Michelle Obama’s Healthy Eating Campaign

7 02 2010

“Michelle Obama’s Healthy Eating Campaign,” The Root, 4 February 2010.

The first lady urges the country to take childhood obesity as its cause.

The White House Kitchen Garden is frozen under, but, this Black History Month, first lady Michelle Obama is once more using food to address the epidemic of childhood obesity that has gripped the country and, she said in a recent speech to the United States’ Conference on Mayors, “never fails to take my breath away.”

It should. The statistics are grim: One-third of young people in the United States are overweight or obese, and one-third will suffer from diabetes at some point in their lives. In the Latino and black American community, those numbers go up to almost 50 percent. According to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, children today spend seven hours a day using some kind of media device. At the same time, school lunches are fattier, school gym classes are shorter or nonexistent, and the erosion of 1950s “neighborhood” culture means the days of playing outside until supper are long gone.

Today, said Obama, “medical experts are predicting that this generation is on track to have a shorter lifespan than their parents.” Not only does decreased productivity and life expectancy endanger long-term American economic prosperity, diet-related diseases like asthma, diabetes, hypertension and certain cancers are slowly adding to the national health care burden.

All of this impacts the black community more severely than the rest of America: Black men are 30 percent more likely to die from heart disease, and black women are 1.7 times more likely to be obese than their white counterparts. Black neighborhoods in major cities have been shown to have fewer fresh food options and grocery stores than the average community. And according to the government’s Office of Minority Health, black Americans have reduced access to quality health care. Children who don’t eat well are performing worse in school. At an event with the first lady at a Virginia YMCA, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said: “the unhealthier we are as a nation the more our health care costs will continue to rise,” adding that the Obama administration has “not only a moral obligation but economic imperative to begin to make a change.”

Perhaps fittingly, Obama has chosen Black History Month to make her stand, for “smart, strategic efforts to help our kids lead active, healthy lives right from the beginning.” By starting young and staying firm, she hopes to slow the impact of the killer diet that threatens all Americans.

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Categories : America, Culture, Education, Green

The State of the Union is Still Uncertain

30 01 2010

“The State of the Union is Still Uncertain,” The Root, 27 January 2010.

Obama dogged Congress about deficits that threaten America’s livelihood–and the “deficit of trust” that threatens its democracy.

Capitol Hill is a wild, rowdy beast, and a president either rides it or gets bucked out of town. President Obama has learned that lesson the hard way over the past 12 months, and the question that loomed largest as he strode into Congress for his first State of the Union address was this: Can he regain control of the Beltway’s always fractious debate—or will the “ways of Washington” tear him down?

As has been the case at several high-stakes moments in his political career, Obama rose to the rhetorical task. He laid a heavy guilt trip on the beltway stalwarts who have “for years” stopped progressive change. “We face a deficit of trust—deep and corrosive doubts about how Washington works,” he said. “To close that credibility gap, we must take action on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue … to give our people the government they deserve.”

Obama then ticked off a long list of ideas—from community college reform to new trade agreements overseas—designed to boost the competitiveness of the American economy, but also to win the approval of his audience of Republicans, Democrats and ordinary Americans. While some of these policies—such as the move to freeze non-military discretionary spending after 2011, or directly challenge the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on corporations and campaigns—are controversial, Obama understood that the State of the Union is the rare speech in which policy details matter far less than tone. Indeed, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi noted just after the address concluded: “Good policy is probably good politics, but the fact is that what’s important is what it means to the American people.”

So Obama wisely doled out a heap of feel-your-pain empathy, waved the American flag of resilience in the face of hard times, and bashed the banks regularly. He “set the record straight” on just who got the United States deep into debt, and also took responsibility for some of the confusion that has reined in the debate on health care. He also mixed in enough humor to afford himself an occasion to flash that million-dollar smile.

