Number 3) Protecting Wildlife from Climate Change

I am hopeful that one of the things this Administration will prioritise is a substantial reduction in CO2 emissions to help us halt the onset of global climate change. BUT, the changing climate has already begun to have a serious impact on wildlife and plant species and sadly we now have no choice but to adapt to these changes.

The warming temperatures, for example, have caused caterpillars to be born weeks earlier in the year than previously. That may not sound so bad, but baby birds rely on them as their main source of food. Some bird species are starting to experience mass starvation of thier chicks, who are now being born weeks after the caterpillars on which have passed their peak.

In fact, birds generally appear to be in serious trouble:

The May, 2008, International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) assessment concluded that “climate change—and even some attempts to tackle it—are pushing one in eight species of birds towards extinction.” In the past year alone, 26 of the 1,226 species on their “Red List” of threatened bird species became more endangered, while only 2 species improved in status...

In the United States bird populations have also shrunk, and nearly a third of the bird species living in the eastern Midwest and Great Lakes areas could be lost. (Emphasis mine)

The Department of the Interior has for decades been responsible for managing public lands and ensuring the preservation of wildlife. However, the methods they use for species conservation are likely to need a major overhaul in light of the changing patterns in nature. And you don't have to be an animal lover to be concerned about this - mass species extinction can lead to devastating consequences for human populations. For instance, without birds to contain them, insect populations can swell, leading to crop blight. Fish extinctions could destroy the fishing industry, and with it countless local economies that rely on it.

To prevent these potentially costly and devastating outcomes, we need to make a modest investment in rejigging our land management in line with visible and measurable impact that climate change is having on the landscape today (as well as preparing for the likely future). This budget increases the funding for such work by $140 Million, $40 Million of which will be shared with the states to support their local conservation efforts. It also grants $10 Million to North American Wetlands Conservation Act (NAWCA) activities to acquire, restore, or protect wetlands used by migratory waterfowl and other birds

Money well spent.

Number 4) Home Nurses Visitation Program

Sometimes when we make policy decisions, we have to take our best guess about what types of programs work and what don't. For instance, a lot of people had very high hopes for abstinence education programs, and even those of us who were dubious about the idea couldn't be sure whether the programs would be effective until they had been tried and data had been gathered to determine if they would work. (The verdict is now in, though. They don't.)

However, this is not always the case. Sometimes we are blessed with the opportunity to support programs that have a long track record and have proven statistically effective in achieving valuable social goals. For example, the Home Nurses program, which sends nurses to the homes of low income mothers to be to offer instruction and support in infant care. Programs of this type have been running in trial versions since the late 1970's and have consistently shown real benefits.

But that description is too cold. What we are talking about here is children who would otherwise be abused are not being abused. Children who would otherwise receive poor nutrition are well fed. Children who would be born premature, are born healthy. Teenagers who benefited from the program as children are less likely to be arrested themselves or for their parents to be in jail

The Home Nurses programs work with the most underprivildged families in some of the poorest neighborhoods in the country. Here's a description pulled from a heartbreaking article on the nurses and mothers participating in the program in New Orleans. A home nurse, Luwana, is trying to help a mother called Alexis learn how to care for her 13 day old baby:

No matter how chaotic the scene - no matter that Alexis' sister has taken a break from hacking chicken parts by the kitchen sink to attend to the ex-inmate's sexual needs in the next room - Luwana's first task is to create an aura of momentousness around the new baby. As she moves through a household, giving advice about routine-building, breast-feeding, and storing the shotguns out of reach, she attempts to win over not just a young mother but a typically unwieldy cast of supporting players, from the baby's father to the great-grandmother getting high in a tent behind the house. What Luwana tells each family may seem, on the face of it, fiction: that in this infant enormous possibilities inhere. But such fictions can be strategic...

Obama's budget creates a national Nurse Home Visitation program to help turn this fiction into a reality for thousands of the neediest infants in America.

Money well spent.

Budget Top 10 Interlude: Why I'm Doing This...

