, that the climate deniers and contrarians had not yet launched their greatest and most devastating attack?

The “story” on this subject changed, says Mooney, thanks to two separate lines of argument from conservatives that exploited public doubts on climate science. The first was the hammer-headed approach of pointing to cold temperatures here or there as “proof” there was no global warming:

The new skeptic strategy began with a ploy that initially seemed so foolish, so petty, that it was unworthy of dignifying with a response. The contrarians seized upon the hottest year in some temperature records, 1998—which happens to have been an El Nino year, hence its striking warmth—and began to hammer the message that there had been “no warming in a decade” since then.It was, in truth, little more than a damn lie with statistics. Those in the science community eventually pointed out that global warming doesn’t mean every successive year will be hotter than the last one—global temperatures be on the rise without a new record being set every year. All climate theory predicts is that we will see a warming trend, and we certainly have. Or as the U.S. EPA recently put it, “Eight of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 2001.” But none of them beat 1998; and so the statistical liars, like George Will of the Washington Post, continued their charade.

The second prong of the backlash against a climate change consensus among Americans was all about the incident that delighted conservatives call “ClimateGate.” If you’ve somehow missed it, emails hacked and linked from the bowels of a British climate change institute allegedly show coverups of inconvenient data and other un-kosher practices. It’s not clear why this is supposed to make us all assume that climate science is a vast cesspool of conspiracy, but that’s how it has been used by climate change deniers, notes Mooney:

“ClimateGate” generated a massive wave of media attention, blending together the skeptics’ longstanding focus on undercutting climate science with a new overwhelming message of scandal and wrongdoing on the part of the climate research establishment. This story was not going to go away, and even as scientists put out statements (most of them several days late) explaining that the science of climate remains unchanged and unaffected by whatever went on at East Anglia, the case for human-caused global warming was dealt a blow the likes of which we have perhaps never before seen.

The timing of the ClimateGate furor, on the eve of international discussions on global climate change, isn’t coincidental, and has obviously been as destructive as it was intended to be.

It may well be that increasing public doubts about climate change in this country are just rationalizations for the normal fear that saving the planet is in conflict with saving jobs, and is thus a challenge best consigned to mañana.

But the aggressive campaign of denialists and skeptics, skillfully exploiting every bit of evidence and pseudo-evidence that the consensus on climate change is unravelling, is a factor too large to ignore.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Obama’s Nobel Speech and the Lesson for Progressives

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

I was struck by the unexpected tone of President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech — instead of spending the entire address laying out a vision to achieve world peace, he spent the first half addressing the odd position in which he finds himself: receiving the prize while serving as commander-in-chief of a nation involved in two wars.

In the process, he laid out the most compelling ideological foundation for a progressive view on national security I have ever heard him give:

We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.

I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King said in this same ceremony years ago — “Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.” As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life’s work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there is nothing weak — nothing passive — nothing naïve — in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

I raise this point because in many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today, no matter the cause. At times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America, the world’s sole military superpower.

Yet the world must remember that it was not simply international institutions — not just treaties and declarations — that brought stability to a post-World War II world. Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest — because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples’ children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.

This is where progressives should stand on national security: we must acknowledge that there is evil in the world and show a resolve to make tough choices when America’s vital national security interests are at stake. Our preference is to not use force, but when all other options have been exhausted and our security remains directly threatened, force may be the last resort.

A Game Plan for Infrastructure

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A Game Plan for InfrastructureIt’s a sign of the times when “our bridges and roads are falling apart” gets cited as an issue more pressing than college football’s annoying Bowl Championship Series (BCS) on ESPN.

And, while the president hasn’t fulfilled his promise to set up an eight-team playoff yet, he’s taken the issue of infrastructure head-on. The administration’s focus on infrastructure investment is good for both long-term growth and generating jobs through the quick start-up of “shovel ready” projects.

However, one-time disbursements like those outlined in the Recovery Act or the president’s announcement earlier this week fall short of fixing more fundamental issues.

On the heels of Obama’s speech at Brookings on Tuesday, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) is at the same venue today pushing a much more sustainable approach.