His performance, roundly praised by colleagues in the House and Senate, was critical in a moment in which progressives are disheartened by Obama’s dip in popularity and a crushing electoral defeat in Massachusetts. With November elections just around the corner, congressional Democrats are feeling hounded, and their leadership is openly divided. Republicans are emboldened by the success of their party-of-no strategy. And voters are in a throw-the-bums-out kind of mood—62 percent say the nation is headed in the wrong direction. In the House of Representatives, “We were frustrated and wondering,” says Keith Ellison, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus from Minnesota. “The circumstances that we’re in are difficult, and we were looking for him to shoot some light back into the moment. I think he did a good job of that.”

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Categories : America, Politics, Recession

Rebuilding a Better Port-au-Prince

19 01 2010

“Rebuilding a Better Port-au-Prince,” The Root, 19 January 2010.

After Haiti’s earthquake, “starchitects” and urban developers ask: What next?

Three days after the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that sent Haiti from a developing nation to a flattened one, President Barack Obama addressed a statement directly to the people of Haiti: “You will not be forsaken, you will not be forgotten.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who cut short a trip to Southeast Asia and traveled to Haiti over the weekend, appeared with Haitian President René Préval to declare: “We will be here today, tomorrow and for the time ahead.” But one week after the earthquake that claimed up to 200,000 lives and destroyed the backbone of Haiti’s infrastructure, talk is turning from destruction and rescue to mourning and, inevitably, reconstruction.

Rebuilding Haiti will be a tough haul. Major institutions—the national cathedral, the presidential palace—lie toppled. Countless other homes, stores, office buildings and more churches have been reduced to rubble. Debris will need to be cleared before new structures can take their place. Those buildings still standing will need to be tested for safety. Making things worse, Haiti has a notoriously weak state—the sort that couldn’t enforce building codes, or prevent the deforestation that has left the soil unable to deflect routine flooding. Indeed, two-thirds of the buildings in Port-au-Prince were unsafe before the Jan. 12 earthquake. “The challenge for Haiti as compared to New York after 9/11, for example, is the institutional context,” says Diane Davis, a professor of urban planning at MIT who has worked on post-disaster reconstruction in several Latin American cities. “It’s very hard to project a timeline for rebuilding because the situation is so unstable.”

Yet many urban planners, architects and developers are seeing a silver lining in the near-total destruction of a major Haitian city. “It would be a small silver lining if in three years, we see a more sustainable Haiti, with energy efficient, healthy, disaster resistant buildings that makes the nation more resilient to future electricity shortages, public health crises and disasters,” says Matthew Peterson, CEO of Global Green, a sustainable development consulting firm with strong ties to the New Orleans recovery effort. Victoria Harris, CEO of Article 25, a nonprofit architectural consulting firm whose name derives from the United Nations charter naming the built environment as a human right, discussed the opportunity for Haiti to build a truly modern city on the ruins of what came before. “Buildings will affect what people need, want, do—and we want to ensure that they are technically serving their purpose,” she said. But “there is also a chance to build something that is valuable to the community.”

Haiti’s best chance lies in the lessons of history. After the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia, recent mudslides in Columbia, earthquakes in Mexico, in rural China and in Nicaragua—not to mention the devastation of Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast of the United States—a template for rebuilding in poor countries has begun to take shape.

Near the fourth anniversary of Katrina, President Obama asked Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan to convene a Long-term Disaster Recovery Working Group. Their interagency mandate, says Fred Tamar, senior HUD adviser and lead staffer for the group, was “to look at disaster recovery and what the federal government could do, working with state and local governments, think tanks and faith-based organizations to help communities impacted by disaster recover more fully and recover faster.”

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Categories : Abroad, America, Green, Politics, Race

Does America Speak Terrorist?

15 01 2010

“Does America Speak Terrorist?” The Root, 14 January 2010.

In the ongoing fight to defend against violent extremists, language is more important than we’ve given it credit for.

Somali terrorists tried to blow up Barack Obama’s inauguration. Internet yahoos threatened to “lay him out in a box.” He requested Secret Service protection for himself earlier than any presidential candidate in history. And on Christmas, the botched plane bombing by a Nigerian allegedly claiming al-Qaida affiliation exposed America’s security vulnerabilities like never before.