Just a quick reminder: the reason I'm blogging my top ten budget goodies is simple. Republicans realise that the Presiden't Budget is a progressive and pragmatic proposal. They know that there's an awful lot in there that people are going to like. So they would rather spend their time distracting you from it.

And when the legislative battle gets started, despite the fact they are in the minority, despite the fact they are wildly unpopular, despite the fact Obama has made every effort to include them where appropriate (short of selling out the things he was elected to do) they are going to go for all out war.

They don't want to give up on their fundamental economic principle that low taxes + small government always = good. Here's Rep. Eric Cantor describing the Republican budget plan:

Cantor called the Republican budget “a responsible attempt to restrain the
growth in government, to return us back to a period of economic growth through
tax relief and fiscal prudence.

In other words, cut taxes for the rich and eliminate programs for the poor. Hmm.... where have I heard this before? It's incumbent on all of us to learn something about the President's budget so we can speak up for it against the Republican nonsense.

Update: And here's a new Organizing for America ad asking for your support on the budget:

Number 5) More FBI agents to target financial fraud

If you have been even vaguely sentient over the last few months, you must be aware that massive, multi-billion dollar fraud schemes have recently rocked the US economy. Federal investigators estimate that Bernard Madoff alone had accumulated more than $64.8 Billion through his Ponzi scheme - not a penny of which was legitimately invested. Allen Stanford is currently under investigation for what appears to be a fraudulent $8Billion dollar fund, and the scale of his Ponzi scheme may turn out to be much larger. He has also been accused of money laundering, and tax evasion.

Both of these individuals operated for years with little to no oversight, despite the fact that their massive businesses appeared to be nothing more than thin facades.

The damage that these men have done isn't just to wealthy investors - many charities, universities and foundations invested with these men. For instance, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner Eli Wiesel had invested the entire $15.2 million of his charitable foundation with Madoff. Nothing is left. Those funds were earmarked to help Darfuri and Ethiopian refugees to rebuild their lives, amongst other things.

But Madoff and Stanford are just the tip of a very cold and ugly iceberg - with the rise of computer crime and the increasingly complicated nature of financial transactions, a wide range of financial crime is now threatening all of us. Identity theft is on the rise, as is phishing. Thousands of Americans are about to lose their homes due to fraudulent or illegal mortgage practices. And, of course, we may yet find that significant financial fraud was behind the current financial sector collapse - investigations are ongoing.

It seems to me that what we are experiencing right now is a massive crime wave sweeping the country - just the same as if thousands of masked muggers had suddenly taken to the streets. But at the moment we don't have anything like the resources we would need to fight it.

We need lots more law enforcement officials with specialist training in financial crime.

That's why Obama's budget now includes significant funds to add:

• Additional FBI Agents with financial training
• More federal prosecutors and civil litigators and
• Bankrupcy attorneys

All of these will help to protect investors and will safeguard the American taxpayer. The disastrous decision to leave financial oversight in the hands of the SEC has proved unbearably costly. From now on, we need to invest more in strong federal oversight and prosecution, not only to brign these criminals to justice but, hopefully, to deter such crime in the first place. Money well spent.

Number 6) Supertrains!

Living in a country where the rail infrastructure is (far from perfect but) widely used and considered a necessary, normal part of daily life in the country, I'm always astonished by how far most Americans are from thinking this way. A few years ago I needed to travel from Spingfield, Massachusetts to Manhattan and I booked an Amtrack ticket to do so. This was a 4 hour journey, which would land me three blocks from where I needed to be. However, the family that I was visiting in the Springfield area were confused and disapproving - "why didn't you fly?" they kept asking me.

Well, leaving aside the fact that the train cost about the same, took about the same amount of time (when you factor in the need to travel out to the airport and into the city at each end) and that the train has more comfortable seats, and allows you to stretch your legs there is also the fact that rail travel is FAR less polluting than airplane travel. The CO2 released in air travel has 10 times the environmental impact as CO2 at ground level. And car travel, in addition to being more polluting than rail, is also significantly less safe - automobile fatalities are the 6th most common cause of deat in developed countries.