Ellison is a co-sponsor on Rep. Rosa DeLauro’s (D-CT) National Infrastructure Development Bank Act, a good start on developing sustainable infrastructure funding the country so desperately needs.

DeLauro and and Ellison’s bill builds on the work of a bipartisan commission chaired by former Sen. Warren Rudman (R-NH) and titan of finance Felix Rohatyn. The bill envisions $5 billion a year from the federal government to capitalize the bank and a government debt guarantee of up to $50 billion.

But even Ellison and DeLauro’s idea can be improved upon. As outlined in Jessica Milano’s PPI policy memo, “Building our 21st Century Infrastructure,” an American Infrastructure Bank (AIB) seeded with a one-time investment at the federal level — a potential use for the TARP funds the president announced this week — and stakeholder buy-ins from the states would be a more effective way to fund a bank dedicated to financing infrastructure programs.

An infrastructure bank would offer a way to leverage much larger private sector investments from a strapped public budget. The bank would raise inexpensive funding for infrastructure projects by issuing debt on the capital markets backed by the U.S. government’s credit rating. By backing these bonds with the revenue or assets of the projects they are financing, taxpayers would not be left to pick up the bill. These projects would be determined according to strict criteria that promote economic development while being fiscally and environmentally sound.

After the President’s remarks on Tuesday, Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania — an infrastructure bank supporter — said the president had “essentially” endorsed the idea of an AIB. But while the president sounded open to the idea this week, he hasn’t gotten behind the legislation needed to get it done. President Obama endorsed an infrastructure bank back when he was candidate Obama. But, much like his promise of reforming the BCS, this threatens to become another campaign promise that falls by the wayside. Now’s the moment for the president to come off the sidelines and lead a sustained drive down the field.

Taking Measure of D.C.’s IMPACT Program

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As states craft their Race to the Top applications, they will likely focus on how to improve teacher and principal quality, as 28 percent of the points that they can earn fall under the “Great Teachers and Leaders” category. The criterion covers, among other things, the development of evaluation systems for teachers and principals, and the use of those evaluations to inform key decisions.

The press release announcing Race to the Top stressed a key point about the teacher-evaluation component:

…states should use multiple measures to evaluate teachers and principals, including a strong emphasis on the growth in achievement of their students. But it also reinforces that successful applicants will need to have rigorous teacher and principal evaluation programs and use the results of teacher evaluations to inform what happens in the schools.

That emphasis on “multiple measures” informs D.C. Public Schools’ new teacher evaluation system: IMPACT. The evaluation program offers a combination of approaches. Teachers of grades 4-8 mathematics and reading, for whom value-added data can be collected, will have 50 percent of their evaluation based on DC-CAS student achievement data. But another 40 percent will come from something called the Teaching and Learning Framework. For teachers in non-tested grades and subjects, the Teaching and Learning Framework comprises an even greater proportion – 80 percent – of their evaluation.

The Teaching and Learning Framework calls for five observations of teachers by administrators and master teachers in a given school year. Evaluation is broken down into three major categories: planning, teaching, and increasing effectiveness. Planning has to do with preparation of the content as well as the creation of a safe and productive learning environment; teaching gets into engagement, instructional techniques, and interaction with the students (among other factors); and increasing effectiveness deals with student assessment and the use of data to inform decision-making.

The use of more frequent observation of teachers and a clear rubric fills an important gap in teacher accountability. Since value-added student achievement data is currently available for only a small cohort of the teaching force, reliable tools for evaluating the rest of the teachers are crucial. We need rigorous ways to identify great and struggling teachers, but also to help the ones in the middle range improve. It’s easy to identify poor teachers; the tougher part is knowing how to help them improve or when to cut the cord. The Teaching and Learning Framework helps to define and show teachers paths to improvement through post-observation conferences.

