Jimmy Carter: Not waiting for Big Gov't to act

Do-gooders can be annoying and sanctimonious, as Jimmy Carter sometimes is, but he's also the real deal. Although typecast as the prototypical liberal bogeyman, he puts conservatives' Christian ideals into practice. Habitat for Humanity is another example of Carter not waiting for government to take action.

If only high profile conservatives would spend more of their time and money making the world a better place through private charity, instead of yapping about the evils of "Big Gubument"!...

Torture by Worms

February 18, 2007
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

JIMMA, Ethiopia

Presidents are supposed to be strong, and on his latest visit to Africa Jimmy Carter proved himself strong enough to weep.

The first stop of Mr. Carter's four-nation African trip was Ghana, where he visited his projects to wipe out the Guinea worm, a horrendous two-foot-long parasite that lives inside the body and finally pops out, causing excruciating pain.

Mr. Carter was shaken by the victims he met, including a 57-year-old woman with a Guinea worm coming out of her nipple.

"She and her medical attendants said she had another coming out her genitals between her legs, and one each coming out of both feet," Mr. Carter added. "And so she had four Guinea worms emerging simultaneously."

"Little 3-, 4- and 5-year-old children were screaming uncontrollably with pain" because of the worms emerging from their flesh, Mr. Carter said. "I cried, along with the children."

We tend to think of human rights in terms of a right to vote, a right to free speech, a right to assembly. But a child should also have a right not to suffer agony because of a worm that is easily preventable, as well as a right not to go blind because of a lack of medication that costs a dollar or two, even a right not to die for lack of a $5 mosquito net.

As president, Mr. Carter put the issue of human rights squarely on the national agenda. Now Mr. Carter argues — and he's dead right — that we conceive of human rights too narrowly as political and civil rights, and that we also need to fight for the human right of children to live healthy lives.

He has led the way in waging that battle. Because of Mr. Carter's two-decade battle against Guinea worm disease, it is expected to be eradicated worldwide within the next five years. It will be the first ailment to be eliminated since smallpox in 1977, and it has become a race between the worm and the ex-president to see who outlasts the other.

"I'm determined to live long enough to see no cases of Guinea worm anywhere in the world," Mr. Carter said as he walked in blue jeans through a couple of villages in a remote corner of southwestern Ethiopia, the third country of his African tour.

After leaving the White House, Mr. Carter ended up "adopting" diseases like Guinea worm disease, river blindness, elephantiasis, trachoma and schistosomiasis that afflict the world's most voiceless people. These are horrific diseases that cause unimaginable suffering, yet they rarely get attention, treatment or research funding because their victims are impoverished and invisible.

When Mr. Carter met with Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, then Pakistan's president, President Zia had never heard of Guinea worm and didn't know it existed in Pakistan. Nor did his health minister. But after Mr. Carter put the issue on the agenda, Pakistan worked energetically with the Carter Center to eliminate the parasite in that country.

The villages here in Ethiopia that Mr. Carter visited cradle a fast-moving creek, making a lovely image of thatch huts and bubbling water. But the creek is home to the black flies whose bites spread the parasite that causes river blindness, leading to unbearable itching and often eventually to blindness.

"It's almost impossible to imagine the suffering of people with river blindness," Mr. Carter said as he traipsed through the village beside his wife, Rosalynn.

Already, Mr. Carter's campaign is making huge progress against the disease.

Kemeru Befita, a woman washing her clothes in the creek near Mr. Carter, told me that two of her children had caught river blindness in the last couple of months. After a visit to the witch doctor didn't help, she took them to a clinic where — thanks to Mr. Carter's program — they received medicine that killed the baby worms. They are two of the nearly 10 million people to whom the Carter Center gave medication last year alone, who won't go blind.

At the end of the day, this one-term president who left office a pariah in his own party will transform the lives of more people in more places over a longer period of time than any other recent president. And I hope that he can also transform our conception of human rights, so that we show an interest not only in the human rights of people suffering from the oppression of dictators, but also from the even more brutal tyranny of blindness, malaria and worms.

U.S. Maternity Leave Policies 'Among Worst'

U.S. Policies on Maternity Leave 'Among the Worst'

Monday, February 19, 2007

By: Tamara Schweitzer

INC.com

FOXNews.com

The United States is one of only five countries that does not provide or require employers to provide some form of paid maternity leave, placing it behind a majority of the world when it comes to instituting family-oriented job policies, according to a new study.

