I can't help but participate in the media frenzy over Barack Obama's first 100 days in office. After all this is the first time in over 10 years that the candidate I voted for actually won the presidency, so I feel a special responsibility for his success or failure.
Looking back it's hard to image the very real fears some Americans felt about electing the first African-American president. In a series that NPR ran on voters in York, Pennsylvania, during the fall campaign, you could sense how uncomfortable some whites felt about him. As one woman put it, “"I don't want to sound racist, and I'm not racist. But I feel if we put Obama in the White House, there will be chaos. I feel a lot of black people are going to feel it's payback time,” ("York Voters Express Post-Election Hopes, Fears," NPR, October 24, 2008). Some white voters like this woman, sincerely thought there would be a racial backlash against whites as a result of this election, if not by Obama, than by voters of color who supported him.
Or course, this seems absurd now. President Obama acts neither like a black president, nor a white president; instead, he has presented himself above all as an American president, and projected an idea of America both here and abroad that is strongly welcoming of those who have felt left out of the political process: the middle class, recent immigrants, people of color, religious minorities, even atheists. Overseas, repressive governments may well feel that the greatest danger posed by Obama is not a resurgence of American imperialism but simply the outpouring of admiration and support among the young, particularly in the Middle East where most of the population is under the age of 30.
Here at home, the Republican Party watches in dismay as Obama woos voters away from their bases of support in the Midwest, West, and even the South. Demographics, both generationally and in growing minority populations, favor Obama's style of politics.
It is true that President Obama has had his own stumbles, particularly with candidates for cabinet and agency positions who turn out to be as beholden to special interests as Republicans nominees before them. For a while, it seemed that just about every nominee had a “tax problem” of some dimension, a few minor, a few serious enough to make it necessary for such candidates to take themselves out of consideration.
It is also true that President Obama finds himself constrained by the nation's overwhelming financial problems from addressing the many ethical questions left behind by the Bush Administration, including its perversion of the Constitution to justify torture, abrogate the right to habeas corpus, and spy on its own citizens in the name of fighting terrorism.
As a pragmatist, Obama has already made it clear he wants to delegate these constitutional and moral issues to the Justice Department so that he can cut the necessary deals with Republicans in both houses to make headway on his ambitious domestic agenda: expanding health care, pushing “green” industries, addressing climate change, and jump starting the economy, not to mention juggling two wars overseas and an ever-evolving series of foreign policy crises in North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, and the Middle East.
While it's too early to give Obama a “grade” for how he has performed domestically and internationally, he certainly deserves high praise for the work ethic he has demonstrated since he took office. No one is likely to compare his days spent on vacation with those of his predecessors, Reagan and Bush. His energy, ambition, and drive are literally breath-taking, yet so far, he exudes a cool-headness about his agenda rather than a sense of hubris.
But Obama's greatest accomplishment so far has been the change he has helped to effect in public confidence. Americans of all political persuasions give him high marks for character and personal integrity, something many thought had all but disappeared on the political stage. More importantly, an increasing number of Americans now believe that the country is on the right track. This month saw a surprisingly sharp uptick in consumer confidence,(1) which is a good indicator that Americans may start spending a little more freely, a necessity if economic activity is to expand again.
Anyone looking at the achievements of the President's first hundred days should also give credit to his wife, Michelle, for the tone she has helped set at home and abroad. Her warmth contrasts with his relative aloofness, and her down-to-earth intelligence combined with great personal charm has given rise to unexpected moments of connection, like the hug she shared with Queen Elizabeth that so shocked veterans of Buckingham Palace.
Obama's own memoir, The Audacity of Hope, seems like an appropriate label for his first hundred days. He has shown considerable audacity in what he has taken on, and he has given Americans hope that he can actually pull it off. That alone gets his Presidency off to a strong start.
(1) "The New York-based Conference Board said Tuesday that its Consumer Confidence Index rose more than 12 points to 39.2, up from a revised 26.9 in March. The reading marks the highest level since November's 44.7 and well surpasses economists' expectations for 29.5," AP, April 29, 2009.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Talk about a “Stale Debate” - Why we Need to Stop Arguing about the “Ticking Bomb” Scenario
One thing is clear in the aftermath of President Obama's release of the so-called “torture” memos: those who wrote these memos and their apologists want to frame the debate as one in which torture saved the world from terrorism. Vice-President Cheney has called for the release of the information gathered by practicing these techniques, alleging that this will prove that the ends justified the means.
Of course, one cannot prove that a terrorist event that didn't take place was definitively related to the gathering of such information or that such information could not have been garnered by other means. We're still left with a putative connection between evidence and and something that might have happened as a result, and those connecting the dots have a vested interest in turning that connection into a narrative of the world saved by a last minute necessity, however brutal or indefensible in any other circumstances.
Behind all of these justifications for resorting to torture lies the specter of the “ticking bomb.” In this hypothetical and highly unlikely scenario, a terrorist who is directly responsible for the setting of a ticking bomb refuses to tell authorities where the bomb is. At that point, some argue that torture is justified to get this information and save the lives of those in harm's way. Those who make this argument as a defense of the Bush Administration's torture policies may believe this to be true or they may simply want to sway public opinion in their favor before they end up as defendants themselves.
Unfortunately, many Americans tend to buy the “ticking bomb” scenario because it's the plot behind just about every Hollywood action flick in which the seconds tick off and the bomb is stopped just in time, usually through the violent intervention of the hero. The popular TV series 24 relies explicitly on the appeal of the “ticking bomb” plot. The world is saved and the hero's vigilante actions demonstrate that in the world of terrorism the ends justify the means.
But real life is not at all like a Hollywood action flick as police officers can tell you when they have to sort out real bomb threats from pranksters or attention seekers. And the perpetrators of terrorist acts like the mentally handicapped woman who was induced to become a suicide bomber in Iraq can also be victims of terrorist plotters just like those who died as a result of her suicide bombing.