George Parker, president of the Washington Teachers’ Union, has been critical of IMPACT, saying, “It’s very punitive. It takes the art of teaching and turns it into bean counting.” A union-administered focus group and survey found that the primary concerns revolve around inadequate training under the system prior to implementation and fears of its use for punitive measures rather than as a tool for improving teacher quality. Early reports on completed observations indicate some bumps in execution. Whether feeling satisfied, overrated, or underrated, teachers have expressed disappointment in the quality of suggestions offered by administrators and master teachers during post-observation conferences. Given the culture of mistrust and fear that permeates many schools, teachers are understandably skeptical and justified in noting that they cannot possibly hit all points of the rubric during a 30-minute observation. However, teachers must also recognize that their openness to the evaluation process is integral to its success and to building a better culture in schools.

The IMPACT program sets a process for clear expectations, clear feedback, and clear growth plans. While value-added testing is a useful measure for student achievement, IMPACT is a worthwhile experiment in pursuing a more expansive evaluation of teacher quality. Offering not just a goal but a pathway for improvement, it’s an innovation worth keeping an eye on.

The Problem of Food Deserts

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The following is an excerpt from Joel Berg’s “Good Food, Good Jobs: Turning Food Deserts into Jobs Oases,” a new policy report from PPI.

Our hunger, malnutrition, obesity, and poverty problems are closely linked. Low-income areas across America that lack access to nutritious foods at affordable prices — the so-called “food deserts” — tend to be the same communities and neighborhoods that, even in better economic times, are also “job deserts” that lack sufficient living-wage employment….A Good Food, Good Jobs program can address these intertwined economic and social problems.

[…]

In Los Angeles County in 2002, an average supermarket served 18,649 people, while the average supermarket in a low-income neighborhood served 27,986 people. The higher the concentration of poverty within a neighborhood, the fewer supermarkets there were. In ZIP codes where fewer than 10 percent of households lived below the federal poverty line, there were approximately 2.26 times as many supermarkets per household as there were in ZIP codes where the number of households living below the federal poverty line exceeded 40 percent. In addition, the higher the concentration of white people in a neighborhood, the greater the number of supermarkets.

In neighborhoods without supermarkets, corner stores, bodegas, and convenience stores fill in the gaps. In a study of rural Orangeburg County, South Carolina, researchers identified 77 stores in the county, of which only 16 percent were supermarkets and 10 percent were grocery stores. The remaining 74 percent were convenience stores. Low-fat and nonfat milk, apples, high-fiber bread, eggs, and smoked turkey were available in 75 to 100 percent of supermarkets and grocery stores versus four to 29 percent of convenience stores. Just 28 percent of all stores sold any of the fruits or vegetables included in the survey. Convenience stores also tended to charge more for items than did supermarkets.

A study conducted by the City of New York found, “The city is vastly underserved by local grocery stores.” That dearth has an economic impact. “NYC has the potential to capture approximately $1 billion in grocery spending lost to suburbs,” according to the city.

The lack of supermarkets makes a real difference. Areas without a full range of markets are “obesogenic” (obesity producing). Four different studies have demonstrated a positive association between access to food stores and improved dietary choices. A study in four states found that areas with high numbers of supermarkets had lower rates of obesity, while areas with higher numbers of convenience stores had higher levels of obesity. Nationwide, for every additional supermarket in a census tract, fruit and vegetable consumption increases by as much as 32 percent.

To add insult to injury, low-income Americans often pay more for food, even though they often purchase food of lower quality than that purchased by higher-income Americans.

To read the executive summary, click here. To download the report, click here.

Europe, We Love You, But Please Shut Up

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Over the course of the past week, the Swedish government, which currently holds the EU’s soon-to-be-extinguished rotating presidency, suggested that the European Union’s foreign ministries declare Jerusalem a divided city and the future capital of a Palestinian state. The draft statement also implied that the EU would recognize a unilateral Palestinian declaration of statehood.

The Israelis reacted harshly, and lobbied the Europeans to change the statement, which now reads, “If there is to be a genuine peace, a way must be found (through negotiations) to resolve the status of Jerusalem as the future capital of two states.”

Even the milder declaration hasn’t exactly received much enthusiasm from the Israelis, while garnering divided support between the Arab League and Palestinian Authority.

