American Forum Op-Ed

AMERICAN FORUM
By Marianne Hill

Women’s Equality Day, August 26, is both a celebration of women’s progress and a reminder that equality remains a goal, not a reality.

On this day in 1920, women gained the right to vote under the 19th Amendment. Today, over 90 years later, the struggle to advance women’s rights is concentrated on the economic front -- with an end to discrimination against women in the labor force a critical, and hotly-debated, objective.

Two proposals now stalled in Congress would improve women’s odds of getting a fair shake at the workplace. They face an uphill battle, but it’s one worth fighting.

Many companies pay their male employees more than even better-qualified women in the same job. The best-known victim of pay discrimination today may be Lilly Ledbetter, but her case is far from unique. Consider the lawsuit against Wal-Mart, the one that the Supreme Court ruled could not proceed as a class action suit. The firm’s records, cited by the plaintiffs, showed that although more than two-thirds of the firm’s hourly employees were female, only 15 percent of store managers were women. “Women were paid less than men of equal seniority in every major job category, even though women on average had higher performance ratings and lower turnover rates than men,” states the Public Justice Center.

The Fair Pay Act and the Paycheck Fairness Act would close many of the loopholes and lax penalties that have made the Equal Pay Act of 1963 ineffective in ensuring pay equity in such cases. Studies show that bias against women begins at hiring and persists at promotion time. According to the American Association of University Women, one year after graduating from college, women earn only 80 percent as much as their male counterparts in the same field, and after 10 years of experience, women earn only 69 percent as much. In other words, the pay elevators for women start lower, are slower and don’t go as high as those for men. And the wage gaps are worse for black and Hispanic women.

A woman working full-time in 2009 earned at the median only 77 percent of what a man earned. Over the course of her lifetime, this translates into $400,000 of lost earnings. At the bottom of the wage scale, poor adults are largely women, and the poverty rate of 15 percent among working age women is 30 percent higher than that for men. The top of the income scale is dominated by men: approximately 80 percent of persons earning $100,000 or more per year are men.

The Fair Pay Act of 2011 would require employers to make public the job-related data that is basic to determining whether or not there has been discrimination. At present, women who believe they have been discriminated against cannot get the data on jobs and pay scales they need without filing a lawsuit. At some firms, they cannot even ask co-workers about their pay.

The other bill, the Paycheck Fairness Act, clarifies that wage differences must be based on job characteristics, not on gender. And, if wage discrimination is proven in court, individuals would be able to receive full compensatory and punitive damages, as is already true in cases of discrimination based on race. It would prohibit retaliation by firms against employees who raise wage parity issues.

Eliminating the wage gap is particularly important in families where the woman is the only job-holder. And, among families with children under 18 years of age, 34 percent of working mothers are the sole earners in their family. Progress towards pay equity, then, is vital to the future of American families, and it depends on the passage of proposals like the Fair Pay Act and the Paycheck Fairness Act.
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Hill is an activist who holds a Ph.D. in economics.
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Copyright © American Forum 8/11

AMERICAN FORUM
By Paul Egerman

I love America, and have proudly invested in America. I have invested by building successful businesses employing thousands of American workers. And I have invested in our country by paying taxes.

But our nation loses $100 billion a year to tax dodging by some of our largest corporations and wealthiest people. That’s a trillion dollar hole in our national treasury over the next decade unless we act now to plug it.

Tax dodging companies are disinvesting in our country – not investing in it.

Many U.S. multinational companies use a gimmick called “transfer pricing” – shifting patents to their offshore subsidiaries, for example – in order to pretend they've earned their profits in a tax haven like the Cayman Islands, Bermuda or Luxembourg, even though their operations there may be little more than a mail box. What they’re really doing is transferring their U.S. profits offshore and transferring their tax responsibilities to the rest of us.

In this global version of a shell game, corporations move their profits to offshore shell company subsidiaries; the U.S. parent company reports to the IRS that they've made almost no profits, or even lost money on their U.S. operations. These companies are passing the buck to other taxpayers and robbing our national treasury of funds we need.

It sickens me that businesses like mine responsibly paid taxes at the rate of 35 percent on millions of dollars in profits while companies like GE would pay zero percent on billions of dollars in profits. Even worse, they had so many tax loopholes and tax subsidies that Uncle Sam actually owed them money. From 2008 to 2010, GE had $7.7 billion in pretax U.S. profits and $4.7 billion in tax refunds, giving it a negative 61.3% tax rate, reports the tax experts at Citizens for Tax Justice.

We need to ask what kind of country we want to have and who is going to pay for it.

I have been fortunate to live the American Dream. I know my success is due to many factors. I know, for example, as a software entrepreneur, that I would have had no business at all without the government assistance I received for my college education, or the government research that led to the Internet.

It’s obscene that computer and internet companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple and Cisco are part of a coalition clamoring for a tax holiday to “repatriate” profits they shifted to tax havens to avoid U.S. taxes.

It’s obscene that so many members of Congress are willing to legislate austerity for American workers, small businesses and retirees while leaving the door open for big corporations to dodge taxes through tax havens.

We all benefit from public services, infrastructure and research paid for by tax dollars – education and public transportation, the Centers for Disease Control and food safety inspections, roads, bridges and waterways, the Small Business Administration and economic development programs, police and courts, and the public safety nets, from unemployment insurance to food stamps, that so many depend on in these hard economic times.

Instead of reducing our debt by cutting vital services, we need to close two big tax deficits - the tax haven deficit and the deficit from the Bush tax cuts for the affluent. Each is worth a trillion dollars over the next decade.

The Stop Tax Havens Abuse Act introduced recently in Congress by Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) and Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) would close the loopholes that reward those who disinvest in America and dodge taxes to unfairly boost their corporate treasuries. It should be a no-brainer solution in deficit reduction.

It is simply outrageous that we would ask unemployed and disabled Americans and Medicare and Social Security recipients to sacrifice more while continuing to shower tax savings on millionaires and billionaires who have a larger share of the nation’s income than any time since the 1920’s.

It’s time for Congress to plug the loopholes that allow our largest corporations to avoid billions of dollars in taxes, and it’s time for Congress to ask our wealthiest individuals, including people like me, to also pay our fair share of taxes. After all, American corporations and wealthy individuals should be proud to support our country and invest in its future.

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Paul Egerman, a software entrepreneur, is co-founder and former CEO of the medical information technology company eScription.
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Copyright © American Forum 8/11

Pam Solo

AMERICAN FORUM
By Pam Solo and Grant Smith

The reactor disaster in Fukushima is so fresh in our memories that it may seem incomprehensible to think that the history of that tragic (and still unfolding) event in Japan could ever be rewritten and distorted. But history tells us that the nuclear power industry is very adept at revising the facts about every major reactor disaster.

Consider the Three Mile Island (TMI) reactor crisis in the United States. Thanks to years of industry propaganda, many Americans now assume that the panic that followed in the wake of this near-disaster situation derailed the nuclear power industry in the United States, halting its forward momentum in its prime. (Just watch: If the industry falters after Fukushima, it will once again pin the blame on “unreasoning panic” by the public.)

Panic was not the issue after the Three Mile Island. In reality, the U.S. nuclear power industry was already dead in the water by the time of the TMI accident. The culprit was not unreasoning panic on the part of the public. What killed nuclear power more than a quarter of a century ago was cold, hard economics: Nuclear power was just too expensive to build.

Remember the promises made about nuclear power?

First it was “atoms for peace.” But we now know that our nuclear arsenal was the priority. Then it was “too cheap to meter.” But the truth is that nuclear power has been a financial fiasco, declared by Forbes in 1980 as the worst financial disaster in business history.