In addition, mistaken identity can lead to terrible consequences as a German citizen, Khaled al-Masri, can attest after he was apprehended by US authorities who thought he was a terrorist. US authorities then used the principle of extraordinary rendition to send him directly from Kennedy Airport to be tortured and jailed in a Syrian prison until Condoleeza Rice intervened to order his release.
But the main problem with debating the “ticking bomb” scenario is that it is all about debating unprovable outcomes. We can't prove that authorities will never face the perfect ticking bomb situation, and those who believe that torture is never justifiable under any circumstances can never prove that alternate methods would result in extracting the same information that torture could produce. (For an excellent analysis of this scenario, see Gary Kamiya's article in Salon).
However, we can take as a given that under the ticking bomb scenario, someone will act to stop a terrorist. We witnessed this in the closest thing to a real ticking bomb scenario the U.S. has experienced, namely, when the passengers on Flight 93 realized that the airplane they were flying on was intended as a suicide bomb. The initiative they took to stop that bomb at the expense of their own lives demonstrates that both courage and common sense can prevail in such extraordinarily dangerous circumstances. Nor would we blame the military if they had been forced to shoot down that plane before it could crash into the White House or other buildings in Washington D.C.
Yet what we should be debating far more seriously than these extraordinary circumstances are the effects of policies that give legal authority to use methods explicitly outlawed by the Geneva Conventions, whether you call them “enhanced” interrogation techniques or torture.
How do we protect our own soldiers from being tortured when we use such methods against others? Do we really think that our enemies are going to distinguish between a soldier and a military combatant or even a civilian who ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time?
What will we do with the prisoners at Guantanamo who were tortured? If they are dangerous, we should be reluctant to release them, but under what pretext can we continue to detain them when our legal system requires that they be charged and tried even at this late date? Yet how can we try these prisoners when the evidence against them has been extracted by torture and will not be admissible in any serious court of law? We know that those who are tortured will say anything to stop the pain; therefore, we can never fully rely on the validity of what such prisoners say under duress. Indeed, after such treatment, it is unclear whether those who were tortured are even mentally fit to stand trial.
In fact, the information gathered by torturing Al Quaeda leaders like Abu Zubaydah often blurred the distinction between real threats and imaginary alarms as much of the information he gave led to unnecessary and expensive surveillance of American landmarks like the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty and even large malls when no real threat existed. Ask any American if s/he is really worried about our being at “orange” alert level, and you realize how dangerous the dissemination of bad information can be in lulling Americans into a false sense of security, and no one yet knows or has acknowledged how much useless information was tortured out of individuals along with information that had some value.
But the real problem with the torture memos is that the United States traded a potential short-term gain for vastly more negative long term consequences. If the real goal of our government is to stop terrorism, we have instead prolonged and strengthened the impetus towards terrorism by our actions. Every act of torture recorded by the Red Cross, every photo of a prisoner at Abu Ghraib, every case of mistaken identity that ended with in the abuse of an innocent person has served as a recruiting poster for Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.
Yes, we have not experienced an act of terrorism on U.S. soil, but in the interim the incidence of terrorism around the world has risen significantly since 9/11, even as respect for and cooperation with the U.S. government has plummeted.
Worse, by giving up on our Constitutional principles and respect for the rule of law, the United States has abandoned the ethical in high ground that gave hope to millions around the world who look to the U.S. as a defender of laws and of human rights. That makes it much much harder for the United States to condemn the actions of a Russia or a China against its own citizens when those actions can so easily be coded as acts to prevent “terrorism” whether in Chechnya or Tibet.
The Obama Administration has taken an important step in rectifying the United States's past mistakes by making the torture memos public. But this is only the first step, and much more remains to be disclosed before we can close the door on this sordid chapter of our history.
What we should do now is stop debating whether or not torture is ever necessary and start recognizing the ways our practice of torture has already damaged our national security and our relations with the rest of the world.
We remain a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, but it will be a long time before the rest of the world trusts us to uphold them. We need to start building that trust now by repudiating torture in the strongest and most unequivocal terms.
The Obama Administration is trying to steer a middle course between letting bygones be bygones and taking on a full-scale prosecution of those who committed torture by bringing past practices to light but not taking legal action against the perpetrators. That is understandable given the President's inherent pragmatism and the enormous challenges he faces domestically that will require the cooperation of Republicans in Congress.
But that does not mean that the Justice Department and Congress itself need follow this course. For example, Congress has the ability and the right to impeach Judge Jay Bybee who signed two of these memos. Senator Carl Levin has stated: "I really think it's important that the Justice Department make the decision as to who, if anybody, is prosecuted here,” adding that it is his personal opinion “that the legal opinions here were abominations,” ("Congress: Who's Accountable for Torture Memos?" Morning Edition, April 23, 2009).
If the United States wants to demonstrate to the rest of the world that we truly are a nation of laws, we should let our own rule of law take its course and bring those responsible for these memos to justice, according them the basic human rights they so easily denied to those who were brutally treated as a result of their perverse interpretation of our Constitution and our common understanding of what constitutes “torture."
Of course, one cannot prove that a terrorist event that didn't take place was definitively related to the gathering of such information or that such information could not have been garnered by other means. We're still left with a putative connection between evidence and and something that might have happened as a result, and those connecting the dots have a vested interest in turning that connection into a narrative of the world saved by a last minute necessity, however brutal or indefensible in any other circumstances.
Behind all of these justifications for resorting to torture lies the specter of the “ticking bomb.” In this hypothetical and highly unlikely scenario, a terrorist who is directly responsible for the setting of a ticking bomb refuses to tell authorities where the bomb is. At that point, some argue that torture is justified to get this information and save the lives of those in harm's way. Those who make this argument as a defense of the Bush Administration's torture policies may believe this to be true or they may simply want to sway public opinion in their favor before they end up as defendants themselves.