Nevertheless, Americans seem to feel comfortable with the relative level of security that the United States offers. Compared to nations like Israel or Indonesia, bombings are not a daily worry. A recent poll found that Obama’s approval rating for handling terrorism is actually up. But there’s a very worrisome trend: The United States’ intelligence officers do not have the language capabilities needed to root out terror where it lies.

For a nation of immigrants, the United States is surprisingly underprepared to talk with potential terrorists. In a 2009 budget report, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued a stern warning that language skills in the intelligence apparatus are basically “nonexistent.” “Very few people speak Arabic, and very few have ever been to the region,” one former NCTC analyst told the Washington Independent. U.S. soldiers rely heavily on translators, who are themselves at risk of being targeted by hostile locals. The recent killing of seven CIA agents in Pakistan by a supposed “triple” agent spotlights the dangers of relying on individuals with the linguistic skill set who haven’t been thoroughly vetted.

We’ve had almost 10 years to get this right. After 9/11, an entirely new federal agency was created to keep Americans safe—and not just in airplanes. The Department of Homeland Security, headed by Janet Napolitano, is tasked with defending ports, food and water supplies, as well as guarding against attacks from above. Dennis Blair, the new director of national intelligence, wields unprecedented powers of coordination in the fight against violent extremism. The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), also established after 9/11, evokes the Fox television show 24 and describes its mission as “integrating all instruments of national power to ensure unity of effort.”

That sounds good—but with only “eight or nine” analysts assigned to the Middle East and just one analyst committed to the entire Arabian Peninsula (from which suspected Detroit bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly obtained his explosives), the NCTC looks like it needs help.

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Categories : Politics

A New Terror Threat?

2 01 2010

“A New Terror Threat?” The Root, 26 December 2009.

What the Nigerian plane bomber reveals about Africa, America and terror in the 21st century.

On Christmas Day, a clatter, a puff of smoke and a brief, terrifying flame: Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian passenger on a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, had allegedly tried to blow up his airplane. Others aboard the airliner quickly subdued the man, a former University College of London student who claims to have ties to Al-Qaeda and been supplied with explosives from Yemen. The plane landed safely in Detroit, where Mutallab was treated for third degree burns, and where federal police officially charged him with attempting to destroy the jet.

Airport security increased dramatically in several airports in the United States and in Europe as a result of the incident. But this latest botched act of terrorism has wider implications: it raises important questions about sources of new threats to the West, the actual level of U.S. competence in guarding against terror, and yet another American effort to build an important relationship with a fragile, unstable country.

Scrutiny has focused on Muhammad Murtallah International Airport in Lagos, from which Mutallab departed on Christmas Eve. As recently as Thanksgiving 2009, the Nigerian airport was deemed compliant with air safety protocols set by the American Transportation Security Administration and the Nigerian Civil Aviation Association—though over the last decade, it has been intermittently placed on TSA watchlists as one of the least secure airports in the world. Mutallab did not undergo secondary security screening at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam before boarding his flight for the U.S.

Since the failed bombing, reportedly involving PETN, a highly volatile explosive, Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups in Yemen have claimed credit for training Mutallab—though no U.S. government officials have confirmed those connections. Nevertheless, authorities have called the incident “an attempted terrorist attack”, and president Barack Obama is “actively” monitoring the situation as it develops, according to the White House.

It’s not clear that Mutallab’s actions represent an Al-Qaeda comeback. But the suspect’s Nigerian connections introduce African affairs into what has been seen, since 9/11, as a primarily Middle Eastern threat.

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Categories : Abroad, Africa, America, Europe, Religion

The Prez in Denmark

20 12 2009

“The Prez in Denmark,” The Root, 17 December 2009.

Obama’s trip to the climate conference in Denmark could end in failure.

When President Barack Obama touches down in Copenhagen, Denmark, he will be entering a hornet’s nest of urgent, competing priorities that will test his negotiating skills like never before. Far from the kumbaya conference that one might expect for a gathering devoted to saving the planet, the two weeks of United Nations-sponsored climate talks have been a pitched battle—a literal street fight, at times—to balance the economic interests of the diverse nations in attendance. Poor, industrializing countries are demanding climate aid; rich nations are wary of overpromising both financial assistance and emissions cuts; while island nations and global hot spots seek some assurance that they will not be left to drown or burn.