Little has changed since then, including the nuclear power industry’s enormous lobbying influence and public relations clout. While Wall Street continues to take a pass on financing risky reactors, President Obama and bipartisan Congressional supporters continue to cheerlead the so-called “nuclear renaissance” even as the worst industrial disaster in history continues to play out in Japan. The possibility of an accident, we were told, was next to impossible. But we’ve had three major incidents in 30 years and numerous near misses.

Now “clean” is the mantra in support of nuclear power for politicians and environmentalists alike who think only of reducing CO2. Is nuclear power a clean energy source? Not so much. The evidence paints quite a different story: routine, low-level, radioactive emissions, tritium leaks into water supplies, thousands of tons of fish each year annihilated at water intakes, thermal pollution of lakes and streams, tens of thousands of tons of extremely toxic high-level nuclear waste generated with thousands more to come.

The industry began trumpeting the “nuclear renaissance” in 2003. Yet, not one nuclear unit has been built in the United States. The average price for one reactor increased from an estimated $3 billion in 2002 to $10 billion in 2010 – not including the inevitable cost overruns that have plagued nuclear power construction since the beginning.

In 2009 Citigroup Global Markets wrote: “Three of the risks faced by (nuclear plant) developers – construction, power price and operational – are so large and variable that individually they could bring even the largest utility to its knees.” This analysis is playing itself out now.

In Florida, Progress Energy announced in 2006 that a reactor would cost $6 billion in 2006. By 2010 it was estimated to be over $22 billion.

The price of the French nuclear power plant project in Olkiluoto, Finland has doubled and faces a costly four-year delay. Duke Energy has petitioned the North Carolina public utility commission for rate recovery of over $400 million just to design two nuclear plants. Duke, in North Carolina, and AEP, in Indiana, are pushing legislation to further shift design, construction and operational costs of nuclear plants to ratepayers.

In the meantime, the chronic and seemingly intractable problems for nuclear power continue. In December of 2009, Mark Cooper, a nuclear expert, said that 90 percent of the plants applied for at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had been cancelled or faced delays.

We’ve been down this road before … and it is truly the road to financial ruin. Ratepayers were saddled with an estimated $200 to $300 billion in cost overruns from completed nuclear plants from the 1960s through the 1980s; nearly $50 billion for abandoned plants. Due to industry whining during the deregulation craze in the 1990s, claiming that nuclear power couldn’t compete in deregulated markets because of the high cost of nuclear power, ratepayers once again bailed out the nuclear industry to the tune of $40 billion.

So, how does nuclear power essentially defy the financial law of gravity and continue to be touted by indefatigable boosters?

According to the Institute for Southern Studies the industry has spent an estimated $640 million on lobbying. The goal has been and continues to be not to reduce financial risk but to shift it to taxpayers and ratepayers.

What have we learned after 60 years with nuclear power? The bottom line comes down to this: Nuclear power is an extraordinarily expensive and dangerous way to boil water. Don’t take our word for it, just ask the people in Fukushima.
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Pam Solo is the president and founder of the nonprofit and nonpartisan Civil Society Institute and facilitator of the Citizens Lead for Energy Action Now. Grant Smith is a senior energy policy analyst to the Civil Society Institute and former executive director of the Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana, where he worked for 29 years.
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© American Forum 8/11

Mitchell Szczepanczyk

Steve Macek

AMERICAN FORUM
By Steve Macek and Mitchell Szczepanczyk

The British tabloid, News of the World, owned by conservative media-mogul Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., has been implicated since 2005 in intercepting voicemails of celebrities and politicians. But recently the newspaper has been swept up in explosive new allegations that its staff also intercepted voicemails of victims of the July 7, 2005, London bombing, of relatives of deceased British soldiers, and of a 13-year-old murdered girl.

Ramifications snowballed. Within a week of the new allegations, Murdoch closed News of the World after 168 years of operation, firing the paper's 200 employees. A class-action lawsuit filed in March against Murdoch about lax oversight was quickly amended to include the new allegations, and News Corp.’s stock lost $10 billion in value in the scandal’s first two weeks. The company's top U.K. executive, Rebekah Brooks, has tendered her resignation, and the scandal derailed an attempt by Murdoch to secure majority control of BSkyB, Britain's largest satellite broadcaster. The scandal has also impacted the head of Scotland Yard, who resigned once ties between News of the World and Scotland Yard became known.

But the Murdoch media empire extends across the world and the scandal may well have repercussions on this side of the Atlantic. News of the World is alleged to have paid a New York police officer to secure voicemails of victims of the 9/11 attacks, and the FBI has apparently opened an investigation. What's more, the editor of Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal who served as the editor at News of the World during the time of voicemail intercepts has also resigned in disgrace.

Clearly, Murdoch must face accountability for crimes committed under his watch, and one way the U.S. government could hold him accountable would be to repeal News Corp's TV broadcast licenses.

By law, American TV stations must be licensed by the FCC, and those licenses carry a requirement of having to serve the "public interest, convenience and necessity.” Theoretically, the FCC has power to take away the license of any broadcaster who fails to live up to this standard (though the FCC has historically never exercised this power without being ordered to do so by courts).

The idea of stripping News Corp of its TV licenses already has gained traction in the wake of the voicemail scandal. Murdoch reacts to license challenges about as well as werewolves do a full moon. When the FCC threatened a single Murdoch TV license in 1997, Murdoch's chief lobbyist threatened then-FCC-chair Reed Hundt, saying that Hundt wouldn't be able to "get a job as a dog catcher" if he pulled even a single Murdoch TV license.

But Murdoch is now in the hot seat and the window for broadcast license renewals (and rejections) begins next year. Moreover, the FCC is already considering pending license challenges affecting a number of stations in Chicago, Milwaukee, Wisc., and Portland, Ore. Some of those stations are Fox affiliates. (Full disclosure: One of the co-authors of this op-ed is a party to one of those challenges.) Given the speed with which News Corp's voicemail hacking scandal has developed, prompt action by the FCC will be required, and we encourage the FCC to use its power to withdraw licenses of broadcasters owned by criminals.
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Macek is an associate professor of speech communication at North Central College and Szczepanczyk is an organizer with Chicago Media Action.
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Copyright (C) 2011 by the American Forum. 8/11

AMERICAN FORUM
By Christine Owens

Two years ago this week, 4.5 million of America’s workers enjoyed a modest pay increase, as the federal minimum wage rose from $6.55 to $7.25 an hour. The increase was the final of a three-step boost enacted in 2007. Of those getting a bump in pay, more than three-quarters were adults, nearly two-thirds were women, and nearly half a million were single parents with children under 18.

Yet during the past two years, these working families have seen the real value of their wages fall. Minimum-wage earners working full-time make roughly $15,000 a year. Had the minimum wage rate kept up with inflation, their paychecks would have increased by $800 this year. Instead, our nation’s lowest-paid workers have had an even harder time providing basic needs for their families. This is one more reason that Main Street is having a tough time recovering from the economic calamity brought on by financial collapse.

CEO compensation grew 23 percent in 2010, while pay for the average American worker grew only half a percent. Minimum wage workers have fared even worse: Since the 2009 increase, the real value of the minimum wage has fallen 5 percent.

The decline in value of the minimum wage during the past four decades has been even more dramatic, as prices for goods and services have risen much faster than the wage floor. If the minimum wage had kept up with inflation since the late 1960s, it would be $10.38 today. Yet, roughly a quarter of the nation’s work force is now earning less than that.

Instead of keeping the minimum wage current, Congress has acted just three times in the last three decades to increase it. The deterioration of the wage floor has helped fuel a level of economic inequality not seen in this nation since the early 1900s—the era of sweatshops and robber barons. With more and more income and wealth being transferred from working families to the super-rich, our economy, our democracy and the American way of life are under threat.

