Shhh, Don't Say 'Poverty'

By BOB HERBERT

ormer Senator Phil Gramm, a Republican from Texas who was known for his orneriness, once said, "We're the only nation in the world where all our poor people are fat."

That particular example of compassionate conservatism came to mind as I looked over a report from the Department of Agriculture showing that more than 12 million American families continue to struggle, and not always successfully, to feed themselves.

The 12 million families represent 11.2 percent of all U.S. households. "At some time during the year," the report said, "these households were uncertain of having, or unable to acquire, enough food for all their members because they had insufficient money or other resources."

Of the 12 million families that worried about putting food on the table, 3.9 million had members who actually went hungry at some point last year. "The other two-thirds ... obtained enough food to avoid hunger using a variety of coping strategies," the report said, "such as eating less varied diets, participating in federal food assistance programs, or getting emergency food from community food pantries or emergency kitchens."

These are dismal statistics for a country as well-to-do as the United States. But we don't hear much about them because hunger is associated with poverty, and poverty is not even close to becoming part of our national conversation. Swift boats, yes. Sex scenes on "Monday Night Football," most definitely. The struggle of millions of Americans to feed themselves? Oh no. Let's not go there.

What does that tell you about American values?

We are surrounded by poor and low-income people. (The definitions can be elastic and easily blurred, but essentially we're talking about individuals and families that don't have enough money to cover the essentials - food, shelter, clothing, transportation and so forth.) Many of them are full-time workers, and some have more than one job.

A new study by the Center for an Urban Future, a nonprofit research group, found that more than 550,000 families in New York - a quarter of all working families in the state - had incomes that were too low to cover their basic needs.

We just had a bitterly contested presidential election, but this very serious problem (it's hardly confined to New York) was not a major part of the debate.

According to the study: "Most low-income working families do not conform to the popular stereotype of the working poor as young, single, fast-food workers: 88 percent of low-income working families include a parent between 25 and 54 years old. Married couples head 53 percent of these families nationwide. Important jobs such as health aide, janitor and child care worker pay a poverty wage."

In its introduction, the study says, "The implied bargain America offers its citizens is supposed to be that anyone who works hard and plays by the rules can support his or her family and move onward and upward."

If that was the bargain, we've broken it again and again. Low-income workers have always been targets for exploitation, and that hasn't changed. The Times's Steven Greenhouse had a troubling front-page article in last Friday's paper about workers at restaurants, supermarkets, call centers and other low-paying establishments who are forced to go off the clock and continue working for periods of time without pay.

The federal government has not raised the minimum wage since 1997, and has made it easier for some employers to deny time-and-a-half pay to employees who work overtime.

Franklin Roosevelt, in his second Inaugural Address, told a rain-soaked crowd, "The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."

I can hear the politicians in today's Washington having a hearty laugh at that sentiment.

There are advocates and even some politicians hard at work addressing the myriad problems faced by beleaguered workers and their families. But they get very little in the way of attention or resources from the most powerful sectors of society. So the health care workers who can't afford health insurance will continue emptying bedpans for a pittance. And the janitors will clean up faithfully after the big shots who ignore them.

These are rough times for the American dream. But times change, and the people who have broken faith with the dream won't be in power forever.

Bush's Echo Chamber

By BOB HERBERT

olin Powell, who urged the president to think more deeply about the consequences of invading Iraq, is being shoved toward the exit. And Condoleezza Rice, who blithely told America, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," is being ushered in to take his place.

Competence has never been highly regarded by the fantasists of the George W. Bush administration. In the Bush circle, no less than in your average youth gang, loyalty is everything. The big difference, of course, is that the administration is far more dangerous than any gang. History will show that the Bush crowd of incompetents brought tremendous amounts of suffering to enormous numbers of people. The amount of blood being shed is sickening, and there is no end to the grief in sight.

Ironically, Ms. Rice was supposed to be the epitome of competence. She was the charming former provost of Stanford University, an expert on Soviet and East European affairs who was also an accomplished pianist, ice skater and tennis player, and the presidential candidate George W. Bush's tutor on foreign policy.

She was superwoman. They didn't come more accomplished.

She and Mr. Bush developed a remarkable bond, and he made her his national security adviser. Which was a problem. Because all the evidence shows she wasn't very good at the job.

