Analysts Ratings: Bank of America Corp (NYSE: BAC) Analysts Raise Price Target on Apple, Inc (NASDAQ: AAPL)
Copyright by American Banking News
May 30th, 2010
http://www.americanbankingnews.com/2010/05/30/bank-of-america-corp-nyse-bac-analysts-raise-price-target-on-apple-inc-nasdaq-aaplbank-of-america-corp-nyse-bac%E2%80%99s-merrill-lynch-division-analysts-raised-their-price-target-on-shares/
Filed Under: Analysts Ratings
Bank of America Corp (NYSE: BAC)’s Merrill Lynch division analysts raised their price target on shares of Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) on Friday from $300.00 to $325.00 and maintained their “buy” rating on the company.
The analysts said that shares of Apple make for a strong valuation play given the recent correction.
The analyst raised his FY10 earnings per share estimate on Apple from $13.19 to $13.84, his FY11 estimate from $14.15 to $17.00 and his FY12 estimate from $15.36 to $19.26. The consensus estimate is currently looking for FY10 earnings per share of $13.32 and FY11 earnings per share of $15.43. The analyst raised his FY10 forecast for iPad’s from 2.5 million to 3.7 million and his FY11 estimate on iPhones from 37.5 million to 43.5 million.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Washington Post Editorial: China's Korea crisis
Washington Post Editorial: China's Korea crisis
Copyright by The Washington Post
Monday, May 31, 2010
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/30/AR2010053003382.html
CHINA HAS BEEN treating its neighbors, and the world, to a demonstration of why its rising power is not necessarily to be welcomed. Though it has become undeniable that its neighbor and client, North Korea, committed an act of war by sinking a South Korean warship in March, Beijing continues to shield the loathsome regime of Kim Jong Il. An authoritative investigation by a multinational commission has produced fragments of the torpedo fired by the North's submarine, yet Chinese officials continue to pretend they don't know the facts of what happened. Their public statements are limited to empty calls for "restraint."
A visit last week to Beijing and Seoul by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton served, at least, to put China on the spot. Ms. Clinton rightly pressed the Chinese leadership to consider the commission's 400-page report. She spoke publicly about the need for "a strong but measured response" to the incident as well as cooperation on the future direction of North Korea, which some experts believe may be unraveling.
China's best response came Friday when Premier Wen Jiabao, on a visit to Seoul, reportedly told President Lee Myun-bak in a closed meeting that Beijing would not protect the North if it concluded that the North was responsible. South Korean officials took that as a hint that China might not oppose Mr. Lee's plan to seek a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the Kim regime. Yet China has offered no sign that it will take any action of its own to pressure the North, though it has far more leverage than any other country. Indeed, President Hu Jintao hosted Mr. Kim this month -- and probably committed to supply him with more aid -- even after the naval attack.
In the short term China's behavior has benefited the United States. Watching Beijing defend the indefensible probably helped the Japanese government settle a dispute with the Obama administration over a U.S. base on Okinawa. It has shown South Koreans as well as people throughout Asia why the United States remains an indispensable guarantor of security in the region.
Still, an end to the crisis between the Koreas will require a more responsible approach by China. Abstaining from a Security Council resolution is not enough; Beijing must act decisively to restrain Mr. Kim from further provocations. The events of the past week are a sign that China cannot prop up a criminal client state and also be regarded as benign in its growing power. Sooner rather than later, it will have a choice to make.
Copyright by The Washington Post
Monday, May 31, 2010
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/30/AR2010053003382.html
CHINA HAS BEEN treating its neighbors, and the world, to a demonstration of why its rising power is not necessarily to be welcomed. Though it has become undeniable that its neighbor and client, North Korea, committed an act of war by sinking a South Korean warship in March, Beijing continues to shield the loathsome regime of Kim Jong Il. An authoritative investigation by a multinational commission has produced fragments of the torpedo fired by the North's submarine, yet Chinese officials continue to pretend they don't know the facts of what happened. Their public statements are limited to empty calls for "restraint."
A visit last week to Beijing and Seoul by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton served, at least, to put China on the spot. Ms. Clinton rightly pressed the Chinese leadership to consider the commission's 400-page report. She spoke publicly about the need for "a strong but measured response" to the incident as well as cooperation on the future direction of North Korea, which some experts believe may be unraveling.
China's best response came Friday when Premier Wen Jiabao, on a visit to Seoul, reportedly told President Lee Myun-bak in a closed meeting that Beijing would not protect the North if it concluded that the North was responsible. South Korean officials took that as a hint that China might not oppose Mr. Lee's plan to seek a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the Kim regime. Yet China has offered no sign that it will take any action of its own to pressure the North, though it has far more leverage than any other country. Indeed, President Hu Jintao hosted Mr. Kim this month -- and probably committed to supply him with more aid -- even after the naval attack.
In the short term China's behavior has benefited the United States. Watching Beijing defend the indefensible probably helped the Japanese government settle a dispute with the Obama administration over a U.S. base on Okinawa. It has shown South Koreans as well as people throughout Asia why the United States remains an indispensable guarantor of security in the region.
Still, an end to the crisis between the Koreas will require a more responsible approach by China. Abstaining from a Security Council resolution is not enough; Beijing must act decisively to restrain Mr. Kim from further provocations. The events of the past week are a sign that China cannot prop up a criminal client state and also be regarded as benign in its growing power. Sooner rather than later, it will have a choice to make.
India’s economy grows 8.6 per cent
India’s economy grows 8.6 per cent
By James Lamont in New Delhi
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010
Published: May 31 2010 08:00 | Last updated: May 31 2010 11:34
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/aa0dd416-6c7e-11df-91c8-00144feab49a.html
The Indian economy grew 8.6 per cent in the quarter ending March this year compared with the same period last year, returning one the world’s fastest growing emerging markets close to where it was before the global financial crisis struck two years ago.
The strong performance, buoyed by government spending and a recovery in manufacturing, will add pressure on the Reserve Bank of India to raise interest rates to curb high inflation in the coming weeks.
The economy grew 7.4 per cent in the year ending March, much in line with finance ministry forecasts.
Brian Jackson, senior strategist at the Royal Bank of Canada, said the data “basically confirms the strong monthly industrial production data we already had, but it should reassure the RBI that they made the right decision to start hiking rates a few months ago.”
“The near-term outlook for growth also looks solid, suggesting that the RBI's focus will remain on dealing with inflation, which is still uncomfortably high.”
Last week, Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister, said it was his ambition to take India’s now largely service driven economy to 10 per cent economic growth in the “medium term” to put India’s expansion on a par with its neighbour China.
Mr Singh also tried to tame fears of rising prices by saying that his government would help pull wholesale price inflation back to 5-6 per cent by December from near double digits.
The Congress party-led government has faced fierce criticism from the Hindu nationalist opposition Bharatiya Janata party for failing to cool rising prices that it argues have brought more pain than the benefit of high rates of economic growth.
Farm output, in a region heavily dependent on seasonal rains, remained a concern. In the quarter ending March this year, farm production grew by 0.7 per cent. Weakness in agriculture had checked the speed of India's economic recovery after growth of 9 per cent a year before the global financial crisis. But forecasts of normal monsoon rains this summer bring hope of a stronger contribution from the farm sector.
Some economists have warned that complacency in an economy whose fast-paced growth is largely supported by domestic consumption and public spending is one of India's biggest perils. They have called for the speedier adoption of measures to address the inadequacies of education, health and infrastructure.
India’s policymakers have shrugged off fears of a fallout from the European sovereign debt crisis on demand for Indian exports in spite of falls in the rupee and the local stockmarkets.
Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the deputy chairman of the powerful planning commission, however, said India needs a recovery in the global economy to sustain its high levels of economic growth. He described India’s recovery from the global economic downturn as “excellent”.
The finance ministry has predicted economic growth would rise to as much as 8.75 per cent in the fiscal year that began in April.
By James Lamont in New Delhi
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010
Published: May 31 2010 08:00 | Last updated: May 31 2010 11:34
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/aa0dd416-6c7e-11df-91c8-00144feab49a.html
The Indian economy grew 8.6 per cent in the quarter ending March this year compared with the same period last year, returning one the world’s fastest growing emerging markets close to where it was before the global financial crisis struck two years ago.
The strong performance, buoyed by government spending and a recovery in manufacturing, will add pressure on the Reserve Bank of India to raise interest rates to curb high inflation in the coming weeks.
The economy grew 7.4 per cent in the year ending March, much in line with finance ministry forecasts.
Brian Jackson, senior strategist at the Royal Bank of Canada, said the data “basically confirms the strong monthly industrial production data we already had, but it should reassure the RBI that they made the right decision to start hiking rates a few months ago.”
“The near-term outlook for growth also looks solid, suggesting that the RBI's focus will remain on dealing with inflation, which is still uncomfortably high.”
Last week, Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister, said it was his ambition to take India’s now largely service driven economy to 10 per cent economic growth in the “medium term” to put India’s expansion on a par with its neighbour China.
Mr Singh also tried to tame fears of rising prices by saying that his government would help pull wholesale price inflation back to 5-6 per cent by December from near double digits.
The Congress party-led government has faced fierce criticism from the Hindu nationalist opposition Bharatiya Janata party for failing to cool rising prices that it argues have brought more pain than the benefit of high rates of economic growth.
Farm output, in a region heavily dependent on seasonal rains, remained a concern. In the quarter ending March this year, farm production grew by 0.7 per cent. Weakness in agriculture had checked the speed of India's economic recovery after growth of 9 per cent a year before the global financial crisis. But forecasts of normal monsoon rains this summer bring hope of a stronger contribution from the farm sector.
Some economists have warned that complacency in an economy whose fast-paced growth is largely supported by domestic consumption and public spending is one of India's biggest perils. They have called for the speedier adoption of measures to address the inadequacies of education, health and infrastructure.
India’s policymakers have shrugged off fears of a fallout from the European sovereign debt crisis on demand for Indian exports in spite of falls in the rupee and the local stockmarkets.
Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the deputy chairman of the powerful planning commission, however, said India needs a recovery in the global economy to sustain its high levels of economic growth. He described India’s recovery from the global economic downturn as “excellent”.
The finance ministry has predicted economic growth would rise to as much as 8.75 per cent in the fiscal year that began in April.
Chinese Edge Toward Supercomputing Record
Chinese Edge Toward Supercomputing Record
By JOHN MARKOFF
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/science/01compute.html?hpw
A Chinese supercomputer has ranked as the world’s second fastest machine, surpassing European and Japanese systems and underscoring China’s aggressive commitment to science and technology.
The Dawning Nebulae, based at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, China, has achieved a sustained computing speed of 1.27 petaflops — the equivalent of one thousand trillion mathematical operations per second — in the twice annual ranking of the world’s fastest 500 hundred computer.
The newest Top 500 ranking is scheduled to be made public on Monday at the International Supercomputer Conference in Hamburg, Germany.
The Chinese machine is actually now ranked as the world’s fastest in terms of theoretical peak performance, but that is considered a less significant measure than the actual computing speed achieved on a standardized computing test.
The world’s fastest computer remains the Cray Jaguar supercomputer, based at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, used mostly for nuclear weapons simulation. Last November it was measured at 1.75 petaflops.
In the previous year’s ranking, the Chinese had the fifth fastest computer, a system that was based at a National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China. That machine has now dropped to seventh in the rankings.
The U.S. continues to be both the dominant manufacturer as well as the nation with the most supercomputers on the Top 500 ranking. This year, the U.S. had 282 of the world’s fastest 500 computers, an increase from 277 last November. However, the Chinese appear to be intent on challenging U.S. dominance. There had been some expectation that they would make an effort to complete a system based on Chinese designed components in time for the June ranking. The Nebulae is based on chips from Intel and Nvidia.
The new system, which is based on a microprocessor that has been designed and manufactured in China, is now expected later this year. A number of supercomputing industry scientists and engineers said that it is possible that the new machine will claim the title of world’s fastest.
“The one development that is really clear is that the Chinese are pushing at the high end,” said Horst Simon, associate laboratory director for computing science at Lawrence Berkeley laboratory.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if by the end of this year they surpass the scientific computing power of the EU countries combined and have a computer system with an achieved performance to reach the number one position on the Top 500,” said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee and one of the researchers who has organized the Top 500 ranking.
The U.S. designed the first machines that were defined as supercomputers during the 1960s and has rarely been dislodged from his controlling position as technology leader. In 2002, however, the Japanese Government’s Earth Simulator set off shockwaves in Washington D.C. when that system briefly claimed the number one position on the Top 500 list.
The U.S. began investing heavily in the computing systems which are used for scientific and engineering problems ranging from climate simulation to automotive design. The U.S. broke the petaflop barrier in 2008 and is now preparing to launch another sustained push to build systems capable of computing at what is known as exascale performance — one thousand times faster than today’s fastest systems. The goal is to reach that technology generation sometime between 2018 and 2020.
“Computational scientists in various areas, such as climate, nuclear energy, combustion, advanced material CO2 sequestration etc., have made the case that they need an exascale system to advance their fields,” said Dr. Dongarra.
By JOHN MARKOFF
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/science/01compute.html?hpw
A Chinese supercomputer has ranked as the world’s second fastest machine, surpassing European and Japanese systems and underscoring China’s aggressive commitment to science and technology.
The Dawning Nebulae, based at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, China, has achieved a sustained computing speed of 1.27 petaflops — the equivalent of one thousand trillion mathematical operations per second — in the twice annual ranking of the world’s fastest 500 hundred computer.
The newest Top 500 ranking is scheduled to be made public on Monday at the International Supercomputer Conference in Hamburg, Germany.
The Chinese machine is actually now ranked as the world’s fastest in terms of theoretical peak performance, but that is considered a less significant measure than the actual computing speed achieved on a standardized computing test.
The world’s fastest computer remains the Cray Jaguar supercomputer, based at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, used mostly for nuclear weapons simulation. Last November it was measured at 1.75 petaflops.
In the previous year’s ranking, the Chinese had the fifth fastest computer, a system that was based at a National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China. That machine has now dropped to seventh in the rankings.
The U.S. continues to be both the dominant manufacturer as well as the nation with the most supercomputers on the Top 500 ranking. This year, the U.S. had 282 of the world’s fastest 500 computers, an increase from 277 last November. However, the Chinese appear to be intent on challenging U.S. dominance. There had been some expectation that they would make an effort to complete a system based on Chinese designed components in time for the June ranking. The Nebulae is based on chips from Intel and Nvidia.
The new system, which is based on a microprocessor that has been designed and manufactured in China, is now expected later this year. A number of supercomputing industry scientists and engineers said that it is possible that the new machine will claim the title of world’s fastest.
“The one development that is really clear is that the Chinese are pushing at the high end,” said Horst Simon, associate laboratory director for computing science at Lawrence Berkeley laboratory.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if by the end of this year they surpass the scientific computing power of the EU countries combined and have a computer system with an achieved performance to reach the number one position on the Top 500,” said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee and one of the researchers who has organized the Top 500 ranking.
The U.S. designed the first machines that were defined as supercomputers during the 1960s and has rarely been dislodged from his controlling position as technology leader. In 2002, however, the Japanese Government’s Earth Simulator set off shockwaves in Washington D.C. when that system briefly claimed the number one position on the Top 500 list.
The U.S. began investing heavily in the computing systems which are used for scientific and engineering problems ranging from climate simulation to automotive design. The U.S. broke the petaflop barrier in 2008 and is now preparing to launch another sustained push to build systems capable of computing at what is known as exascale performance — one thousand times faster than today’s fastest systems. The goal is to reach that technology generation sometime between 2018 and 2020.
“Computational scientists in various areas, such as climate, nuclear energy, combustion, advanced material CO2 sequestration etc., have made the case that they need an exascale system to advance their fields,” said Dr. Dongarra.
Prospective Catholic Priests Face Sexuality Hurdles
Prospective Catholic Priests Face Sexuality Hurdles
By PAUL VITELLO
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/nyregion/31gay.html?hpw
Every job interview has its awkward moments, but in recent years, the standard interview for men seeking a life in the Roman Catholic priesthood has made the awkward moment a requirement.
“When was the last time you had sex?” all candidates for the seminary are asked. (The preferred answer: not for three years or more.)
“What kind of sexual experiences have you had?” is another common question. “Do you like pornography?”
Depending on the replies, and the results of standardized psychological tests, the interview may proceed into deeper waters: “Do you like children?” and “Do you like children more than you like people your own age?”
It is part of a soul-baring obstacle course prospective seminarians are forced to run in the aftermath of a sexual abuse crisis that church leaders have decided to confront, in part, by scrubbing their academies of potential molesters, according to church officials and psychologists who screen candidates in New York and the rest of the country.
But many of the questions are also aimed at another, equally sensitive mission: deciding whether gay applicants should be denied admission under complex recent guidelines from the Vatican that do not explicitly bar all gay candidates but would exclude most of them, even some who are celibate.
Scientific studies have found no link between sexual orientation and abuse, and the church is careful to describe its two initiatives as more or less separate. One top adviser to American seminaries characterized them as “two circles that might overlap here and there.”
Still, since the abuse crisis erupted in 2002, curtailing the entry of gay men into the priesthood has become one the church’s highest priorities. And that task has fallen to seminary directors and a cadre of psychologists who say that culling candidates has become an arduous process of testing, interviewing and making decisions — based on social science, church dogma and gut instinct.
“The best way I can put it, it’s not black and white,” said the adviser, the Rev. David Toups, the director of the secretariat of clergy, consecrated life and vocations of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. “It’s more like one of those things where it’s hard to define, but ‘I know it when I see it.’ ”
Many church officials have been reluctant to discuss the screening process, and its details differ from diocese to diocese. In the densely populated Diocese of Brooklyn, officials are confident of their results in one respect.
“We have no gay men in our seminary at this time,” said Dr. Robert Palumbo, a psychologist who has screened seminary candidates at the diocese’s Cathedral Seminary Residence in Douglaston, Queens, for 10 years. “I’m pretty sure of it.” Whether that reflects rigorous vetting or the reluctance of gay men to apply, he could not say. “I’m just reporting what is,” he said.
Concern over gay men in the priesthood has simmered in the church for centuries, and has been heightened in recent years by claims from some Catholic scholars that 25 percent to 50 percent of priests in the United States are gay. The church has never conducted its own survey, but other experts have estimated the number to be far smaller.