Some will say this is not the moment to be concerned with the minimum wage. But restoring the value of the minimum is in fact a key building block of sustainable economic recovery.

Businesses and economists agree that lack of demand is the primary driver of the stalled recovery and high unemployment. Without customers lining up for goods and services, employers will not expand their production or their payrolls. Raising the minimum wage would put more money in pockets of the lowest earners who have little choice but to spend their wages immediately. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that raising the minimum wage to $9.50, as President Obama proposed during the 2008 presidential campaign, would generate more than $60 billion in new consumer spending.

Wielding outdated economic theories, opponents claim that raising the minimum wage will cost jobs and slow rehiring. The tired canard that the minimum wage causes unemployment recently received national attention when reporters revisited 2005 testimony in which Congresswoman Michele Bachmann argued that eliminating the minimum wage would wipe out unemployment entirely. This extremist view was roundly criticized, yet many corporate interests still promote the dogma that raising the minimum wage reduces employment.

While simplistic supply and demand theory suggests that employment will fall as wages rise, this 18th century model fails to capture the complexities of how the labor market works. Two decades of rigorous empirical research has revealed that increases in the minimum wage have not cost jobs or slowed rehiring, even during times of high unemployment.

Since the end of the recession, corporate profits have recovered and CEO compensation has skyrocketed. Corporations are sitting pretty on nearly $2 trillion in assets that they refuse to use to expand production or rehire because the rest of America has little cash of their own to spend on goods and services. Raising the minimum wage will help Main Street share in—and power—a robust economic recovery. It’s the least we can do for those with the least means to stay afloat and get ahead in a brutal economy.
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Owens is executive director of the National Employment Law Project
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Copyright (C) 2011 by the American Forum. 7/11

AMERICAN FORUM
By Sue Hetrick

Open the newspaper any morning and one story is at the top: Leaders in Washington are negotiating a deal to reduce our nation’s debt and balance the budget. Trillions of dollars and thousands of laws and programs are at stake. While the public looks on, some of the most influential people in our country go back and forth with proposals: President Obama; Vice President Joe Biden; House Speaker John Boehner; Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid …. .
And Sue, Micah and Nick Hetrick.

No, we aren’t members of Congress. Nor are we cabinet secretaries or big-time lobbyists. We’re an Ohio family -- I’m the proud mother of Micah, 22, and Nick, 27. Along with representatives of the American Association of People with Disabilities and United Cerebral Palsy, we traveled to Washington this week to show the human face of the policies now under consideration. Our mission was to share our family’s story with officials in the White House and on Capitol Hill in order to protect Medicaid. This program, which has enabled our family to lead a fulfilling, healthy life, is on the chopping block. My family has something to say about that.

Micah was born with Down syndrome. Throughout his life, he’s faced challenges that many young people can’t imagine, including heart surgery when he was 5 months old. He’s a fine young man who has always worked hard to reach his potential. He’s a high school graduate who works two volunteer jobs and is looking for paid work. An enthusiastic reader, he’s making his way through C.S. Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia” series.

I work full-time. At the end of a workday, I return home to find him preparing dinner with the aide provided to us through Medicaid. Micah cannot be home alone for a long stretch, and he needs help with transportation, his health care and skills like preparing dinner. If he didn’t have an aide, he wouldn’t be contributing as a volunteer and he couldn’t be searching for a job.
Without someone to be with Micah during the day, I could not work. I’d have to be there to support Micah. I would be on public assistance myself—not supporting our family and paying taxes. I have a master’s degree and a strong commitment to support my family and serve my community. Eliminating the benefit my family uses would mean my potential—and Micah’s – would go entirely to waste.

As the debt negotiations in Washington progress, potential cuts to Medicaid have come into play. Implementing them would harm people with disabilities and their families—who are already under-served. Our family is fortunate to have an Individual “Option Waiver” through Medicaid, which provides the services we use to keep our household running smoothly (and keep me at work). As I write this, there are more than 27,000 people on the wait list for this program in Ohio. They were not in the room during our meetings, but their stories need to be heard too.

I’m proud of both of my sons, Micah and Nick. Both have worked hard throughout their lives. Nick, who is 27, just received his PhD; Micah recently received his high school diploma. I love them both, and think I’ve given them the start in life they need to become the best people they can be. Like any mother, I love them equally. But without Medicaid, one of them could not live the productive, fulfilling life he deserves. Without Medicaid, neither could I.

Nick is married and expecting his first child. We have the highest hopes for his baby. Everyone should enter this world with the same chance in life. I fear that Washington could take this country in the wrong direction, chipping away at a resource that helps thousands of families like mine—one that keeps people at work and promotes self-sufficiency.

That’s the message I brought to Washington this week. Our elected leaders need to hear all of our voices. There are steps that can be taken without cutting off this lifeline to people who really need it. I hope my fellow Ohioans will stand up for those with disabilities, parents and hard-working families all of whom are the face of Medicaid.
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Hetrick is Public Policy Director for the Ability Center of Greater Toledo.
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Copyright (C) 2011 by the American Forum. 7/11

AMERICAN FORUM
By Monique Perry Danziger

Section 1504 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was an anti-corruption game-changer tucked into a historic, comprehensive piece of legislation aimed primarily at overhauling the nation’s financial regulatory structure. Since becoming law, anti-corruption and financial transparency proponents are still waiting for the law to be implemented.

Section 1504 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act would require oil, gas, and mining companies that must report to the SEC—approximately 90 percent of the major internationally operating oil and gas companies in the world—to disclose payments made to governments for the oil, gas, and minerals they extract. This would be a boon to anti-corruption workers trying to get the records straight when investigating bribery and corruption in developing countries. It also would serve investors looking to make informed decisions about their portfolios.

Of course, 1504 attracted industrial vitriol from the usual suspects—companies used to doing business behind a cloak of secrecy were not thrilled at the prospect of having to open their ledgers. Industry concerns aside, the provision enjoyed strong bipartisan support from legislators, including Sens. Richard Lugar (R-IN); Ben Cardin (D-MD); Patrick Leahy (D-VT); and Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA).

Earlier in the season, ending tax breaks for oil companies was proposed as a means of raising revenue against looming budget deficits. The proposal was expected to raise $12 billion by eliminating a domestic manufacturing tax deduction for big oil companies such as BP, Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron and ConocoPhillips, and $6 billion by ending deductions for taxes paid to foreign governments. Proponents of the plan argued that oil companies are able to disguise foreign royalty payments as taxes, in order to reduce their tax liability.

Such disguises and obfuscations of operating payments, sales, profits and taxes owed and paid to foreign governments are a major part of the United States government’s tax collection problem.

This week, Sen. Carl Levin introduced his signature Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act, which seeks to take a bite out of the nation’s estimated $100 billion annual loss in uncollected tax revenue through offshore tax haven abuse. The bill includes new language that would require SEC-registered corporations to report on their employees, sales, purchases and financing arrangements on a country-by-country basis. The logic behind such measures being that greater transparency will enable both U.S. and foreign tax collection authorities to spot profit shifting shenanigans that companies engage in to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.

In addition to 1504 and the Levin Bill measures, momentum on the financial transparency issue is growing: Hong Kong put its own version of 1504 into effect roughly this time last year, requiring any petroleum and mineral companies listing with the Hong Kong stock exchange for the first time to report significantly more details about operations including taxes, royalties and other payments made to governments on a country-by-country basis. The EU is working on its own version of a 1504-type bill.

It is increasingly obvious that letting multinational companies operate on an honor system is bad business. Instituting Section1504 and passing the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act would strengthen U.S. and foreign government tax collection, inform global investment strategies, and foster good governance in the developing world—a key component in a stable global economic recovery.