Skeptics say that Sweden’s stab at forging European unity was a cynical attempt to leave a legacy from its last crack at the EU presidency (with the advent of Herman Von Rompuy’s more permanent ascent to that post) to either show symbolic solidarity with Palestine or to forge a joint European position on an important issue.

And though the Palestinians are, of course, content to receive international backing, let’s be honest: This effort at joint European diplomacy looks like amateur hour and risks further destabilizing an already fragile process.

A few months ago, I had lunch with a friend involved in European social-democratic circles. He said (and I’m paraphrasing), “Europe can’t do anything on the diplomatic front with Israel/Palestine, but if America can broker a deal, we are ready and anxious to pay for the whole thing: security, development, trade… you name it.”

My friend was right — Europe hasn’t invested much diplomatic capital in the Middle East peace process. Issuing public and controversial statements of questionable utility could only upset – and, in the worst case, undo — the hard, delicate, behind-the-scenes work of the American administration.

We’d love for Europe to pay; but for now, we’d also love for it to shut up.

Some Unanswered Questions on Financial Reform

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA)-authored Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act passed the House Financial Services Committee last Wednesday, and could come to a floor vote in the House as soon as this week. Through legislative jujitsu on Frank’s part, the bill will have a lead on Sen. Chris Dodd’s (D-CT) efforts in the Senate.

The day after the committee passed the legislation, I saw Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-CO) talk about it at an event hosted by the National Journal and got to exchange a few words with him on the subject. He was positive about the bill and its chances in the House (it will likely pass easily), and gave positive marks to the administration’s handling of the crisis in its first year in office.

But while Perlmutter said he felt the House has done its part to address regulatory reforms, I thought some of the accomplishments he touted leave unanswered fundamental questions raised by the financial crisis.

He spoke about the legislation’s planned Financial Stability Council, that would provide a forum for regulators like the Fed to address systemic risk. But the Financial Stability Council, instead of facilitating coordination among regulators, won’t live up to expectations — much like what happened with the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) that was supposed to facilitate information-sharing in the intelligence sector, but has had limited effectiveness in getting different agencies to talk to each other. The weak mandate of a Financial Stability Council would lead to regulator shopping by financial institutions, a temptation that can lead to problems similar to those seen in the case of under-regulated AIG. Moreover, the resolution authority that the council would have is useful only after the fact — it would not preemptively deal with the Too Big To Fail problem we still face.

Fixing Mark-to-Market Requirements

More generally, however, Perlmutter mentioned two ideas the House is considering that could actually contain the seeds of our next crisis.

One idea is extending the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s (FASB) loosening of mark-to-market requirements for financial institutions to value their securities. Perlmutter wants to suspend mark-to-market and make permanent the FASB’s contentious April decision to ease mark-to-market rules.

The rule would let the Financial Stability Council order FASB to suspend mark-to-market in cases where there is no market in a security or securities are being sold in a “fire sale” or distressed environment. More worrisome, however, is that banks get to declare whether the market in the securities they are holding is distressed or not. Banks can drive a truckload of bad investment decisions through this loophole without having to disclose them on their bottom line or affecting capital requirements. Under this new rule, banks will have no incentive to conduct diligent analysis of the securities they hold — anything that turns out to be worthless (like bonds backed by subprime loans) can just be called “distressed.” This would decrease transparency and not restore confidence to the system.

But mark-to-market does have the bad consequence of increasing volatility in bank balance sheets. During crises like last year’s, banks can even perversely see mark-to-market improve their bottom line the closer they get to bankruptcy.

A better idea than the one Perlmutter mentioned has been put forward by PPI contributor Robert Pozen in his new book, Too Big To Save. Pozen suggests delinking banking capital regulations from accounting mark-to-market rules by effectively recognizing all securities as being “held for sale” (an accounting distinction) for regulatory purposes. This would allow us to continue to keep the transparency in assets that mark-to-market allows, while avoiding the bottom line volatility that banks would like to avoid.