The sexual abuse scandal has prompted some conservative bishops to lay blame for the crisis on a “homosexual subculture” in the priesthood. While no one has proposed expelling gay priests, the crisis has pitted those traditionalists against other Catholics who attribute the problem to priests, gay and straight, with dysfunctional personalities.
In 2005, the Vatican sidestepped that ideological debate, but seemed to appease conservatives by issuing guidelines that would strictly limit the admission of gay men to Catholic seminaries.
The guidelines, which bolstered existing rules that had been widely unenforced, defined homosexuality in both clear-cut and ambiguous ways: Men who actively “practice homosexuality” should be barred. But seminary rectors were left to discern the meaning of less obvious instructions to reject candidates who “show profoundly deep-rooted homosexual tendencies, or support the so-called gay culture.”
Though some Catholics saw room in that language for admitting celibate gay men, the Vatican followed up in 2008 with a clarification. “It is not enough to be sure that he is capable of abstaining from genital activity,” ruled the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education, which issued the initial guidelines. “It is also necessary to evaluate his sexual orientation.”
Some seminary directors were baffled by the word “orientation,” said Thomas G. Plante, a psychologist and the director of the Spirituality and Health Institute at Santa Clara University, who screens seminary candidates for several dioceses in California and nationwide.
Could a psychologically mature gay person, committed to celibacy, never become a priest? Dr. Plante said several admissions officers asked. Could the church afford to turn away good candidates in the midst of a critical priest shortage?
The Vatican permits every bishop and leader of a religious order to make those decisions, which vary from stricter to more liberal interpretations of the rules. But the methods of reaching them have become increasingly standard, experts say.
Msgr. Stephen Rossetti, a psychologist at Catholic University who has screened seminarians and once headed a treatment center for abusive priests, said the screening could be “very intrusive.” But he added, “We are looking for two basic qualities: the absence of pathology and the presence of health.”
To that end, most candidates are likely to be asked not only about past sexual activities but also about masturbation fantasies, consumption of alcohol, relationships with parents and the causes of romantic breakups. All must take H.I.V. tests and complete written exams like the 567-question Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, which screens for, among other things, depression, paranoia and gender confusion. In another test, candidates must submit sketches of anatomically correct human figures.
In interviews by psychologists — who are usually selected because they are Catholic therapists with religious views matching those of the local church leadership — candidates are also likely to be asked about their strategies for managing sexual desire.
“Do you take cold showers? Do you take long runs?” said Dr. Plante, describing a typical barrage of questions intended both to gather information and to let screeners assess the candidate’s poise and self-awareness — or to observe the tics and eye-avoidance that may signal something else.
In seminaries that seek to hew closely to the Vatican rules, a candidate may be measured by the extent to which he defines himself as gay.
The church views gay sex as a sin and homosexual tendencies as a psychological disorder, but it does not bar chaste gay men from participating in the sacraments. That degree of acceptance does not extend to ordination.
“Whether he is celibate or not, the person who views himself as a ‘homosexual person,’ rather than as a person called to be a spiritual father — that person should not be a priest,” said Father Toups, of the bishops’ conference.
Beyond his assertion that “I know it when I see it,” no one interviewed for this article was able to describe exactly how screeners or seminary directors determine whether someone’s sexual orientation defines him. Some Catholics have expressed fear that such vagueness leads to bias and arbitrariness. Others call it a distraction from the more important objective of finding good, emotionally healthy priests.
“A criterion like this may not ensure that you are getting the best candidates,” said Mark D. Jordan, the R. R. Niebuhr professor at Harvard Divinity School, who has studied homosexuality in the Catholic priesthood. “Though it might get you people who lie or who are so confused they do not really know who they are.”
“And not the least irony here,” he added, “is that these new regulations are being enforced in many cases by seminary directors who are themselves gay.”
It is difficult to gauge reaction to the recent guidelines among seminary students and gay priests. Priests who once defended the work of gay men in the priesthood have become reluctant to speak publicly.
“It is impossible for them to come forward in this atmosphere,” said Marianne Duddy-Burke, the executive director of DignityUSA, an advocacy group for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Catholics. “The bishops have scapegoated gay priests because gays are still an acceptable scapegoat in this society, particularly among weekly churchgoers.”
Seminary officials of the Diocese of Brooklyn and the Archdiocese of New York would not permit a reporter to interview seminarians. But the Brooklyn diocese did allow a reporter to talk to its psychologist, Dr. Palumbo, and its director of vocations, the Rev. Kevin J. Sweeney, whose incoming classes of three to five seminarians each year make him one of the more successful vocation directors in the country. Half of the nation’s seminaries have one or two new arrivals each a year, and one-quarter get none, according to a recent church study.
Father Sweeney said the new rules were not the order of battle for a witch hunt. “We do not say that homosexuals are bad people,” he said. “And sure, homosexuals have been good priests.”
“But it has to do with our view of marriage,” he said. “A priest can only give his life to the church in the sense that a man gives his life to a female spouse. A homosexual man cannot have the same relationship. It’s not about condemning anybody. It’s about our world view.”
By PAUL VITELLO
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/nyregion/31gay.html?hpw
Every job interview has its awkward moments, but in recent years, the standard interview for men seeking a life in the Roman Catholic priesthood has made the awkward moment a requirement.
“When was the last time you had sex?” all candidates for the seminary are asked. (The preferred answer: not for three years or more.)
“What kind of sexual experiences have you had?” is another common question. “Do you like pornography?”
Depending on the replies, and the results of standardized psychological tests, the interview may proceed into deeper waters: “Do you like children?” and “Do you like children more than you like people your own age?”
It is part of a soul-baring obstacle course prospective seminarians are forced to run in the aftermath of a sexual abuse crisis that church leaders have decided to confront, in part, by scrubbing their academies of potential molesters, according to church officials and psychologists who screen candidates in New York and the rest of the country.
But many of the questions are also aimed at another, equally sensitive mission: deciding whether gay applicants should be denied admission under complex recent guidelines from the Vatican that do not explicitly bar all gay candidates but would exclude most of them, even some who are celibate.
Scientific studies have found no link between sexual orientation and abuse, and the church is careful to describe its two initiatives as more or less separate. One top adviser to American seminaries characterized them as “two circles that might overlap here and there.”
Still, since the abuse crisis erupted in 2002, curtailing the entry of gay men into the priesthood has become one the church’s highest priorities. And that task has fallen to seminary directors and a cadre of psychologists who say that culling candidates has become an arduous process of testing, interviewing and making decisions — based on social science, church dogma and gut instinct.
“The best way I can put it, it’s not black and white,” said the adviser, the Rev. David Toups, the director of the secretariat of clergy, consecrated life and vocations of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. “It’s more like one of those things where it’s hard to define, but ‘I know it when I see it.’ ”
Many church officials have been reluctant to discuss the screening process, and its details differ from diocese to diocese. In the densely populated Diocese of Brooklyn, officials are confident of their results in one respect.
“We have no gay men in our seminary at this time,” said Dr. Robert Palumbo, a psychologist who has screened seminary candidates at the diocese’s Cathedral Seminary Residence in Douglaston, Queens, for 10 years. “I’m pretty sure of it.” Whether that reflects rigorous vetting or the reluctance of gay men to apply, he could not say. “I’m just reporting what is,” he said.
Concern over gay men in the priesthood has simmered in the church for centuries, and has been heightened in recent years by claims from some Catholic scholars that 25 percent to 50 percent of priests in the United States are gay. The church has never conducted its own survey, but other experts have estimated the number to be far smaller.
The sexual abuse scandal has prompted some conservative bishops to lay blame for the crisis on a “homosexual subculture” in the priesthood. While no one has proposed expelling gay priests, the crisis has pitted those traditionalists against other Catholics who attribute the problem to priests, gay and straight, with dysfunctional personalities.
In 2005, the Vatican sidestepped that ideological debate, but seemed to appease conservatives by issuing guidelines that would strictly limit the admission of gay men to Catholic seminaries.
The guidelines, which bolstered existing rules that had been widely unenforced, defined homosexuality in both clear-cut and ambiguous ways: Men who actively “practice homosexuality” should be barred. But seminary rectors were left to discern the meaning of less obvious instructions to reject candidates who “show profoundly deep-rooted homosexual tendencies, or support the so-called gay culture.”
Though some Catholics saw room in that language for admitting celibate gay men, the Vatican followed up in 2008 with a clarification. “It is not enough to be sure that he is capable of abstaining from genital activity,” ruled the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education, which issued the initial guidelines. “It is also necessary to evaluate his sexual orientation.”
Some seminary directors were baffled by the word “orientation,” said Thomas G. Plante, a psychologist and the director of the Spirituality and Health Institute at Santa Clara University, who screens seminary candidates for several dioceses in California and nationwide.
Could a psychologically mature gay person, committed to celibacy, never become a priest? Dr. Plante said several admissions officers asked. Could the church afford to turn away good candidates in the midst of a critical priest shortage?
The Vatican permits every bishop and leader of a religious order to make those decisions, which vary from stricter to more liberal interpretations of the rules. But the methods of reaching them have become increasingly standard, experts say.
Msgr. Stephen Rossetti, a psychologist at Catholic University who has screened seminarians and once headed a treatment center for abusive priests, said the screening could be “very intrusive.” But he added, “We are looking for two basic qualities: the absence of pathology and the presence of health.”
To that end, most candidates are likely to be asked not only about past sexual activities but also about masturbation fantasies, consumption of alcohol, relationships with parents and the causes of romantic breakups. All must take H.I.V. tests and complete written exams like the 567-question Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, which screens for, among other things, depression, paranoia and gender confusion. In another test, candidates must submit sketches of anatomically correct human figures.
In interviews by psychologists — who are usually selected because they are Catholic therapists with religious views matching those of the local church leadership — candidates are also likely to be asked about their strategies for managing sexual desire.
“Do you take cold showers? Do you take long runs?” said Dr. Plante, describing a typical barrage of questions intended both to gather information and to let screeners assess the candidate’s poise and self-awareness — or to observe the tics and eye-avoidance that may signal something else.
In seminaries that seek to hew closely to the Vatican rules, a candidate may be measured by the extent to which he defines himself as gay.
The church views gay sex as a sin and homosexual tendencies as a psychological disorder, but it does not bar chaste gay men from participating in the sacraments. That degree of acceptance does not extend to ordination.
“Whether he is celibate or not, the person who views himself as a ‘homosexual person,’ rather than as a person called to be a spiritual father — that person should not be a priest,” said Father Toups, of the bishops’ conference.
Beyond his assertion that “I know it when I see it,” no one interviewed for this article was able to describe exactly how screeners or seminary directors determine whether someone’s sexual orientation defines him. Some Catholics have expressed fear that such vagueness leads to bias and arbitrariness. Others call it a distraction from the more important objective of finding good, emotionally healthy priests.
“A criterion like this may not ensure that you are getting the best candidates,” said Mark D. Jordan, the R. R. Niebuhr professor at Harvard Divinity School, who has studied homosexuality in the Catholic priesthood. “Though it might get you people who lie or who are so confused they do not really know who they are.”
“And not the least irony here,” he added, “is that these new regulations are being enforced in many cases by seminary directors who are themselves gay.”
It is difficult to gauge reaction to the recent guidelines among seminary students and gay priests. Priests who once defended the work of gay men in the priesthood have become reluctant to speak publicly.
“It is impossible for them to come forward in this atmosphere,” said Marianne Duddy-Burke, the executive director of DignityUSA, an advocacy group for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Catholics. “The bishops have scapegoated gay priests because gays are still an acceptable scapegoat in this society, particularly among weekly churchgoers.”
Seminary officials of the Diocese of Brooklyn and the Archdiocese of New York would not permit a reporter to interview seminarians. But the Brooklyn diocese did allow a reporter to talk to its psychologist, Dr. Palumbo, and its director of vocations, the Rev. Kevin J. Sweeney, whose incoming classes of three to five seminarians each year make him one of the more successful vocation directors in the country. Half of the nation’s seminaries have one or two new arrivals each a year, and one-quarter get none, according to a recent church study.
Father Sweeney said the new rules were not the order of battle for a witch hunt. “We do not say that homosexuals are bad people,” he said. “And sure, homosexuals have been good priests.”
“But it has to do with our view of marriage,” he said. “A priest can only give his life to the church in the sense that a man gives his life to a female spouse. A homosexual man cannot have the same relationship. It’s not about condemning anybody. It’s about our world view.”
Democrats Turn G.O.P. Mantra on Its Head
Democrats Turn G.O.P. Mantra on Its Head
By JOHN HARWOOD
Copyright by The New York Times
May 31, 2010, 11:10 AM
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/democrats-turn-g-o-p-mantra-on-its-head/?hpw
With the American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act, House Democratic leaders opened themselves up to both ends of Republicans’ familiar “tax and spend” barbs.
The bill, passed last week, would raise taxes on Wall Street executives and multinational corporations. And it would spend more than $100 billion in the name of creating jobs and extending federal benefits for the jobless.
To overcome opposition, Democrats were forced to make concessions by substantially trimming spending — not the higher taxes.
That points to a new reality as Republicans seek inroads against President Obama and his party in the midterm elections. If they changed the order of their slogan to reflect its current political throw-weight, Republicans would attack Democrats for “spend and tax,” not the other way around.
“The spending issue has supplanted taxes in the G.O.P. mantra,” said Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster. Democrats acknowledge their vulnerability.
“As a metaphor, it is powerful,” said Mark Mellman, a strategist for Democratic leaders. Amid near double-digit unemployment and trillion-dollar deficits, Mr. Mellman said, Americans link spending with “long-term economic decline, lack of discipline, wasted money, money spent bailing out Wall Street instead of helping Main Street.”
The primacy of spending as a hot-button issue may fade if economic recovery continues and if Washington moves aggressively to shrink budget deficits. How much that will help Mr. Obama and his party is another question.
Cuts and Increases
In 1980, Ronald Reagan placed tax cuts at the center of his campaign to oust President
Jimmy Carter and make conservatism the ascendant political force.
In 1992, Ross Perot’s denunciation of deficits helped Bill Clinton wrest the White House from Republican control.
By 2000, economic boom times had eliminated the deficit issue and limited the drawing power of tax cuts. For his presidential victories, George W. Bush relied more on appeals to values and national security.
That spending has taken center stage now is no mystery. First, Mr. Bush guided the budget from surplus to deficit with two tax cuts, new prescription drug benefits under Medicare and increased security spending after Sept. 11, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Then, Washington responded to economic crisis by writing two gargantuan checks. In the fall of 2008, Mr. Bush signed a $700 billion bailout for the financial system. In early 2009, Mr. Obama signed a $787 billion stimulus package in hopes of kick-starting the economy out of recession.
This year, Mr. Obama added a third mammoth expenditure: a health care overhaul priced at $938 billion over 10 years.
Never mind that the Congressional Budget Office says tax increases, spending cuts and cost savings associated with the health bill will actually reduce the deficit.
Nor does it matter, politically, that the Wall Street bailout will end up costing taxpayers a fraction of that $700 billion. Or that Democrats have revived “pay-go” procedures earlier abandoned by Republicans, under which Congress must offset most new entitlement spending or tax cuts with corresponding spending cuts or tax increases.
Mr. Obama’s party is in charge. And the juxtaposition of his activism with the specter of overreach, as dramatized lately by the debt crisis in Greece, has turned spending priorities Americans once valued into the political equivalent of toxic assets.
Arguing Austerity
For many voters, noted Stan Greenberg, a Democratic strategist, “spending is debt — seen as threatening to the long-term economic future.”
An argument now under way inside Mr. Obama’s economic team will settle how, and how quickly, Democrats answer that vulnerability.
Lawrence H. Summers, director of the National Economic Council, insisted last week that the recovery remained too fragile for an immediate turn toward austerity.
“I cannot agree with those who suggest that it somehow threatens the future to provide truly temporary, high-bang-for-the-buck jobs and growth measures,” Mr. Summers said in a speech. “Rather, assuring as rapid a recovery as possible strengthens our future economy, our future prosperity, with many benefits, including a greater ability to manage our debts.”
Peter R. Orszag, the White House budget director, favors a more aggressive approach to deficit reduction once a presidential commission reports in December. That could take some of the sting out of Republican attacks on spending.
Of course, that could also leave Democrats exposed once again on taxes, an issue that has been defused lately by Mr. Obama’s pledge to focus on only high-income Americans. Some Democratic economists insist taming long-term deficits will require setting that promise aside.
For now, Democrats must cope with a shift in attitudes they could not have imagined a few years ago, when they fretted over winning back so-called values voters.
While struggling to pass new spending for the unemployed, House Democrats last week voted to end the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and clear the way for gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military. That objective proved easier to achieve.
By JOHN HARWOOD
Copyright by The New York Times
May 31, 2010, 11:10 AM
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/democrats-turn-g-o-p-mantra-on-its-head/?hpw
With the American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act, House Democratic leaders opened themselves up to both ends of Republicans’ familiar “tax and spend” barbs.
The bill, passed last week, would raise taxes on Wall Street executives and multinational corporations. And it would spend more than $100 billion in the name of creating jobs and extending federal benefits for the jobless.
To overcome opposition, Democrats were forced to make concessions by substantially trimming spending — not the higher taxes.
That points to a new reality as Republicans seek inroads against President Obama and his party in the midterm elections. If they changed the order of their slogan to reflect its current political throw-weight, Republicans would attack Democrats for “spend and tax,” not the other way around.
“The spending issue has supplanted taxes in the G.O.P. mantra,” said Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster. Democrats acknowledge their vulnerability.
“As a metaphor, it is powerful,” said Mark Mellman, a strategist for Democratic leaders. Amid near double-digit unemployment and trillion-dollar deficits, Mr. Mellman said, Americans link spending with “long-term economic decline, lack of discipline, wasted money, money spent bailing out Wall Street instead of helping Main Street.”
The primacy of spending as a hot-button issue may fade if economic recovery continues and if Washington moves aggressively to shrink budget deficits. How much that will help Mr. Obama and his party is another question.
Cuts and Increases
In 1980, Ronald Reagan placed tax cuts at the center of his campaign to oust President
Jimmy Carter and make conservatism the ascendant political force.
In 1992, Ross Perot’s denunciation of deficits helped Bill Clinton wrest the White House from Republican control.