Still, though, Americans are far more likely to fly or drive on long journeys. Rightly or wrongly, rail travel is seen as creaky, slow, and inhibiting.

But supertrains - high speed trains serving major metropolitan areas, such as are common on continental Europe and Japan - are none of these things. Supertrains are clean, safe, cheap and fast. They are a great way to travel, and they can help to reinvigorate urban areas drawign business and consumers back into town centers.

So why is America so far behind the curve on this? We don't have a single high speed rail line in the country, despite being (allegedly) the wealthiest country on earth and having a number of major metropolitican areas that would be ideal to connect in this way.

For instance, the North East corridor would make it easy to create a high speed line connecting Boston, New York, Washington DC and Baltimore.

Or, how about connecting St Louis Missouri and Chicago? Of Seattle and Portland? Or LA and San Francisco? Harry Reid got attacked for a fictional LA to Las Vegas rail line, but creating one of these would actually be a really good idea.

I can't see any reason why America should always be the last developed country to adopt innovative and useful large-scale projects like this. Not only will supertrains create much needed jobs here and now, they will create the kind of robust transport infrastructure that makes ongoing growth easier - similar to how Eisenhower ensured an era of growth by investing in the Interstate Highway program. Plus: SUPERTRAINS! (Sorry, but I' just plain adore them.)

Money well spent.

The Power Of the Ask

I'm at a book launch event for this book and there are computers with signs saying "blog here". So I am. It's amazing what you can persuade people to do by asking them.

Number 7) Energy innovation for housing

The need to reduce energy consumption has become critical, not just a result of climate change (although that certainly makes it more urgent) but also in terms of reducing the increased cost of living and making the best use of our limited supplies of fossil fuels.

In the US, 21% of all energy consumption is household consumption. Most of that comes from space and water heating, as well as cooking and lighting. Relatively simple and cost effective adjustments to homes, including insulation and sealant on windows can make a big difference in home energy consumption. Unfortunately, the people who can least afford the type of up front investment in energy efficiency are also the people who could most benefit from the cost savings that would result.

That's why the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Energy are working together to propose a fund to retrofit older homes. Not only will this money help to stimulate the economy by directly contributing to the growth of the green jobs sector that represents one of our most promising areas for economic growth, but it will help many underpriviledged people to cut their monthly expenses at a time when belts are tighening around the country.

And the long term benefits of cleaner, more efficient houses will pay environmental dividends for years to come, even if the families that initially benefit eventually move on. This is really a win-win-win scenario: economic stimulation, help to the needy and a cleaner environment.

Money well spent.

Number 8) College Completion Incentive Fund

A great deal of time and money has been spent over the years trying to encourage more young people, especially from disadvantaged backgrounds, to attend a four year university. On the whole, these efforts have been fairly successful - yet the proportion of you people with a college degree is much lower for my generation than for the generations before. How can this be true? Well, the simple answer is that an unacceptably high percentage of the people who start college drop out without finishing.

Just 54 percent of students entering four-year colleges in 1997 had a degree six years later — and even fewer Hispanics and blacks did, according to some of the latest government figures. After borrowing for school but failing to graduate, many of those students may be worse off than if they had never attended college at all.

Children from poorer families are more likely to drop out, as are minority children. However, drop out rates do not appear to be predestined - some colleges do a good job of keeping these kids in through their degree, others don't.

In his State of the Union Address, Obama's big "let's go to the moon" moment was a pledge that, "By 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world. That is a goal we can meet." Curently, we are 12th on this metric if you include adults from 25-34 with either a batchelors or associates degree (we do better if you include everyone up to the age of 64, but that's because other countries were further behind us then - they've recently caught up and surpassed us).

Obama's budget creates a $2.5 Billion Completion Incentive Fund to allow colleges to adopt the techniquest that have been successful at high-graduation schools.