No more waiting. The SEC should issue a formal rule for implementation of 1504, as it is required to do under the Dodd Frank bill, and get the ball rolling.
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Danziger is the Communications Director for Global Financial Integrity.
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Copyright (C) 2011 by the American Forum. 7/11

Lilly Ledbetter

AMERICAN FORUM
By Lilly Ledbetter and Linda Hallman

Yesterday a sharply divided Supreme Court ignored more than 40 years of established jurisprudence in its Wal-Mart v. Dukes decision, which severely restricts the ability of employees to fight discrimination as a class-action group. In a deeply misguided opinion, the majority ruled that the women of Wal-Mart cannot band together nationwide and stand up as one against the biggest retailer in the world. It's hard to manage the court costs and find the courage to keep going. We only wish the women of Wal-Mart would not have to do that. Yet the high court decided they did not have enough in common to pursue a nationwide class-action suit, a sadly ironic twist for former employees of the great homogenizer of American retail.

The court’s decision was not related to the merits of the case, however, and the women of Wal-Mart are already planning how to proceed next, either individually or in smaller, reformulated class-action cases. In fact, Wal-Mart may rue the day it fought against allowing a single class-action case. The company’s gamble—that if it could throw up enough barriers, the women would quit—is not going to pay off, and the Goliath retailer may soon end up with more Davids than it ever wanted to fight.

Unfortunately, many other employee class-action cases are now destined to be stuck at a red light, while employers are getting the go-ahead to continue to rely on highly subjective gender discrimination practices, hurting women and their families. And this disturbing ruling extends beyond class-action certification, echoing other recent stories of institutions that were “too big” to be held accountable. First, the banks were too big to fail, and American taxpayers bailed them out even as they were losing their homes and jobs. Now, Wal-Mart is too big for justice, even though American women still face a persistent pay gap that not only undermines their families’ economic security but undercuts the nation’s recovery as well.

But American women will press on as we always do, emboldened again by a Supreme Court majority that just doesn’t get the realities of the modern workplace. This past weekend, Wal-Mart plaintiff Edith Arana’s moving story of her fight against discrimination drew big applause at AAUW’s national convention—an indication of our continuing support for the women of Wal-Mart.

We’ll also be looking into other options to deal with this wrongheaded decision. The court has been wrong before— as we know all too well —but our government is structured so that we can right those wrongs through other channels. Perhaps this decision will give Betty Dukes her own bill or motivate Congress to finally pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, which aims to stop unfair pay before it starts and came within a hair of passing last year. We’re sure the Obama administration and its multi-agency Equal Pay Enforcement Task Force will also be brainstorming to address this latest misstep from the court. This kind of injustice demands action.

Setbacks in achieving women’s equality aren’t new. Ever since women started claiming our rights and fighting for equal opportunity, the powers that be have tried to thwart our plans. Although we wish the Supreme Court had understood the need for women to band together and fight, this decision is just one more battle in the ground war women have been fighting for years. It’s just a chapter, not the end.
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Ledbetter, the namesake of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, lives in Alabama. Hallman is executive director of AAUW.

AMERICAN FORUM
By Pat Byington

Dr. James McClintock, a renowned University of Alabama-Birmingham marine biologist who has conducted research in Antarctica for more than 25 years, told me the following story.

“You work in a scientific lab in the quietest place on Earth -- Antarctica.

"There’s a Crack! Boom!

"You rush to the window of your remote lab with a number of your fellow scientists, and you witness a glacier 'calving' a chunk of ice the size of a house into the water. Adrenaline permeates the room.

"Ten years ago, that exciting and incredible sight would happen about once a week. It was an event. Something rare.

"Today, at that same lab in Antarctica, the calving glacial ice, the explosive sounds, are a daily occurrence.

"The scientists are almost 'ho-hum' about it, barely lifting their heads to recognize the melting ice."

Such is life in a warming world.

McClintock has spent most of his life searching the ends of the earth for a cure for cancer and other human diseases. In fact, his research team has discovered marine species in the Antarctic that produce compounds active against skin cancer and influenza.

McClintock is not an alarmist. He does not have a political agenda. But he knows firsthand the earth is warming and he understands some of the consequences. Mid-winter temperatures on the Antarctic Peninsula where he works are 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than they were 60 years ago. That may not seem like a big difference to us non-scientists, but it’s devastating to a delicate polar ecosystem (and other ecosystems).

In fact, this spring, McClintock and his research associates documented an invasion of king crabs that are likely to endanger fragile Antarctic clams, snails, and brittlestars, or perhaps even the sea squirts that he and his colleagues study that could unlock a cure for skin cancer. This new predator, with its crushing claws, is moving in because of the rapidly warming seas. Once they make their way up onto the Antarctic shelf, an archaic marine ecosystem that has been without crushing predators for millennia will find itself largely defenseless. King crabs could very well destroy McClintock’s living lab. For McClintock, it’s like discovering someone is about to burn down your home and your life’s work and possessions.

I have always believed the National Academies of Science and the National Research Council motto “Where the nation turns for independent and expert advice” accurately portrays that most venerable institution. As a nation, we have been seeking their advice since President Lincoln established this scientific body in 1863. Last month, without much fanfare, and little to no attention from the national media, the National Academies released their latest congressionally requested report on climate change.

The report, “America’s Choices,” does not pull any punches. It reaffirms that climate change is occurring now and that the most effective strategy to combat it would be to begin cutting greenhouse gas emissions immediately.

What makes this report more shocking is the fact that it is not new. As far back as 2005, the National Academies of the U.S., France, Canada, the United Kingdom, India, Italy, Japan, Germany, Brazil and China have jointly called upon policy makers throughout the world to address climate change. The message from the National Academies six years ago was virtually identical to the one in 2011. Climate change is real. We need to drastically reduce greenhouse emissions. We need to aggressively seek technological and scientific solutions. Delaying will only make matters worse.

And now, more than ever, the signs of climate change are becoming starker. The extreme weather and floods in the Midwest and South this spring, historical droughts and fires in Texas and Arizona, permafrost disappearing in Russia/Siberia, floods in Pakistan, massive drought followed by flooding in Australia and whole villages in Alaska disappearing because of sea level rise are just a few recent examples.

The climate is changing so rapidly the Arbor Day Foundation has changed its recommendations for when and where you should plant your trees.

Are we going to follow the National Academy of Sciences and countless scientists’ advice on climate change? Are we going to listen to Dr. James McClintock and try to save a place that can lead to cures for cancer? Or are we going to barely lift our heads and refuse to recognize the climate changing around us?
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Byington is publisher of Bama Environmental News. He is a longtime environmental advocate from Birmingham, Alabama who has served on numerous state and national environmental boards.
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Copyright (C) 2011 by the American Forum. 7/11

By Scott Klinger and Holly Sklar

Some of our nation’s biggest corporations are planning a tax holiday and they want you to pick up the tab.

Actually, you already pay for their routine tax avoidance through the use of tax havens in Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and elsewhere. These accounting acrobatics cost the U.S. Treasury $100 billion a year. Now they want Congress to pass a special tax holiday for money they “repatriate” back to the United States.

There’s nothing patriotic about this repatriation being pushed by Google, Cisco, Pfizer and other companies in the Win America campaign. To sell the tax holiday, they claim it will produce a burst of jobs and investment. In fact, Congress passed a “one-time-only” tax holiday in 2004 with similar promises. Instead, it produced a burst of shareholder dividends and stock buybacks, which goosed the pay of CEOs.

Corporations laid off workers and shifted even more income and investment to offshore tax havens in the wake of the 2004 tax holiday.