Since stepping into the national spotlight, Obama’s political image has been that of a master negotiator: As a legislator in Illinois, he helped to broker a deal between Republicans, Democrats, civil liberties advocates and the police regarding the interrogation of suspects. On the campaign trail, he sold himself as a sensible liberal who could “disagree without being disagreeable.” But in Washington, conventional politics have trumped his attempts at good-faith negotiation on issues such as health care reform. In the Middle East, his team of dedicated diplomats has not been particularly successful in promoting the American position. And the last time Obama tried to turn on the charm in Copenhagen—in support of Chicago’s failed bid to host the Olympic Games—was hardly encouraging.

The climate conference is the first test of the political goodwill that flipped American favorability ratings abroad from 17 to 71 percent since George W. Bush left office. While Obama’s major foreign policy addresses in Berlin, Cairo, and most recently, Oslo, have won plaudits from international observers, the Copenhagen crowd will be a tough one.

The White House upped the stakes significantly when it made the choice to bring Obama to the end of the climate talks rather than the beginning. “Based on his conversations with other leaders and the progress that has already been made … the president believes that continued U.S. leadership can be most productive through his participation at the end,” said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs. That decision, said Andrew Light of the liberal Center for American Progress, “may well have prevented the meeting from ending in a dangerous stalemate.” The president also seems to have faith in his ability to close a deal. But will the Obama treatment—a speech and a handshake—really make a difference?

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Categories : Abroad, Energy, Green, Politics

Copenhagen’s Class Divisions

18 12 2009

“Copenhagen’s Class Divisions,” The Root, 8 December 2009.

Developing countries at the United Nations Climate Conference want to be heard—and compensated.

It isn’t often that Russians climb in bed with Rwandans. Yet, as the much-hyped United Nations climate summit convenes in Copenhagen this week, 56 world newspapers united against the growing threat of catastrophic climate change. An editorial urging global action to deflect the worst effects of fossil fuel dependence appeared in major news outlets, including ones in Moscow and Kigali—and in 10 other newspapers published from the African continent. “This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west,” the text, originally drafted by the Guardian UK, read. “Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.”

The pre-Copenhagen coordination is significant for several reasons. For months, the dialogue on climate policy has largely focused on the actions of China and of the United States—powerful and dynamic economies that are the two largest global polluters. Their electricity production, transportation and manufacturing industries account for the lion’s share of world pollution—with populous India not far behind. But these actions have grave consequences for smaller countries. Water wars between Burkina Faso and Ghana, or Pakistan and India, food shortages in Niger or oil shocks in American cities are all destabilizing to the global economy and political order. As the stakes mount and the conversation deepens, a new alliance among nations from the global south is asserting a voice in the debate.

The primary instigator of this new diplomatic dynamic is the African Union. The federation of 51 African states, formed in 2002, along with the G77—representing 130 developing countries—has made a strong push for financial support as it tries to participate in the new, green world order. Chief among its requests, developed in Accra in 2008 and hammered out at a recent AU conference on the environment in Addis Ababa, is the creation of a climate fund to support the greening of emerging markets, via subsidies for alternative energy production, reforestation, drought and flood-preparedness infrastructure, and technology transfer. The precise amount of funding—rumored to be between $50 and $70 billion over several years—has not been determined, but “it carries a lot of weight that the AU is saying something,” says Mwiza Munthale, director of public outreach for TransAfrica Forum. “You’re trying to get the attention of the most powerful countries of the world that do not always look out for the developing world.”