Why does this matter? Well, leaving aside the social justice argument that poorer kids should have more chances to raise themselves up than they currently have, this program fulfills a very practical need: we aren't producing enough doctors, teachers, scientists or engineers to meet the countries needs today, let alone for the future. If this money can help even a fraction of the 46% of students who don't graduate to actually complete their degrees, it will buy us a downpayment on that future. Money well spent.

Number 9) Improved treatment for mental illness among the military

It's no secret that in recent years, our service men and women have been called upon to serve in deeply traumatic conditions. Instances of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder amongst the military are drastically on the rise, and treatment for it has not increased to meet the need.

An extraordinary story in the New Yorker late last year (read the whole thing!) put the problem into perspective for me:

Compared with other American wars, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan seem to be producing victims at a high rate. A recent RAND Corporation study estimated that three hundred thousand veterans of America’s post-9/11 wars—nearly twenty per cent of those who have served—are suffering from P.T.S.D. or major depression, and many more cases are expected to surface in the years ahead. This elevated rate is generally attributed to the rigors of a long war being fought without conscription: multiple deployments and heavy use of National Guard and reserve units. And on the ground, at unit level, the discouragement of anyone with stress symptoms from asking for help is intense. The same RAND study found that, mainly because of the stigma still attached to P.T.S.D., only half of those afflicted have sought treatment.
The suicide rate among veterans and active-duty military personnel has been rising as well. The number of soldiers who killed themselves last year was the highest since the Army began keeping records, in 1980. When Dr. Ira Katz, the Department of Veterans Affairs chief of mental services, learned earlier this year that preliminary internal reports suggested that a thousand veterans in V.A. care were attempting suicide each month, he sent a colleague an e-mail saying, “Shh! . . . Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before somebody stumbles on it?” Another e-mail, written in March, 2008, by Dr. Norma J. Perez, a P.T.S.D. program coördinator in Texas, said, “Given that we are having more and more compensation seeking veterans, I’d like to suggest that you refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out.”

These men and women aren't just a danger to themselves as suicide risks - left untreated they are also a danger to the communities they return to. But with the programs that manage this problem overstretched, and a strong stigma associated with mental illness, thousands of people aren't getting the help they need. In this study, only 27% or people who showed symptoms of having a problem were getting any help

No matter what you think of the wars in Iraq and Afganistan, the people who fought in them deserve better than this callous indifference.

Obama's budget will increase funding for PTSD, Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and psychological disorders. It will create a tracking system for TBI with a single designated point of responsibility. It will add extra mental health professionals stationed directly with the troops capable of identifying and treating at risk individuals. And it will fund the National Intrepid Center of Excellence for psychological health and traumatic brain injury, which is due to open this year and which will be a cutting edge research and educational facility leading on these issues.

This funding will create jobs, protect our military and save lives. Money well spent.

Number 10) Rural Broadband Investment

I'm concerned that as President Obama tries to pass his budget, there are going to be a lot of people attacking him for doing things that I think need to be done. So, stealing a page from John McCain's inaccurate and unserious "top ten" twittering, here are ten things in Obama's budget that make me hopeful about our future.

The first one comes from the budget for the Department of Agriculture, and it's about $1.3Billion in loans and grants for rural broadband infrastructure. At this point, I'm sure someone somewhere is making a stupid joke about online porn. Let's allow the snickering at the back of the class to die down before we continue. Ready now?

Fine. This particular investment is not only necessary - it's long overdue. Manufacturing jobs are dying out and farming jobs are on the decline. As a result of these and other factors (poor access to healthcare and education among them), rural communities tend to be more poor than suburban or urban communities. They also lag behind in access to broadband internet. To attract and create new jobs to these areas, we will need not create fundamental infrastructures that put these areas within reach. A fast internet connection has long since stopped being a "Nice to have" for small businesses and start ups - it is essential. But it is simply not commercially viable for the market to supply this - creating broadband capacity is expensive and there aren't enough people in these areas to make it worth the while of commercial enterprises.

What's more, it may surprise you to know that it isn't just rural areas that have fallen behind the times. The US in international comparison has a much lower broadband capacity than other first world nations.