“Why should we reward firms for successfully gaming the tax system when we in turn are called on to make up the missing tax revenues?” Edward Kleinbard, former chief of staff of Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, told Bloomberg. “Much of these earnings overseas are reaped from an enormous shell game: Firms move their taxable income from the U.S. and other major economies – where their customers and key employees are in reality located – to tax havens.”

A favorite accounting trick is transferring a patent from the U.S. parent company to a subsidiary – often a shell company – in a tax haven. Profits from the patent go largely untaxed offshore while the costs of development, marketing and management remain in the U.S. where they are taken as tax deductions.

Pfizer was the largest beneficiary of the last tax holiday, bringing $37 billion back to the United States and paying just $1.7 billion in federal corporate income taxes. It laid off 10,000 American workers in the following months. The U.S. is the world’s most profitable drug market and yet over the last three years, Pfizer – maker of Lipitor, Viagra and much more – has reported $7.9 billion in U.S. losses while claiming $37.8 billion in profits in the rest of the world. Pfizer, like the rest of Big Pharma, is heavily subsidized by taxpayer-funded research at the National Institutes of Health and elsewhere. It should not be rewarded with another tax holiday.

Bloomberg reported that Win America member “Google reduced its income taxes by $3.1 billion over three years by shifting income to Ireland, then the Netherlands, and ultimately to Bermuda.” What a corporate ingrate. Google would not exist without the Internet, and the Internet grew out of U.S. government research beginning in the 1960s. In the 1990s, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Digital Library Initiative research at Stanford University that Larry Page and Sergey Brin, now billionaires, developed into Google. Brin was also supported by an NSF Graduate Student Fellowship.
Increasingly, U.S. multinational corporations want to benefit from government spending on education, infrastructure, research, health care and so on without paying for it. Today, large corporations pay, on average, 18 percent of their profits in federal income taxes and as a group contribute just 9 percent toward federal government bills – down from 32 percent in 1952. The Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation says a new tax holiday would cost $79 billion.

A dozen national and state business organizations led by Business for Shared Prosperity recently wrote members of Congress urging them to oppose the tax holiday. The letter said, “When powerful large U.S. corporations avoid their fair share of taxes, they undermine U.S. competitiveness, contribute to the national debt and shift more of the tax burden to domestic businesses, especially small businesses that create most of the new jobs.”

There is no excuse for repeating a policy that’s a proven failure. It would be even worse this time around, as corporations would redouble their efforts to shift profits overseas in anticipation of the next tax holiday. Congress should close the tax loopholes that reward companies for transferring U.S. profits, jobs and investment abroad – not encourage them.

Real patriots pay their fair share of taxes. They don’t run out on the bill.
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Scott Klinger is Director of Tax Policy and Holly Sklar is Executive Director of Business for Shared Prosperity. Mr. Klinger is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) charterholder. Readers can write to them at info [at] businessforsharedprosperity dot org.
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© Copyright American Forum. 6/11

Riane Eisler

Kim Otis

By Riane Eisler and Kimberly Otis

What do women really want from our President? This is a question President Obama should be asking if he wants to keep his job for another term -- which hinges on the women’s vote. The recent posting of his accomplishments mentions several positive appointments: two women to the Supreme Court, Elizabeth Warren to launch the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; and other outstanding women to top Cabinet posts; such as Secretaries Hillary Clinton, Janet Napolitano, Kathleen Sebelius, and Hilda Solis.

But such accomplishments do not begin to go far enough. For one thing, by authorizing major cuts to traditionally women’s jobs in education, health care, and family planning, the President allowed an assault on women’s economic status and health-care access. Moreover, he allowed opponents to divert the conversation about economic recovery from the millions of unemployed and the massive increase in Americans in poverty to an obsessive focus on reducing the deficit through government program cuts. And because women comprise the vast majority of public-sector teachers, nurses, social workers, caregivers, and others being laid off, women are now bearing the brunt of job losses.

These shortsighted and cruel cuts are not only harming millions of people and their families; they will soon harm us all. With health, education, and poverty alleviation programs being scrapped, our nation is undermining the most important asset for our economic future: the “high-quality human capital” economists tell us is essential for success in our post-industrial knowledge/service economy. Yet instead of educating the public about this, the Administration has itself started to talk about job creation exclusively in the private sector – with no mention of the havoc being created by gutting employment in the public sector, or of its dire future consequences.

Instead, the Administration joined “the sky is falling” talk about the deficit, failing to point out that our federal debt (roughly equal to our annual GDP or about $14 trillion, a ratio of 1-to-1 according to the most alarmist calculations) is actually far lower than our debt to GDP ratio during World War II. It is also far lower than that of many other countries. Japan had a 2.25-to-1 debt to GDP even before the massive earthquake and tsunami disaster. Certainly we have to watch our national debt, especially because so much of it is owed to foreign nations. But it must not be used as the rationale for cutting essential services or for a wholesale firing of public employees, much less as an excuse for demonizing unions, without which we would not have had a middle class.

As television and radio host Larry King stated recently, “The average guy isn’t sitting today in a diner going ‘Oh, the deficit.’” Instead we’re supposed to genuflect to the “wisdom” of the old boys clubs on Wall Street and the Chamber of Commerce about the importance of addressing the deficit through spending cuts alone to jobs which provide needed human capital. Continued focus on cutting teachers, health care workers, and other traditionally female jobs will not address the stalling of the economy, but instead will mean a lot more pain and no gains for a lot more people both in the short and long term.

We’ve got to also debunk clichés about a typical American family sitting around the dinner table being better at understanding how to balance a budget than officials in Washington. In reality, most Americans’ mortgages average about $172,000 – more than four times the $40,000 average annual salary. College students also amass heavy debts with student loans, but few would encourage young people to forgo the enormous future value of a higher education. Moreover, businesses routinely take on substantial debt in order to invest in future research and development that produces a high return.

As Sally Kohn reported in her USA Today op-ed, “IBM borrows twice as much money as it earns annually. Boeing borrows four times more than it earns. JP Morgan Chase… borrows 50 times more than it earns … If the U.S. were borrowing anywhere near as much as Chase bank, we'd have legitimate reason to worry. But in general, borrowing money is necessary to invest in the future — whether the future of a business or the future of a nation.”

With the recent announcement of an opening for a new Chair of the President’s Council on Economic Advisors, there is an opportunity for the Administration to re-direct the conversation to what has been ignored at our peril: the urgent need for investing in our nation’s human infrastructure. And choosing a woman who understands these vital matters could go a long way to applying the fundamentals of economics in a more balanced way. We need the voices of women to talk about what really counts: increasing the real wealth of our nation by investing in its human beings.
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Riane Eisler is best-selling author of The Chalice and the Blade and most recently of The Real Wealth of Nations and founder of the Center for Partnership Studies. Kimberly Otis is a women’s rights advocate and Director of the Center’s Caring Economics Campaign.
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Copyright (C) 2011 by the American Forum. 6/11

By Karen Jacob

I've lived in the heartland for more than two decades. And I can tell you that there’s nothing like a sultry July night at the local ballpark, rooting for the home team, eating hot dogs and quaffing beer, watching fireworks viewed from damp, warm infield grass.

This time of year, the Midwest is awash in flags and bumper stickers boasting one’s support for the troops and the good ol’ red, white and blue. But, lately we have seen more and more “Come home!” messages, and headlines such as, “Locals hope for an end to the war.” Unemployment, which struck the heartland harder than most places, still affects many who are at the end of their unemployment checks or are underemployed. War costs in Afghanistan, nearing $2 billion a week, particularly stick in the craw of these suffering Americans.

My son will be a sophomore majoring in music education at Butler University this fall (You know, that small Midwest college with the basketball team that went to the Final Four -- two years in a row), will graduate not knowing whether there will be music and band programs in public schools where he can work. Juxtapose that against the two decades of his life filled with costly wars. The first Iraq war started in 1991, when he was not yet born. That war, followed by bombing in the Balkans and elsewhere -- Afghanistan, Iraq again, and now Libya, with the hint of more to come … means that my son and his generation have grown up in continuous war. They know nothing else.