By 2000, economic boom times had eliminated the deficit issue and limited the drawing power of tax cuts. For his presidential victories, George W. Bush relied more on appeals to values and national security.
That spending has taken center stage now is no mystery. First, Mr. Bush guided the budget from surplus to deficit with two tax cuts, new prescription drug benefits under Medicare and increased security spending after Sept. 11, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Then, Washington responded to economic crisis by writing two gargantuan checks. In the fall of 2008, Mr. Bush signed a $700 billion bailout for the financial system. In early 2009, Mr. Obama signed a $787 billion stimulus package in hopes of kick-starting the economy out of recession.
This year, Mr. Obama added a third mammoth expenditure: a health care overhaul priced at $938 billion over 10 years.
Never mind that the Congressional Budget Office says tax increases, spending cuts and cost savings associated with the health bill will actually reduce the deficit.
Nor does it matter, politically, that the Wall Street bailout will end up costing taxpayers a fraction of that $700 billion. Or that Democrats have revived “pay-go” procedures earlier abandoned by Republicans, under which Congress must offset most new entitlement spending or tax cuts with corresponding spending cuts or tax increases.
Mr. Obama’s party is in charge. And the juxtaposition of his activism with the specter of overreach, as dramatized lately by the debt crisis in Greece, has turned spending priorities Americans once valued into the political equivalent of toxic assets.
Arguing Austerity
For many voters, noted Stan Greenberg, a Democratic strategist, “spending is debt — seen as threatening to the long-term economic future.”
An argument now under way inside Mr. Obama’s economic team will settle how, and how quickly, Democrats answer that vulnerability.
Lawrence H. Summers, director of the National Economic Council, insisted last week that the recovery remained too fragile for an immediate turn toward austerity.
“I cannot agree with those who suggest that it somehow threatens the future to provide truly temporary, high-bang-for-the-buck jobs and growth measures,” Mr. Summers said in a speech. “Rather, assuring as rapid a recovery as possible strengthens our future economy, our future prosperity, with many benefits, including a greater ability to manage our debts.”
Peter R. Orszag, the White House budget director, favors a more aggressive approach to deficit reduction once a presidential commission reports in December. That could take some of the sting out of Republican attacks on spending.
Of course, that could also leave Democrats exposed once again on taxes, an issue that has been defused lately by Mr. Obama’s pledge to focus on only high-income Americans. Some Democratic economists insist taming long-term deficits will require setting that promise aside.
For now, Democrats must cope with a shift in attitudes they could not have imagined a few years ago, when they fretted over winning back so-called values voters.
While struggling to pass new spending for the unemployed, House Democrats last week voted to end the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and clear the way for gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military. That objective proved easier to achieve.
Cleanup Draws Critics Over Speed and Care
Cleanup Draws Critics Over Speed and Care
By LESLIE KAUFMAN and JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/us/31cleanup.html?hpw
PORT FOURCHON, La. — By dawn, the beach here looks like the staging area for a B-movie invasion.
As semi rigs unload equipment and dozens of all-terrain vehicles buzz up and down the sand, young men in blinding white protective suits listlessly shovel globs of rust-colored oil in the heat.
Operations here are just the forward tip of a growing army of cleanup workers, already thousands strong, that is advancing along hundreds of miles of Louisiana shoreline to combat the oily sludge that began washing up heavily here about two weeks ago.
Yet the cleanup effort is drawing some criticism as it unfolds on the beaches, in the bayous and in the marshes.
Environmentalists accuse workers of running roughshod over wildlife and delicate grasses. Conversely, state and local officials are worried that the crews are not doing enough, fast enough. And most agree that the effort has been wildly uneven.
Here in Port Fourchon, vehicles have not only flattened sand dunes, one of the few lines of defense against erosion by the gulf waves, but have also plowed through nesting sites of the least tern.
“There is a lot of collateral damage out there,” said C. Cathy Norman, who manages the nine-mile beachfront here and 35,000 acres of marshland behind it for a local trust.
At other points along the Louisiana coast, some officials complained that the companies hired by BP, which bears heavy responsibility for the cleanup, were not adequately supervising their workers.
On the western end of Grand Isle, where crews filled thousands of bags with oily debris before President Obama’s visit on Friday, local residents cited a dead dolphin that had been buried rather than removed and about a dozen large redfish, dead and still covered with oil, that had been thrown into the grasslands.
All dead wildlife are supposed to be bagged and counted. But local officials said incidents like the tossed redfish are perhaps unavoidable in such a large undertaking done mostly by a newly hired and quickly trained labor force.
Cleanup workers on the beach the day the president arrived declined requests for interviews, saying they had been instructed not to speak to reporters. “I need this job,” explained one man who asked not to be named.
Some local officials complained about delays in the crews’ arrival. In Plaquemines Parish, home to the Mississippi River Delta, the companies hired by BP to clean up the marshes have been slow to respond, sometimes waiting a week to 10 days after oil has been spotted in the marshes to attack the problem, officials there said.
And where they have acted, the workers have at times trampled on flora and fauna as they deployed large absorbent pads to sop up the oil, the parish president, Billy Nungesser, said in an interview.
“I classify it as a sloppy cleanup,” he said.
Some other parish leaders echoed his criticisms. In Terrebonne Parish, oil has fouled the delicate marshes on Timbalier Bay, Lake Felicity and Lake Barre, which are important spawning grounds for brown shrimp.
“Not only was the response not adequate, but the cleanup wasn’t adequate,” the parish president, Michel Claudet, said. “The oil goes into the marsh, and they would send 15 guys in who would trample on the marsh to get it out.”
But Mr. Claudet said contractors working for BP stepped up the number of cleanup crews working in his region late last week, recruiting unemployed people in Houma and New Orleans for $12 an hour. The response time is improving, he said.
He also welcomed the assignment of a Coast Guard officer to each parish last week to be a go-between with BP, saying it had helped improve coordination.
BP and the Coast Guard say that their biggest challenge is explaining to eager and desperate residents why some oil is being left instead of being mopped up.
“We are walking a real fine line between getting the oil removed and irreversibly harming the environment,” said Rear Adm. James Watson, a deputy federal on-scene commander.
The National Audubon Society, which owns beachfront property west of Port Fourchon, recently posted signs warning contractors not to act without its approval, said Paul Kemp, a vice president of the group. “We hope that will forestall the zealous cleanup folks from working without supervision.”
Dr. Kemp said he hoped the size and inaccessibility of many of the marshes would protect them. “The only saving grace is that they can’t get to most of the beaches,” he said of the workers.
But that is changing swiftly, too. On Saturday, in response to criticisms from eager parishes, Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, announced that they hoped to move 2,200 workers into the more inaccessible areas of the marsh using tent camp bases and floating hotels.
“It’s scary,” said Angelina Freeman, a coastal scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund who has been making boat inspections off the marsh area off Pass a Loutre. “You are seeing lots of wildlife disturbance.”
Some environmentalists assert that BP’s contractors seem more worried about giving the appearance of cleaning up than about cataloging the damage and taking care not to disturb the ecosystem more than necessary.
“The larger reason for these efforts seems to be to make it seem that they are doing everything they can,” said Joseph Smyth, a spokesman for Greenpeace, “when, tragically, there isn’t much that can be done to clean up a spill of this size and nature.”
The avoidable damage is what bothers Ms. Norman, the beachfront manager.
She has brought in her brother, Don Norman, a wildlife toxicologist, to evaluate the harm that the oil and the cleanup are doing to birds here.
He said he had seen the all-terrain vehicles that roam up and down the beach spin through nesting colonies and had even witnessed the occupants honking at baby Wilson’s plovers for fun.
“Nesting season will be over soon,” he said, sighing. “And that is a good thing.”
By LESLIE KAUFMAN and JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/us/31cleanup.html?hpw
PORT FOURCHON, La. — By dawn, the beach here looks like the staging area for a B-movie invasion.
As semi rigs unload equipment and dozens of all-terrain vehicles buzz up and down the sand, young men in blinding white protective suits listlessly shovel globs of rust-colored oil in the heat.
Operations here are just the forward tip of a growing army of cleanup workers, already thousands strong, that is advancing along hundreds of miles of Louisiana shoreline to combat the oily sludge that began washing up heavily here about two weeks ago.
Yet the cleanup effort is drawing some criticism as it unfolds on the beaches, in the bayous and in the marshes.
Environmentalists accuse workers of running roughshod over wildlife and delicate grasses. Conversely, state and local officials are worried that the crews are not doing enough, fast enough. And most agree that the effort has been wildly uneven.
Here in Port Fourchon, vehicles have not only flattened sand dunes, one of the few lines of defense against erosion by the gulf waves, but have also plowed through nesting sites of the least tern.
“There is a lot of collateral damage out there,” said C. Cathy Norman, who manages the nine-mile beachfront here and 35,000 acres of marshland behind it for a local trust.
At other points along the Louisiana coast, some officials complained that the companies hired by BP, which bears heavy responsibility for the cleanup, were not adequately supervising their workers.
On the western end of Grand Isle, where crews filled thousands of bags with oily debris before President Obama’s visit on Friday, local residents cited a dead dolphin that had been buried rather than removed and about a dozen large redfish, dead and still covered with oil, that had been thrown into the grasslands.
All dead wildlife are supposed to be bagged and counted. But local officials said incidents like the tossed redfish are perhaps unavoidable in such a large undertaking done mostly by a newly hired and quickly trained labor force.
Cleanup workers on the beach the day the president arrived declined requests for interviews, saying they had been instructed not to speak to reporters. “I need this job,” explained one man who asked not to be named.
Some local officials complained about delays in the crews’ arrival. In Plaquemines Parish, home to the Mississippi River Delta, the companies hired by BP to clean up the marshes have been slow to respond, sometimes waiting a week to 10 days after oil has been spotted in the marshes to attack the problem, officials there said.
And where they have acted, the workers have at times trampled on flora and fauna as they deployed large absorbent pads to sop up the oil, the parish president, Billy Nungesser, said in an interview.
“I classify it as a sloppy cleanup,” he said.
Some other parish leaders echoed his criticisms. In Terrebonne Parish, oil has fouled the delicate marshes on Timbalier Bay, Lake Felicity and Lake Barre, which are important spawning grounds for brown shrimp.
“Not only was the response not adequate, but the cleanup wasn’t adequate,” the parish president, Michel Claudet, said. “The oil goes into the marsh, and they would send 15 guys in who would trample on the marsh to get it out.”
But Mr. Claudet said contractors working for BP stepped up the number of cleanup crews working in his region late last week, recruiting unemployed people in Houma and New Orleans for $12 an hour. The response time is improving, he said.
He also welcomed the assignment of a Coast Guard officer to each parish last week to be a go-between with BP, saying it had helped improve coordination.
BP and the Coast Guard say that their biggest challenge is explaining to eager and desperate residents why some oil is being left instead of being mopped up.
“We are walking a real fine line between getting the oil removed and irreversibly harming the environment,” said Rear Adm. James Watson, a deputy federal on-scene commander.
The National Audubon Society, which owns beachfront property west of Port Fourchon, recently posted signs warning contractors not to act without its approval, said Paul Kemp, a vice president of the group. “We hope that will forestall the zealous cleanup folks from working without supervision.”
Dr. Kemp said he hoped the size and inaccessibility of many of the marshes would protect them. “The only saving grace is that they can’t get to most of the beaches,” he said of the workers.
But that is changing swiftly, too. On Saturday, in response to criticisms from eager parishes, Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, announced that they hoped to move 2,200 workers into the more inaccessible areas of the marsh using tent camp bases and floating hotels.
“It’s scary,” said Angelina Freeman, a coastal scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund who has been making boat inspections off the marsh area off Pass a Loutre. “You are seeing lots of wildlife disturbance.”
Some environmentalists assert that BP’s contractors seem more worried about giving the appearance of cleaning up than about cataloging the damage and taking care not to disturb the ecosystem more than necessary.
“The larger reason for these efforts seems to be to make it seem that they are doing everything they can,” said Joseph Smyth, a spokesman for Greenpeace, “when, tragically, there isn’t much that can be done to clean up a spill of this size and nature.”
The avoidable damage is what bothers Ms. Norman, the beachfront manager.
She has brought in her brother, Don Norman, a wildlife toxicologist, to evaluate the harm that the oil and the cleanup are doing to birds here.
He said he had seen the all-terrain vehicles that roam up and down the beach spin through nesting colonies and had even witnessed the occupants honking at baby Wilson’s plovers for fun.
“Nesting season will be over soon,” he said, sighing. “And that is a good thing.”
NATO Has High Hopes for Afghan Peace Council
NATO Has High Hopes for Afghan Peace Council
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/world/asia/31afghan.html?hpw
KABUL, Afghanistan — Western leaders are banking on a national peace council set to begin here on Wednesday to start a new chapter in Afghanistan’s political life, bringing the country together and strengthening President Hamid Karzai, even as security deteriorated on Sunday in several areas of the country.
Times Topics: Afghanistan | North Atlantic Treaty Organization
In a joint news conference, the NATO commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, and the senior civilian representative, Mark Sedwill, emphasized that the West supported the peace council, called a jirga, even as many Afghans questioned whether those attending would truly represent the many factions in the country.
“This is a big week for Afghanistan,” said Mr. Sedwill, who described the conference as “the first of a series of major political events that are going to set the agenda of 2010.”
The jirga will be followed by the Kabul Conference on economic development in July and parliamentary elections in September.
“This is a critical moment for this country to bring together all of the people of Afghanistan, their representatives, in an opportunity to set the direction forward and create a national consensus behind the overall approach to security, to development, to reconciliation,” Mr. Sedwill said.
The Electoral Complaints Commission announced Sunday that 85 candidates had been preliminarily barred from participating in the parliamentary elections because they are members of illegal armed groups. They will have the right to appeal. Still, the number is far more than that in the first round of parliamentary elections in 2005, when just 17 people were disqualified for the same reason, according to a former E.C.C. commissioner, Fahim Hakim.
The increase suggests that a more rigorous review system is now in place, analysts say.
Even as the peace efforts proceed in the capital, Kabul, security appeared to be deteriorating in districts in the east and south of the country and on the western border, where Afghan insurgents trained in Iran are returning to fight and smuggling in weapons, General McChrystal said.
“There is clear evidence of Iranian activities, in some cases supplying weaponry and training to the Taliban that is inappropriate,” he said.
In Nuristan Province, on the country’s eastern border, hundreds of local and Pakistani Taliban have taken control of a remote district near the Pakistan border, Barg-e-Matal. The number of fighters who have crossed the border from Pakistan swelled through the week and now has reached 1,000 to 1,500, said Gen. Zaman Mamozai, the commander of the Afghan Border Police for the eastern region of Afghanistan.
They are “mostly from Pakistan and are conducting collective attacks,” he said.
It appears that many of the Taliban from Pakistan had come to Nuristan in search of a new haven after having come under attack from the Pakistani Army in Pakistan. There are few Afghan security troops in Nuristan’s rugged mountains and only a small number of American troops in the province.
NATO leaders say that they cannot control the entire country with the number of troops they have and had to rely on Afghan forces in remote areas. But because not enough Afghans have been trained, NATO officials say they may have to live with some insurgent havens.
“As we execute our strategy and our capacity to secure areas, we must prioritize the order in which we do those, and how we deploy our forces and our assets,” General McChrystal said when asked whether Barg-e-Matal was being allowed to become a sanctuary.
“The Taliban can still muster strength in places and there are a lot of unknowns there,” added a senior NATO officer, speaking about Nuristan on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record on the matter.
“If there are Taliban there, so what?” he said, adding that the district was far from any population center. He acknowledged that the situation would become more complicated if the Taliban filter out of remote mountain redoubts and into populated areas.
There was violence as well in the southeastern province of Khost, where a barely completed high school, built with international aid, was blown up late Saturday night by men using rocket-propelled grenades and bombs.
The school, which cost $220,000 to build, would have provided classrooms for 1,300 students, said Musa Majrooh, the spokesman for the Khost Education Department. A Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, denied that the Taliban were involved in the blast.
Also in Khost, a suicide car bomber detonated his vehicle at the entrance to the police battalion that patrols suburban areas. Nine police officers were wounded, two of them seriously.
In Nangahar Province, in the east, which until recently was relatively calm, two bombings killed five members of the Afghan security forces, and in Badakhshan Province in the far northeast, six counternarcotics officers were killed when their patrol vehicle was blown up by a homemade bomb.
They were on a mission to eradicate poppy, and the province’s governor, Baz Mohammed, accused narcotics traffickers and the Taliban of setting the bomb.
Sharifullah Sahak and Waheed Abdul Wafa contributed reporting from Kabul, and an Afghan employee of The New York Times from Khost.
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/world/asia/31afghan.html?hpw
KABUL, Afghanistan — Western leaders are banking on a national peace council set to begin here on Wednesday to start a new chapter in Afghanistan’s political life, bringing the country together and strengthening President Hamid Karzai, even as security deteriorated on Sunday in several areas of the country.
Times Topics: Afghanistan | North Atlantic Treaty Organization
In a joint news conference, the NATO commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, and the senior civilian representative, Mark Sedwill, emphasized that the West supported the peace council, called a jirga, even as many Afghans questioned whether those attending would truly represent the many factions in the country.
“This is a big week for Afghanistan,” said Mr. Sedwill, who described the conference as “the first of a series of major political events that are going to set the agenda of 2010.”
The jirga will be followed by the Kabul Conference on economic development in July and parliamentary elections in September.
“This is a critical moment for this country to bring together all of the people of Afghanistan, their representatives, in an opportunity to set the direction forward and create a national consensus behind the overall approach to security, to development, to reconciliation,” Mr. Sedwill said.
The Electoral Complaints Commission announced Sunday that 85 candidates had been preliminarily barred from participating in the parliamentary elections because they are members of illegal armed groups. They will have the right to appeal. Still, the number is far more than that in the first round of parliamentary elections in 2005, when just 17 people were disqualified for the same reason, according to a former E.C.C. commissioner, Fahim Hakim.
The increase suggests that a more rigorous review system is now in place, analysts say.
Even as the peace efforts proceed in the capital, Kabul, security appeared to be deteriorating in districts in the east and south of the country and on the western border, where Afghan insurgents trained in Iran are returning to fight and smuggling in weapons, General McChrystal said.