What to Do About Sarbanes-Oxley

The second idea is exempting firms from some Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) reporting requirements. Passed in the wake of Enron, SOX was designed to hold companies and their executives accountable for their auditing, and eliminate some glaring conflicts of interest in financial auditing.

SOX does two good things. It makes a publicly held company have legitimate auditors, and ensures that those same auditors aren’t also advising the company on how to prepare the books for auditing (thereby basically handing over the answer key before a test). SOX also made sure that companies had proper controls that minimized the risk of errors in financial statements and of people either using company money inappropriately (as Enron did in off-balance-sheet shell companies) and of people embezzling money. Exempting firms from this would eventually lead to the same bad behavior happening again.

That said, SOX isn’t without flaws. Many in the auditing industry perceive it as very manpower intensive and, as a result, a significant burden to publicly listed companies, especially smaller ones (with income under $100 million). The SEC has responded by annually exempting small companies from some reporting requirements, but the exemption is not going to be extended past next year.

The solution to this problem is to streamline SOX to make it less burdensome to companies, not gutting it and letting new Enrons bubble up. Instead of providing an internal control report with each annual filing to the SEC — which can require up to three percent of a small company’s income — the SEC and Congress should encourage accounting oversight boards to spell out further guidelines and best practices to adopt. This streamlined SOX could even be extended to non-public financial institutions, as a key part of what allowed Bernie Madoff to steal people’s money for so long was having a small one-man upstate auditor keep tabs on his multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme.

PPI Releases Policy Report on Food Jobs and Hunger

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

NEWS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 8, 2009

PRESS CONTACTS:
Steven Chlapecka—schlapecka@ppionline.org, T: 202.525.3931
or Lori Azim—lori.azim@gmail.com, T: 718.362.0473

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Americans facing and living with hunger is on the rise. In 2008, 49 million Americans struggled to find adequate and affordable food in the United States. Good Food, Good Jobs: Turning Food Deserts into Jobs Oases, a new policy report authored by Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger and former U.S. Department of Agriculture coordinator for community food security, proposes the creation of a food and jobs program to fight hunger, foster economic growth, and bolster employment.

Download the full policy report here.

“Our hunger, malnutrition, obesity and poverty problems are closely linked,” writes Berg. “A Good Food, Good Jobs program can address these intertwined economic and social problems, and help the Obama administration meet two of its top goals: job creation and improving nutrition.”

By creating a Good Food, Good Jobs program, the author argues the government could solve a number of very tangible problems, while fusing the growing public interest in food issues with ongoing efforts to fight poverty at the grassroots level.  Berg’s paper builds upon the brief discussion of community food security work in his book, published last year, titled All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America?

Download the full policy report here.

 

For more information or to speak with the author, contact Steven Chlapecka, schlapecka@ppionline.org, 202.525.3931or Lori Azim, lori.azim@gmail.com, 718.362.0473.

###

Tea Party Party?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Republicans’ favorite polling outfit, Rasmussen, sure gave the GOP a toxic little gift this week, in the form of a “generic ballot” for Congress listing the Tea Party Movement (hypothetically organized as a political party) as an option. The Tea Party brand outperformed the GOP 23 percent to 18 percent (Democrats lead the pack with 36 percent).

The Tea Party movement has been around for roughly 10 months, compared to 156 years for the Republican Party.

Unsurprisingly, another political parvenu is being closely linked to this third-party talk. On Friday, Sarah Palin was pressed by a conservative talk radio host to rule a third-party presidential run in 2012 out or in. She responded: “If the Republican party gets back to that [conservative] base, I think our party is going to be stronger and there’s not going to be a need for a third party, but I’ll play that by ear in these coming months, coming years.”