My son's generation thinks gas prices are about war. He knows this father was drafted during the Vietnam War, and that he escaped that fate. He has older friends who returned from recent wars as lesser human beings.

His generation has grown up in a time of plenty, and also a time of economic insecurity. As someone who has worked for peace all her life, I love the Fourth of July. I honor freedom, justice and all that it envelops. Yet, I worry about the constant drain on our American collective dream of freedom, justice and economic security.

This Fourth will be observed with millions of Americans out of work, many whose homes have been foreclosed. State legislatures are cutting social services, and in Indiana, public education is being drained by a voucher system to private schools. We have returning soldiers with injuries so deep that they and their families will never recover. Our federal coffers so sapped by war spending that we may not have the money to pay for our endless war wounds. In fact, we plan for this Fourth knowing that our nation is deeply in debt. Climbing out of this hole will require deep cuts that will hurt.

Still, I am hopeful. I can’t go to a picnic with deviled eggs and apple pie, ready for the barbecue, without optimism. America is the richest country in the history of the world.

But, surprise! We often spend our federal tax dollars foolishly. The recent focus on the debt and deficit, the president’s commission on tax reform, and the congressional impasse on how to solve the problem places a magnifying glass to the federal budget.

Another surprise: Our investments in job training, education and health care – the things that make us secure and cause us to work for our collective futures – are on the chopping block. Medicare and Social Security, two of the government’s most successful programs for keeping people out of poverty, also are on the chopping block. Yet, be cautious, my friends -- some excessive spending is wrapped in a patriotic flag.

Keep your ears open for anyone who says we have to “finish the job” in Afghanistan. What job? Osama bin Laden is gone. The $2 billion a week we spend on this war could go a long way toward job training to put America back to work, for example.

Enjoy this Fourth of July. We are free, and that is no small thing, as spreading revolutions in the Mideast attest. However, freedom cannot exist without justice. We will celebrate, and we will work until our mutual critical needs are met.
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Jacob serves as president of WAND of Northern Indiana and is the national WAND board chair. WAND is a national activist organization working to redirect excessive military spending to unmet human and environmental needs.
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Copyright (C) 2011 by the American Forum. 6/11

AMERICAN FORUM
By Matthew Hoh

As he was announcing his second increase in troops for Afghanistan in December 2009, President Obama promised that by July 2011 those troops would begin coming home. As relayed by Bob Woodward’s book, Obama’s Wars, we know the president was skeptical about the United States’ war effort in Afghanistan. In spite of that skepticism, the president's new plan for the war extends the longest war in American history for the foreseeable future.

President Obama announced his first surge of 20,000 troops in spring 2009. Pushing American forces well above the 50,000 mark and reinforcing a counterinsurgency strategy, he escalated a war in a country entering its fourth decade of continuous conflict.

Thousands of Marines and soldiers were rushed in, with the announcement that they were there to ensure free and fair Afghan elections. That summer, these troops found an insurgency fueled by resentment of their presence. Either because of hostility to foreign occupation or because our troops simply sided with someone else’s rival, akin to supporting just one side in a Hatfield-McCoy feud, 2009 became the deadliest year of the war, doubling the amount of American dead in 2008.

Meanwhile, the fire hydrant-like stream of dollars, being pumped into the second most corrupt nation in the world , seemed to purchase only further grievances among the population against a government radiantly kleptocratic. When President Hamid Karzai blatantly stole the elections in August, American officials were forced to abandon any narrative of Americans fighting and dying for democracy in Afghanistan. Then, in October, National Security Advisor Jim Jones announced that al-Qaeda had fewer than 100 members in Afghanistan.

However, given little political cover from the left, feeling little political pressure from the right and receiving nothing but a choice of small, medium or large escalation of the war by the Pentagon, President Obama in December 2009 ordered 30,000 more troops and billions of dollars into what soon would become America’s longest war.

Predictably, by doubling down on a policy that had proved counterproductive, we betrayed our national values and failed to inflict damage on al-Qaeda. We also went from being waist-deep to chest-deep in quicksand.

This past year surpassed 2009 as the deadliest year of the conflict, killing 57 percent more American service members.

Tragically, but unsurprisingly, 2011 has been even more deadly. Insurgent attacks from January to March increased nearly 50 percent from the same period in 2010, while American deaths from March to May of this year increased 41 percent from last spring’s totals.

Nationwide, a U.S.-led campaign of night raids on homes has terrorized families, while a massive nation-building program funded by U.S. taxpayers has enriched a corrupt few and disenfranchised a poor majority. Again, betraying our own values, we looked the other way when elections were stolen for the second time in as many years. The number of civilian deaths are on pace to surpass the totals from 2010, the deadliest year of the war for civilians since 2001. The result: Eight in ten Afghan men now say the U.S. presence is bad for Afghanistan.

By the administration's own account, al-Qaeda has not existed in any meaningful capacity in Afghanistan since we successfully scattered them in 2001. Over the last decade, they have evolved into an increasingly flat or networked organization(s) of individuals and small cells around the globe that is most successfully attacked through good intelligence, international law-enforcement cooperation and surgical-strikes, such as the raid against Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. Our Afghan war policy does not affect al-Qaeda.

American troops killed or maimed in Afghanistan and others who have returned home with physical and mental injuries, increasing numbers of whom are taking their own lives, cannot be said to have made a worthy sacrifice. We must acknowledge to families that their losses did not prevent another Sept. 11.

Moreover, our policies have destabilized the region, most notably in Pakistan, a nuclear nation with 170 million people.

Indeed, President Obama was right to be skeptical.

However, despite growing bipartisan support for an accelerated drawdown, on Wednesday President Obama announced the withdrawal of 30,000 troops through next year. Such a withdrawal, particularly without a change in strategy will only bring us back to where we were in December 2009. With only modest cuts in troop levels and no real changes in our strategy, we will continue to be stuck in Afghan quicksand for years to come.

The president should go further -- removing the most recent 30,000 surge troops by the end of 2011 and reducing to a total of fewer than 30,000 troops by the end of 2012. Combined with sincere political efforts in Afghanistan and the broader region, and by maintaining a focus on al-Qaeda, the United States can move Afghanistan and the region toward stability, while freeing itself from its quicksand.
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Hoh is a a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy and the Director of the Afghanistan Study Group. He served with the Marine Corps in Iraq and with State Department teams in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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Copyright (C) 2010 by the American Forum. 6/11

AMERICAN FORUM
By Yifat Susskind

Hurricane season begins this month, and in Haiti’s displacement camps, people have begun to look fearfully toward the skies. For solutions, they must look to Haitian women.

More than a year after the earthquake, each day continues to bring life-threatening challenges to the hundreds of thousands of Haitians living in tent cities. Families that lost everything to the earthquake now struggle to feed themselves, to find clean water or to stay healthy in the face of dangerous illnesses like cholera.

Now, on top of all of this, the hurricanes are returning.

In 2008, Haiti was slammed by four hurricanes in but a few weeks in August and September. Hundreds of people were killed and thousands of homes destroyed by winds, flooding and mudslides. Today, as Haitian communities continue to reel from the earthquake, another hurricane would add to the misery.

Through decades of experience responding to disasters, women’s groups worldwide have learned indispensable lessons. We know that in the aftermath of disaster, women and girls confront particular challenges. They face increased risk of rape and violence. They lose access to reproductive health services. What’s more, aid distribution targeting male heads-of-household often leaves women out.