“There is clear evidence of Iranian activities, in some cases supplying weaponry and training to the Taliban that is inappropriate,” he said.
In Nuristan Province, on the country’s eastern border, hundreds of local and Pakistani Taliban have taken control of a remote district near the Pakistan border, Barg-e-Matal. The number of fighters who have crossed the border from Pakistan swelled through the week and now has reached 1,000 to 1,500, said Gen. Zaman Mamozai, the commander of the Afghan Border Police for the eastern region of Afghanistan.
They are “mostly from Pakistan and are conducting collective attacks,” he said.
It appears that many of the Taliban from Pakistan had come to Nuristan in search of a new haven after having come under attack from the Pakistani Army in Pakistan. There are few Afghan security troops in Nuristan’s rugged mountains and only a small number of American troops in the province.
NATO leaders say that they cannot control the entire country with the number of troops they have and had to rely on Afghan forces in remote areas. But because not enough Afghans have been trained, NATO officials say they may have to live with some insurgent havens.
“As we execute our strategy and our capacity to secure areas, we must prioritize the order in which we do those, and how we deploy our forces and our assets,” General McChrystal said when asked whether Barg-e-Matal was being allowed to become a sanctuary.
“The Taliban can still muster strength in places and there are a lot of unknowns there,” added a senior NATO officer, speaking about Nuristan on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record on the matter.
“If there are Taliban there, so what?” he said, adding that the district was far from any population center. He acknowledged that the situation would become more complicated if the Taliban filter out of remote mountain redoubts and into populated areas.
There was violence as well in the southeastern province of Khost, where a barely completed high school, built with international aid, was blown up late Saturday night by men using rocket-propelled grenades and bombs.
The school, which cost $220,000 to build, would have provided classrooms for 1,300 students, said Musa Majrooh, the spokesman for the Khost Education Department. A Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, denied that the Taliban were involved in the blast.
Also in Khost, a suicide car bomber detonated his vehicle at the entrance to the police battalion that patrols suburban areas. Nine police officers were wounded, two of them seriously.
In Nangahar Province, in the east, which until recently was relatively calm, two bombings killed five members of the Afghan security forces, and in Badakhshan Province in the far northeast, six counternarcotics officers were killed when their patrol vehicle was blown up by a homemade bomb.
They were on a mission to eradicate poppy, and the province’s governor, Baz Mohammed, accused narcotics traffickers and the Taliban of setting the bomb.
Sharifullah Sahak and Waheed Abdul Wafa contributed reporting from Kabul, and an Afghan employee of The New York Times from Khost.
The Pain Caucus By PAUL KRUGMAN
The Pain Caucus
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/opinion/31krugman.html?th&emc=th
What’s the greatest threat to our still-fragile economic recovery? Dangers abound, of course. But what I currently find most ominous is the spread of a destructive idea: the view that now, less than a year into a weak recovery from the worst slump since World War II, is the time for policy makers to stop helping the jobless and start inflicting pain.
When the financial crisis first struck, most of the world’s policy makers responded appropriately, cutting interest rates and allowing deficits to rise. And by doing the right thing, by applying the lessons learned from the 1930s, they managed to limit the damage: It was terrible, but it wasn’t a second Great Depression.
Now, however, demands that governments switch from supporting their economies to punishing them have been proliferating in op-eds, speeches and reports from international organizations. Indeed, the idea that what depressed economies really need is even more suffering seems to be the new conventional wisdom, which John Kenneth Galbraith famously defined as “the ideas which are esteemed at any time for their acceptability.”
The extent to which inflicting economic pain has become the accepted thing was driven home to me by the latest report on the economic outlook from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an influential Paris-based think tank supported by the governments of the world’s advanced economies. The O.E.C.D. is a deeply cautious organization; what it says at any given time virtually defines that moment’s conventional wisdom. And what the O.E.C.D. is saying right now is that policy makers should stop promoting economic recovery and instead begin raising interest rates and slashing spending.
What’s particularly remarkable about this recommendation is that it seems disconnected not only from the real needs of the world economy, but from the organization’s own economic projections.
Thus, the O.E.C.D. declares that interest rates in the United States and other nations should rise sharply over the next year and a half, so as to head off inflation. Yet inflation is low and declining, and the O.E.C.D.’s own forecasts show no hint of an inflationary threat. So why raise rates?
The answer, as best I can make it out, is that the organization believes that we must worry about the chance that markets might start expecting inflation, even though they shouldn’t and currently don’t: We must guard against “the possibility that longer-term inflation expectations could become unanchored in the O.E.C.D. economies, contrary to what is assumed in the central projection.”
A similar argument is used to justify fiscal austerity. Both textbook economics and experience say that slashing spending when you’re still suffering from high unemployment is a really bad idea — not only does it deepen the slump, but it does little to improve the budget outlook, because much of what governments save by spending less they lose as a weaker economy depresses tax receipts. And the O.E.C.D. predicts that high unemployment will persist for years. Nonetheless, the organization demands both that governments cancel any further plans for economic stimulus and that they begin “fiscal consolidation” next year.
Why do this? Again, to give markets something they shouldn’t want and currently don’t. Right now, investors don’t seem at all worried about the solvency of the U.S. government; the interest rates on federal bonds are near historic lows. And even if markets were worried about U.S. fiscal prospects, spending cuts in the face of a depressed economy would do little to improve those prospects. But cut we must, says the O.E.C.D., because inadequate consolidation efforts “would risk adverse reactions in financial markets.”
The best summary I’ve seen of all this comes from Martin Wolf of The Financial Times, who describes the new conventional wisdom as being that “giving the markets what we think they may want in future — even though they show little sign of insisting on it now — should be the ruling idea in policy.”
Put that way, it sounds crazy. And it is. Yet it’s a view that’s spreading. And it’s already having ugly consequences. Last week conservative members of the House, invoking the new deficit fears, scaled back a bill extending aid to the long-term unemployed — and the Senate left town without acting on even the inadequate measures that remained. As a result, many American families are about to lose unemployment benefits, health insurance, or both — and as these families are forced to slash spending, they will endanger the jobs of many more.
And that’s just the beginning. More and more, conventional wisdom says that the responsible thing is to make the unemployed suffer. And while the benefits from inflicting pain are an illusion, the pain itself will be all too real.
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/opinion/31krugman.html?th&emc=th
What’s the greatest threat to our still-fragile economic recovery? Dangers abound, of course. But what I currently find most ominous is the spread of a destructive idea: the view that now, less than a year into a weak recovery from the worst slump since World War II, is the time for policy makers to stop helping the jobless and start inflicting pain.
When the financial crisis first struck, most of the world’s policy makers responded appropriately, cutting interest rates and allowing deficits to rise. And by doing the right thing, by applying the lessons learned from the 1930s, they managed to limit the damage: It was terrible, but it wasn’t a second Great Depression.
Now, however, demands that governments switch from supporting their economies to punishing them have been proliferating in op-eds, speeches and reports from international organizations. Indeed, the idea that what depressed economies really need is even more suffering seems to be the new conventional wisdom, which John Kenneth Galbraith famously defined as “the ideas which are esteemed at any time for their acceptability.”
The extent to which inflicting economic pain has become the accepted thing was driven home to me by the latest report on the economic outlook from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an influential Paris-based think tank supported by the governments of the world’s advanced economies. The O.E.C.D. is a deeply cautious organization; what it says at any given time virtually defines that moment’s conventional wisdom. And what the O.E.C.D. is saying right now is that policy makers should stop promoting economic recovery and instead begin raising interest rates and slashing spending.
What’s particularly remarkable about this recommendation is that it seems disconnected not only from the real needs of the world economy, but from the organization’s own economic projections.
Thus, the O.E.C.D. declares that interest rates in the United States and other nations should rise sharply over the next year and a half, so as to head off inflation. Yet inflation is low and declining, and the O.E.C.D.’s own forecasts show no hint of an inflationary threat. So why raise rates?
The answer, as best I can make it out, is that the organization believes that we must worry about the chance that markets might start expecting inflation, even though they shouldn’t and currently don’t: We must guard against “the possibility that longer-term inflation expectations could become unanchored in the O.E.C.D. economies, contrary to what is assumed in the central projection.”
A similar argument is used to justify fiscal austerity. Both textbook economics and experience say that slashing spending when you’re still suffering from high unemployment is a really bad idea — not only does it deepen the slump, but it does little to improve the budget outlook, because much of what governments save by spending less they lose as a weaker economy depresses tax receipts. And the O.E.C.D. predicts that high unemployment will persist for years. Nonetheless, the organization demands both that governments cancel any further plans for economic stimulus and that they begin “fiscal consolidation” next year.
Why do this? Again, to give markets something they shouldn’t want and currently don’t. Right now, investors don’t seem at all worried about the solvency of the U.S. government; the interest rates on federal bonds are near historic lows. And even if markets were worried about U.S. fiscal prospects, spending cuts in the face of a depressed economy would do little to improve those prospects. But cut we must, says the O.E.C.D., because inadequate consolidation efforts “would risk adverse reactions in financial markets.”
The best summary I’ve seen of all this comes from Martin Wolf of The Financial Times, who describes the new conventional wisdom as being that “giving the markets what we think they may want in future — even though they show little sign of insisting on it now — should be the ruling idea in policy.”
Put that way, it sounds crazy. And it is. Yet it’s a view that’s spreading. And it’s already having ugly consequences. Last week conservative members of the House, invoking the new deficit fears, scaled back a bill extending aid to the long-term unemployed — and the Senate left town without acting on even the inadequate measures that remained. As a result, many American families are about to lose unemployment benefits, health insurance, or both — and as these families are forced to slash spending, they will endanger the jobs of many more.
And that’s just the beginning. More and more, conventional wisdom says that the responsible thing is to make the unemployed suffer. And while the benefits from inflicting pain are an illusion, the pain itself will be all too real.
Repealing 'don't ask': History or hysteria?
Repealing 'don't ask': History or hysteria?
Carolyn Lochhead
Copyright by The San Francisco Chronicle
Monday, May 31, 2010
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fc%2Fa%2F2010%2F05%2F30%2FMNJQ1DM6GQ.DTL
(05-31) 04:00 PDT Washington -- After 17 years of controversy and more than 13,000 dismissals of gays and lesbians from the military, repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gays in the military is likely to resemble the phantom Y2K computer scare a decade ago - if other countries' experience is a prelude.
But before that can happen, the repeal that passed the House last week awaits a filibuster threat in the full Senate by John McCain, R-Ariz., as well as a multimillion-dollar study by the Pentagon and certification by President Obama, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Michael Mullen that lifting the ban will not harm America's fighting force.
More than two dozen foreign militaries allow homosexuals to serve, the latest being Uruguay. Suzanne Goldberg, director of the Columbia Law School's Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic, said that Canada, Britain, Australia and Israel found that allowing open service has been, "as one person put it, a collective yawn."
In the United States, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Secret Service allow open service. The key to implementation, experts said, is a uniform code of conduct that is enforced without regard to sexual orientation.
Polling finds that more than three-quarters of the public and most self-described conservatives favor open service. Opposition has dwindled to "a rear-guard action by some people who really care about this, and there aren't that many of them," said Morris Fiorina, a political scientist at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
If repeal overcomes the obstacles, gays and lesbians in the military will still be governed - as are all 8 million federal employees - by the 1994 Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibits the federal government extending marriage benefits to same-sex couples.
"Who gets notified if you're injured or killed?" asked Jon Davidson, legal director at Lambda Legal, an advocacy group. "What benefits does your spouse or partner get? Do they get to shop at the PX? If you're stationed at a base, can they live with you there? Right now, this repeal will not address any of those. It just means people will not get kicked out."
Foes become backers
While repeal must pass the Senate, would-be Democratic foes such as Robert Byrd of West Virginia and Ben Nelson of Nebraska have announced their support. McCain's last-ditch effort to kill repeal in committee - by soliciting letters from military chiefs urging Congress to await the Dec. 1 completion of the Pentagon study - failed. Mainstream conservative groups have stayed on the sidelines.
One of the few that has been active, the Family Research Council, issued a report predicting an increase in homosexual assaults. The report cited Pentagon case synopses of "forcible sodomy," "female-on-female assaults" and a gay lovers' quarrel that led to violence.
But academics find no evidence of disproportionate same-sex sexual assaults. "The most substantial problem is with men assaulting women, and it's been an ongoing struggle for the military," said Goldberg.
Aaron Belkin, director of the Palm Center, a UC Santa Barbara think tank, said questions regarding benefits to same-sex partners and spouses may cause administrative problems, "but these are not high-church issues. These are in-the-weeds issues that will be figured out without much difficulty."
Many of the authors of "don't ask, don't tell," including Georgia Democrat Sam Nunn, then chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs, have since reconsidered.
Their burning worries of the time seem quaint in hindsight. Nunn stood on the Senate floor in January 1993 demanding answers to a list of questions, including what would happen if a gay couple in uniform danced together at a formal event.
Still, it took a shove from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, to get the White House to agree to a vote this year. Having promised the Pentagon a study, the administration sought to delay repeal until next year, despite Obama's State of the Union pledge.
Reaching compromise
Pelosi, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, forced the administration's hand by threatening to move alone.
The resulting compromise allowed a vote on repeal this year but delayed implementation until after the Pentagon study is finished and certified. The compromise also omits language banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation that was contained in the original repeal bill, the Military Readiness Enhancement Act by former Contra Costa Rep. Ellen Tauscher, a Democrat now at the State Department.
The study will cover much of the same ground as an exhaustive Rand study commissioned by the Pentagon in 1993.
Landmark research
The Rand study looked at the record of foreign militaries, the integration of gays and lesbians into local police and fire departments and the U.S. military's efforts at gender and racial integration. It found no harm to cohesion, retention, recruitment or any other measures of effectiveness.
Despite the Defense of Marriage Act, the military may have considerable leeway in deciding what benefits apply.
The marriage law "is absolutely discriminatory against gay and lesbian couples, but it does not forbid every imaginable form of recognition by the federal government," said Goldberg.
About 34,000 federal employees are in same-sex relationships, according to the Congressional Research Service, including some in marriages. The research service found that benefits not expressly banned by the Defense of Marriage Act can be extended at the discretion of agency heads.
In June 2009, Obama directed federal agencies to extend to federal employees benefits that are granted to domestic partners of federal workers. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton moved to extend many relocation, medical and other benefits to same-sex partners of State Department employees.
E-mail Carolyn Lochhead at clochhead@sfchronicle.com.
Carolyn Lochhead
Copyright by The San Francisco Chronicle
Monday, May 31, 2010
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fc%2Fa%2F2010%2F05%2F30%2FMNJQ1DM6GQ.DTL
(05-31) 04:00 PDT Washington -- After 17 years of controversy and more than 13,000 dismissals of gays and lesbians from the military, repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gays in the military is likely to resemble the phantom Y2K computer scare a decade ago - if other countries' experience is a prelude.
But before that can happen, the repeal that passed the House last week awaits a filibuster threat in the full Senate by John McCain, R-Ariz., as well as a multimillion-dollar study by the Pentagon and certification by President Obama, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Michael Mullen that lifting the ban will not harm America's fighting force.
More than two dozen foreign militaries allow homosexuals to serve, the latest being Uruguay. Suzanne Goldberg, director of the Columbia Law School's Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic, said that Canada, Britain, Australia and Israel found that allowing open service has been, "as one person put it, a collective yawn."
In the United States, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Secret Service allow open service. The key to implementation, experts said, is a uniform code of conduct that is enforced without regard to sexual orientation.
Polling finds that more than three-quarters of the public and most self-described conservatives favor open service. Opposition has dwindled to "a rear-guard action by some people who really care about this, and there aren't that many of them," said Morris Fiorina, a political scientist at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
If repeal overcomes the obstacles, gays and lesbians in the military will still be governed - as are all 8 million federal employees - by the 1994 Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibits the federal government extending marriage benefits to same-sex couples.
"Who gets notified if you're injured or killed?" asked Jon Davidson, legal director at Lambda Legal, an advocacy group. "What benefits does your spouse or partner get? Do they get to shop at the PX? If you're stationed at a base, can they live with you there? Right now, this repeal will not address any of those. It just means people will not get kicked out."
Foes become backers
While repeal must pass the Senate, would-be Democratic foes such as Robert Byrd of West Virginia and Ben Nelson of Nebraska have announced their support. McCain's last-ditch effort to kill repeal in committee - by soliciting letters from military chiefs urging Congress to await the Dec. 1 completion of the Pentagon study - failed. Mainstream conservative groups have stayed on the sidelines.
One of the few that has been active, the Family Research Council, issued a report predicting an increase in homosexual assaults. The report cited Pentagon case synopses of "forcible sodomy," "female-on-female assaults" and a gay lovers' quarrel that led to violence.
But academics find no evidence of disproportionate same-sex sexual assaults. "The most substantial problem is with men assaulting women, and it's been an ongoing struggle for the military," said Goldberg.
Aaron Belkin, director of the Palm Center, a UC Santa Barbara think tank, said questions regarding benefits to same-sex partners and spouses may cause administrative problems, "but these are not high-church issues. These are in-the-weeds issues that will be figured out without much difficulty."
Many of the authors of "don't ask, don't tell," including Georgia Democrat Sam Nunn, then chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs, have since reconsidered.
Their burning worries of the time seem quaint in hindsight. Nunn stood on the Senate floor in January 1993 demanding answers to a list of questions, including what would happen if a gay couple in uniform danced together at a formal event.
Still, it took a shove from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, to get the White House to agree to a vote this year. Having promised the Pentagon a study, the administration sought to delay repeal until next year, despite Obama's State of the Union pledge.
Reaching compromise
Pelosi, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, forced the administration's hand by threatening to move alone.
The resulting compromise allowed a vote on repeal this year but delayed implementation until after the Pentagon study is finished and certified. The compromise also omits language banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation that was contained in the original repeal bill, the Military Readiness Enhancement Act by former Contra Costa Rep. Ellen Tauscher, a Democrat now at the State Department.
The study will cover much of the same ground as an exhaustive Rand study commissioned by the Pentagon in 1993.
Landmark research
The Rand study looked at the record of foreign militaries, the integration of gays and lesbians into local police and fire departments and the U.S. military's efforts at gender and racial integration. It found no harm to cohesion, retention, recruitment or any other measures of effectiveness.