Palin nicely sums up the real meaning of the Tea Party threat. It is exceptionally unusual, not to mention counter-intuitive, for a major party to move away from what is generally perceived to be the political “center” and become self-obsessed with ideological purity immediately after two crushing general election defeats. But the Republican Party has been doing just that; it is a far more conservative party, in terms of its overall message, than it was going into the 2008 election cycle. But it’s not conservative enough just yet for a lot of activists, and for those Tea Party participants who really do think “looters” and “loafers” elected Barack Obama and are busily constructing a totalitarian society. Palin’s telling the world the rightward trend needs to continue, or she’ll be pleased to act out the GOP’s worst nightmare in 2012.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Industry Bashes the EPA Endangerment Finding

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As expected, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finally issued its “endangerment finding” on carbon dioxide. Everyone has known for months that the EPA would be issuing the ruling.

It was prompted by a 2007 Supreme Court decision that found that greenhouse gases are air pollutants covered by the Clean Air Act. Since the Obama administration took power, it was only a matter of time when the EPA would act to comply with the Supreme Court ruling. Certainly doing it before Copenhagen, as my colleague Mike Signer pointed out, hands President Obama a big stick as he prepares to attend the summit next week.

Just as expected was the reaction of certain industry actors to the EPA’s move. The EPA finding “could result in a top-down command-and-control regime that will choke off growth by adding new mandates to virtually every major construction and renovation project,” said U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Donohue.

Donohue’s right that the EPA ruling could lead to command-and-control regulation of carbon emissions. Which leads one to ask – why has the Chamber of Commerce been stonewalling against cap-and-trade legislation? Knowing that the EPA would have to act on emissions, why did the Chamber and other industry players sit out the cap-and-trade process?

Cap-and-trade is a far more flexible process by which the economy can curb carbon emissions. Moreover, it’s a process that’s been open to industry stakeholders – note the gnashing of teeth over the giveaways in the Waxman-Markey bill. Even EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson yesterday said that legislation is still the best way to confront the challenge of climate change.

Yet despite all that and the looming threat of the EPA ruling, the Chamber of Commerce and other industry rejectionists have refused to come and sit at the table to discuss cap-and-trade. And something tells me that even with the EPA finding, the Chamber is still not going to be joining the discussion on cap-and-trade. Instead, they’ll resort to the one thing we know for certain we’ll see in this process: lawsuits.

Vets for Energy Security

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As the Copenhagen summit on climate change gets under way, we’re going to hear a lot from naysayers like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck about the alleged hoax that is climate change. But Operation: Free, a group I’ve written about before, is cutting across ideological lines by using veterans to frame the issue of energy independence as one of national security. It’s a solid idea, and one that’s gaining momentum.

They just wrapped up a bus tour promoting their mission, and even got a shout-out from President Obama on live TV. Check out the video:

Good Food, Good Jobs: Turning Food Deserts into Jobs Oases

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

 

Tens of millions of Americans need more nutritious, more affordable food. Tens of millions need better jobs. Just as the Obama administration and Congress have supported a “green jobs” initiative to simultaneously fight unemployment and protect the environment, they should launch a “Good Food, Good Jobs” initiative. Given that large numbers of food jobs could be created rapidly and with relatively limited capital investments, their creation should become a consideration in any jobs bill that Congress and the president enact.

Our hunger, malnutrition, obesity, and poverty problems are closely linked. Low-income areas across America that lack access to nutritious foods at affordable prices — the so-called “food deserts” — tend to be the same communities and neighborhoods that, even in better economic times, are also “job deserts” that lack sufficient living-wage employment. A concurrent problem has been the growing concentration of our food supply in a handful of food companies that are now “too big to fail.” A Good Food, Good Jobs program can address these intertwined economic and social problems.

In partnership with state, local, and tribal governments, nonprofit organizations, and the private sector, the federal initiative would bolster employment, foster economic growth, fight hunger, cut obesity, improve nutrition, and reduce spending on diet-related health problems. By doing so, not only could government help solve a number of very tangible problems, but it could fuse the growing public interest in food issues with the ongoing efforts, usually underfunded and underreported, to fight poverty at the grassroots level.

