February, 2008

The Sudanese government started the first genocide of the 21st century in Darfur, and now it seems to be preparing to start the second here among the thatch-roof huts of southern Sudan.South Sudan is rich in oil, but its people are among the poorest in the world, far poorer than those in Darfur.Only 1 percent of girls here finish elementary school, meaning that a young woman is more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth than to become literate.

The current presidential campaign shows that politics is too often a contest of powerful interests, partisan attacks, sound bites and media hype. In "Faithful Citizenship," the Church calls for a different kind of political engagement: one shaped by moral convictions of well-formed consciences and focused on the dignity of every human being, the pursuit of the common good, and the protection of the weak and vulnerable. It stresses that Catholics need to be guided more by their moral convictions than by attachment to a political party or interest group.

Just like Utah's estimated 100,000 undocumented residents, Utah Senate Bill 81, an omnibus anti-immigration bill, won't go away. But unlike the vast majority of immigrants, who make valuable contributions to our culture and our economy, nothing good can come from this misguided, discriminatory legislation. There have been a few changes made to soften the cold, hard bill. Churches and humanitarian organizations have been held harmless for providing food, clothing and other charitable aid to undocumented residents. Religious leaders, including officials with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, have urged lawmakers to show compassion, and remember that undocumented immigrants are human beings.

Consumers are often faced with difficult choices between product styles in today's diverse market. There is Chicago vs. New York style pizza. Memphis vs. Texas style barbecue. Swedish vs. Japanese style massages. It is not surprising, therefore, that when the Bush administration decided to get into the torture business, it had to shop around. This shopper's dilemma of choices was evident in the twisted testimony given this month by Steven Bradbury, the acting chief of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel and one of the central figures in the Bush torture controversy. While it received relatively little attention, Bradbury not only acknowledged a formal program of waterboarding, he also casually distinguished President Bush's approach from historical models such as waterboarding by the Spanish Inquisition.

The Authority overseeing the Massachusett's new universal healthcare law is about to raise its rates on people who are living on limited incomes. This insurance is subsidized by the state, and the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority wants to make sure that co-pays and monthly premiums are high enough to discourage people from switching from private insurance. These costs should not be so high, however, that they are a burden for people with chronic conditions or discourage them from getting necessary care. When the connector board meets to set the rates tomorrow, actuarial prudence needs to be leavened by compassion.

As ministry leaders and pastors of churches in this county, we do not ask people of faith to prove their legal status before they can participate in fellowship. In the process, we have watched the lives of immigrants become increasingly intertwined into the lives of our congregations.
This has given us an up-close and personal look at the human toll borne by the men, women and children caught in the crosshairs of politicians who use a broken immigration system as an opportunity to build personal political capital. Instead of solutions, we are offered slogans from soapboxes. Worse still, we are offered poor uses of our state and county's limited resources that cannot begin to solve this clearly federal issue. Local posturing is sure to only drive families further into the shadows - families we care deeply about.

Nearly 19 years after an Exxon oil tanker rammed an underwater reef in Prince William Sound, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the final lawsuit lingering from the environmental disaster. Wednesday, the court will consider Exxon Mobil’s appeal, a 14-year effort that, if successful, would overturn a $2.5 billion punitive damages award considered by many to be the largest verdict ever against a U.S. corporation.

Members of Congress and state legislatures talk about family values. But unlike those in other developed countries, they have not done much to help workers with new babies or sick family members. Only California and Washington have laws mandating paid family leave, and Washington’s benefits are not scheduled to take effect until next year. It’s time for more states in America to follow suit. Better yet, Congress should make paid family leave national policy. Elected officials would then be in a better position to talk about the importance of the family without sounding hypocritical.

Something is very wrong with this picture: The United Nations' World Food Program has been hit so hard by skyrocketing grain prices that it may be forced to cut off some food aid to the world's poorest countries, while the United States is planning to turn record quantities of corn into automotive fuel. The astonishing callousness of burning millions of bushels of grain in gas tanks even as global starvation worsens has apparently never occurred to Congress, the Bush administration or the remaining presidential candidates, all of whom are big boosters of ethanol.

President Bush recently completed a five-day trip to some of Africa's less troubled, more promising countries. He said he wanted to promote progress that has been made, in part because of generous U.S. aid. Although the president acknowledged that much remained to be done — "ending genocide in Darfur, restoring peace and stability to Kenya, and bringing freedom to the Zimbabwean people" — he was criticized for not visiting any of those countries, ravaged by ethnic cleansing, economic implosion or both.

Voting involves moral choices. That's true for Democrats, Republicans and independents alike, for the primary elections now capturing our attention and for the general election coming in November. But the issues are complex. No one candidate or political party has a monopoly on moral positions, as the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops declared last year in its statement, "Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship." Despite the media's tendency to focus almost exclusively on the Catholic position toward abortion or gay marriage, the bishops take a wider view of a voter's duty. They recognize that morality is not an either/or situation.

In his federal budget request for the 2009 fiscal year, President Bush has cast a long, dark shadow across the future of pediatric health care. He proposes to eliminate the funding that enables America's children's hospitals to train pediatricians and other medical specialists who care for children. Children need doctors who are trained to recognize and care for their unique medical needs. By eliminating funds for the Children's Hospitals Graduate Medical Education program, the president is risking the future health of all children cared for by pediatricians and pediatric subspecialists.