Stop and think about that for a second. We all know that traditional industries, like manufacturing, are being increasingly outsourced to third world countries that cand do them better. Our consolation has been that the US can lead in the cutting edge, information age businesses that will lead the future.

But according to the chart above, we have less broadband access and we pay more for it. $1.3 Billion of this year's budget is aimed at helping to bring us up to speed in this area. Money well spent.

Make sure your friends and family know - this budget isn't perfect. But it's important.

Obama: "Here's my guidance to you. Protect health care."

You should really read the excellent inside peak at the Obama White House just published in the New Republic. It's the story of how Health Care became a major priority of the President's budget, and what it demonstrates is that against some significant resistance from trusted advisors, Obama has been personally pushing for this since early on. In addition to the quote in the subject head above, I was very struck by this bit:

Obama's political strategists advised him to soft-pedal the topic. One of them was David Axelrod. Although personally acquainted with the flaws in our health care system because of his disabled daughter, he also understood public opinion: The middle-class voters whose support politicians covet were worried about the cost of insurance, but their enthusiasm for universal coverage seemed shallow. Obama, though, always insisted on keeping health care prominent in the election. "He said, 'I want to do health care as president,'" one senior adviser paraphrased, "'and I can't do health care if I don't talk about it during the campaign.'"

Wow. Strategy + tactics.

Happy St. Patrick's Day (OK, I'm late. So Sue Me)

Yesterday, Michelle Obama decided to celebrate St in Pat's in the tradtional way. The traditional Chicago way, that is. You may have heard Chicago they dye the river green on this most festive of occassions. Yesterday, the White House fountain took on the same hue.

But I'm really just posting this to remind you all of my favorite Irish Folk song to be written during the campaign:



Favorite lines:

Oh he's in the White House. He took his chance.
Now let's see Barack do Riverdance.

Twitter and Google and Meet Up and....

This is just a quick housekeeping post to remind all my new readers (hello new readers!) that this blog is part of an extended Obama London family of online activity.

• First off, yes - I am on Twitter. My Twitter name is KarinJR. You can find me here, should you be so minded. http://twitter.com/karinjr
• We also have an Obama London MeetUp Group - it's open to all, but some events that we list are Democrats Abroad events and therefore by necessity are for US citizens only. Find us here: http://www.meetup.com/barackobama-349/
  
• There is also the Obama London Google Group (if you prefer it - this group tends to get the same info that goes to the MeetUp, and I find MeetUp a bit easier to handle) here: http://groups.google.co.uk/group/obama-london?hl=en

• And finally, if you ARE a US Citizen and have not done so yet, make sure you join Democrats Abroad. DA is the official party organisation for the Democrats overseas, and is a great source for events, info and voting help. And I'm not just saying that because I'm UK Vice Chair (the opposite in fact): https://www.democratsabroad.org/user/register

RIP Ron Silver

Actor and political activist Ron Silver died yesterday. Silver was an interesting and smart man - a fervent liberal who became more conservative after the events of Sept 11 and wound up supporting both the Iraq war and President Bush's 2004 re-election. Obviously, I disagreed with him on both points!

But I did have the chance to see Silver at an event last year in the House of Commons, and I have to say he struck me as sincere, thoughtful and very intelligent. We chatted briefly after the event and he told me that he had mixed feelings about Obama, but thought he would almost certainly win (according to his obituaries, it looks like he wound up voting for him).

Silver was clearly a complicated guy. Socially very progressive but positively militiaristic on foreign policy, he didn't really fit in anywhere. Still, he was a great actor, and if he did nothing else in his life I'd still consider it a life well-lived just for Bruno Gianelli:

The Internet for Activists

So I was invited to speak this weekend at a conference called "The Internet for Activists." They were looking for examples of succes stories - online activism that achieve a real world result - and they thought the Obama campaign might be a fair example of that. All right then.