Unfortunately, many Americans tend to buy the “ticking bomb” scenario because it's the plot behind just about every Hollywood action flick in which the seconds tick off and the bomb is stopped just in time, usually through the violent intervention of the hero. The popular TV series 24 relies explicitly on the appeal of the “ticking bomb” plot. The world is saved and the hero's vigilante actions demonstrate that in the world of terrorism the ends justify the means.
But real life is not at all like a Hollywood action flick as police officers can tell you when they have to sort out real bomb threats from pranksters or attention seekers. And the perpetrators of terrorist acts like the mentally handicapped woman who was induced to become a suicide bomber in Iraq can also be victims of terrorist plotters just like those who died as a result of her suicide bombing.
In addition, mistaken identity can lead to terrible consequences as a German citizen, Khaled al-Masri, can attest after he was apprehended by US authorities who thought he was a terrorist. US authorities then used the principle of extraordinary rendition to send him directly from Kennedy Airport to be tortured and jailed in a Syrian prison until Condoleeza Rice intervened to order his release.
But the main problem with debating the “ticking bomb” scenario is that it is all about debating unprovable outcomes. We can't prove that authorities will never face the perfect ticking bomb situation, and those who believe that torture is never justifiable under any circumstances can never prove that alternate methods would result in extracting the same information that torture could produce. (For an excellent analysis of this scenario, see Gary Kamiya's article in Salon).
However, we can take as a given that under the ticking bomb scenario, someone will act to stop a terrorist. We witnessed this in the closest thing to a real ticking bomb scenario the U.S. has experienced, namely, when the passengers on Flight 93 realized that the airplane they were flying on was intended as a suicide bomb. The initiative they took to stop that bomb at the expense of their own lives demonstrates that both courage and common sense can prevail in such extraordinarily dangerous circumstances. Nor would we blame the military if they had been forced to shoot down that plane before it could crash into the White House or other buildings in Washington D.C.
Yet what we should be debating far more seriously than these extraordinary circumstances are the effects of policies that give legal authority to use methods explicitly outlawed by the Geneva Conventions, whether you call them “enhanced” interrogation techniques or torture.
How do we protect our own soldiers from being tortured when we use such methods against others? Do we really think that our enemies are going to distinguish between a soldier and a military combatant or even a civilian who ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time?
What will we do with the prisoners at Guantanamo who were tortured? If they are dangerous, we should be reluctant to release them, but under what pretext can we continue to detain them when our legal system requires that they be charged and tried even at this late date? Yet how can we try these prisoners when the evidence against them has been extracted by torture and will not be admissible in any serious court of law? We know that those who are tortured will say anything to stop the pain; therefore, we can never fully rely on the validity of what such prisoners say under duress. Indeed, after such treatment, it is unclear whether those who were tortured are even mentally fit to stand trial.
In fact, the information gathered by torturing Al Quaeda leaders like Abu Zubaydah often blurred the distinction between real threats and imaginary alarms as much of the information he gave led to unnecessary and expensive surveillance of American landmarks like the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty and even large malls when no real threat existed. Ask any American if s/he is really worried about our being at “orange” alert level, and you realize how dangerous the dissemination of bad information can be in lulling Americans into a false sense of security, and no one yet knows or has acknowledged how much useless information was tortured out of individuals along with information that had some value.
But the real problem with the torture memos is that the United States traded a potential short-term gain for vastly more negative long term consequences. If the real goal of our government is to stop terrorism, we have instead prolonged and strengthened the impetus towards terrorism by our actions. Every act of torture recorded by the Red Cross, every photo of a prisoner at Abu Ghraib, every case of mistaken identity that ended with in the abuse of an innocent person has served as a recruiting poster for Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.
Yes, we have not experienced an act of terrorism on U.S. soil, but in the interim the incidence of terrorism around the world has risen significantly since 9/11, even as respect for and cooperation with the U.S. government has plummeted.
Worse, by giving up on our Constitutional principles and respect for the rule of law, the United States has abandoned the ethical in high ground that gave hope to millions around the world who look to the U.S. as a defender of laws and of human rights. That makes it much much harder for the United States to condemn the actions of a Russia or a China against its own citizens when those actions can so easily be coded as acts to prevent “terrorism” whether in Chechnya or Tibet.
The Obama Administration has taken an important step in rectifying the United States's past mistakes by making the torture memos public. But this is only the first step, and much more remains to be disclosed before we can close the door on this sordid chapter of our history.
What we should do now is stop debating whether or not torture is ever necessary and start recognizing the ways our practice of torture has already damaged our national security and our relations with the rest of the world.
We remain a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, but it will be a long time before the rest of the world trusts us to uphold them. We need to start building that trust now by repudiating torture in the strongest and most unequivocal terms.
The Obama Administration is trying to steer a middle course between letting bygones be bygones and taking on a full-scale prosecution of those who committed torture by bringing past practices to light but not taking legal action against the perpetrators. That is understandable given the President's inherent pragmatism and the enormous challenges he faces domestically that will require the cooperation of Republicans in Congress.
But that does not mean that the Justice Department and Congress itself need follow this course. For example, Congress has the ability and the right to impeach Judge Jay Bybee who signed two of these memos. Senator Carl Levin has stated: "I really think it's important that the Justice Department make the decision as to who, if anybody, is prosecuted here,” adding that it is his personal opinion “that the legal opinions here were abominations,” ("Congress: Who's Accountable for Torture Memos?" Morning Edition, April 23, 2009).