Ms. Rice's domain was the filter through which an awful lot of mangled and misshapen intelligence made its way to the president and the American people. She either believed the nonsense she was spouting about mushroom clouds, or she deliberately misled her president and the nation on matters that would eventually lead to the deaths of thousands.

Secretary Powell's close friend and deputy at the State Department, Richard Armitage, viewed Ms. Rice's operation with contempt. In his book "Plan of Attack," Bob Woodward said Mr. Armitage "believed that the foreign-policy-making system that was supposed to be coordinated by Rice was essentially dysfunctional."

In October 2003, the president, frustrated by setbacks in Iraq, put Ms. Rice in charge of his Iraq Stabilization Group, which gave her the responsibility for overseeing the effort to quell the violence and begin the reconstruction in Iraq.

We see from recent headlines how well that has worked out.

A crucial mentor for Ms. Rice was Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser for the first President Bush. He appointed her to the National Security Council in 1989. Ms. Rice and the nation would have benefited if she had sought out and followed Mr. Scowcroft's counsel on Iraq.

Mr. Scowcroft's view, widely expressed before the war, was that the U.S. should exercise extreme caution. He did not believe the planned invasion was wise or necessary. In an article in The Wall Street Journal in August 2002, he wrote:

"There is scant evidence to tie Saddam to terrorist organizations, and even less to the Sept. 11 attacks. Indeed Saddam's goals have little in common with the terrorists who threaten us, and there is little incentive for him to make common cause with them."

Ms. Rice exhibited as little interest in Mr. Scowcroft's opinion as George W. Bush did in his father's. (When Bob Woodward asked Mr. Bush if he had consulted with the former president about the decision to invade Iraq, he replied, "There is a higher father that I appeal to.")

As I watch the disastrous consequences of the Bush policies unfold - not just in Iraq, but here at home as well - I am struck by the immaturity of this administration, whatever the ages of the officials involved. It's as if the children have taken over and sent the adults packing. The counsel of wiser heads, like George H. W. Bush, or Brent Scowcroft, or Colin Powell, is not needed and not wanted.

Some of the world's most important decisions - often, decisions of life and death - have been left to those who are less competent and less experienced, to men and women who are deficient in such qualities as risk perception and comprehension of future consequences, who are reckless and dangerously susceptible to magical thinking and the ideological pressure of their peers.

I look at the catastrophe in Iraq, the fiscal debacle here at home, the extent to which loyalty trumps competence at the highest levels of government, the absence of a coherent vision of the future for the U.S. and the world, and I wonder, with a sense of deep sadness, where the adults have gone.

Veterinarians should act to stop crating of pregnant pigs

November 6, 2004

BY JAMES CROMWELL

The American Veterinary Medical Association gathered in Chicago on Nov. 5 to discuss a topic that is very dear to my heart: the treatment of pigs.

Imagine being shoved inside a small closet with barely enough room to move. Your feet begin to ache from the hard floor so you contort your body just enough to sit down. But after a while, this position offers no more comfort and you struggle to stand up again. The lack of room to walk or turn around starts to atrophy your muscles, and festering sores on your feet make every movement agony. Now imagine spending six years like this -- and you'll begin to understand what life is like for nearly 6 million pregnant or nursing pigs in the United States.

In our everyday lives, it may be hard to relate to the miseries endured by farmed animals, but making the movie ''Babe'' opened my eyes to the intelligence and the inquisitive personalities of pigs. These highly social animals possess an amazing capacity for love, joy and sorrow that makes them remarkably similar to our beloved canine and feline friends. In fact, the scientific adviser to the British government says pigs are smarter than dogs and even do better on intelligence tests than 3-year-old children.

That's why it's so heartbreaking that pigs used for breeding spend day after day, month after month inside concrete and steel "gestation crates." Reduced to mere piglet-producing machines, sows are scuttled from crate to crate in a miserable breeding cycle that lasts as long as six years. Such restrictive confinement leads to both physical and psychological suffering. Would you subject your dog or cat to similar conditions?

The scientific consensus is so complete that gestation crates have been banned in the European Union. Yet the crating system continues to dominate the U.S. industry, in no small part because of its support from the American Veterinary Medical Association. Although its professed mission is to improve animal health, it's the factory farmers who make the decisions about animal welfare on their farms. This was even acknowledged by association President Dr. Bonnie Beaver in her 2004 address to the group's House of Delegates, in which she announced: "It is important for each of us to recognize that we may at times become too close to the industries we serve, losing our objectivity about what is the best welfare and adopting instead that suggested by the industry."