Digging into the organisers a little bit, I found that they were a collection of decidedly left of centre activists, ranging from the Marxist wing of the Labour party, to the Respect party, to one guy there who just thinks "no matter who you vote for, the government always wins" and therefore seems to eschew politics altogether. They were, in short, not from the "sensible centre" of British politics. Which is fine by me. Personally, I respect anyone who gives their time and effort to making the world closer to their vision of a good place to live. In America especially, the lunatic right has a strong voice whereas anyone further left than John Edwards practically doesn't exist in the public debate (Dennis Kucinich and Michael Moore being the exceptions that prove the rule). So I've got no problem with someone whose views are further left than mine working for their causes - to the contrary, I think a more balanced public debate, with the extremes on both side getting a reasonably hearing, will recalibrate the political discussion in a helpful way - the choice between far right, right, center right and center left isn't exactly a balanced range of options, is it?

But what I often DO get frustrated by in leftist activists is a certain self-absorbed self riteousness that seems to congratule itself on it's purity of thought rather than doing the hard work of actually persuading others to that point of view.

So in speaking at this event, there were a few things I wanted to achieve. I was certainly curious to meet the people - and there were some interesting folks there, for sure. Also a couple of jerks (I will not be blogging about the Masked Man from Anonymous, though he was indeed a jerk, because 1) I think he wants the attention and 2) apart from being online bullies I don't think they count as actual activists). But mainly I met well meaning folks, including some interesting bloggers.

I did want to respond to one speaker, though, who summed up his presentation with a small dig at the Obama campaign, arguing that they were "not an activist-led" campaign, and essentially that we shouldn't emulate their model because we should be striving for "more activist-led campaigns". Being a bit slow on the uptake, I sat there going, "huh?" and missed my chance to respond to this. Mainly because I couldn't initially work out what on earth he was arguing.

Obama himself definitely came from the activist tradition - local community organising is the purest form of direct activism I know. Barack first came to public attention by speaking at an anti-war rally, for heavens sake! Surely this is the sterotypical vision of an activist, yes?

And the other campaign leaders, David Plouffe, David Axelrod et. al. were far from insidery types - Axelrod actually got his start as a campaigning journalist in Chicaco, and Plouffe developed a campaign plan that was based to an unprecedented degree on building local grassroots organisation and keeping our core supporters fired up and active.

And certainly on grassroots level, it was activist led by definition, right? All these hundreds of thousands of Americans, young and old who gave up their evenings and weekends or even in some cases their jobs to work for no pay in support of a common goal - thousands of people who had never been active before. Thousands more for whom the Democratic party in the past had been too far right, or left, but who believed under Barack it could be just right. Millions of people who gave money, small and large, even in tough economic times, because they believed it was an investment in their future. These people aren't activists?

Only after the conference did I have my big, "well duh" moment and realise: No. To him, these people are not activists. He, and I'm sorry to say a lot of other people in the room, seem to give credit for genuine community spirit only to people who already think and act exactly like them. Mainstream political organising isn't activism. The community organising that Barack did in Chicago wasn't activism. All those previously non-political people who got inspired by Barack and spent months of their lives traipsing through rain and snow for him - that didn't make them activists.

I think it's the worst kind of snobbery. And, worse, I think it guarantees failure.

By definition, if you're a left of center activist, the majority does not already agree with you. Spending all your days talking only to the people exactly like you and looking down your nose at everyone else as philosophically impure isn't going to achieve a damn thing. So if you really care about what you claim to believe in, you're going to have to haul yourself out of your comfy little world and start formulating arguments.

The analogy that I oh-so-gently made in my presentation was to the underpants gnomes.

You know about he underpants gnomes, right?

No? Well, in short - they steal people's underwear in a scheme to get rich.

Their business plan is as follows:

Phase 1: Collect Underpants
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Profit!

Activists, I would urge, should work on their phase 2 planning. Lots of protests have a business plan somewhat similar to this. For example, let's say you are trying to end the war. You decide to hold a protest. Does your action plan resemble this?

Phase 1: Gather lots of people for a protest.
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Peace!

If you don't have a phase 2, you're just playing self gratifying games. And that's not an activist led campaign.