If the United States wants to demonstrate to the rest of the world that we truly are a nation of laws, we should let our own rule of law take its course and bring those responsible for these memos to justice, according them the basic human rights they so easily denied to those who were brutally treated as a result of their perverse interpretation of our Constitution and our common understanding of what constitutes “torture."
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Who Says You Can't Grow a Garden without “Crop Protection Products”?
Organic gardening on the White House lawn? Plants grown without artificial fertilizer and insecticides? Children learning that food comes from the soil and not from the supermarket?
The Mid America CropLife Association just won't stand for it any longer. Appalled by the revolution sprouting where manicured, fertilized, and properly “crop protected” lawn used to sit, this agricultural trade association has decided to educate Michelle Obama and her young associates about the proper role of a garden.
Not only did Executive Director and Program Director of MACA send a letter to Mrs. Obama, they also forwarded it to their associates with the warning:
Of course! Plant one organic garden outside the White House, and then everybody will have a garden in their backyard, and sooner than you can say “organically grown,” the fragile edifice that is American agribusiness will come crumbling down in a torrent of corn husks.
The letter goes on to extol the virtues of American agriculture, claiming that “many people, especially children, don't realize the extent to which their daily lives depend on America's agricultural industry.” Okay, and having kids create a garden won't enlighten them about where their food comes from?
No, starting a garden is not worth the effort the letter-writers warn. “The time needed to tend a garden is not there for the majority of our citizens, certainly not a garden of sufficient productivity to supply much of a family's year-round food needs.”
Furthermore, the writers claim that “much of the food considered not wholesome or tasty is the result of how it is stored or prepared rather than how it is grown. Fresh foods grown conventionally are wholesome and flavorful yet more economical” than food grown using “organic” methods, a word these writers don't even want to mention.
These CropLife Ambassadors then generously offer to “educate” Mrs. Obama and her young gardeners. "The CropLife Ambassador Network offers educational programs for elementary school educators at http://ambassador.maca.org covering the science behind crop protection products and their contribution to sustainable agriculture. You may find our programs America's Abundance, Farmers Stewards of the Land and War of the Weeds of particular interest."
This kind of propaganda would be merely amusing (I really, really want to see the War of the Weeds), but it does show just how scared big agribusiness is of Americans caring about and wanting to learn about how their food is grown and what effect our conventional methods of agriculture are having on the environment, on fuel consumption, and on our national security (as the price of food rises around the world so does political instability).
While the CropLife Ambassador Networks wants Americans to imagine a bucolic world of abundance, where an acre of land yields “42,000 lbs. of strawberries, 110,000 heads of lettuce, 25,400 lbs. of potatoes, 8,900 lbs. of sweet corn, or 640 lbs of cotton lint,” the real focus of agribusiness is directed towards the production of corn, meat and dairy products, and soybeans.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reported that as of 2003 the top five U.S. agricultural “products” were: 1. Corn 256,904,992 2. Cattle meat 11,736,300 3. Cow's milk, whole, fresh 78,155,000 4. Chicken meat 15,006,000 5. Soybeans 65,795,300 (all in metric tonnes).
Add to that the fact that more than 50% of the corn grown in the U.S. is fed to animals and that an increasing percentage is going towards ethanol production, and you can see that providing your local family with lettuce, strawberries, and sweet corn ranks way down the list of agribusiness priorities. Throw in the additional fact that more than 50% of antibiotics used in the U.S. go to animals raised for food, and you can see that “crop-protection” products may well protect “crops” (plant and animal) at the expense of those who consume them (Mark Bittman, Food Matters, p. 23).
To add insult to injury, the Mid America CropLife Association is affiliated with CropLife America, a marketing association funded by the Department of Agriculture, that is, taxpayers like you and me. A list of the member organizations of Mid America CropLife reads like a who's who of the chemical industry, including, but not limited to: Aceto Agricultural Chemicals Corporation, Cheminova Inc., Dow Agrosciences, Kova Fertilizer, Monsanto, and United Phosphorus, Inc.
No wonder they shudder at the thought of the White House putting its imprimatur on an organic garden and teaching kids that they can grow food without pesticides.
After all, that's how we got people to stop smoking: by showing them just what kind of chemicals they were ingesting with every puff and educating the young, who in turn, educated their parents.
So even if you laugh at the Mid American CropLife Association's overreaction to Mrs. Obama's organic garden, don't fail to take them seriously. And while you're at it, send Mrs. Obama and her gardeners a letter of thanks for making a garden grow in a way that benefits the earth and all of us.
The Mid America CropLife Association just won't stand for it any longer. Appalled by the revolution sprouting where manicured, fertilized, and properly “crop protected” lawn used to sit, this agricultural trade association has decided to educate Michelle Obama and her young associates about the proper role of a garden.
Not only did Executive Director and Program Director of MACA send a letter to Mrs. Obama, they also forwarded it to their associates with the warning:
While a garden is a great idea, the thought of it being organic made Janet Braun, CropLife Ambassador Coordinator and I shudder. As a result, we sent a letter encouraging them to consider using crop protection products and to recognize the importance of agriculture to the entire U.S. economy.
Of course! Plant one organic garden outside the White House, and then everybody will have a garden in their backyard, and sooner than you can say “organically grown,” the fragile edifice that is American agribusiness will come crumbling down in a torrent of corn husks.
The letter goes on to extol the virtues of American agriculture, claiming that “many people, especially children, don't realize the extent to which their daily lives depend on America's agricultural industry.” Okay, and having kids create a garden won't enlighten them about where their food comes from?
No, starting a garden is not worth the effort the letter-writers warn. “The time needed to tend a garden is not there for the majority of our citizens, certainly not a garden of sufficient productivity to supply much of a family's year-round food needs.”
Furthermore, the writers claim that “much of the food considered not wholesome or tasty is the result of how it is stored or prepared rather than how it is grown. Fresh foods grown conventionally are wholesome and flavorful yet more economical” than food grown using “organic” methods, a word these writers don't even want to mention.