The Obama administration’s final position on American emissions reduction targets is not yet known, though a 17 percent cut (below 2005 levels, by 2020) has been its working number. The White House has also suggested that developed nations provide some $10 billion annually by 2012 to help the global south adapt to climate change—but the G77 and AU, along with China, India, Brazil and South Africa, are pushing for more action on both fronts. “We cannot agree to [halving emissions by 2050] because it implies that … the remaining (cuts) must be done by developing countries,” said Alf Willis, chief climate negotiator for South Africa. African states boycotted a preliminary diplomatic conference in Barcelona in November based on a similar complaint. And the same bloc of nations is insisting that climate aid be a central part of any deal in Copenhagen. “These are the new shifts in global decisionmaking,” says Emira Woods, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. “Having one common platform has strengthened the hand of the region.”

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Categories : Abroad, America, Energy, Green, Politics

Who Will Teach the Children?

23 10 2009

“Who Will Teach The Children?” The Root, 21 October 2009.
Obama’s education policy seeks the right mix of change and stability in the heated debate over the importance of teachers.

obamaschoolmd
President Barack Obama had more homework than usual this week. In the wee hours of Monday morning, Obama surprised administrators at Washington’s Sidwell Friends Academy, where his two daughters attend school. He and his wife showed up for the quarterly ritual known as the parent-teacher conference. After hearing about Malia and Sasha from their teachers, Obama stopped by Viers Mill Elementary School in Maryland, where he led a group of local students in chants of “read, read, read, read!”

The whole first family has been focused on education. The first lady penned an op-ed in U.S. News and World Report in which she sang the praises of the men and women who are training the next generation of America’s leaders: “We all remember the impact a special teacher had on us—a teacher who refused to let us fall through the cracks; who pushed us and believed in us when we doubted ourselves; who sparked in us a lifelong curiosity and passion for learning,” she wrote, citing data that shows “the single most important factor affecting students’ achievement is the caliber of their teachers.”

Michelle is right: A 2006 Brookings Institution report notes that “having a top-quartile teacher rather than a bottom-quartile teacher four years in a row would be enough to close the black-white test score gap.” In the face of distressing recent reports that the racial achievement gap is as wide as it has ever been, that is an important statistic.

But is any teacher a good teacher? Is a smaller class a better class? That’s been the subject of a fierce debate in education-policy circles for years.

Lawyer and media mogul Steven Brill jumped into the fray with a lengthy screed about bad teachers last month in New Yorker magazine. He argues that teachers’ unions are too powerful; that the political cost of firing bad teachers is so great that the city of New York tolerates enormous monetary costs just to avoid doing it. One such teacher, “Patricia Adams,” was found passed out in her classroom: ‘There were 34 students present in [Adams’s] classroom,’” Brill reports. “When the principal ‘attempted to awaken [Adams], he was unable to.’ When a teacher ‘stood next to [Adams], he detected a smell of alcohol emanating from her.’ ”

Needless to say, this doesn’t describe the teachers at posh Sidwell Friends. And the Adams case is an extreme example of incompetence. But what is to be done about the bad apples teaching the 50 million school-aged children, including the majority of black children, in the nation’s public school system?

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Categories : America, Books, Education

Our Bodies, Our World

30 09 2009

“Our Bodies, Our World,” Democracy, September 2009.

The fight for reproductive righs extends far beyond America’s shores.

maternalmortality

The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World
By Michelle Goldberg • Penguin Press • 2009 • 272 pages • $25.95

On the third day of Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Senator Tom Coburn asked, “Do you believe that the court’s abortion rulings have ended the national controversy over this issue?” Sotomayor was curt: “No.” Coburn went further: “You don’t have to name them, but do you think there are other similarly divisive issues that could be decided by the court in the future?” A measured Sotomayor again declined to get specific. “That, I can’t answer,” she said. “I can only answer what exists. People are very passionate about the issues they believe in.”

From the May assassination of Dr. George Tiller, a provider of therapeutic and late-term abortions in Kansas, to the first of what may be a string of Supreme Court vacancies, reproductive rights have returned to the American political spotlight. The exchange on the Senate Judiciary Committee was one of several involving abortion law during the confirmation hearing, highlighting a still-violatile domestic political debate surrounding how and under what circumstances women reproduce.