Despite the Defense of Marriage Act, the military may have considerable leeway in deciding what benefits apply.
The marriage law "is absolutely discriminatory against gay and lesbian couples, but it does not forbid every imaginable form of recognition by the federal government," said Goldberg.
About 34,000 federal employees are in same-sex relationships, according to the Congressional Research Service, including some in marriages. The research service found that benefits not expressly banned by the Defense of Marriage Act can be extended at the discretion of agency heads.
In June 2009, Obama directed federal agencies to extend to federal employees benefits that are granted to domestic partners of federal workers. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton moved to extend many relocation, medical and other benefits to same-sex partners of State Department employees.
E-mail Carolyn Lochhead at clochhead@sfchronicle.com.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Ariz gov. bypasses attorney general on immigration lawsuits
Ariz gov. bypasses attorney general on immigration lawsuits
Copyright By CNN News
May 29, 2010 3:45 p.m. EDT
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/29/arizona.immigration.attorney.general/index.html?hpt=T2
(CNN) -- Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona has bypassed Attorney General Terry Goddard and will rely on other lawyers to defend the state against lawsuits challenging its controversial law targeting illegal immigration, according to a statement.
The legislature gave Brewer the power to hire outside counsel "because of its lack of confidence in the Attorney General's willingness to vigorously defend" the law, she said in the statement.
Her statement referred to Goddard's opposition to the new immigration law, which lets police officers check the residency status of anyone who is being investigated for a crime or possible legal infraction if there is reasonable suspicion the person is in the United States illegally.
Critics, including U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, have said the law will promote racial profiling. Several lawsuits have been filed to challenge the law. The federal government is considering whether to file a lawsuit of its own.
The governor's statement came after the U.S. Justice Department sent an assistant attorney general and several other key officials to Arizona on Friday to emphasize federal reservations about the new law.
The federal officials met separately in Phoenix with Goddard, a Democrat, and aides to Brewer, a Republican.
"We continue to have concerns that the law drives a wedge between law enforcement and the communities they serve, and are examining it to see what options are available to the federal government," said Justice spokeswoman Hannah August.
After the Justice Department visit -- and before the governor said she would bypass him -- Goddard said in a statement that he told the federal lawyers that Arizona would "fight back" if the federal government sued Arizona.
"The people of Arizona are deeply frustrated by the federal government's inability to enact comprehensive immigration reform," he said.
The governor said she acted due to Goddard's "curious coordination with the U.S. Department of Justice ... and his consistent opposition to Arizona's new immigration laws."
Copyright By CNN News
May 29, 2010 3:45 p.m. EDT
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/29/arizona.immigration.attorney.general/index.html?hpt=T2
(CNN) -- Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona has bypassed Attorney General Terry Goddard and will rely on other lawyers to defend the state against lawsuits challenging its controversial law targeting illegal immigration, according to a statement.
The legislature gave Brewer the power to hire outside counsel "because of its lack of confidence in the Attorney General's willingness to vigorously defend" the law, she said in the statement.
Her statement referred to Goddard's opposition to the new immigration law, which lets police officers check the residency status of anyone who is being investigated for a crime or possible legal infraction if there is reasonable suspicion the person is in the United States illegally.
Critics, including U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, have said the law will promote racial profiling. Several lawsuits have been filed to challenge the law. The federal government is considering whether to file a lawsuit of its own.
The governor's statement came after the U.S. Justice Department sent an assistant attorney general and several other key officials to Arizona on Friday to emphasize federal reservations about the new law.
The federal officials met separately in Phoenix with Goddard, a Democrat, and aides to Brewer, a Republican.
"We continue to have concerns that the law drives a wedge between law enforcement and the communities they serve, and are examining it to see what options are available to the federal government," said Justice spokeswoman Hannah August.
After the Justice Department visit -- and before the governor said she would bypass him -- Goddard said in a statement that he told the federal lawyers that Arizona would "fight back" if the federal government sued Arizona.
"The people of Arizona are deeply frustrated by the federal government's inability to enact comprehensive immigration reform," he said.
The governor said she acted due to Goddard's "curious coordination with the U.S. Department of Justice ... and his consistent opposition to Arizona's new immigration laws."
Chicago Tribune Editorial: The Nov. 2 election
Chicago Tribune Editorial: The Nov. 2 election
Copyright © 2010, Chicago Tribune
May 30, 2010
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-edit-state-20100530,0,2734217.story
They are pleasant people, most of these Illinois lawmakers who need to be voted from office. But there is no point to bathing them in soft encouragements, to say they should "summon the courage to act" or "demonstrate true leadership." They've had their chances and flat-out refused to deliver. Their devotion to nothing more noble than their own political survival has become the reason to deprive them of it.
Failure can lead to consequences. Intentional failure should.
It is with that conviction that this page looks beyond another inconclusive legislative session to focus primarily on the general election just 22 weeks away. The people of this state need solutions to three crises that have Illinois in a downward spiral. We believe Illinois is worth fighting for. We hope voters share that belief, and react less with hot anger than with cold resolve:
Illinoisans need a solutions-oriented General Assembly. But with their combined 72 years in the legislature, House Speaker Michael Madigan and Senate President John Cullerton are embedded in the ossified status quo. Shooing their underworked troops home last week for yet another paid vacation, the two Democrats proved again that they cannot — or, more likely, will not — risk their party's hold on power to solve those three crises. To do so would infuriate public employee unions and other constituencies fattened by overspent, overborrowed Illinois.
Throughout this session we've written about the crises — the need for Madigan and Cullerton to make jobs-starved Illinois attractive to employers, to pass the anti-corruption reforms they ducked in 2009, and to end the chronic money mismanagement best summarized as: "Splurge. Borrow. Repeat." In a March 21 editorial titled "Last chance," we noted that voters are financially liable for our leaders' wreckage — their legacy of unpaid bills, astonishing debts and still more borrowing. If Madigan and Cullerton didn't start meeting epic challenges with epic responses, we said on that day's front page, then "we'll try to defeat as many of their caucus members as we can."
•••
Across the U.S., other state governments are working to attract jobs and restructure how they spend taxpayers' dollars. On Tuesday, The New York Times chronicled how "more leaders have begun to talk not of nipping, not of tucking, but, in essence, of turning government upside down and starting over." Options include eliminating costly but obsolete local governments, merging state agencies, and other overhead reductions analogous to the sacrifices American families and businesses have made. On Thursday, in New York, gubernatorial nominee Andrew Cuomo pledged that, if elected, he will not slash his state's big deficit with tax hikes or borrowing binges. Instead, the liberal Democrat said, he'll cut spending.
Contrast that with Illinois, where Gov. Pat Quinn wants to borrow another $3.7 billion for the most basic of operating expenses: payments into, yes, the nation's worst-funded pension system. And he wants a tax increase. Legislators, meanwhile, have done nothing to restructure state government and how it spends today. And they're content to let other states be the lower-cost options for businesses looking to create new jobs. They won't even ratchet down spending enough to pay billions in overdue bills for services already provided. Instead, they've sent Quinn a measure that would allow the state to … delay payments even longer.
•••
Memorial Day weekend is a time for all of us to ponder the Illinois we inherited from previous generations, and to ask if we want to bequeath something other than insolvency and debt. Consider: On this generation's watch, lawmakers who gerrymander the state to choose their own constituents are avoiding such basic tasks as budgeting how much money goes for what. Abdicating responsibility to Quinn insulates legislators from complaints — and proves them useless.
It is time, then, for many of today's incumbents to go. We have begun, months earlier than usual, to evaluate the records and the votes (on such issues as Quinn's pension borrowing plan) of candidates for the Nov. 2 election. We intend to interview and endorse the best of the bunch statewide.
We want to elect Democrats, Republicans and third-party candidates who can prove that they have demanded and will demand a fundamental change in the status quo. Some of the candidates we'll encourage voters to choose on Election Day will be incumbents. Many, though, will not. Illinoisans can't afford to have the current crowd dodging decisions while taxpayer debt explodes and job creation here wallows at 48th in the U.S.
Give us time to do our job of bird-dogging better candidates and, come November, all of us can do the most important job of all.
Copyright © 2010, Chicago Tribune
May 30, 2010
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-edit-state-20100530,0,2734217.story
They are pleasant people, most of these Illinois lawmakers who need to be voted from office. But there is no point to bathing them in soft encouragements, to say they should "summon the courage to act" or "demonstrate true leadership." They've had their chances and flat-out refused to deliver. Their devotion to nothing more noble than their own political survival has become the reason to deprive them of it.
Failure can lead to consequences. Intentional failure should.
It is with that conviction that this page looks beyond another inconclusive legislative session to focus primarily on the general election just 22 weeks away. The people of this state need solutions to three crises that have Illinois in a downward spiral. We believe Illinois is worth fighting for. We hope voters share that belief, and react less with hot anger than with cold resolve:
Illinoisans need a solutions-oriented General Assembly. But with their combined 72 years in the legislature, House Speaker Michael Madigan and Senate President John Cullerton are embedded in the ossified status quo. Shooing their underworked troops home last week for yet another paid vacation, the two Democrats proved again that they cannot — or, more likely, will not — risk their party's hold on power to solve those three crises. To do so would infuriate public employee unions and other constituencies fattened by overspent, overborrowed Illinois.
Throughout this session we've written about the crises — the need for Madigan and Cullerton to make jobs-starved Illinois attractive to employers, to pass the anti-corruption reforms they ducked in 2009, and to end the chronic money mismanagement best summarized as: "Splurge. Borrow. Repeat." In a March 21 editorial titled "Last chance," we noted that voters are financially liable for our leaders' wreckage — their legacy of unpaid bills, astonishing debts and still more borrowing. If Madigan and Cullerton didn't start meeting epic challenges with epic responses, we said on that day's front page, then "we'll try to defeat as many of their caucus members as we can."
•••
Across the U.S., other state governments are working to attract jobs and restructure how they spend taxpayers' dollars. On Tuesday, The New York Times chronicled how "more leaders have begun to talk not of nipping, not of tucking, but, in essence, of turning government upside down and starting over." Options include eliminating costly but obsolete local governments, merging state agencies, and other overhead reductions analogous to the sacrifices American families and businesses have made. On Thursday, in New York, gubernatorial nominee Andrew Cuomo pledged that, if elected, he will not slash his state's big deficit with tax hikes or borrowing binges. Instead, the liberal Democrat said, he'll cut spending.
Contrast that with Illinois, where Gov. Pat Quinn wants to borrow another $3.7 billion for the most basic of operating expenses: payments into, yes, the nation's worst-funded pension system. And he wants a tax increase. Legislators, meanwhile, have done nothing to restructure state government and how it spends today. And they're content to let other states be the lower-cost options for businesses looking to create new jobs. They won't even ratchet down spending enough to pay billions in overdue bills for services already provided. Instead, they've sent Quinn a measure that would allow the state to … delay payments even longer.
•••
Memorial Day weekend is a time for all of us to ponder the Illinois we inherited from previous generations, and to ask if we want to bequeath something other than insolvency and debt. Consider: On this generation's watch, lawmakers who gerrymander the state to choose their own constituents are avoiding such basic tasks as budgeting how much money goes for what. Abdicating responsibility to Quinn insulates legislators from complaints — and proves them useless.
It is time, then, for many of today's incumbents to go. We have begun, months earlier than usual, to evaluate the records and the votes (on such issues as Quinn's pension borrowing plan) of candidates for the Nov. 2 election. We intend to interview and endorse the best of the bunch statewide.
We want to elect Democrats, Republicans and third-party candidates who can prove that they have demanded and will demand a fundamental change in the status quo. Some of the candidates we'll encourage voters to choose on Election Day will be incumbents. Many, though, will not. Illinoisans can't afford to have the current crowd dodging decisions while taxpayer debt explodes and job creation here wallows at 48th in the U.S.
Give us time to do our job of bird-dogging better candidates and, come November, all of us can do the most important job of all.
The fake feminism of Sarah Palin
The fake feminism of Sarah Palin
By Jessica Valenti
Copyright by the Washington Post
Sunday, May 30, 2010
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/28/AR2010052802263.html?hpid=artslot
Sarah Palin sure is dropping the f-bomb a lot lately.
In a widely noted speech this month to the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion-rights group, Palin invoked the words "feminism" and "feminist" no less than a dozen times. She called for a "pro-woman sisterhood" and addressed the "sisters" in the audience. If it weren't for the regular references to gun rights, you might have thought you were listening to Gloria Steinem.
If this rhetoric seems uncharacteristic of the former governor of Alaska, that's because it is. When running for vice president in 2008, Palin flip-flopped on the feminist question, telling CBS's Katie Couric that she is one, but later telling NBC's Brian Williams, "I'm not going to label myself anything."
Today, however, Palin is happily adopting the feminist label. She's throwing support behind "mama grizzly" candidates, describing the large number of women in the "tea party" as evidence of a "mom awakening" and preaching girl power on her Facebook page.
It's not a realization of the importance of women's rights that's inspired the change. It's strategy. Palin's sisterly speechifying is part of a larger conservative move to woo women by appropriating feminist language. Just as consumer culture tries to sell "Girls Gone Wild"-style sexism as "empowerment," conservatives are trying to sell anti-women policies shrouded in pro-women rhetoric.
Several years ago, when antiabortion protesters realized that screaming "Murderer!" at women wasn't winning hearts and minds, they launched more palatable campaigns claiming that abortion hurts women -- their new protest signs read "Women Deserve Better." (Not surprisingly, this message is much more effective than spitting invective at emotionally vulnerable women.)
When members of the conservative Independent Women's Forum argue against efforts to address pay inequity, they say the salary gap is a result of women's informed choices -- motherhood, for example -- and that claims of discrimination turn women into victims. Conservatives have realized that women respond to seemingly feminist arguments.
But, of course, Palin isn't a feminist -- not in the slightest. What she calls "the emerging conservative feminist identity" isn't the product of a political movement or a fight for social justice.
It isn't a structural analysis of patriarchal norms, power dynamics or systemic inequities. It's an empty rallying call to other women who are as disdainful of or apathetic to women's rights as Palin herself: women who want to make abortion and emergency contraception illegal and who fight same-sex marriage rights. As Kate Harding wrote on Jezebel.com: "What comes next? 'Phyllis Schlafly feminism?' 'Patriarchal feminism?' 'He-Man Woman Hater Feminism?' "
Given that so-called conservative feminists don't support women's rights, how can they paint their movement as pro-woman? Why are they not being laughed out of the room?
Easy: They preempt criticism of their lack of bona fides by aligning themselves with a history that most women are proud of -- the fight for suffrage. They claim they're the real feminists, as Palin did in her speech lauding the Susan B. Anthony List for "returning the women's movement back to its original roots." (She wasn't talking about voting rights; she was referring to the debated notion that first-wave feminists were antiabortion.)
It may seem odd to argue that for women to make progress, they should ground their movement in the past -- but it's appropriate, given the beliefs of conservative "feminists." They don't want to move forward; instead they knock 1960s-era feminism as hooey while claiming to support equality. In her book "Going Rogue," for example, Palin writes that she doesn't agree with "the radical mantras of that early feminist era, but reasoned arguments for equal opportunity definitely resonated with me."
Of course, by dismissing the past 40 years of feminism, women such as Palin disparage the very movement that made it possible for them to be public figures. After all, would Palin be addressing tea party rallies if Betty Friedan had never talked about the "problem that has no name?"
By tying their "feminism" to the suffragists, whose goal was realized nearly 100 years ago, they're not-so-subtly saying that women in America have achieved equality. In fact, they don't believe that systemic sexism exists. The conservative writer Christina Hoff Sommers, for example, says that women aren't oppressed and that "it is no longer reasonable to say that as a group, women are worse off than men."
If you believe women have made it, you're not going to fight very hard on their behalf. But it's difficult to rally women's support behind a message of inaction, so Palin is doing her best to frame this nonmovement as proactive and, of course, "empowering."
"More young women agree with these feminist foremothers [on abortion] than ever before," Palin said in her Susan B. Anthony List speech. "And believe in that culture of life, empowering women by offering them a real choice." (Exactly what said choice would be once abortion is illegal went unmentioned.)
A related strategy for Palin and fellow conservatives is to paint actual feminists as condescending hypocrites who simply don't believe in young women: "[They] send this message, that 'Nope, you're not capable of doing both. You can't give your child life and still pursue career and education. You're not strong enough; you're not capable.' So it's very hypocritical," she told the anti-abortion-rights crowd. Palin's "pro-woman sisterhood," however, "is telling these young women that they're strong enough and smart enough, they are capable to be able to handle an unintended pregnancy and still be able to . . . handle that [and] give that child life." (Unless of course, these young women were unlucky enough to live in Alaska when then-Gov. Palin cut funding for an Anchorage shelter for teenage moms.)
So Palin's "feminism" isn't just co-opting the language of the feminist movement, it's deliberately misrepresenting real feminism to distract from the fact that she supports policies that limit women's rights.
Of course, deciding who gets to call themselves feminists is a tricky business. Even some people who seem to generally disagree with Palin have found it difficult to bar her from the feminist ranks. Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Connie Schultz wrote that she won't "quibble with her" over the label, and Meghan Daum said in the Los Angeles Times that if Palin "has the guts to call herself a feminist, then she's entitled to be accepted as one."
Now, there's no grand arbiter of the label, and the tremendous range of thought in the movement means there isn't a singular platform one can look to as a reference point. And the sad reality is that there are plenty of self-identified liberal feminists who exhibit not-so-egalitarian ideals, such as racism or homophobia. So is it possible to exclude women such as Palin from feminism if we don't have a conclusive definition?
Absolutely. If anyone -- even someone who actively fights against women's rights -- can call herself a feminist, the word and the movement lose all meaning. And while part of the power of feminism is its intellectual diversity, certain things are inarguable. Feminism is a social justice movement with values and goals that benefit women. It's a structural analysis of a world that oppresses women, an ideology based on the notion that patriarchy exists and that it needs to end.
What Palin is peddling isn't feminism -- it's a manipulated buzzword being used to garner support for a party that time and time again votes against women's rights. Palin isn't trying to further a movement for justice or equality; she's shilling for women's votes -- a "stampede of pink elephants," she says -- for the midterm elections.