These CropLife Ambassadors then generously offer to “educate” Mrs. Obama and her young gardeners. "The CropLife Ambassador Network offers educational programs for elementary school educators at http://ambassador.maca.org covering the science behind crop protection products and their contribution to sustainable agriculture. You may find our programs America's Abundance, Farmers Stewards of the Land and War of the Weeds of particular interest."
This kind of propaganda would be merely amusing (I really, really want to see the War of the Weeds), but it does show just how scared big agribusiness is of Americans caring about and wanting to learn about how their food is grown and what effect our conventional methods of agriculture are having on the environment, on fuel consumption, and on our national security (as the price of food rises around the world so does political instability).
While the CropLife Ambassador Networks wants Americans to imagine a bucolic world of abundance, where an acre of land yields “42,000 lbs. of strawberries, 110,000 heads of lettuce, 25,400 lbs. of potatoes, 8,900 lbs. of sweet corn, or 640 lbs of cotton lint,” the real focus of agribusiness is directed towards the production of corn, meat and dairy products, and soybeans.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reported that as of 2003 the top five U.S. agricultural “products” were: 1. Corn 256,904,992 2. Cattle meat 11,736,300 3. Cow's milk, whole, fresh 78,155,000 4. Chicken meat 15,006,000 5. Soybeans 65,795,300 (all in metric tonnes).
Add to that the fact that more than 50% of the corn grown in the U.S. is fed to animals and that an increasing percentage is going towards ethanol production, and you can see that providing your local family with lettuce, strawberries, and sweet corn ranks way down the list of agribusiness priorities. Throw in the additional fact that more than 50% of antibiotics used in the U.S. go to animals raised for food, and you can see that “crop-protection” products may well protect “crops” (plant and animal) at the expense of those who consume them (Mark Bittman, Food Matters, p. 23).
To add insult to injury, the Mid America CropLife Association is affiliated with CropLife America, a marketing association funded by the Department of Agriculture, that is, taxpayers like you and me. A list of the member organizations of Mid America CropLife reads like a who's who of the chemical industry, including, but not limited to: Aceto Agricultural Chemicals Corporation, Cheminova Inc., Dow Agrosciences, Kova Fertilizer, Monsanto, and United Phosphorus, Inc.
No wonder they shudder at the thought of the White House putting its imprimatur on an organic garden and teaching kids that they can grow food without pesticides.
After all, that's how we got people to stop smoking: by showing them just what kind of chemicals they were ingesting with every puff and educating the young, who in turn, educated their parents.
So even if you laugh at the Mid American CropLife Association's overreaction to Mrs. Obama's organic garden, don't fail to take them seriously. And while you're at it, send Mrs. Obama and her gardeners a letter of thanks for making a garden grow in a way that benefits the earth and all of us.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
An Immigrant Story: Retracing my Family's Journey to America
Photo of Steinbach-Hallenberg by Stefan Nothnagel (24.12.2006)  |
| From Beth Wahl Family Small |
A few years before he died in 1978 my father sat down and typed up all he could remember of his family history. This is how his story begins:
In west central Germany in the general vicinity of Erfurt is a small town named Steinbach-Hallenberg which is approximately twenty miles south of Eisenach, Thüringer. So far as is known its only industry was a nail factory, which provided the principal income for the townspeople. Near the end of the nineteenth century, all that I know of my father's family left there and emigrated to America. The family consisted of my grandmother Mary Wahl and her three sons Adolph, August, and David. My father was about seven years old when they landed at Ellis Island and settle din the metropolitan New York-New Jersey area. My uncle August became a toolmaker, Adolph and electroplater, and David a house painter...David was the eldest and lived his whole life in Newark, New Jersey. My father, Adolph, was very energetic and ambitious. I recall he rode a motorcycle from Newark to Rochester, New York in 1910. August never married and lived most of his life in New York City until he passed away in 1960.
My father's autobiography begins, not with his own birth, but with the exodus of his ancestors from their homeland, constructing a narrative that echoes the structure of a fairy tale: a widowed mother with three boys, leaving their small town to seek their fortunate in a strange new land.
I was fifteen when my father died, and I hadn't yet developed a curiosity about my family origins. If anything, I was relatively prejudiced against all things German, which I associated with older relatives pontificating about the past and too much wurst, potatoes, and long drawn-out family gatherings.
But this summer I will finally make my father's father's journey in reverse, traveling from America to Germany, and for the first time in two generations, I will meet some of the Wahls who did stay behind in Steinbach-Hallenberg.
Now I want to ask him so many questions: Who told you the family came from Steinbach-Hallenberg? Did the nail factory shut down? What made your paternal grandmother decide to leave and what happened to her in America? Why did August never marry, and why did your father leave the family in Newark to make a new life for himself in the upstate town of Rochester so far away and so different from Newark or Manhattan?
In the meantime, I am trying my best to piece together some of the history that lies behind those all too brief sentences my father typed out for his children in the basement of our house in Detroit.
Some of the things I've found out have been surprising. Searching the Ellis Island archives, I discovered that David Wahl traveled three years before his mother and younger brothers on the ship Lahn arriving on June 8th, 1893 when he was only 16 years old. Marie Wahl arrived July 2, 1896 on the same ship with August and Wilhelm Adoph, my paternal grandfather. I've also discovered that Marie Wahl's maiden name was Bauerschmidt and that her husband, Peter Wilhelm Wahl died in 1893, a scant six months after his eldest son, David, arrived in the United States.
Travelling to Ellis Island two summers ago, I had a chance to see just a little bit of what my grandfather and his brothers might have experienced in 1896 when they arrived on the Lahn. If they had first or second-class tickets, the immigration experience would have been not much more burdensome than what we experience today in customs: a cursory inspection aboard ship.