In a study from McGill University's Institute for Health and Social Policy, the United States, Lesotho, Liberia, Swaziland, and Papua New Guinea were the only countries out of 173 studied that didn't guarantee any paid leave for mothers. Among the 168 countries that do, 98 offer 14 or more weeks of paid leave.

Overall, the study's other major findings indicate that workplace policies in the United States for families — such as paid sick days and support for breast-feeding — are weaker than those in all high-income countries as well as many middle and low-income countries.

"More countries are providing the workplace protections that millions of Americans can only dream of," Jody Heymann, director of McGill's Institute for Health and Social Policy, who led study, said in a statement.

At least 145 countries provide paid sick days for short- and long-term illnesses, with 127 countries providing for a week or more every year, the study found. In addition, 137 countries require its employers to provide paid annual leave, whereas the Unites States does not guarantee any sort of paid leave.

Under the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, U.S. workers are allowed to take up to 12 weeks leave for to tend to family or medical needs, but their absence is unpaid.

States are beginning to take more of an initiative on this front, human-resources experts say. For example, California has passed legislation for paid family leave — called the State Disability Insurance Program, which entitles employees a maximum of six weeks of partial pay per year to care for a newborn or other family matters.

While U.S. companies are moving in the way of providing more family-friendly workplace policies, many currently provide alternative forms of payment through their short-term disability programs. For example, having a baby can be considered a qualifying condition for getting paid disability leave.

The release of the study was appropriately timed with discussions in Washington over whether to consider new legislation that would enforce paid leaves. On Feb. 1, Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., who authored the Family and Medical Leave Act, proposed new legislation that would expand the act by providing at least six weeks of paid leave for workers.

"Besides our nation's families, our nation's economy, its production, and its competitiveness are threatened when families are forced to choose between the job they need and the family they love," Dodd said in a statement announcing the legislation. "FMLA was a milestone in our nation's dialogue, acknowledging that families, workforce production and competitiveness are not mutually exclusive."

The United States also lags behind in protecting working women's right to breastfeed. At least 107 countries grant women the right to breastfeed, and in 73 of those countries, the breaks are paid, the study found. The United States does not have any protections in place for women who want to breastfeed.

The only area where U.S. job policies were more favorable compared to other countries was in regard to guaranteeing higher pay for overtime work and non-discriminatory hiring policies, researchers found.

"The U.S. has been a proud leader in adopting law that provide for equal opportunity in the workplace, but our work/family protections are among the worst," Heymann said. "It's time for a change."

Mummified: Could this be you?

Or almost you?

Myself, I'm guilty of it, no question.

According to the U.S. Labor Dept., the average American watches 2.6 hours of TV a day, compared to 45 minutes per day socializing and visiting with friends. (BTW, you never see the friends on Friends watching TV, do you? Who would watch them do that?)

A healthy civil society starts with getting our butts off the sofa and out of the house -- and not just to shop!

Mummified body found in front of blaring TV

NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Police called to a Long Island man's house discovered the mummified remains of the resident, dead for more than a year, sitting in front of a blaring television set.

The 70-year-old Hampton Bays, New York, resident, identified as Vincenzo Ricardo, appeared to have died of natural causes. Police said on Saturday his body was discovered on Thursday when they went to the house to investigate a report of a burst water pipe.

"You could see his face. He still had hair on his head," Newsday quoted morgue assistant Jeff Bacchus as saying. The home's low humidity had preserved the body.

Officials could not explain why the electricity had not been turned off, considering Ricardo had not been heard from since December 2005.

Neighbors said when they had not seen Ricardo, who was diabetic and had been blind for years, they assumed he was in the hospital or a long-term care facility.

Ex-diplomat: Iraq rebuilding plan a failure

You can't re-build a country while it's at war.

Ex-envoy says Iraq rebuilding plan won't work

By Sue Pleming

Reuters | Sat Feb 17, 10:32 AM ET

Kiki Munshi was showcased by the media in September as a seasoned U.S. diplomat who came out of retirement to lead a rebuilding group in Iraq.

Now she is back home, angry, and convinced that President George W. Bush's new strategy of doubling the number of such groups to 20 along with a troop surge of 21,500 will not help stabilize Iraq.

A diplomat for 22 years, she quit her job last month as leader of a Provincial Reconstruction Team -- groups made up of about 50 civilian and military experts that try to help Iraqi communities build their own government while strengthening moderates.

"In spite of the magnificent and often heroic work being done out there by a lot of truly wonderful people, the PRTs themselves aren't succeeding. The obstacles are too great," Munshi said this week in Washington, where she was pressing her view at the State Department and to Congress.