And it's working. The conservative "sisterhood" responded passionately to Palin's call. Blogger Lori Ziganto swooned over Palin and the other "true feminist" candidates she's supporting. "They are the new faces of feminism," she wrote. And Kathryn Jean Lopez at the National Review criticized those who would doubt Palin's feminist credentials.
But feminists -- or anyone who cares about women's progress -- need to stop Palin from turning feminism into yet another empty slogan. Because "sisterhood" and meaningless rallying cries aside, American women need real feminism in their lives, not just the f-bomb.
Jessica Valenti is the author of "The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession With Virginity Is Hurting Young Women" and the founder of Feministing.com. She has written previously for Outlook on women's rights in the United States and on virginity.
By Jessica Valenti
Copyright by the Washington Post
Sunday, May 30, 2010
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/28/AR2010052802263.html?hpid=artslot
Sarah Palin sure is dropping the f-bomb a lot lately.
In a widely noted speech this month to the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion-rights group, Palin invoked the words "feminism" and "feminist" no less than a dozen times. She called for a "pro-woman sisterhood" and addressed the "sisters" in the audience. If it weren't for the regular references to gun rights, you might have thought you were listening to Gloria Steinem.
If this rhetoric seems uncharacteristic of the former governor of Alaska, that's because it is. When running for vice president in 2008, Palin flip-flopped on the feminist question, telling CBS's Katie Couric that she is one, but later telling NBC's Brian Williams, "I'm not going to label myself anything."
Today, however, Palin is happily adopting the feminist label. She's throwing support behind "mama grizzly" candidates, describing the large number of women in the "tea party" as evidence of a "mom awakening" and preaching girl power on her Facebook page.
It's not a realization of the importance of women's rights that's inspired the change. It's strategy. Palin's sisterly speechifying is part of a larger conservative move to woo women by appropriating feminist language. Just as consumer culture tries to sell "Girls Gone Wild"-style sexism as "empowerment," conservatives are trying to sell anti-women policies shrouded in pro-women rhetoric.
Several years ago, when antiabortion protesters realized that screaming "Murderer!" at women wasn't winning hearts and minds, they launched more palatable campaigns claiming that abortion hurts women -- their new protest signs read "Women Deserve Better." (Not surprisingly, this message is much more effective than spitting invective at emotionally vulnerable women.)
When members of the conservative Independent Women's Forum argue against efforts to address pay inequity, they say the salary gap is a result of women's informed choices -- motherhood, for example -- and that claims of discrimination turn women into victims. Conservatives have realized that women respond to seemingly feminist arguments.
But, of course, Palin isn't a feminist -- not in the slightest. What she calls "the emerging conservative feminist identity" isn't the product of a political movement or a fight for social justice.
It isn't a structural analysis of patriarchal norms, power dynamics or systemic inequities. It's an empty rallying call to other women who are as disdainful of or apathetic to women's rights as Palin herself: women who want to make abortion and emergency contraception illegal and who fight same-sex marriage rights. As Kate Harding wrote on Jezebel.com: "What comes next? 'Phyllis Schlafly feminism?' 'Patriarchal feminism?' 'He-Man Woman Hater Feminism?' "
Given that so-called conservative feminists don't support women's rights, how can they paint their movement as pro-woman? Why are they not being laughed out of the room?
Easy: They preempt criticism of their lack of bona fides by aligning themselves with a history that most women are proud of -- the fight for suffrage. They claim they're the real feminists, as Palin did in her speech lauding the Susan B. Anthony List for "returning the women's movement back to its original roots." (She wasn't talking about voting rights; she was referring to the debated notion that first-wave feminists were antiabortion.)
It may seem odd to argue that for women to make progress, they should ground their movement in the past -- but it's appropriate, given the beliefs of conservative "feminists." They don't want to move forward; instead they knock 1960s-era feminism as hooey while claiming to support equality. In her book "Going Rogue," for example, Palin writes that she doesn't agree with "the radical mantras of that early feminist era, but reasoned arguments for equal opportunity definitely resonated with me."
Of course, by dismissing the past 40 years of feminism, women such as Palin disparage the very movement that made it possible for them to be public figures. After all, would Palin be addressing tea party rallies if Betty Friedan had never talked about the "problem that has no name?"
By tying their "feminism" to the suffragists, whose goal was realized nearly 100 years ago, they're not-so-subtly saying that women in America have achieved equality. In fact, they don't believe that systemic sexism exists. The conservative writer Christina Hoff Sommers, for example, says that women aren't oppressed and that "it is no longer reasonable to say that as a group, women are worse off than men."
If you believe women have made it, you're not going to fight very hard on their behalf. But it's difficult to rally women's support behind a message of inaction, so Palin is doing her best to frame this nonmovement as proactive and, of course, "empowering."
"More young women agree with these feminist foremothers [on abortion] than ever before," Palin said in her Susan B. Anthony List speech. "And believe in that culture of life, empowering women by offering them a real choice." (Exactly what said choice would be once abortion is illegal went unmentioned.)
A related strategy for Palin and fellow conservatives is to paint actual feminists as condescending hypocrites who simply don't believe in young women: "[They] send this message, that 'Nope, you're not capable of doing both. You can't give your child life and still pursue career and education. You're not strong enough; you're not capable.' So it's very hypocritical," she told the anti-abortion-rights crowd. Palin's "pro-woman sisterhood," however, "is telling these young women that they're strong enough and smart enough, they are capable to be able to handle an unintended pregnancy and still be able to . . . handle that [and] give that child life." (Unless of course, these young women were unlucky enough to live in Alaska when then-Gov. Palin cut funding for an Anchorage shelter for teenage moms.)
So Palin's "feminism" isn't just co-opting the language of the feminist movement, it's deliberately misrepresenting real feminism to distract from the fact that she supports policies that limit women's rights.
Of course, deciding who gets to call themselves feminists is a tricky business. Even some people who seem to generally disagree with Palin have found it difficult to bar her from the feminist ranks. Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Connie Schultz wrote that she won't "quibble with her" over the label, and Meghan Daum said in the Los Angeles Times that if Palin "has the guts to call herself a feminist, then she's entitled to be accepted as one."
Now, there's no grand arbiter of the label, and the tremendous range of thought in the movement means there isn't a singular platform one can look to as a reference point. And the sad reality is that there are plenty of self-identified liberal feminists who exhibit not-so-egalitarian ideals, such as racism or homophobia. So is it possible to exclude women such as Palin from feminism if we don't have a conclusive definition?
Absolutely. If anyone -- even someone who actively fights against women's rights -- can call herself a feminist, the word and the movement lose all meaning. And while part of the power of feminism is its intellectual diversity, certain things are inarguable. Feminism is a social justice movement with values and goals that benefit women. It's a structural analysis of a world that oppresses women, an ideology based on the notion that patriarchy exists and that it needs to end.
What Palin is peddling isn't feminism -- it's a manipulated buzzword being used to garner support for a party that time and time again votes against women's rights. Palin isn't trying to further a movement for justice or equality; she's shilling for women's votes -- a "stampede of pink elephants," she says -- for the midterm elections.
And it's working. The conservative "sisterhood" responded passionately to Palin's call. Blogger Lori Ziganto swooned over Palin and the other "true feminist" candidates she's supporting. "They are the new faces of feminism," she wrote. And Kathryn Jean Lopez at the National Review criticized those who would doubt Palin's feminist credentials.
But feminists -- or anyone who cares about women's progress -- need to stop Palin from turning feminism into yet another empty slogan. Because "sisterhood" and meaningless rallying cries aside, American women need real feminism in their lives, not just the f-bomb.
Jessica Valenti is the author of "The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession With Virginity Is Hurting Young Women" and the founder of Feministing.com. She has written previously for Outlook on women's rights in the United States and on virginity.
Malia for President By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Malia for President
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 28, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/opinion/30friedman.html?ref=opinion
It took almost the entire press conference at the White House on Thursday for President Obama to find his voice in responding to the oil disaster in the gulf — and it is probably no accident that it seemed like the only unrehearsed moment. The president was trying to convey why he takes this problem so seriously, when he noted:
“When I woke this morning and I’m shaving and Malia knocks on my bathroom door and she peeks in her head and she says, ‘Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?’ Because I think everybody understands that when we are fouling the Earth like this, it has concrete implications — not just for this generation, but for future generations. I grew up in Hawaii where the ocean is sacred. And when you see birds flying around with oil all over their feathers and turtles dying, that doesn’t just speak to the immediate economic consequences of this; this speaks to how are we caring for this incredible bounty that we have. And so sometimes when I hear folks down in Louisiana expressing frustrations, I may not always think that their comments are fair. On the other hand, I probably think to myself, ‘These are folks who grew up fishing in these wetlands and seeing this as an integral part of who they are.’ And to see that messed up in this fashion would be infuriating.”
And a child shall lead them. ...
This oil leak is not President Obama’s fault. Stopping the spill is BP’s responsibility; it both caused it and it has the best access to the best technology to plug it. Of course, as the nation’s C.E.O., Mr. Obama has to oversee the cleanup, and he has been on top of that. His most important job, though, is one he has yet to take on: shaping the long-term public reaction to the spill so that we can use it to generate the political will to break our addiction to oil. In that job, the most important thing Mr. Obama can do is react to this spill as a child would — because it is precisely that simple gut reaction, repeated over and over, speech after speech, that could change our national conversation on energy.
You see, right now our energy conversation is dominated by three voices. There are the “petro-determinists,” who never tire of telling us that we’ll be dependent on oil for a “long, long time.” That is true. The problem is, these same people have been telling us that ever since the first oil crisis in 1973, and their real objective in doing so is not to help us understand that breaking our oil addiction is difficult, but to make us think that it is impossible — so don’t bother.
Then there are the “eco-pessimists,” who argue that it is probably already too late. We are toast. Unless we rewire human beings to want less growth — not only ourselves but the millions in China and India who aspire to live like us — the end is nigh. The eco-pessimists may be right, and they are certainly sincere, but they have little respect for the power of innovation, the power of six billion minds all trying to solve one problem.
Finally, we have the “Obama realists.” These are the political pros who whisper to him every day that this is not the time to lay out a big new “Obama End to Oil Addiction Act.” The Democrats, they contend, are suffering from “legislative fatigue.” After casting a hard vote for health care, they don’t want to be asked to cast a supposedly hard vote for a price on carbon — the essential first step in getting off oil. And, they rightly add, the G.O.P. today is so cynical, so bought and paid for by Big Oil, that only a couple of Republican senators would have the courage and vision to vote for a price on carbon. So Democrats would be out there alone.
The Obama realists make sure that the president is always careful to talk in vague terms about how he stands behind “Waxman-Markey” and “Kerry-Lieberman” — sterile Washington-speak for the House and Senate bills that attempt to put a small price on carbon. I am glad he is behind them; I just wish he were in front of them. I am glad the president passed health care for the nation. But healthy to do what? To go where? To grasp what dream?
Answering those questions is the president’s great opportunity here, but he has to think like a kid. Kids get it. They ask: Why would we want to stay dependent on an energy source that could destroy so many birds, fish, beaches and ecosystems before the next generation has a chance to enjoy them? Why aren’t we doing more to create clean power and energy efficiency when so many others, even China, are doing so? And, Daddy, why can’t you even mention the words “carbon tax,” when the carbon we spill into the atmosphere every day is just as dangerous to our future as the crude oil that has been spilling into the gulf?
That is what a child would want to know if he or she could vote. That is the well of aspiration for a game-change on energy that Mr. Obama can tap into. And he could even rip off BP for his moon shot motto: Let’s get America “Beyond Petroleum.” As you would say, Mr. President, this is your time, this is your moment. Seize it. A disaster is an inexcusable thing to waste.
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 28, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/opinion/30friedman.html?ref=opinion
It took almost the entire press conference at the White House on Thursday for President Obama to find his voice in responding to the oil disaster in the gulf — and it is probably no accident that it seemed like the only unrehearsed moment. The president was trying to convey why he takes this problem so seriously, when he noted:
“When I woke this morning and I’m shaving and Malia knocks on my bathroom door and she peeks in her head and she says, ‘Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?’ Because I think everybody understands that when we are fouling the Earth like this, it has concrete implications — not just for this generation, but for future generations. I grew up in Hawaii where the ocean is sacred. And when you see birds flying around with oil all over their feathers and turtles dying, that doesn’t just speak to the immediate economic consequences of this; this speaks to how are we caring for this incredible bounty that we have. And so sometimes when I hear folks down in Louisiana expressing frustrations, I may not always think that their comments are fair. On the other hand, I probably think to myself, ‘These are folks who grew up fishing in these wetlands and seeing this as an integral part of who they are.’ And to see that messed up in this fashion would be infuriating.”
And a child shall lead them. ...
This oil leak is not President Obama’s fault. Stopping the spill is BP’s responsibility; it both caused it and it has the best access to the best technology to plug it. Of course, as the nation’s C.E.O., Mr. Obama has to oversee the cleanup, and he has been on top of that. His most important job, though, is one he has yet to take on: shaping the long-term public reaction to the spill so that we can use it to generate the political will to break our addiction to oil. In that job, the most important thing Mr. Obama can do is react to this spill as a child would — because it is precisely that simple gut reaction, repeated over and over, speech after speech, that could change our national conversation on energy.
You see, right now our energy conversation is dominated by three voices. There are the “petro-determinists,” who never tire of telling us that we’ll be dependent on oil for a “long, long time.” That is true. The problem is, these same people have been telling us that ever since the first oil crisis in 1973, and their real objective in doing so is not to help us understand that breaking our oil addiction is difficult, but to make us think that it is impossible — so don’t bother.
Then there are the “eco-pessimists,” who argue that it is probably already too late. We are toast. Unless we rewire human beings to want less growth — not only ourselves but the millions in China and India who aspire to live like us — the end is nigh. The eco-pessimists may be right, and they are certainly sincere, but they have little respect for the power of innovation, the power of six billion minds all trying to solve one problem.
Finally, we have the “Obama realists.” These are the political pros who whisper to him every day that this is not the time to lay out a big new “Obama End to Oil Addiction Act.” The Democrats, they contend, are suffering from “legislative fatigue.” After casting a hard vote for health care, they don’t want to be asked to cast a supposedly hard vote for a price on carbon — the essential first step in getting off oil. And, they rightly add, the G.O.P. today is so cynical, so bought and paid for by Big Oil, that only a couple of Republican senators would have the courage and vision to vote for a price on carbon. So Democrats would be out there alone.
The Obama realists make sure that the president is always careful to talk in vague terms about how he stands behind “Waxman-Markey” and “Kerry-Lieberman” — sterile Washington-speak for the House and Senate bills that attempt to put a small price on carbon. I am glad he is behind them; I just wish he were in front of them. I am glad the president passed health care for the nation. But healthy to do what? To go where? To grasp what dream?
Answering those questions is the president’s great opportunity here, but he has to think like a kid. Kids get it. They ask: Why would we want to stay dependent on an energy source that could destroy so many birds, fish, beaches and ecosystems before the next generation has a chance to enjoy them? Why aren’t we doing more to create clean power and energy efficiency when so many others, even China, are doing so? And, Daddy, why can’t you even mention the words “carbon tax,” when the carbon we spill into the atmosphere every day is just as dangerous to our future as the crude oil that has been spilling into the gulf?
That is what a child would want to know if he or she could vote. That is the well of aspiration for a game-change on energy that Mr. Obama can tap into. And he could even rip off BP for his moon shot motto: Let’s get America “Beyond Petroleum.” As you would say, Mr. President, this is your time, this is your moment. Seize it. A disaster is an inexcusable thing to waste.
New York Times Editorial: The Trans-Atlantic Crisis
New York Times Editorial: The Trans-Atlantic Crisis
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 29, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/opinion/30sun1.html?ref=opinion
America's Uncertain Recovery
The stock market gyrated wildly last week, soaring when China denied reports it was about to forsake the euro, then retreating on bad news about Spain’s creditworthiness. Contagion from Europe is obviously still a threat to the United States. But Europe’s woes are only one of several risks still facing the American economy. And those risks are made all the worse by an increasingly incoherent response from Congress.
The biggest danger is high and intractable unemployment, currently 9.9 percent, or 15.3 million people, nearly half of whom have been jobless for more than six months. Even if last month’s strong job growth is sustained — a big if — it would take five years to get back to a more tolerable unemployment rate of 5 percent.
At the same time, state budgets are collapsing, with governments facing a collective budget hole of $112 billion in the fiscal year that starts for most of them on July 1. Closing the gaps will mean tax increases and spending cuts, which will provoke more layoffs, both among public employees and businesses that contract with state and local governments.
Adding to the economic pressure on families, more house price declines are likely, the result of millions of foreclosures and other distressed homes sales. Adding to the pressure on small businesses, credit will continue to be tight, as potentially hundreds of small banks fail, most of them weakened by souring loans on commercial real estate. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation recently reported that 775 banks were on its watch list, the most since mid-1993.
Any one of those issues would be worrying. Collectively, they constitute an emergency. Yet, the Senate left town on Friday for a week’s break without passing a bill to extend expiring unemployment benefits; senators said they would get to it later. The House voted for the bill, but stripped out provisions for a health-insurance subsidy for jobless workers and for more aid to states.
Congress’s reluctance to pass the package of measures, which costs about $70 billion, is grounded in familiar arguments that the nation must act now to cut the budget deficit. In fact, withholding support now — when the recovery is still fragile and needs are still great — runs the risk of condemning the economy to a long, hard slog of subpar growth, barely indistinguishable, in effect, from recession itself. That would be worse for the nation’s finances than upfront spending.
It is up to the Obama administration and Democratic Congressional leaders to make that case, ideally in tandem with a credible plan for reducing the deficit in the longer term. Health care reform was a down payment on controlling costs. Further serious discussion of the deficit has been put off until after the midterm election, when the president’s budget panel is due to report.
Even then, how many politicians will find the courage to deal frankly with the tax increases that deficit reduction will require? Economic recovery is not a given. Neither is effective political leadership. We will not have one without the other.
So far, Europe’s troubles have not hurt American banks, which own little debt from beleaguered Greece, Portugal or Spain. But the American and European financial sectors are entwined, and it is unclear whether American banks are prepared for what could happen.
Doubts remain about the solvency of the weaker European countries, despite the plan by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund to make up to $1 trillion available to indebted economies.