A Good Food, Good Jobs program could provide the first serious national test of the effectiveness of such efforts in boosting the economy and improving public health. The new initiative should:

  • Provide more and better-targeted seed money to food jobs projects. The federal government should expand and more carefully target its existing grants and loans to start new and expand existing community food projects: city and rooftop gardens; urban farms; food co-ops; farm stands; community-supported agriculture (CSA) projects; farmers’ markets; community kitchens; and projects that hire unemployed youth to grow, market, sell, and deliver nutritious foods while teaching them entrepreneurial skills.
  • Bolster food processing. Since there is far more profit in processing food than in simply growing it (and since farming is only a seasonal occupation), the initiative should focus on supporting food businesses that add value year-round, such as neighborhood food processing/freezing/canning plants; businesses that turn raw produce into ready-to-eat salads, salad dressings, sandwiches, and other products; healthy vending-machine companies; and affordable and nutritious restaurants and catering businesses.
  • Expand community-based technical assistance. Federal, state, and local governments should dramatically expand technical assistance to such efforts and support them by buying their products for school meals and other government nutrition assistance programs, as well as for jails, military facilities, hospitals, and concession stands in public parks, among other venues. Additionally, the AmeriCorps program — significantly increased recently by the bipartisan passage of the Edward Kennedy Serve America Act — should provide large numbers of national-service participants to implement nonprofit food jobs efforts.
  • Develop a better way of measuring success. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) should develop a “food access index,” a new measure that would take into account both the physical availability and economic affordability of nutritious foods, and use this measure as another tool to judge the success of food projects. All such efforts should be subject to strict performance-based outcome measures, and programs should not be expanded or re-funded unless they can prove their worth.
  • Invest in urban fish farming. Given that fish is the category of food most likely to be imported, and given growing environmental concerns over both wild and farm-raised fish, the initiative should provide significant investment into the research and development of environmentally sustainable, urban, fish-production facilities.
  • Implement a focused research agenda. The government should enact a focused research agenda to answer the following questions: Can community food enterprises that pay their workers sufficient wages also make products that are affordable? Can these projects become economically self-sufficient over the long run, particularly if they are ramped up to benefit from economies of scale? Could increased government revenues due to economic growth and decreased spending on health care and social services offset long-term subsidies? How would the cost and benefits of government spending on community food security compare to the cost and benefits of the up to $20 billion that the U.S. government now spends on traditional farm programs, much of which goes to large agribusinesses?

For a community to have good nutrition, three conditions are necessary: food must be affordable; food must be available; and individuals and families must have enough education to know how to eat better. This comprehensive proposal accomplishes those objectives. Moreover, in the best-case scenario, it could create large numbers of living-wage jobs in self-sustaining businesses even as it addresses our food, health, and nutrition problems. But even in a worst-case scenario, the plan would create short-term subsidized jobs that would provide an economic stimulus, and at least give low-income consumers the choice to obtain more nutritious foods — a choice so often denied to them.

Download the full report.

Popular Dissent “From the Left” On Health Reform

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Nate Silver has a post up at 538.com that is sure to get a lot of attention. Looking closely at an IPSOS/McClatchey poll that asks supporters and opponents of health care reform their underlying concerns, Nate notices that about one-fourth of those opposing current proposals think they “don’t go far enough to reform health care,” and suggests there’s a little-discussed segment of the electorate that might either grow if reform is further compromised, and/or might eventually come around if and when legislation is on the president’s desk.

This is an argument that Jonathan Chait made a couple of weeks ago at TNR, based on earlier polling.

Both articles are important refutations of the common assumption of conservatives that there is monolithic majority opposition to health care reform, and also a monolithic majority of Americans happy with the status quo in health care.

Beyond that, of course, this argument will be catnip to those progressives who are searching for ways to convince the White House and the congressional Democratic leadership to abandon or greatly toughen its endless negotiations with Senate “centrists” and the odd Republican, particularly over the public option. A majority of Americans, they will argue, either likes the current bill or wants something with more and more generous coverage, and a stronger public option. This is, of course, a subset of the ancient debate among Democrats between the strategy of seeking a majority coalition by peeling off “centrist” independents, or by solidifying and energizing the presumably liberal party “base” (along with “populist” independents).