"Once again we are proceeding to lay people's lives on a line drawn with faulty information. Once again the fantasies of the 'policy-makers' drive decisions without much link to the realities on the ground," said Munshi, who retired from the foreign service in 2002 .

Her postings included Romania, India and Sierra Leone before Iraq, where Munshi said he had felt a "moral obligation to sort out the mess we have made there."

An audit by the special inspector general for Iraq last October found similar problems with the PRTs to those listed by Munshi, including an "ever-changing security situation, the difficulty of integrating civilian and military personnel, the lack of a finalized agreement on PRT operational requirements and responsibilities."

REJECTION

Members of Congress have also been critical of the program, which suffered early on from not being able to attract enough civilian staff and a dispute between the State and Defense departments over who would provide security for the teams.

The Bush administration rejects Munshi's views and the State Department said the expanded PRT plan was more focused, requiring team members to do pre-deployment training and with a clear goal of bolstering moderates and sidelining militants.

"We have been very mindful of the problems our PRT leaders have reported to us. We have worked very hard to streamline it," said Barbara Stephenson, the deputy coordinator for Iraq at the State Department, which oversees the PRT plan.

Munshi said the PRT plan was ill-conceived, under-funded and poorly staffed.

She said security was so bad that the council in the town in Diyala province where she was based had not had a quorum since last October and that death squads were rife.

PRT members found it hard to meet with Iraqis because of intimidation, she said, giving the example of training sessions that had been canceled because of poor security.

The PRTs are embedded with the military, a tactic Munshi says has varying results depending on the ability of the unit.

"All the PRTs embedded with the military are subject to the vicissitudes of military fortune, for good or ill," she said.

But the State Department countered that Munshi's experiences were not repeated in all the provinces and set up interviews with two PRT leaders who said while there were difficulties, they believed their work was making an impact.

Stephanie Miley, a PRT leader in the Iraqi town of Tikrit, said her teams managed to get out to see Iraqi officials five or six times a week but security issues meant they could not stay for long.

"I just hope that people will recognize that this is not something we will achieve overnight," she said.

Economic deja vu: The 90's all over again?

The difference this time is that Bush's economic expansion is 100% thanks to his tax cuts, whereas the 90's unequalled period of uninterrupted economic growth had nothing to do with Clinton's low deficits and HIGHER taxes.

In other words, Bush is a macro-economic genius, Clinton just got lucky.


Déjà vu for the U.S. economic cycle

By Eduardo Porter and Jeremy W. Peters

Monday, February 12, 2007 | The New York Times

It is five years into an economic expansion and most Americans are still waiting for their share. Inflation is swallowing pay raises. Businesses are hiring, but forecasters worry the economy may be about to stall. "If this is a recovery," the leader of the political opposition complains, "I can hardly wait for the recession."

This may sound like the stuff of headlines today. But it comes from 1996, when Bill Clinton was president and his rival was Bob Dole, the Republican nominee. The economic expansion in question, which got off to a sputtering start in March 1991, was to become the longest period of uninterrupted growth in U.S. history.

Now, half a decade into an expansion that officially started in November 2001, the economy is showing remarkable parallels with what it looked like about a decade ago.

"It's striking how similar they are," said Robert Gordon, an economics professor at Northwestern University.

The overall rate of growth has followed a trajectory almost identical to the first five years of the 1990s expansion. Now, as then, corporate profits have surged; the stock market has, too. But just as workers have finally begun to reap some of the spoils of a growing economy, many forecasters worry — as they did a decade earlier — that the expansion is running out of steam.

What is striking, considering these similarities, is how little effect the policy choices of Democratic and Republican administrations seem to have had on how both growth cycles unrolled.

Few economic forecasters expect the current growth cycle to have the length and vigor of the 1990s boom, which continued for 10 years from trough to peak. Yet fewer expected strong growth in the mid-1990s. In early 1996, forecasters polled by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia predicted that the economy would grow merely 1.8 percent that year. The economy ended up growing at twice that pace.

Average Americans were more pessimistic then than they are now. According to Gallup Poll's most recent snapshot of public opinion, last month 52 percent of Americans rated economic conditions as "excellent" or "good." In May 1996, only 30 percent did so.

"Consumers don't expect a slowing economy," said Richard Curtin, who heads the surveys of consumers at the University of Michigan. "According to consumers, we are going to improve."

Given the parallels, perhaps it is not surprising that the economy is providing the same sort of political ammunition as it did 10 years ago.