The plan has brought needed respite to financial markets. Crucially, the European Central Bank threw a lifeline to banks in the euro area, promising to buy tens of billions worth of weak-country debt from them, a small portion. The German Bundestag overcame public resistance and approved the rescue package.
But it has a fundamental shortcoming: it relies on deep budget cuts from countries that are in a recession or teetering on the edge. Several have weak governments that may not be able to carry through the prescribed fixes. Even if they do, the budget cuts are likely to make them even weaker.
Consider Ireland, which was quick to address the financial crisis. Last year, the Irish government slashed spending, cutting the pay of public-sector workers. It raised taxes. The Irish economy contracted 7 percent, and the budget deficit widened to 14 percent of its gross domestic product. This year, the deficit is expected to reach 12 percent of G.D.P.
Greece has now pledged to slash its budget deficit by more than 10 percentage points of G.D.P. by 2014. Spain says it will cut its deficit to 6 percent of G.D.P. next year from 11.2 percent in 2009. Italy announced cuts worth $30 billion. Portugal and even Germany have also announced budget cuts.
This is a recipe for economic stagnation. It also may not avert a debt rescheduling by some of the weaker European countries, which would force European banks to take a cut on their holdings. Sitting on slim cushions of capital reserves, European banks are in no shape for a sharp drop in the value of their assets.
It would be best to recognize that debt restructuring is inevitable. That would allow weaker countries to start growing again more quickly, but to withstand it European banks must be made to raise more capital. German banks’ capital amounts to less than 5 percent of their total assets, compared with 12.4 percent in the United States. And they are sitting on $650 billion in debt from the four most stricken countries.
American banks are more stable and better capitalized but must remain alert. American banks ended 2009 with $1.2 trillion worth of total European debt. That is about par with the amount of subprime residential mortgage debt outstanding in 2008. It would be foolhardy to assume this problem is far away.
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 29, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/opinion/30sun1.html?ref=opinion
America's Uncertain Recovery
The stock market gyrated wildly last week, soaring when China denied reports it was about to forsake the euro, then retreating on bad news about Spain’s creditworthiness. Contagion from Europe is obviously still a threat to the United States. But Europe’s woes are only one of several risks still facing the American economy. And those risks are made all the worse by an increasingly incoherent response from Congress.
The biggest danger is high and intractable unemployment, currently 9.9 percent, or 15.3 million people, nearly half of whom have been jobless for more than six months. Even if last month’s strong job growth is sustained — a big if — it would take five years to get back to a more tolerable unemployment rate of 5 percent.
At the same time, state budgets are collapsing, with governments facing a collective budget hole of $112 billion in the fiscal year that starts for most of them on July 1. Closing the gaps will mean tax increases and spending cuts, which will provoke more layoffs, both among public employees and businesses that contract with state and local governments.
Adding to the economic pressure on families, more house price declines are likely, the result of millions of foreclosures and other distressed homes sales. Adding to the pressure on small businesses, credit will continue to be tight, as potentially hundreds of small banks fail, most of them weakened by souring loans on commercial real estate. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation recently reported that 775 banks were on its watch list, the most since mid-1993.
Any one of those issues would be worrying. Collectively, they constitute an emergency. Yet, the Senate left town on Friday for a week’s break without passing a bill to extend expiring unemployment benefits; senators said they would get to it later. The House voted for the bill, but stripped out provisions for a health-insurance subsidy for jobless workers and for more aid to states.
Congress’s reluctance to pass the package of measures, which costs about $70 billion, is grounded in familiar arguments that the nation must act now to cut the budget deficit. In fact, withholding support now — when the recovery is still fragile and needs are still great — runs the risk of condemning the economy to a long, hard slog of subpar growth, barely indistinguishable, in effect, from recession itself. That would be worse for the nation’s finances than upfront spending.
It is up to the Obama administration and Democratic Congressional leaders to make that case, ideally in tandem with a credible plan for reducing the deficit in the longer term. Health care reform was a down payment on controlling costs. Further serious discussion of the deficit has been put off until after the midterm election, when the president’s budget panel is due to report.
Even then, how many politicians will find the courage to deal frankly with the tax increases that deficit reduction will require? Economic recovery is not a given. Neither is effective political leadership. We will not have one without the other.
So far, Europe’s troubles have not hurt American banks, which own little debt from beleaguered Greece, Portugal or Spain. But the American and European financial sectors are entwined, and it is unclear whether American banks are prepared for what could happen.
Doubts remain about the solvency of the weaker European countries, despite the plan by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund to make up to $1 trillion available to indebted economies.
The plan has brought needed respite to financial markets. Crucially, the European Central Bank threw a lifeline to banks in the euro area, promising to buy tens of billions worth of weak-country debt from them, a small portion. The German Bundestag overcame public resistance and approved the rescue package.
But it has a fundamental shortcoming: it relies on deep budget cuts from countries that are in a recession or teetering on the edge. Several have weak governments that may not be able to carry through the prescribed fixes. Even if they do, the budget cuts are likely to make them even weaker.
Consider Ireland, which was quick to address the financial crisis. Last year, the Irish government slashed spending, cutting the pay of public-sector workers. It raised taxes. The Irish economy contracted 7 percent, and the budget deficit widened to 14 percent of its gross domestic product. This year, the deficit is expected to reach 12 percent of G.D.P.
Greece has now pledged to slash its budget deficit by more than 10 percentage points of G.D.P. by 2014. Spain says it will cut its deficit to 6 percent of G.D.P. next year from 11.2 percent in 2009. Italy announced cuts worth $30 billion. Portugal and even Germany have also announced budget cuts.
This is a recipe for economic stagnation. It also may not avert a debt rescheduling by some of the weaker European countries, which would force European banks to take a cut on their holdings. Sitting on slim cushions of capital reserves, European banks are in no shape for a sharp drop in the value of their assets.
It would be best to recognize that debt restructuring is inevitable. That would allow weaker countries to start growing again more quickly, but to withstand it European banks must be made to raise more capital. German banks’ capital amounts to less than 5 percent of their total assets, compared with 12.4 percent in the United States. And they are sitting on $650 billion in debt from the four most stricken countries.
American banks are more stable and better capitalized but must remain alert. American banks ended 2009 with $1.2 trillion worth of total European debt. That is about par with the amount of subprime residential mortgage debt outstanding in 2008. It would be foolhardy to assume this problem is far away.
Placing the Blame as Students Are Buried in Debt
Placing the Blame as Students Are Buried in Debt
By RON LIEBER
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 28, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/29/your-money/student-loans/29money.html?hpw
Like many middle-class families, Cortney Munna and her mother began the college selection process with a grim determination. They would do whatever they could to get Cortney into the best possible college, and they maintained a blind faith that the investment would be worth it.
Today, however, Ms. Munna, a 26-year-old graduate of New York University, has nearly $100,000 in student loan debt from her four years in college, and affording the full monthly payments would be a struggle. For much of the time since her 2005 graduation, she’s been enrolled in night school, which allows her to defer loan payments.
This is not a long-term solution, because the interest on the loans continues to pile up. So in an eerie echo of the mortgage crisis, tens of thousands of people like Ms. Munna are facing a reckoning. They and their families made borrowing decisions based more on emotion than reason, much as subprime borrowers assumed the value of their houses would always go up.
Meanwhile, universities like N.Y.U. enrolled students without asking many questions about whether they could afford a $50,000 annual tuition bill. Then the colleges introduced the students to lenders who underwrote big loans without any idea of what the students might earn someday — just like the mortgage lenders who didn’t ask borrowers to verify their incomes.
Ms. Munna does not want to walk away from her loans in the same way many mortgage holders are. It would be difficult in any event because federal bankruptcy law makes it nearly impossible to discharge student loan debts. But unless she manages to improve her income quickly, she doesn’t have a lot of good options for digging out.
It is utterly depressing that there are so many people like her facing decades of payments, limited capacity to buy a home and a debt burden that can repel potential life partners. For starters, it’s a shared failure of parenting and loan underwriting.
But perhaps the biggest share lies with colleges and universities because they have the most knowledge of the financial aid process. And I would argue that they had an obligation to counsel students like Ms. Munna, who got in too far over their heads.
How many people are like her? According to the College Board’s Trends in Student Aid study, 10 percent of people who graduated in 2007-8 with student loans had borrowed $40,000 or more. The median debt for bachelor’s degree recipients who borrowed while attending private, nonprofit colleges was $22,380.
The Project on Student Debt, a research and advocacy organization in Oakland, Calif., used federal data to estimate that 206,000 people graduated from college (including many from for-profit universities) with more than $40,000 in student loan debt in that same period. That’s a ninefold increase over the number of people in 1996, using 2008 dollars.
The Family
No one forces borrowers to take out these loans, and Ms. Munna and her mother, Cathryn, have spent the years since her graduation trying to understand where they went wrong. Ms. Munna’s father died when she was 13, after a series of illnesses.
She started college at age 17 and borrowed as much money as she could under the federal loan program. To make up the difference between her grants and work study money and the total cost of attending, her mother co-signed two private loans with Sallie Mae totaling about $20,000.
When they applied for a third loan, however, Sallie Mae rejected the application, citing Cathryn’s credit history. She had returned to college herself to finish her bachelor’s degree and was also borrowing money. N.Y.U. suggested a federal Plus loan for parents, but that would have required immediate payments, something the mother couldn’t afford. So before Cortney’s junior year, N.Y.U. recommended that she apply for a private student loan on her own with Citibank.
Over the course of the next two years, starting when she was still a teenager, she borrowed about $40,000 from Citibank without thinking much about how she would pay it back. How could her mother have let her run up that debt, and why didn’t she try to make her daughter transfer to, say, the best school in the much cheaper state university system in New York? “All I could see was college, and a good college and how proud I was of her,” Cathryn said. “All we needed to do was get this education and get the good job. This is the thing that eats away at me, the naïveté on my part.”
But Cortney resists the idea that this is a tale of bad parenting. “To me, it would be an uncharitable reading,” she said. “My mother has tried her best, and I don’t blame her for anything in this.”
The Lender
Sallie Mae gets a pass here, in my view. A responsible grownup co-signed for its loans to the Munnas, and the company eventually cut them off.
But what was Citi thinking, handing over $40,000 to an undergraduate who had already amassed debt well into the five figures? This was, in effect, a “no doc” or at least a “low doc” subprime mortgage loan.
A Citi spokesman declined to comment, even though Ms. Munna was willing to sign a waiver giving Citi permission to talk about her loans. Perhaps the bank worried that once it approved one loan, cutting her off would have led her to drop out or transfer and have trouble paying back the loan.
Today, someone like Ms. Munna might not qualify for the $40,000 she borrowed. But as the economy rebounds, there is little doubt that plenty of lenders will step forward to roll the dice on desperate students, especially because the students generally can’t get rid of the debt in bankruptcy court.
The financial aid office often has the best picture of what students like Ms. Munna are up against, because they see their families’ financial situation splayed out on the federal financial aid form. So why didn’t N.Y.U. tell Ms. Munna that she simply did not belong there once she’d passed, say, $60,000 in total debt?
“Had somebody called me and said, ‘Do you have a clue where this is all headed?’, it would have been a slap in the face, but a slap in the face that I needed,” said Cathryn Munna. “When financial aid told her that they could get her $2,000 more in loans, they should have been saying ‘You are in deep doo-doo, little girl.’ ”
That’s not a role that the university wants to take on, though. “I think that would be completely inappropriate,” said Randall Deike, the vice president of enrollment management for N.Y.U., who oversees admissions and financial aid. “Some families will do whatever it takes for their son or daughter to be not just at N.Y.U., but any first-choice college. I’m not sure that’s always the best decision, but it’s one that they really have to make themselves.”
The complications here go well beyond the propriety of suggesting that a student enroll elsewhere. Colleges don’t always know how much debt its students are taking on, which makes it hard to offer good counsel. (N.Y.U. does appear to have known about all of Ms. Munna’s loans, though.)
Then there’s a branding problem. Urging students to attend a cheaper college or leave altogether suggests a lack of confidence about the earning potential of alumni. Nobody wants to admit that. And once a university starts encouraging middle-class students to go elsewhere, it must fill its classes with more children of the wealthy and a much smaller number of low-income students to whom it can afford to offer enormous scholarships. That’s hardly an ideal outcome either.
Finally, universities exist to enroll students, not turn them away. “Aid administrators want to keep their jobs,” said Joan H. Crissman, interim president and chief executive of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “If the administration finds out that you’re encouraging students to go to a cheaper school just because you don’t think they can handle the debt load, I don’t think that’s going to mesh very well.”
That doesn’t change the fact, however, that the financial aid office is still in the best position to see trouble coming and do something to stop it. University officials should take on this obligation, even if they aren’t willing to advise students to attend another college.
Instead, they might deputize a gang of M.B.A. candidates or alumni in the financial services industry to offer free financial planning to admitted students and their families. Mr. Deike also noted that the bigger problem here is one of financial literacy. Fine. He and N.Y.U. are in a great position to solve for that by making every financial aid recipient take a financial planning class. The students could even use their families as the case study.
The Options
The balance on Cortney Munna’s loans is about $97,000, including all of her federal loans and her private debt from Sallie Mae and Citibank. What are her options for digging out?
Her mother can’t help without selling her bed and breakfast, and then she’d have no home. She could take her daughter in, but there aren’t good ways for her to earn a living in Alexandria Bay, in upstate New York.
Cortney could move someplace cheaper than her current home city of San Francisco, but she worries about her job prospects, even with her N.Y.U. diploma.
She recently received a raise and now makes $22 an hour working for a photographer. It’s the highest salary she’s earned since graduating with an interdisciplinary degree in religious and women’s studies. After taxes, she takes home about $2,300 a month. Rent runs $750, and the full monthly payments on her student loans would be about $700 if they weren’t being deferred, which would not leave a lot left over.
She may finally be earning enough to barely scrape by while still making the payments for the first time since she graduated, at least until interest rates rise and the payments on her loans with variable rates spiral up. And while her job requires her to work nights and weekends sometimes, she probably should find a flexible second job to try to bring in a few extra hundred dollars a month.
Ms. Munna understands this tough love, buck up, buckle-down advice. But she also badly wants to call a do-over on the last decade. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life slaving away to pay for an education I got for four years and would happily give back,” she said. “It feels wrong to me.”
Correction: An earlier version of this column online misstated the benchmark year in a study by the Project on Student Debt.
By RON LIEBER
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 28, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/29/your-money/student-loans/29money.html?hpw
Like many middle-class families, Cortney Munna and her mother began the college selection process with a grim determination. They would do whatever they could to get Cortney into the best possible college, and they maintained a blind faith that the investment would be worth it.
Today, however, Ms. Munna, a 26-year-old graduate of New York University, has nearly $100,000 in student loan debt from her four years in college, and affording the full monthly payments would be a struggle. For much of the time since her 2005 graduation, she’s been enrolled in night school, which allows her to defer loan payments.
This is not a long-term solution, because the interest on the loans continues to pile up. So in an eerie echo of the mortgage crisis, tens of thousands of people like Ms. Munna are facing a reckoning. They and their families made borrowing decisions based more on emotion than reason, much as subprime borrowers assumed the value of their houses would always go up.
Meanwhile, universities like N.Y.U. enrolled students without asking many questions about whether they could afford a $50,000 annual tuition bill. Then the colleges introduced the students to lenders who underwrote big loans without any idea of what the students might earn someday — just like the mortgage lenders who didn’t ask borrowers to verify their incomes.
Ms. Munna does not want to walk away from her loans in the same way many mortgage holders are. It would be difficult in any event because federal bankruptcy law makes it nearly impossible to discharge student loan debts. But unless she manages to improve her income quickly, she doesn’t have a lot of good options for digging out.
It is utterly depressing that there are so many people like her facing decades of payments, limited capacity to buy a home and a debt burden that can repel potential life partners. For starters, it’s a shared failure of parenting and loan underwriting.
But perhaps the biggest share lies with colleges and universities because they have the most knowledge of the financial aid process. And I would argue that they had an obligation to counsel students like Ms. Munna, who got in too far over their heads.
How many people are like her? According to the College Board’s Trends in Student Aid study, 10 percent of people who graduated in 2007-8 with student loans had borrowed $40,000 or more. The median debt for bachelor’s degree recipients who borrowed while attending private, nonprofit colleges was $22,380.
The Project on Student Debt, a research and advocacy organization in Oakland, Calif., used federal data to estimate that 206,000 people graduated from college (including many from for-profit universities) with more than $40,000 in student loan debt in that same period. That’s a ninefold increase over the number of people in 1996, using 2008 dollars.
The Family
No one forces borrowers to take out these loans, and Ms. Munna and her mother, Cathryn, have spent the years since her graduation trying to understand where they went wrong. Ms. Munna’s father died when she was 13, after a series of illnesses.
She started college at age 17 and borrowed as much money as she could under the federal loan program. To make up the difference between her grants and work study money and the total cost of attending, her mother co-signed two private loans with Sallie Mae totaling about $20,000.
When they applied for a third loan, however, Sallie Mae rejected the application, citing Cathryn’s credit history. She had returned to college herself to finish her bachelor’s degree and was also borrowing money. N.Y.U. suggested a federal Plus loan for parents, but that would have required immediate payments, something the mother couldn’t afford. So before Cortney’s junior year, N.Y.U. recommended that she apply for a private student loan on her own with Citibank.
Over the course of the next two years, starting when she was still a teenager, she borrowed about $40,000 from Citibank without thinking much about how she would pay it back. How could her mother have let her run up that debt, and why didn’t she try to make her daughter transfer to, say, the best school in the much cheaper state university system in New York? “All I could see was college, and a good college and how proud I was of her,” Cathryn said. “All we needed to do was get this education and get the good job. This is the thing that eats away at me, the naïveté on my part.”
But Cortney resists the idea that this is a tale of bad parenting. “To me, it would be an uncharitable reading,” she said. “My mother has tried her best, and I don’t blame her for anything in this.”
The Lender
Sallie Mae gets a pass here, in my view. A responsible grownup co-signed for its loans to the Munnas, and the company eventually cut them off.
But what was Citi thinking, handing over $40,000 to an undergraduate who had already amassed debt well into the five figures? This was, in effect, a “no doc” or at least a “low doc” subprime mortgage loan.