Yet according to Michelle Goldberg, nearly the entire conversation about sex, access to contraception, and abortion in America is a shibboleth. The 150 million women of the United States enjoy some of the greatest reproductive freedoms on the planet. Eighty percent of the world allows abortion in only the first 12 weeks of pregnancy; the United States permits therapeutic abortions until the sixth month. Three quarters of American women use modern birth control to plan their families, while in many countries birth control is inaccessible, if not illegal. Women abroad suffer under restrictions on their reproductive choices, including cultural stigma against condom use.

Ironically, Goldberg points out in The Means of Reproduction, it is the United States that exercises extraordinary and often restrictive control over the rest of the world’s ability to promote women’s health and family planning–not least because it is the largest funder of family planning programs worldwide. The current administration will give $545 million this year for such efforts to the United Nations Population Fund (also known by its French acronym, UNFP) and other international bodies. Indeed, while dramatic, the dispute between Coburn and Sotomayor over the threatened but consistent protections of Roe vs. Wade obscures a 30-year proxy war that’s produced catastrophic outcomes for women outside the United States.

Religion has played a particularly destructive role. Goldberg, a journalist who has written on feminism and religion, unpacks the workings of a new alliance between religious conservatives around the world that aims to shred reproductive freedoms for women. American Protestants and Latin American Catholics join with the Mormon church, and Iranian clerics join with the Holy See, to prosecute a moral crusade for chastity, one that, in the age of international law and globalized culture, has become a high-stakes geopolitical fencing match.

“The globalization of the culture wars,” writes Goldberg, “was revealing something important about the significant fissures dividing the world. Religious rivalries . . . masked an equally important polarization, both inside of countries and among them, between secular, liberalizing cultures and traditional, patriarchal ones.” The longstanding conflict over women’s bodies, she concludes, shows this particular clash of civilizations in high relief. And unlike traditional conceptions of grand strategy, it has never been a fight between East and West, left and right, or rich and poor. Instead, it is “a battle between a cosmopolitan network of reproductive rights activists and an equally cosmopolitan network of religious conservatives.”

Goldberg reports from the front lines of this genteel but deadly conflict, describing sex and fertility as pressure points critical to reshaping the global conversation on not just women’s rights but the entire global economy. Allowing women access to reproductive choices, she asserts, is central to the cause of international development: “Underlying diverse conflicts–over demography, natural resources, human rights, and religious mores–is the question of who controls the means of reproduction.”

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Categories : Abroad, Africa, America, Culture, History, Politics, Religion, Women

New World Order

28 09 2009

“New World Order,” The Root, 24 September 2009.

How the Group of 8 became the G20.

g20NEW YORK—On the eve of the international political conference in Pittsburgh known as the Group of 20, President Barack Obama addressed a packed main hall of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Making his first appearance before the international diplomatic and peacekeeping body, Obama stressed that expectations of global cooperation now drive American foreign policy.

“In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero sum game,” he said. “No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold. The traditional division between nations of the south and north makes no sense in an interconnected world.”

After eight years of unilateralism under George W. Bush, the message of outreach and inclusion was received with enthusiastic applause. But as Obama lands in Pittsburgh, it’s worth remembering that until recently, a smaller, more elite group of eight countries dominated global discussion. Leaders from those nations will have their own meetings during the two-day conference devoted to climate change, nuclear security and restabilizing the global economy. Yet it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll hear more about the G20 than the G8. Suddenly, the organization, created in 1975, is “no longer the board of directors of the world,” but a more inclusive organization, said David Wessel of the Wall Street Journal, while addressing the Council on Foreign Relations last week.

But just when did the G8 become the G20?

Originally, the G8 was the Group of 7—which included finance ministers from the U.S., Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan. In 1998, it became the G8 for “political reasons,” according to former President Bill Clinton. The massive and resurgent Russian Federation could no longer be credibly excluded from the debate. Similarly, says Clinton, the dozen other countries at this week’s G20 gathering have earned a seat at the table by representing the increasingly diverse elements of a more interdependent world order. “It’s not a bipolar world, as it was during the Cold War, not a polar world, as it was briefly in the aftermath of the Cold War,” Clinton told The Root.

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Categories : Abroad, Energy, Europe, History, Politics

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