However, if they were third class or “steerage” passengers they would have traveled in crowded, and not very sanitary conditions near the bottom of their steamship, spending perhaps two weeks in their bunks before they finally could breathe fresh air. Upon arrival in New York City, the ships would dock at the Hudson or East River piers and allow the first and second class passengers to disembark first. The other passengers were taken from the pier by ferry or barge to Ellis Island where everyone had to undergo a medical and legal inspection before being released. Most likely David had encountered a friend or family member to meet him at Ellis Island, but I cannot know this for sure.
All I can say is that standing on Ellis Island on a humid morning in July with the air so thick and cloudy it felt that you could cut it with a knife, I imagine that it would have been both thrilling to see the Statue of Liberty so close at hand and a little frightening as well to realize that only a narrow channel of water separated you from unforeseen adventures in Manhattan or on the Jersey shore.
Still as I reread my father's words, so many questions run through my mind: Why did David go ahead of the others? Did Marie and her children wait to follow David because their father was ill? Was the original plan for all of them to emigrate together? Why did Marie wait almost three years to follow her sixteen-year-old son? And what did he do for those three years while he waited for the rest of the family to arrive?
I am so grateful to have the story my father left me and to have been able to discover a few more facts with the help of archives and my cousins in the U.S. who share my interest in family history. Now that I have the chance to reconnect with my German cousins in Steinbach-Hallenberg, I may even be able to answer some of those questions that remain.
This is most definitely an episode “to be continued.”
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Putting the Screws on Credit Card Debtors
Today Bank of America joined a number of other credit card issuers in raising credit rates for borrowers who carry a balance. These are not credit card holders who have failed to pay on time, or who have any history of credit problems. Many of them even pay more than the minimum balance each month.
But they do have the misfortune of carrying a balance on their credit cards, putting them among the more than 50% of families who don't or can't pay off their credit card balances each month.
The average balance per open credit card -- including both retail and bank cards -- was $1,157 at the end of 2008. That's up from $1,033 at the end of 2006, a growth of nearly 11 percent in two years. (Source: Experian marketing insight snapshot, March 2009).
Even though credit card borrowing fell in February 2009, the number of credit card holders defaulting on their debt has continued to rise in the very same month. According to Reuters, “U.S. credit card defaults rose in February to their highest level in at least 20 years, with losses particularly severe at American Express Co (AXP.N) and Citigroup (C.N).” Incidentally American Express is the company that recently gained notoreity by paying low-charging customers to close their accounts, and Citigroup has been one of the most aggressive in raising rates.
Recently Congress has considered legislation to stop some of the credit card companies' practices that hurt consumers most:
The bad news for consumers is that these changes will not take place until 2010, and in the meantime, credit card companies are doing everything possible to wring out what they can in fees and interest rate increases while they still can.
To be fair, credit card companies are facing their own limitations on how much they can lend in a financial system where banks are leery even of lending to one another. Since the recession has dragged on, and unemployment has escalated, credit card companies have little way of knowing which of today's “good” customers may be tomorrow's defaulting customers because of escalating job losses. As a result, “Meredith Whitney, one of Wall Street's best known and most bearish bank analysts, estimates that Americans' credit card lines will be cut by $2.7 trillion, or 50 percent, by the end of 2010 -- and fewer Americans will be offered new cards.”
Some of those who pay off their balances every month and enjoy good credit may feel scant sympathy for those who are facing higher rates because they still carry credit card balances. But it's hardly a secure position when even good borrowers are losing their home equity lines and finding other sources of credit drying up.
If credit card companies continue to squeeze those who are paying them on a regular basis, particularly by lowering their credit limits and injuring their creditworthiness, they risk worsening the already weak consumer spending that generates a substantial portion of the United States' gross domestic product (GDP).
What looks like fiscal prudence now could also backfire on credit card companies when the economy begins to rebound, as many consumers may choose to get rid of their cards rather than pay the higher fees and interest rates.
For example, “Tamara Smith of Burlington, Vt., got a notice from Bank of America that her 7.9% rate will increase to nearly 13%. She immediately called the bank and opted out of the change. That means she keeps the 7.9% rate on her roughly $2,000 balance, but can't use the card for new purchases without having the higher rate apply to her entire balance,” (“BofA to Boost Rates on Cards with Balances,” The Wall Street Journal, April 9, 2009).
Credit card companies may find a short-term profit boost in these actions, but as more consumers move from credit to debit cards or even to cash, they may find little reason to return to the companies that tried to ditch or gouge them. And credit card companies may find it much harder to woo back the American consumer in good times when they have treated the consumer so badly when times were bad.
But they do have the misfortune of carrying a balance on their credit cards, putting them among the more than 50% of families who don't or can't pay off their credit card balances each month.
The average balance per open credit card -- including both retail and bank cards -- was $1,157 at the end of 2008. That's up from $1,033 at the end of 2006, a growth of nearly 11 percent in two years. (Source: Experian marketing insight snapshot, March 2009).
Even though credit card borrowing fell in February 2009, the number of credit card holders defaulting on their debt has continued to rise in the very same month. According to Reuters, “U.S. credit card defaults rose in February to their highest level in at least 20 years, with losses particularly severe at American Express Co (AXP.N) and Citigroup (C.N).” Incidentally American Express is the company that recently gained notoreity by paying low-charging customers to close their accounts, and Citigroup has been one of the most aggressive in raising rates.
Recently Congress has considered legislation to stop some of the credit card companies' practices that hurt consumers most:
Suddenly raising interest on accumulated balances
Raising rates across all credit cards held by a borrower because of a late payment made on one card
Charging for payments made over the internet or phone
The bad news for consumers is that these changes will not take place until 2010, and in the meantime, credit card companies are doing everything possible to wring out what they can in fees and interest rate increases while they still can.