There are, however, two problems with excessive reliance on the “progressive majority” analysis on health care reform. The first is that the polling numbers are based on some pretty vague ideas about what would constitute “doing more” on the health care front; it’s not entirely clear “more” means “more” of what progressive opinion-leaders want. And the second problem, more to the immediate point, is that in a Senate with a sixty-vote threshold for enactment of major legislation, a handful of Democratic and Republican senators, who represent not the nation as a whole but their own states, have the whip hand on the details of health care reform. I don’t think many progressives would want to abandon health care reform if a durable majority did, in fact, favor the status quo; this is a complex issue that’s not exactly good material for a plebiscite.

The more useful observation about the existence of a “dissent from the left” on health reform involves the wrath that Republicans (and obstructionist Democrats) may well inherit if nothing happens this year, and health care premiums, along with insurance industry abuses, continue to get steadily worse. We will then be talking not about a constantly shifting and poorly understood thing called “Obamacare,” but about one party that sees a major national challenge and wants to do something about it, and another that’s fine with an increasingly untenable status quo.

The diversity of opinion among those unhappy with the present legislation is, to be clear, an excellent argument for increasing the frequency and volume of claims that said legislation really will accomplish a great deal, if not everything it should or could achieve. All the news that’s been made about compromises on health reform over the last few months, along with reform advocates’ efforts to reassure seniors and others that they won’t lose anything worth caring about, have undoubtedly “undersold” the extent of change that even a “weakened” bill would make happen. A reform effort that’s marketed as a tepid bowl of porridge won’t satisfy much of anybody.

The Incredible Hulk in Copenhagen

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Among some members of the chattering class, it’s become something of a meme to assert that the Obama administration is too deferential to its opponents — whether Tea Partiers arguing about health care or Senate Republicans attacking on Afghanistan. The charge has especially been taken up by his critics, who seem to delight in attacking the president they’re beating up as a president whom, well, they can beat up. In September, for instance, Fred Barnes wrote in the Weekly Standard, “There’s the Obama who defers, the one who dithers, and the one who’s out of touch. The Obama presidencies have one thing in common. They’re all weak.”

These critics should be silenced, at least for a while, by the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) announcement today formally declaring that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant, paving the way for its regulation under the Clean Air Act.

On the cusp of meetings in Copenhagen to discuss an international climate treaty, the announcement has huge significance. It essentially enables the administration to circumvent climate obstructionists in Congress. Under the rules announced today, the administration can not only directly regulate carbon — it can exceed the limits contemplated by current Senate and House bills that would cap carbon dioxide emissions by 17 to 20 percent by 2020, compared with 2005 levels.

It seems unlikely that the EPA will actually act unilaterally to regulate carbon; the most administrable policy will probably remain market-based solutions such as cap-and-trade and similar proposals, rather than a command-and-control approach. However, the announcement today has political and strategic significance beyond its legal effect — and shows that the administration has just opened a brand new offensive playbook on carbon.

Two things are clear from the announcement today. First, the EPA decision puts the president on an unequivocal and strong footing for his visit to Copenhagen in a little over a week. The president will now be able to assert leadership on the issue on the basis of a clear authority to act.

Second, with today’s announcement, Barack Obama has placed a big stick on his desk in the Oval Office. His opponents in Congress and in industry will be pounding their own desks in outrage. Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-OH) immediately released a statement today, for instance, saying, “The EPA claims its process is dictated by science, however, it’s conveniently timed to push its politics.” Yes, that is a plaintive note you detected in Sensenbrenner’s statement. That’s because the president’s opponents will now have no option but to play on the president’s turf on carbon.

Cap-and-trade passed the U.S. House earlier this year. As it stands, cap and trade — originally a market-based, Republican-friendly program — faces a very uncertain fate next spring in the U.S. Senate. But with his move today, the president has told Senate opposition that he has the upper hand, and that if they do not act to cut carbon, he will. On climate change, where the president will certainly be faced with Tea Party-ish opposition every day of his administration, the Incredible Hulk-like transformation (green meeting muscle) comes just in time.