"Profits are up for our companies, but where are the wage increases?" Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the New York Democrat who is running for president, asked during an online conversation with voters last month. "Where are the, you know, the benefits that should accrue to hard-working Americans?"

Wage increases have, indeed, been slow in coming. In December, 61 months after the economy started to grow, the wages of production and other non-management workers were barely 1.7 percent higher, after inflation, than when the economy hit bottom in November 2001. Most of those gains came in the last few months.

But many people have forgotten that, initially, the expansion of the 1990s was also dubbed a "jobless recovery," and then a "joyless" one, when employment started growing but real wages did not.

Advocates on each side insist that government policy was crucial to steering the economy. Gene Sperling, a former economic adviser to Bill Clinton, argued that his administration's efforts to cut the budget deficit were instrumental in bringing down interest rates and improving investors' confidence in the economy.

By contrast, Edward Lazear, President George W. Bush's chief economic adviser, argued that the tax cuts enacted by the administration in 2003 deserve some credit for the current expansion. "They had a fundamental impact on investment," Lazear said. "There was an abrupt turnaround at the point when those tax cuts were put into effect."

There are substantial differences, of course, in the nature of the two expansions. The early 1990s were characterized by a building bust; the current one has been supported by a housing bubble. The boom of the second half of the 1990s was underpinned by an Internet-driven investment bubble, but most technology stocks today are far below their earlier highs.

"In both situations we had overinvestment, now in housing, then in fiber optics," said Joseph Stiglitz, a professor of economics at Columbia University who was a chief economic adviser in the Clinton administration.

Bush and Clinton had very different economic priorities and will leave very different economic legacies. Clinton increased the top marginal tax rate to 39.6 percent from 31 percent and closed the budget deficit. Bush cut tax rates back to 35 percent, and the deficit reappeared. Corporate profits have swollen twice as fast, as a share of the economy, in the first five years of this expansion, under Bush, as in the like period of the previous one.

Still, policy has had less effect on the distribution of the rewards of growth than the stated goals of Democrats and Republicans would suggest. Indeed, the share of the economy devoted to workers' compensation shrunk as much in the first five years of the 1990s expansion, to 56.3 percent of gross domestic product from 57.7 percent, as in the most recent five years, when it fell from 58.1 percent to 56.6 percent.

No one knows how this expansion will end. In the 1990s, nearly all the gains for ordinary Americans occurred in the second half of the decade.

"If we conjecture another five years of the current expansion, I think it's going to be another surprise," said Gordon, the professor at Northwestern. "We had a good surprise in the '90s, but this time I think we're in for a series of bad surprises."

One ingredient that helped drive the 1990s expansion is missing today: the explosion of productivity growth that took off in the mid-1990s and lasted for more than a decade, when the investments that firms began to make in technology in the 1980s started to pay off.

"It's kind of hard to point to anything like that now," said Ken Matheny, senior economist at Macroeconomic Advisers. "It's difficult to say that we're about to have another productivity and investment boom as we saw in the late '90s."

Productivity grew by 3 percent in the last quarter of 2006. Still, for the full year, it grew only 2.1 percent for the year, which is the slowest since 1997.

Even as growth has remained on a remarkably similar path in both decades, administration critics say that Bush's policies have weakened the economy's longer-term prospects.

Stiglitz argued that Bush's tax cuts, aimed mostly at the wealthy, opened a big hole in the budget and provided little stimulus to the economy. This forced the Federal Reserve to push interest rates very low to keep the economy afloat, he said, creating a bubble in housing.

Under a more effective fiscal policy, Stiglitz said, "growth would be more broadly based and less of the economy would depend on real estate."

Sperling suggested that the mushrooming of the U.S. trade imbalance and the reappearance of large budget deficits have not caused more damage to the economy because money flooding into the United States from China and elsewhere has kept long-term interest rates low, underpinning investment and consumption. That support, he suggested, will eventually dry up.

"We are in a moment where excess savings are coming from India and China, so perhaps it is a moment in which fiscal irresponsibility won't have as negative short-term consequences," Sperling said. "But it has increased the risk factor in the economy. It is still poor long-term policy."

Meanwhile, the housing bubble has turned to bust, dragging residential investment down. Overall growth has been little affected so far, but many economists still expect household finances to weaken, cutting into consumer spending, the main bulwark of economic growth.

"Maybe we dodged a bullet, but you don't know," said Jeffrey Frankel, an economics professor at Harvard.