To be fair, credit card companies are facing their own limitations on how much they can lend in a financial system where banks are leery even of lending to one another. Since the recession has dragged on, and unemployment has escalated, credit card companies have little way of knowing which of today's “good” customers may be tomorrow's defaulting customers because of escalating job losses. As a result, “Meredith Whitney, one of Wall Street's best known and most bearish bank analysts, estimates that Americans' credit card lines will be cut by $2.7 trillion, or 50 percent, by the end of 2010 -- and fewer Americans will be offered new cards.”
Some of those who pay off their balances every month and enjoy good credit may feel scant sympathy for those who are facing higher rates because they still carry credit card balances. But it's hardly a secure position when even good borrowers are losing their home equity lines and finding other sources of credit drying up.
If credit card companies continue to squeeze those who are paying them on a regular basis, particularly by lowering their credit limits and injuring their creditworthiness, they risk worsening the already weak consumer spending that generates a substantial portion of the United States' gross domestic product (GDP).
What looks like fiscal prudence now could also backfire on credit card companies when the economy begins to rebound, as many consumers may choose to get rid of their cards rather than pay the higher fees and interest rates.
For example, “Tamara Smith of Burlington, Vt., got a notice from Bank of America that her 7.9% rate will increase to nearly 13%. She immediately called the bank and opted out of the change. That means she keeps the 7.9% rate on her roughly $2,000 balance, but can't use the card for new purchases without having the higher rate apply to her entire balance,” (“BofA to Boost Rates on Cards with Balances,” The Wall Street Journal, April 9, 2009).
Credit card companies may find a short-term profit boost in these actions, but as more consumers move from credit to debit cards or even to cash, they may find little reason to return to the companies that tried to ditch or gouge them. And credit card companies may find it much harder to woo back the American consumer in good times when they have treated the consumer so badly when times were bad.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
If It's on the Internet, It must be True
A couple of days ago, my nine-year-old arrived home from school full of excitement. “There's this website I have to show you, mom,” he cried.
Mentally I groaned, thinking I was going to have to see some obscure piece of Lego weaponry or yet another video of exploding Coke and Mentos. “Okay,” I replied reluctantly. “You have to go to www.allaboutexplorers.com, and click on Christopher Columbus,” he continued. Once there I found the following:
I started laughing and Nico joined in, unable to contain himself at the joke. “There was a teacher who read this to her class, and only one kid, one kid in the whole school realized it couldn't be true, Mom,” he said proudly.
“Well,” I told him, “you know how I always tell you: 'If it's on the Internet, it must be true'.” "I'm really glad your librarian showed this to you,” I added. “The Internet is a great resource but you have to be sure that any website you use is a reliable one.”
I kept thinking about this example of a teacher getting kids to think about sources they find on the web, and it made me realize that the Internet has simply writ large a problem that has always existed.
While I sympathize to some degree with teachers who don't want kids just to go to Wikipedia to do all their research and forget how to use a book, I also don't agree with those teachers who simply ban the use of Wikipedia altogether.
With all its flaws, Wikipedia is a monument, not just to collective knowledge, but to the collective regulation of knowledge, that has not been equaled since Diderot and his fellow philosophes conceived of the Encyclopedie. With its constant updating and editorial self-review, the Wikipedia is probably the most peer-reviewed resource on the planet, and one with the capacity to add new sources of knowledge at a rate faster than any other published source.
Rather than telling kids not to use this resource, Wikipedia offers a great place to begin discussing why some sources are more reliable than others and why good research has to go beyond any encyclopedia to be sufficiently extensive.
Beyond Wikipedia, the Internet offers phenomenal resources for research as many libraries continue to put primary sources online, some in facsimile formats, that allow students to get to information that otherwise would require extensive preparation and the expense of travel. For elementary and middle school kids, the most important part of using the Internet is having teachers set up the right kind of portal with pre-selected websites, while high school students can be given tools to help them evaluate the reliability of a website on their own.
At the same time, for those who bemoan that Internet research is replacing a trip to the local library, it's a good idea to remember that just because something is published in a book is no guarantee that it's necessarily the truth.
Michael Bellesiles' Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in History before subsequent scholars began re-examining the validity of his research and thus questioning the basis for this arguments. As a 2002 Emory University Report of the Investigative Committee in the matter of Professor Michael Bellesile finally put it: “[T]he best that can be said of his work with the [historical] record is that he is guilty of unprofessional and misleading work. Every aspect of his work in the probate records is deeply flawed.”
How many students used this highly praised book published by the respected Columbia University Press for their research before it was shown to be “deeply flawed” is anyone's guess. But it does demonstrate that the old adage, “don't judge a book by its cover” should be extended to cover the awards on its jacket and the blurbs on the back.
In fact, some of the most interesting research that I've done myself has stemmed from uncovering primary sources that have been obscured, falsified, or marked as “unreadable” by a book that cites them. For example, Lilian Faderman in her famous work on “romantic friendship” between women in the 18th and 19th century argued that no one ever suspected such friendships to be “lesbian” in character because sexual relations between women were unimaginable at the time.
But much of what Faderman came across as “sources” were works that had been “cleaned up” or even censored by Victorian editors. Her most famous example was a celebrity couple, the Ladies of Llangollen, who ran away as teenagers and spent the rest of their adult lives living together. Their “friendship” was widely idealized at the time, and they received visits from many famous politicans and writers in their day who never publicly stated that there was anything untoward in their domestic arrangements. But in their diaries, the comments could be much less polite. Hester Thrale Piozzi wrote in the manuscript version of her diary that the ladies were in fact “damned sapphists,” a contemporary term for “lesbian,” and a reference that was deliberately left out when her diaries were published years later.