These threats are anything but natural. Instead, they fall along social fault lines that unload the worst burdens on the most vulnerable -- especially poor women.

But there is more to this story. Survival of families and communities depends upon women standing on the front lines of a disaster. As pillars of their communities, women know how best to rebuild. These are the women who know which family has a new baby or which grandmother has been ill.

When floods in Pakistan displaced millions of people last year, women set up clinics in remote areas and made sure that aid reached the most vulnerable populations.

When Hurricane Mitch leveled Nicaragua in 1998, women directed crucial supplies like food, clothing and medicine to families most in need.

And in the year and a half since the Haiti earthquake, women there have worked tirelessly to rebuild communities and deliver life-saving aid long after the global spotlight moved elsewhere. When the next hurricane hits, no one will be better prepared to spring into action.

We can make this hurricane season different. We can’t stop the hurricane once it begins its swift path across the ocean, but we can protect communities in its wake. The best way to do this is by working with women.

Women in a hurricane’s path are demanding they not be forgotten. They are demanding a voice in disaster-response policies, so that they can help aid get to the most vulnerable. They are demanding the opportunity to use their expertise to rebuild stronger communities.

If we support relief efforts that include women and listen to these demands, we can save lives.
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Susskind is Executive Director of MADRE: Rights, Resources and Results for Women Worldwide.
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Copyright © 2011 by the American Forum. 6/11

AMERICAN FORUM
By Dr. William Barclay

This month marks the tenth anniversary of the first of the two tax cuts sought by the President George Bush. The Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act was enacted in 2001 to be followed, in 2003, by the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act. Ten years later, it is time we assess the actual results of these tax cuts, looking at economic performance rather than political promises. The results have been a disaster for the US economy and for almost all of the American people. We have experienced very slow income and employment growth for the vast majority of families, an extremely unequal distribution of the direct financial benefits from these measures, and, very slow growth in the economy as a whole.

As someone who has personally received these tax cuts during the past 10 years, I feel it is my responsibility to speak out.

Supporters of tax cuts for high income households, such as House majority leader John Boehner, argue that wealthy people are the “job creators” and that tax cuts will encourage them to create jobs and that these new jobs will, in turn, increase employment opportunities and improve the wages of the remainder of the population. Did any of these benefits occur after the Bush tax cuts? The quick and accurate answer is, no, they did not. Adjusted for inflation, the median weekly earnings of working Americans actually fell by 2.3 percent from the end of the 2000 – 01 recession to the onset of the Great Recession. This is unique in the post WWII period. Further, the recovery from the 2000 – 01 recession was the slowest of any post WWII recession to date, requiring 39 months before the number of employed Americans reached the pre-recession level. Where is even a scintilla of evidence that tax cuts such as those passed in 2001 and 2003 generate income and employment growth for the vast majority of the population?

A significant part of the failure of the Bush tax cuts to generate jobs and income growth flows from the top-heavy distribution of the benefits conveyed by these measures. The vast bulk of the reduced taxes were reaped by a very small number of families. In 2011, the average tax reduction to families receiving an income of $1 million or more (about 321,000 families) will be $139,199. For this less than 0.5 percent of all families this is a reduction in taxes of $860 million/week.

Compare these tax benefits to the yearly savings proposed by cutting the WIC program: $833 million. An obvious question is, why can’t this very small group of extremely high income families give up just one week of their tax cut to provide nutrition for the tens of thousands of women and children that benefit from the WIC program? More significantly, in light of the deficit hysteria gripping Washington D.C., the combined impact of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts has been the addition of more than $2.6 trillion to the federal debt. This included more than $400 billion in interest payments on the debt necessary to pay for the cuts.

Of course, one might forgive these policy failures if the promise of economic growth had been fulfilled. On this measure, however, the record is even worse. The 2000 – 01 recession ended in the fourth quarter of 2001, just in time for the first Bush tax cut to take effect. From the end of the recession until the onset of the Great Recession, the economy grew at a slower rate than in any other post recession period since WWII. Thus, despite promises from the advocates of the tax cuts, the reality was slower growth rather than faster growth. The additional tax cut in 2003 did nothing to increase the pace of economic growth.

In sum, the Bush tax cuts were a bad idea at the time and are an even worse idea today. Ending these cuts for incomes over $250,000 would generate over $100 billion/year in additional revenue. If we also created additional tax rates for very high-income families (e.g. at $500,000, $1,000,000, $5,000,000 and $10,000,000) we could increase federal revenue by more than double that amount and put us on the road to reducing deficits and debts.
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Barclay worked for 22 years in financial service before retiring in 2004. He is an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the Liautaud Graduate School of Business and is a member of Wealth for the Common Good.
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Copyright (C) 2011 by the American Forum. 6/11

AMERICAN FORUM
 
By Erik Camayd-Freixas

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Camayd-Freixas is a Professor of Hispanic Studies at Florida International University.
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Copyright (C) 2010 by American Forum 12/10

AMERICAN FORUM

By Sen. Dede Feldman

Anselm Roanhorse’s eyes grow large when he talks about his childhood on the Navajo reservation, herding sheep. “As a boy, I was out there for days, by myself, chasing sheep, protecting them, covering miles and miles of terrain,” he recalls. Now the Director of the Navajo Division of Health, Roanhorse explained to an obesity summit here in June that exercise was part of the traditional Navajo lifestyle, not an “add-on.”

“Our grandparents were not recreationally-oriented,” said Paul Pino, the chair of the health committee at Laguna Pueblo, a smaller settlement of Native Americans near Albuquerque. “But they were active, digging ditches for irrigation, plastering adobe walls or putting a new floor in the kiva, the center of traditional ceremonies.”

In as little as 15 years, all that has changed.

For Native American youth, digging ditches and herding sheep has been replaced by video games and chillin’ in front of the TV. Double Whoppers and Big Gulps, sold at local fast food outlets, have replaced fresh fruits and vegetables. The results of the cultural shift are dramatic.

On the sprawling Navajo reservation, for example, Roanhorse says 23,000 (out of approximately 250,000) Navajos, are now affected by diabetes; in 1940 there was only one documented case.

New Mexico’s Native Americans have two to three times the rate of obesity and diabetes than the overall population does; Indian youth are consistently more overweight than young people in the U.S. Most alarmingly, Native Americans here have the highest death rate from diabetes. The high death rate is particularly perplexing since American Indians are more likely to receive recommended screenings through the Indian Health Service.

Tribal communities, though, are tackling these chronic diseases. They are creating school and community programs to increase physical activity, encourage a return to traditional agriculture and promote healthy food choices. Their efforts are boosted by the cohesiveness of their communities and the commitment of their leaders.

At San Ildefonzo Pueblo, outside of Santa Fe, the Pueblo’s Governor, Perry Martinez, has issued at 5-2-1-0 challenge that has tribal members eating 5 fruits or vegetables per day, logging less than 2 hours of screen time, 1 or more hours of physical activity and 0 sweetened drinks. It’s part of “Keeping Po Woh Healthy—One Child at a Time.” The program uses garden mentors, walking trails and native language to deliver the message to children and their parents.

At Santa Clara Pueblo, elders are teaching kids how to identify medicinal plants, as well as edible ones. There’s a running club and lessons on how to prepare nutritious food. A University of New Mexico mobile health clinic brings health screening opportunities, and diabetes monitoring is done via cell phone. A wellness center is on the drawing board.

A more massive assault on the problem is underway on the Navajo reservation. “Just Move It,” is a series of runs and walks that depart each week from chapter houses and spread out through New Mexico and Arizona. Approximately 10,000 people participated last year with 30 to 150 participating in each event. The runs complement a more coordinated approach to school health in Northern Navajo schools.