To its credit, this past July, the association finally ended its support of forced molting -- the factory-farming practice of starving hens for up to two weeks to induce an additional egg-laying cycle. But the association continues to drag its feet on other important animal welfare issues, including the issue of gestation crates for mother pigs.

Sadly, when the association received a resolution from its nonfactory-farm members to reverse its endorsement of cruel gestation crates just last year, it stalled the process for nearly two years by scheduling what was supposed to be a scientific meeting to make a recommendation on the issue. Now, the association is further obscuring and potentially delaying this process -- it hosted a "Sow Housing and Welfare" discussion session on Friday. Even if the association's animal welfare committee finally takes the long-awaited first step to change the association's endorsement of gestation crates, its recommendation may not be approved at the next convention in July 2005.

In the meantime, 6 million pigs in the United States remain immobilized in gestation crates despite the existence of viable, humane alternatives that are being successfully implemented elsewhere.

So what is the association waiting for? The organization should be true to its mission statement by condemning the use of cruel and oppressive gestation crates.

From the NY Times:

O.K., Folks: Back to Work

By BOB HERBERT

n iron rule of life is to be careful what you wish for.

President Bush can take his re-election victory to the bank, and his political portfolio has been bolstered by enhanced Republican majorities in both houses of Congress. That's the good news for the president. Nearly all the other news is bad.

A story in the business section of yesterday's Times noted, "Even as President Bush was celebrating his election victory on Wednesday, his Treasury Department provided an ominous reminder about the economic challenges ahead."

With budget deficits exploding, the government will have to borrow $147 billion in the first three months of 2005, a quarterly record. But the record won't stand for long. The government is hemorrhaging money, and the nation has a war to pay for. A new record is almost sure to be set before the year is out.

Managing money is not one of this president's strong points. Plus and minus signs mean nothing to him. If he were actually writing checks, they'd be bouncing to the moon. The federal government's revenue was $100 billion lower this year than when Mr. Bush took office, and spending is $400 billion higher.

Yesterday, at his press conference, the president made it clear that his campaign promise of more - not fewer - tax cuts for the wealthy is at the top of his second-term agenda.

Much has been made of the support Mr. Bush has gotten from religious people. He's going to need all of their prayers that some miracle happens to suspend the laws of simple arithmetic and keep his fiscal house of cards from collapsing.

Meanwhile, the situation in Iraq, overshadowed by the election, is as grim as ever. Insurgents blew up a critical oil pipeline on Tuesday, the latest severe blow to efforts to get the Iraq economy on track. Three British soldiers were killed in an attack yesterday. The assassinations, kidnappings and car bombings continued. The humanitarian aid group Doctors Without Borders announced that it would cease operations in Iraq because of the unrelenting danger. And Hungary became the latest U.S. coalition partner to announce that it would withdraw its troops from Iraq.

In other words, nothing has changed. Mr. Bush's victory on Tuesday was not based on his demonstrated competence in office or on a litany of perceived successes. For all the talk about values that we're hearing, the president ran a campaign that appealed above all to voters' fears and prejudices. He didn't say he'd made life better for the average American over the past four years. He didn't say he had transformed the schools, or made college more affordable, or brought jobs to the unemployed or health care to the sick and vulnerable.

He said, essentially, be very afraid. Be frightened of terrorism, and of those dangerous gay marriages, and of those in this pluralistic society who may have thoughts and beliefs and values that differ from your own.

As usual, he turned reality upside down. A quintessential American value is tolerance for ideas other than one's own. Tuesday's election was a dismaying sprint toward intolerance, sparked by a smiling president who is a master at appealing to the baser aspects of our natures.

Which brings me to the Democrats - the ordinary voters, not the politicians - and where they go from here. I have been struck by the extraordinary demoralization, even dark despair, among a lot of voters who desperately wanted John Kerry to defeat Mr. Bush. "We did all we could," one woman told me, "and we still lost."

Here's my advice: You had a couple of days to indulge your depression - now, get over it. The election's been lost but there's still a country to save, and with the current leadership that won't be easy. Crucial matters that have been taken for granted too long - like the Supreme Court and Social Security - are at risk. Caving in to depression and a sense of helplessness should not be an option when the country is speeding toward an abyss.