The point is that whether a source exists in cyberspace or on the shelves of the local library or bookstore, we should never take the information we find for granted. Whenever possible, we need to educate our children to seek out the primary sources that others use to build a narrative about an historical event, or a set of medical data, or a social phenomenon like women joining the work force. What they find there may reinforce or it may undermine the narrative they've been reading, but the more they understand the relation between primary sources and the secondary source that builds on them, the better they will be at evaluating the books and web sites they use and thinking about them critically.
Which brings me full circle to my son and his “not really all about explorers” website. “How did you know that the information on Christopher Columbus was false?” I asked him. First he rolled his eyes at me. Then he said, “Well if Columbus sailed in 1492, he couldn't have been born in 1951, could he? He'd, like, have to be 500 years old!”
“Exactly,” I replied. A little arithmetic and some common sense goes a long way when you're researching. A little skepticism doesn't hurt either.
And you've read this on the Internet, so it must be true.
Mentally I groaned, thinking I was going to have to see some obscure piece of Lego weaponry or yet another video of exploding Coke and Mentos. “Okay,” I replied reluctantly. “You have to go to www.allaboutexplorers.com, and click on Christopher Columbus,” he continued. Once there I found the following:
Christopher Columbus was born in 1951 in Sydney, Australia. His home was on the sea and Christopher longed to become an explorer and sailor. However, as a young man, Christopher went to Portugal and got involved in the map making business with his brother, Bartholomew. This business made Columbus a rich man. His books of maps are still found today in every library in the world.
I started laughing and Nico joined in, unable to contain himself at the joke. “There was a teacher who read this to her class, and only one kid, one kid in the whole school realized it couldn't be true, Mom,” he said proudly.
“Well,” I told him, “you know how I always tell you: 'If it's on the Internet, it must be true'.” "I'm really glad your librarian showed this to you,” I added. “The Internet is a great resource but you have to be sure that any website you use is a reliable one.”
I kept thinking about this example of a teacher getting kids to think about sources they find on the web, and it made me realize that the Internet has simply writ large a problem that has always existed.
While I sympathize to some degree with teachers who don't want kids just to go to Wikipedia to do all their research and forget how to use a book, I also don't agree with those teachers who simply ban the use of Wikipedia altogether.
With all its flaws, Wikipedia is a monument, not just to collective knowledge, but to the collective regulation of knowledge, that has not been equaled since Diderot and his fellow philosophes conceived of the Encyclopedie. With its constant updating and editorial self-review, the Wikipedia is probably the most peer-reviewed resource on the planet, and one with the capacity to add new sources of knowledge at a rate faster than any other published source.
Rather than telling kids not to use this resource, Wikipedia offers a great place to begin discussing why some sources are more reliable than others and why good research has to go beyond any encyclopedia to be sufficiently extensive.
Beyond Wikipedia, the Internet offers phenomenal resources for research as many libraries continue to put primary sources online, some in facsimile formats, that allow students to get to information that otherwise would require extensive preparation and the expense of travel. For elementary and middle school kids, the most important part of using the Internet is having teachers set up the right kind of portal with pre-selected websites, while high school students can be given tools to help them evaluate the reliability of a website on their own.
At the same time, for those who bemoan that Internet research is replacing a trip to the local library, it's a good idea to remember that just because something is published in a book is no guarantee that it's necessarily the truth.
Michael Bellesiles' Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in History before subsequent scholars began re-examining the validity of his research and thus questioning the basis for this arguments. As a 2002 Emory University Report of the Investigative Committee in the matter of Professor Michael Bellesile finally put it: “[T]he best that can be said of his work with the [historical] record is that he is guilty of unprofessional and misleading work. Every aspect of his work in the probate records is deeply flawed.”
How many students used this highly praised book published by the respected Columbia University Press for their research before it was shown to be “deeply flawed” is anyone's guess. But it does demonstrate that the old adage, “don't judge a book by its cover” should be extended to cover the awards on its jacket and the blurbs on the back.
In fact, some of the most interesting research that I've done myself has stemmed from uncovering primary sources that have been obscured, falsified, or marked as “unreadable” by a book that cites them. For example, Lilian Faderman in her famous work on “romantic friendship” between women in the 18th and 19th century argued that no one ever suspected such friendships to be “lesbian” in character because sexual relations between women were unimaginable at the time.
But much of what Faderman came across as “sources” were works that had been “cleaned up” or even censored by Victorian editors. Her most famous example was a celebrity couple, the Ladies of Llangollen, who ran away as teenagers and spent the rest of their adult lives living together. Their “friendship” was widely idealized at the time, and they received visits from many famous politicans and writers in their day who never publicly stated that there was anything untoward in their domestic arrangements. But in their diaries, the comments could be much less polite. Hester Thrale Piozzi wrote in the manuscript version of her diary that the ladies were in fact “damned sapphists,” a contemporary term for “lesbian,” and a reference that was deliberately left out when her diaries were published years later.
The point is that whether a source exists in cyberspace or on the shelves of the local library or bookstore, we should never take the information we find for granted. Whenever possible, we need to educate our children to seek out the primary sources that others use to build a narrative about an historical event, or a set of medical data, or a social phenomenon like women joining the work force. What they find there may reinforce or it may undermine the narrative they've been reading, but the more they understand the relation between primary sources and the secondary source that builds on them, the better they will be at evaluating the books and web sites they use and thinking about them critically.
Which brings me full circle to my son and his “not really all about explorers” website. “How did you know that the information on Christopher Columbus was false?” I asked him. First he rolled his eyes at me. Then he said, “Well if Columbus sailed in 1492, he couldn't have been born in 1951, could he? He'd, like, have to be 500 years old!”
“Exactly,” I replied. A little arithmetic and some common sense goes a long way when you're researching. A little skepticism doesn't hurt either.
And you've read this on the Internet, so it must be true.
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