For Native Americans and others confronting the obesity epidemic, it may require more. Citing escalating health care costs for the public, a number of states and local governments have attempted to use the same tactics against the junk food lobby that were used against Big Tobacco. New York and California now require food labeling for fat and sugar content echoing the FDA’s warning label on cigarettes.

In the past few years, Arkansas and Washington have taxed soda pop. Earlier this year, New York was unsuccessful at implementing a soda tax.

In New Mexico, beverage taxes present a particular challenge due to tribal sovereignty issues, which can cause a dual tax structure on and off reservations. It’s a challenge that the state and tribes overcame when the state raised tobacco taxes by 75 cents per pack in July. The new tax applies both on and off the reservation. It could serve as a model for a sugar sweetened beverage tax.

Meanwhile, tribal and community efforts continue with friends in high places. First Lady Michelle Obama has taken up the obesity cause, encouraging community gardens and even planting heirloom Native American seeds in the White House garden.
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Feldman (D-District 13) is a State Senator and Chairman of the Senate Public Affairs Committee.
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Copyright (C) 2010 by American Forum. 9/10

AMERICAN FORUM

By Michael Mariotte

American taxpayers bailed out the banks. They bailed out auto manufacturers. But at least they were our banks and automakers. Now, taxpayers are once again being asked to lend a hand. This time it's to subsidize multi-billion-dollar foreign companies with names like Toshiba, Hitachi and Areva. If the going gets rough for them, taxpayers will be forced to dig into their pockets to bail them out, too.

America needs to invest in new forms of energy: to combat climate change and increase security by reducing our dependence on foreign suppliers. But that reality is being used by some on Capitol Hill to justify the expenditure of billions of dollars to construct new nuclear reactors – a high-cost, high-risk gamble.

Various proposals in both the House and Senate call for as much as $54 billion in taxpayer-supplied loan guarantees for new reactors. Another bill would put no ceiling on the amount of guarantees.

In the haste to make the case for these massive public investments there’s one detail that rarely receives much mention: The construction push will largely benefit global companies and overseas workers. They get the profits; U.S. taxpayers assume the risks.

All 18 of the energy companies seeking approval to build new reactors will be relying on foreign manufacturers to fill the bulk of their orders. That means revenue and jobs in Japan and France, not Ohio or North Carolina or any other state.

Foreign involvement in nuclear construction in this country goes even deeper than manufacturing. Two reactor projects at the head of the line for federal loan guarantees have foreign investors. Calvert Cliffs in Maryland is dominated by the French government-owned EDF Group and Areva (Constellation Energy is also a partner) and the South Texas Project is a partnership between NRG Energy of New Jersey, Toshiba and Tokyo Electric Power Company, both of Japan. A third reactor project awaiting approval, Nine Mile Point in New York, also is co-owned by Constellation and EDF.

Earlier this year, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) took issue with the fact that federal stimulus money was being used to purchase foreign-made equipment for solar and wind projects. That money should be spent here, Schumer argued, not abroad. Unfortunately, that same question has not been raised when it comes to insuring billions in nuclear investments.

Each of these new reactors is estimated to cost about $10 billion or more. If the projects fail – and the Congressional Budget Office has put the odds of that happening at 50-50 – U.S. taxpayers will be forced to foot the bill to make good on the debt. In other words, another bailout to benefit Areva or Toshiba or Hitachi.

Why are U.S. taxpayers being asked to stake profitable global companies looking to make money in American markets? Wall Street is gun-shy. Investors there have looked at the risks of nuclear power and said no. So, to get these projects moving, nuclear backers in Washington have volunteered the taxpayers.

Why aren’t U.S. companies vying for these projects?

The U.S. nuclear manufacturing industry is moribund, its production facilities shuttered. No new reactors have been ordered in this country since Palo Verde in 1973.

Once, the number of U.S. suppliers licensed to produce nuclear-grade building components was 400; now it is down to 80. Today, for example, the only companies capable of building giant steel reactor vessels are located in Japan, China and Russia. While some new manufacturing capacity is being developed in the U.S., it will be years, if ever, before it could play a major role in reactor construction. Thus the U.S. is forced to look overseas for the foreseeable future.

We live in a global economy. American consumers are accustomed to seeing foreign-made labels on their clothing, cars and computers. Foreign investment in the U.S. is nothing new, either.

But what sets apart this latest entry into the U.S. market is the fact that when it comes to nuclear expansion, Washington wants taxpayers to take the risk out of making those investments. That wouldn’t make sense even if the nuclear companies’ owners were all living on Main Street. It makes absolutely no sense to expect U.S. taxpayers to bail out foreign companies – or the French government – if things go sour.
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Mariotte is Executive Director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service.
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Copyright (C) 2010 by American Forum. 9/10

AMERICAN FORUM

By Antonio Gonzalez and Kathleen Rogers

On September 17, 1787, a group of visionaries and leaders signed our Constitution. They were intent on creating a functioning government based on universal truths and extraordinary principles in an environment complicated by disparate regional economies and wildly divergent parochial interests. Back then, differing proposals for the shape of our government divided our country into two camps, but the necessity to address the need for a common defense and a cohesive economic policy made our Constitution a great pragmatic solution that brought together two polarized sides.

Within a few years of our Constitution’s signing, these political camps became political parties and they refined their differences as they mobilized. At times, violent partisanship became so common that outgoing president George Washington, in his farewell speech to the American public denounced the dangers of such divisions: “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.”

Notwithstanding his warning, our country has been fortunate to have had leaders that have embraced bipartisanship to produce some remarkable achievements worthy of the U.S. Constitutional framers. President Truman and a bipartisan coalition led the U.S. to invest in the Marshall Plan, which has cemented stable relations with Japan and Europe for the last 60 years. Lyndon Baines Johnson steered Congress through polemic waters in order to pass the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, despite the hit that he would take from the Southern Democrats. The best examples of bipartisanship result when thought-leaders of different perspectives came together on common principles and developed pragmatic solutions free of partisan politics.

Unfortunately, the leadership that existed then to design and implement lasting solutions that did not require special interest payoffs is not present in our government today. Instead, we are steadily sidling into the same reality that President Washington warned us about over 200 years ago.

Time and time again -- no politics-free solutions have been attempted to address our nation’s most pressing problems. Instead, Washington, DC has punted on issues such as climate change, immigration reform, Wall Street loopholes and unsustainable fiscal policies.

In the 1970s, President Nixon and a Democrat-controlled Congress passed the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. Those groundbreaking environmental protections passed almost unanimously. Compare that to today where despite overwhelming support for action on clean energy and climate change (70 percent), not a single Republican Senator would even cross the aisle to vote on a climate change bill -- not even Senator Lindsay Graham who co-authored the bill, nor Senator John McCain who at one point proposed more ambitious climate bills.

Bipartisanship for immigration reform has also faltered. The last major immigration law passed in 1986 with overwhelming dual party support. Since then, however, our evolving world has exposed deep problems in our current system and still, despite consistent popular support for a compassionate and effective solution, immigration reform hasn’t moved in Congress. In the meantime, millions of families and small businesses face unanswered questions that impact day-to-day life while the parties play political football with the Latino vote and border “swing states.”

Although James Madison famously said that there were three great principles of the Constitution: “compromise, compromise, compromise,” he also said it “will be of little avail to the people… if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.” Today our lack of commitment to principled solutions lead us towards the same sprawling unintelligible laws that Madison warned us about.

If our leaders want to be remembered for legacies of action and courage reminiscent of America’s architects, they need to manifest leadership, the type of leadership that yields bipartisanship -- a common thread in our nation’s proudest moments.
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Rogers is president of Earth Day Network. Gonzalez is president of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project (SVREP) and the William C. Velasquez Institute.
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Copyright (C) 2010 by the American Forum. 9/10