Roll up your sleeves and do what you can. Talk to your neighbors. Call or write your elected officials. Volunteer to help in political campaigns. Circulate petitions. Attend meetings. Protest. Run for office. Support good candidates who are running for office. Register people to vote. Reach out to the young and the apathetic. Raise money. Stay informed. And vote, vote, vote - every chance you get.

Democracy is a breeze during good times. It's when the storms are raging that citizenship is put to the test. And there's a hell of a wind blowing right now.

From the NY Times:

The Red Zone

By MAUREEN DOWD

ASHINGTON

With the Democratic Party splattered at his feet in little blue puddles, John Kerry told the crushed crowd at Faneuil Hall in Boston about his concession call to President Bush.

"We had a good conversation," the senator said. "And we talked about the danger of division in our country and the need, the desperate need, for unity, for finding the common ground, coming together. Today I hope that we can begin the healing."

Democrat: Heal thyself.

W. doesn't see division as a danger. He sees it as a wingman.

The president got re-elected by dividing the country along fault lines of fear, intolerance, ignorance and religious rule. He doesn't want to heal rifts; he wants to bring any riffraff who disagree to heel.

W. ran a jihad in America so he can fight one in Iraq - drawing a devoted flock of evangelicals, or "values voters," as they call themselves, to the polls by opposing abortion, suffocating stem cell research and supporting a constitutional amendment against gay marriage.

Mr. Bush, whose administration drummed up fake evidence to trick us into war with Iraq, sticking our troops in an immoral position with no exit strategy, won on "moral issues."

The president says he's "humbled" and wants to reach out to the whole country. What humbug. The Bushes are always gracious until they don't get their way. If W. didn't reach out after the last election, which he barely grabbed, why would he reach out now that he has what Dick Cheney calls a "broad, nationwide victory"?

While Mr. Bush was making his little speech about reaching out, Republicans said they had "the green light" to pursue their conservative agenda, like drilling in Alaska's wilderness and rewriting the tax code.

"He'll be a lot more aggressive in Iraq now," one Bush insider predicts. "He'll raze Falluja if he has to. He feels that the election results endorsed his version of the war." Never mind that the more insurgents American troops kill, the more they create.

Just listen to Dick (Oh, lordy, is this cuckoo clock still vice president?) Cheney, introducing the Man for his victory speech: "This has been a consequential presidency which has revitalized our economy and reasserted a confident American role in the world." Well, it has revitalized the Halliburton segment of the economy, anyhow. And "confident" is not the first word that comes to mind for the foreign policy of a country that has alienated everyone except Fiji.

Vice continued, "Now we move forward to serve and to guard the country we love." Only Dick Cheney can make "to serve and to guard" sound like "to rape and to pillage."

He's creating the sort of "democracy" he likes. One party controls all power in the country. One network serves as state TV. One nation dominates the world as a hyperpower. One firm controls contracts in Iraq.

Just as Zell Miller was so over the top at the G.O.P. convention that he made Mr. Cheney seem reasonable, so several new members of Congress will make W. seem moderate.

Tom Coburn, the new senator from Oklahoma, has advocated the death penalty for doctors who perform abortions and warned that "the gay agenda" would undermine the country. He also characterized his race as a choice between "good and evil" and said he had heard there was "rampant lesbianism" in Oklahoma schools.

Jim DeMint, the new senator from South Carolina, said during his campaign that he supported a state G.O.P. platform plank banning gays from teaching in public schools. He explained, "I would have given the same answer when asked if a single woman who was pregnant and living with her boyfriend should be hired to teach my third-grade children."

John Thune, who toppled Tom Daschle, is an anti-abortion Christian conservative - or "servant leader," as he was hailed in a campaign ad - who supports constitutional amendments banning flag burning and gay marriage.

Seeing the exit polls, the Democrats immediately started talking about values and religion. Their sudden passion for wooing Southern white Christian soldiers may put a crimp in Hillary's 2008 campaign (nothing but a wooden stake would stop it). Meanwhile, the blue puddle is comforting itself with the expectation that this loony bunch will fatally overreach, just as Newt Gingrich did in the 90's.

But with this crowd, it's hard to imagine what would constitute overreaching.

Invading France?