A Citi spokesman declined to comment, even though Ms. Munna was willing to sign a waiver giving Citi permission to talk about her loans. Perhaps the bank worried that once it approved one loan, cutting her off would have led her to drop out or transfer and have trouble paying back the loan.
Today, someone like Ms. Munna might not qualify for the $40,000 she borrowed. But as the economy rebounds, there is little doubt that plenty of lenders will step forward to roll the dice on desperate students, especially because the students generally can’t get rid of the debt in bankruptcy court.
The financial aid office often has the best picture of what students like Ms. Munna are up against, because they see their families’ financial situation splayed out on the federal financial aid form. So why didn’t N.Y.U. tell Ms. Munna that she simply did not belong there once she’d passed, say, $60,000 in total debt?
“Had somebody called me and said, ‘Do you have a clue where this is all headed?’, it would have been a slap in the face, but a slap in the face that I needed,” said Cathryn Munna. “When financial aid told her that they could get her $2,000 more in loans, they should have been saying ‘You are in deep doo-doo, little girl.’ ”
That’s not a role that the university wants to take on, though. “I think that would be completely inappropriate,” said Randall Deike, the vice president of enrollment management for N.Y.U., who oversees admissions and financial aid. “Some families will do whatever it takes for their son or daughter to be not just at N.Y.U., but any first-choice college. I’m not sure that’s always the best decision, but it’s one that they really have to make themselves.”
The complications here go well beyond the propriety of suggesting that a student enroll elsewhere. Colleges don’t always know how much debt its students are taking on, which makes it hard to offer good counsel. (N.Y.U. does appear to have known about all of Ms. Munna’s loans, though.)
Then there’s a branding problem. Urging students to attend a cheaper college or leave altogether suggests a lack of confidence about the earning potential of alumni. Nobody wants to admit that. And once a university starts encouraging middle-class students to go elsewhere, it must fill its classes with more children of the wealthy and a much smaller number of low-income students to whom it can afford to offer enormous scholarships. That’s hardly an ideal outcome either.
Finally, universities exist to enroll students, not turn them away. “Aid administrators want to keep their jobs,” said Joan H. Crissman, interim president and chief executive of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “If the administration finds out that you’re encouraging students to go to a cheaper school just because you don’t think they can handle the debt load, I don’t think that’s going to mesh very well.”
That doesn’t change the fact, however, that the financial aid office is still in the best position to see trouble coming and do something to stop it. University officials should take on this obligation, even if they aren’t willing to advise students to attend another college.
Instead, they might deputize a gang of M.B.A. candidates or alumni in the financial services industry to offer free financial planning to admitted students and their families. Mr. Deike also noted that the bigger problem here is one of financial literacy. Fine. He and N.Y.U. are in a great position to solve for that by making every financial aid recipient take a financial planning class. The students could even use their families as the case study.
The Options
The balance on Cortney Munna’s loans is about $97,000, including all of her federal loans and her private debt from Sallie Mae and Citibank. What are her options for digging out?
Her mother can’t help without selling her bed and breakfast, and then she’d have no home. She could take her daughter in, but there aren’t good ways for her to earn a living in Alexandria Bay, in upstate New York.
Cortney could move someplace cheaper than her current home city of San Francisco, but she worries about her job prospects, even with her N.Y.U. diploma.
She recently received a raise and now makes $22 an hour working for a photographer. It’s the highest salary she’s earned since graduating with an interdisciplinary degree in religious and women’s studies. After taxes, she takes home about $2,300 a month. Rent runs $750, and the full monthly payments on her student loans would be about $700 if they weren’t being deferred, which would not leave a lot left over.
She may finally be earning enough to barely scrape by while still making the payments for the first time since she graduated, at least until interest rates rise and the payments on her loans with variable rates spiral up. And while her job requires her to work nights and weekends sometimes, she probably should find a flexible second job to try to bring in a few extra hundred dollars a month.
Ms. Munna understands this tough love, buck up, buckle-down advice. But she also badly wants to call a do-over on the last decade. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life slaving away to pay for an education I got for four years and would happily give back,” she said. “It feels wrong to me.”
Correction: An earlier version of this column online misstated the benchmark year in a study by the Project on Student Debt.
New York Times Editorial: One Cell Forward
New York Times Editorial: One Cell Forward
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 28, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/opinion/30sun3.html?th&emc=th
In a recent issue of Science magazine, the genome pioneer Craig Venter announced that he and scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute had created a “synthetic cell.” Mr. Venter heralded it as “the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer” and said it could allow humans to create new vaccines and biofuels using artificial microbes.
Mr. Venter’s claim to have created a synthetic species is likely overstated. But there is no denying that he has brought us an important step closer to the possibility of artificial life. President Obama has asked the White House bioethics commission to report back to him on the significance of this development.
“Synthetic cell” makes it sound as though Mr. Venter had constructed the entire cell, molecule by molecule. What he has done is create a synthetic genome — the longest string of DNA to be assembled in a laboratory — and place it in a bacterium. There, the synthetic DNA takes over the cell’s DNA, causing the bacterium to synthesize the proteins specified by the new DNA.
Several questions immediately leap to mind: Is this new technology practical for the commercial purposes Mr. Venter imagines? And is the creation of artificial life, even in this limited sense, a good thing?
Artificial life is a Pandora’s box unlike almost any other. The knowledge it could yield is incredibly tempting. Mr. Venter’s ingenuity and determination are formidable. Inventive as he is — inventive as we, as a species, are — that does not necessarily guarantee wisdom. There are plausible arguments on nearly all sides of these questions, and they have been debated hotly ever since the first, imaginary prospect of life. This newest step in Mr. Venter’s research brings a fresh urgency to the debate — and the need for some profound decisions.
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 28, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/opinion/30sun3.html?th&emc=th
In a recent issue of Science magazine, the genome pioneer Craig Venter announced that he and scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute had created a “synthetic cell.” Mr. Venter heralded it as “the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer” and said it could allow humans to create new vaccines and biofuels using artificial microbes.
Mr. Venter’s claim to have created a synthetic species is likely overstated. But there is no denying that he has brought us an important step closer to the possibility of artificial life. President Obama has asked the White House bioethics commission to report back to him on the significance of this development.
“Synthetic cell” makes it sound as though Mr. Venter had constructed the entire cell, molecule by molecule. What he has done is create a synthetic genome — the longest string of DNA to be assembled in a laboratory — and place it in a bacterium. There, the synthetic DNA takes over the cell’s DNA, causing the bacterium to synthesize the proteins specified by the new DNA.
Several questions immediately leap to mind: Is this new technology practical for the commercial purposes Mr. Venter imagines? And is the creation of artificial life, even in this limited sense, a good thing?
Artificial life is a Pandora’s box unlike almost any other. The knowledge it could yield is incredibly tempting. Mr. Venter’s ingenuity and determination are formidable. Inventive as he is — inventive as we, as a species, are — that does not necessarily guarantee wisdom. There are plausible arguments on nearly all sides of these questions, and they have been debated hotly ever since the first, imaginary prospect of life. This newest step in Mr. Venter’s research brings a fresh urgency to the debate — and the need for some profound decisions.
When Patients Meet Online, Are There Side Effects?
When Patients Meet Online, Are There Side Effects?
By NATASHA SINGER
copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 28, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/business/30stream.html?th&emc=th
COULD we cure diseases faster, or at least better control them, through crowd-sourcing?
Brian Stauffer
That is the premise behind social networking sites like CureTogether.com and PatientsLikeMe.com, which offer online communities for patients and collect members’ health data for research purposes.
PatientsLikeMe provides forums where more than 65,000 members with epilepsy, multiple sclerosis and more than a dozen other disorders are encouraged to share details about their conditions and the success or pitfalls of specific drug treatments.
“When patients share real-world data, collaboration on a global scale becomes possible,” the site says. “New treatments become possible.”
Moreover, in a world where serious side effects often emerge only years after a new medication enters the market, such real-time information from real-world patients may also provide an early warning signal for drug safety problems.
PatientsLikeMe has an innovative for-profit business model, too. It sells health data, gathered from member profiles but with certain identifying information removed, to drug makers and others for scientific and marketing research.
Jamie Heywood, the company’s chairman, says both patients and drug makers delve into that data to meet their own needs.
Members can seek out patients of the same age, sex, and disease progression, whose profiles are displayed on the site, to see which drugs or doses worked for them. Drug makers can pinpoint subgroups — say, severely depressed middle-aged men — who reported the greatest improvement on a particular medication.
“What we have done is made a system that allows you to think about personalized medicine,” says Mr. Heywood. He co-founded the site in 2004 with his brother Ben and a friend after another brother, Stephen Heywood, developed amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. (Stephen died in 2006.)
But pharmaceutical crowd-sourcing also raises important questions about the trade-off between the benefits of information sharing and the risk of patient exploitation.
Some people share their health information for the sake of the greater good. Yet they typically have no way of knowing whether their health profiles contribute directly to the development of more effective treatments — or are simply mined to create more effective drug marketing.
“Do we need to protect people who have illnesses from being exploited?” says Cathy Dwyer, an associate professor at Pace University who has studied how advertisers market to consumers based on their online behavior. “It’s a very tricky line because people absolutely need emotional support when they are dealing with illness.”
PatientsLikeMe is one of many sites that promote the idea of the “e-patient,” a health consumer empowered by online information gathering. Along with offering health resources, many of these sites are also engineered to foster an environment where patients effectively promote treatments to other patients, without a doctor as intermediary.
The lines become blurry in these new arenas. There are unbranded “disease awareness” communities — for example, on Facebook or YouTube — where a drug maker may pay people to moderate patient forums or give testimonials but might not prominently display that fact to participants. Other sites collect consumer health data to help drug makers aim at specific kinds of consumers, using psychological cues.
Unlike television viewers, who can immediately spot direct-to-consumer drug ads, consumers on some health sites may not fully understand that they could be subject to marketing or marketing research, even if they have read the site’s privacy policy.
“We are talking about a digital pharma stealth economy that is emerging,” says Jeff Chester, the director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a nonprofit group that works to safeguard user privacy. “You don’t know who is being paid to moderate. You don’t know who’s listening in to your conversation. You don’t know what exactly they are focused on and what they are doing with the information.”
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 restricts the way health care providers use and disseminate patients’ information, but entities like consumer health Web sites are not subject to it. The Food and Drug Administration, meanwhile, which strictly regulates direct-to-consumer drug commercials and print ads, is still developing a policy on drug marketing through social media.
In many ways, PatientsLikeMe is open and clear about its data collection and how it makes its money.
The site’s privacy policy explains that it shares members’ data, shorn of certain personal identifiers, with drug makers and others. Even as the policy encourages people to share their health information so others can learn from their experiences, it advises members that the more personal details they disclose, the more they risk being publicly identified.
For corporate clients, the site also functions as a sophisticated data-mining tool that allows them to better pinpoint consumers and to develop new or improved drugs. PatientsLikeMe adopts a more bottom-line approach to companies than it does when advocating its greater-good policy to consumers.
“Yesterday, you couldn’t engage with patients because of regulatory conflicts and lack of patient access,” one corporate pitch says on the site. “Today, all that has changed. It’s time to interact directly with your new customers: patients.”
Among the services the site provides to its corporate clients is analysis of members’ conversations, broken down by age, sex, disease progression and treatments, to “learn not only what’s being said about your brand, but by whom.” Another service allows drug makers to conduct market research on 25 to 50 of the most active users on the site — typically those who post messages often and have emerged as opinion leaders — who consent to participate. Afterward, drug makers can refine their marketing efforts based on the effect of the program “on patient dialogues across the entire community,” the site says.
Ms. Dwyer of Pace says she has been “really, really shocked at the blatant manipulative language” that some sites use to describe their corporate services to industry versus how they describe themselves to consumers.
Ben Heywood, president of PatientsLikeMe, says the program for drug makers that focuses on the site’s most active users is not meant to promote specific messages. After participating in the program, he says, members do not disseminate industry ideas on the site. Some members, he says, simply want to share their opinions with drug makers, but they aren’t paid to do so.
Jamie Heywood says that such data analyses provide insight for drug makers on how best to reach patients, but the site itself does not market drugs to its members. Moreover, the Heywood brothers say, the site openly describes its industry services.
“Our objective is to teach the company,” he says, “not teach the patient about the company’s products.”
Still, some of PatientsLikeMe’s competitors have taken a less aggressive approach to how they market patient data.
CureTogether.com, for example, has occasionally earned money by e-mailing advertisements aimed at its members who have certain health conditions on behalf of drug makers seeking participants for clinical trials, says Daniel Reda, who co-founded the site with his wife, Alexandra Carmichael.
But CureTogether does not post a person’s profile for other members on the site to see or give drug makers access to members’ health data in any form, he says. “The best way to protect people,” Mr. Reda says, “is to collect as little information as possible.”
By NATASHA SINGER
copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 28, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/business/30stream.html?th&emc=th
COULD we cure diseases faster, or at least better control them, through crowd-sourcing?
Brian Stauffer
That is the premise behind social networking sites like CureTogether.com and PatientsLikeMe.com, which offer online communities for patients and collect members’ health data for research purposes.
PatientsLikeMe provides forums where more than 65,000 members with epilepsy, multiple sclerosis and more than a dozen other disorders are encouraged to share details about their conditions and the success or pitfalls of specific drug treatments.
“When patients share real-world data, collaboration on a global scale becomes possible,” the site says. “New treatments become possible.”
Moreover, in a world where serious side effects often emerge only years after a new medication enters the market, such real-time information from real-world patients may also provide an early warning signal for drug safety problems.
PatientsLikeMe has an innovative for-profit business model, too. It sells health data, gathered from member profiles but with certain identifying information removed, to drug makers and others for scientific and marketing research.
Jamie Heywood, the company’s chairman, says both patients and drug makers delve into that data to meet their own needs.
Members can seek out patients of the same age, sex, and disease progression, whose profiles are displayed on the site, to see which drugs or doses worked for them. Drug makers can pinpoint subgroups — say, severely depressed middle-aged men — who reported the greatest improvement on a particular medication.
“What we have done is made a system that allows you to think about personalized medicine,” says Mr. Heywood. He co-founded the site in 2004 with his brother Ben and a friend after another brother, Stephen Heywood, developed amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. (Stephen died in 2006.)
But pharmaceutical crowd-sourcing also raises important questions about the trade-off between the benefits of information sharing and the risk of patient exploitation.
Some people share their health information for the sake of the greater good. Yet they typically have no way of knowing whether their health profiles contribute directly to the development of more effective treatments — or are simply mined to create more effective drug marketing.
“Do we need to protect people who have illnesses from being exploited?” says Cathy Dwyer, an associate professor at Pace University who has studied how advertisers market to consumers based on their online behavior. “It’s a very tricky line because people absolutely need emotional support when they are dealing with illness.”
PatientsLikeMe is one of many sites that promote the idea of the “e-patient,” a health consumer empowered by online information gathering. Along with offering health resources, many of these sites are also engineered to foster an environment where patients effectively promote treatments to other patients, without a doctor as intermediary.
The lines become blurry in these new arenas. There are unbranded “disease awareness” communities — for example, on Facebook or YouTube — where a drug maker may pay people to moderate patient forums or give testimonials but might not prominently display that fact to participants. Other sites collect consumer health data to help drug makers aim at specific kinds of consumers, using psychological cues.
Unlike television viewers, who can immediately spot direct-to-consumer drug ads, consumers on some health sites may not fully understand that they could be subject to marketing or marketing research, even if they have read the site’s privacy policy.
“We are talking about a digital pharma stealth economy that is emerging,” says Jeff Chester, the director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a nonprofit group that works to safeguard user privacy. “You don’t know who is being paid to moderate. You don’t know who’s listening in to your conversation. You don’t know what exactly they are focused on and what they are doing with the information.”
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 restricts the way health care providers use and disseminate patients’ information, but entities like consumer health Web sites are not subject to it. The Food and Drug Administration, meanwhile, which strictly regulates direct-to-consumer drug commercials and print ads, is still developing a policy on drug marketing through social media.
In many ways, PatientsLikeMe is open and clear about its data collection and how it makes its money.
The site’s privacy policy explains that it shares members’ data, shorn of certain personal identifiers, with drug makers and others. Even as the policy encourages people to share their health information so others can learn from their experiences, it advises members that the more personal details they disclose, the more they risk being publicly identified.
For corporate clients, the site also functions as a sophisticated data-mining tool that allows them to better pinpoint consumers and to develop new or improved drugs. PatientsLikeMe adopts a more bottom-line approach to companies than it does when advocating its greater-good policy to consumers.
“Yesterday, you couldn’t engage with patients because of regulatory conflicts and lack of patient access,” one corporate pitch says on the site. “Today, all that has changed. It’s time to interact directly with your new customers: patients.”
Among the services the site provides to its corporate clients is analysis of members’ conversations, broken down by age, sex, disease progression and treatments, to “learn not only what’s being said about your brand, but by whom.” Another service allows drug makers to conduct market research on 25 to 50 of the most active users on the site — typically those who post messages often and have emerged as opinion leaders — who consent to participate. Afterward, drug makers can refine their marketing efforts based on the effect of the program “on patient dialogues across the entire community,” the site says.
Ms. Dwyer of Pace says she has been “really, really shocked at the blatant manipulative language” that some sites use to describe their corporate services to industry versus how they describe themselves to consumers.
Ben Heywood, president of PatientsLikeMe, says the program for drug makers that focuses on the site’s most active users is not meant to promote specific messages. After participating in the program, he says, members do not disseminate industry ideas on the site. Some members, he says, simply want to share their opinions with drug makers, but they aren’t paid to do so.
Jamie Heywood says that such data analyses provide insight for drug makers on how best to reach patients, but the site itself does not market drugs to its members. Moreover, the Heywood brothers say, the site openly describes its industry services.
“Our objective is to teach the company,” he says, “not teach the patient about the company’s products.”
Still, some of PatientsLikeMe’s competitors have taken a less aggressive approach to how they market patient data.
CureTogether.com, for example, has occasionally earned money by e-mailing advertisements aimed at its members who have certain health conditions on behalf of drug makers seeking participants for clinical trials, says Daniel Reda, who co-founded the site with his wife, Alexandra Carmichael.
But CureTogether does not post a person’s profile for other members on the site to see or give drug makers access to members’ health data in any form, he says. “The best way to protect people,” Mr. Reda says, “is to collect as little information as possible.”
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