The issue is health care. Have you noticed that presidential candidates assume that universal health insurance means universal health care? They use the terms interchangeably. They assume that once the law enables or requires everyone to buy health insurance, everyone will have adequate health care. But anyone who has been seriously ill or cared for a sick relative knows that while health insurance may be the solution, too often it is part of the problem. Health insurance and health care are two different products for two different markets. Health insurance is for healthy people. Health care is for the sick. What we need to lead full, productive lives is good health care.

Here's a factlet about U.S. popularity overseas that we didn't know: Nine of the 10 countries whose citizens rated American leadership most favorably in a recent 47-nation Pew Research Center Poll were in sub-Saharan Africa. But that makes sense, given the energy and effort President Bush has devoted to the continent's challenges -- fighting diseases, fostering economic development and so on. He was welcomed as a hero during his just-completed, five-nation visit to the continent.

In the past, Democrats weren't just passive nonactors who stood by helplessly while the GOP claimed Christ for itself. Instead of pushing back against conservatives' insistence that Democrats aren't religious, the party beat a hasty retreat, ceding the high ground in the competition for religious Christian voters and discussions of morality. The religious divide in U.S. politics that emerged -- call it the God gap -- represented as much a failure by Democrats as it did an achievement by Republicans.

After a Maryland senate hearing on a global warming pollution control bill this week, a business advocacy group sent out a press release with a claim that cast doubt on global warming. The organization, called Maryland Business for Responsive Government, said that "more than 19,000 American scientists" have signed an online petition saying that "there is no convincing scientific evidence" that human release of carbon dioxide will cause "disruption of the Earth's climate." The group directed reporters to www.oism.org. That's a lot of scientists. It certainly gives the impression that most -- or at least many -- experts don't think global warming is a serious problem. But what the press release doesn't say is that this petition was circulated a decade ago, before many recent, highly authoritative reports showing that the scientific consensus is now overwhelmingly that industry is in fact causing global warming, and it's a big problem.

After the United States won its independence from Britain, some soldiers had the idea that America should have a king of its own -- namely George Washington, their commander. Washington promptly scotched the idea. But if he were to see some of the powers asserted by his successors, he might wonder why he bothered. Few presidents have interpreted their authority more broadly than George W. Bush. He has claimed the right to defy a federal wiretapping law, used "signing statements" to nullify provisions of law that he dislikes, ordered Americans arrested on U.S. soil to be held as enemy combatants without access to the courts. He has had fervent support from legal thinkers who worship at the altar of a strong executive branch. The United States signed an international convention banning torture, which is also against federal law, but former Bush Justice Department official John Yoo, asked in 2005 if the president could encourage a suspected terrorist to talk by crushing his child's genitals, didn't say no. He said, "I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that."

Paradoxical efforts by Pope Benedict XVI to promote interreligious dialogue and at the same time reassert Catholic superiority are visible in the current flap over reviving, then revising, the wording of prayers that some Catholics will use this Good Friday calling for conversion of the Jews. Language is a tool of both hospitality and affront. Unavoidably, the pope’s dual agenda has raised concerns that longstanding efforts to heal Jewish-Christian relations are being undermined.

A central aspect of President Bush’s trip to Africa is the promotion of neoliberal trade policies and foreign direct investment as a path to “empowerment” and a “culture of self-reliance and opportunity.” The president has explicitly rejected “the paternalistic notion that treats African countries as charity cases, or a model of exploitation that seeks only to buy up their resources.” But will the impact of his view of trade and investment on workers in Africa truly end this paternalism? Bush will end his trip by spending a few hours in Liberia. There he will try to cast himself in the role of the compassionate conservative who successfully intervened in Liberia’s long civil war, thus heralding in a shining new democracy led by Africa’s first democratically-elected female president. In his February 14 press conference, Bush celebrated increasing private capital flows to sub-Saharan Africa. But the workers supposedly benefiting from foreign private investment in Liberia might have a different perspective. For example, Liberia’s largest investor and employer, Firestone, has been exploiting workers on its rubber plantation for over 80 years. The company has been the focus of an international campaign and a lawsuit in U.S. courts because of its use of child labor and abuse of workers’ rights. Affidavits collected from child laborers on the plantation recently filed in the lawsuit show clearly how foreign direct investment and trade often do not benefit workers.

Neuroscientists have found that “many children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development.” The effect is to impair language development and memory — and hence the ability to escape poverty — for the rest of the child’s life. So now we have another, even more compelling reason to be ashamed about America’s record of failing to fight poverty.

Some 40,000 women died from breast cancer in 2007. Almost unbelievably, the federal government may block one of the disease's more promising therapies for no other reason than the Food and Drug Administration's obsolete, even antimodern, regulations and approval models. Since the lives of terminally ill patients are in the balance, this is fundamentally a moral test -- and one, true to type, that the FDA may well flunk. It is also the latest moral indictment of everything that's wrong with the FDA.

The overriding emphasis on solving globalization’s many ills by urgently sealing the borders strikes me as populism gone astray. First, it’s ineffective, because the country will never be ziplocked as tightly as he wants it to be. The price of trying is too high, and it ignores the millions who enter the country legally but overstay. Most shamefully, it does nothing to resolve the fates of the 12 million undocumented already here. Second, the obsession with enforcement dovetails with the agendas of some nasty people: the nativists for whom immigration is a simple case of brown and white, of preserving “American” culture by keeping Latinos out.

That illegal immigrants living in the United States place an economic burden on schools, hospitals, prisons and other public services is undeniable, but it's also true that they contribute to our economy and our society in myriad ways. Bullying them into leaving is counterproductive and downright mean. It's also shortsighted. Many immigrant families are blended, made up of legal immigrants, illegal ones and U.S.-born citizens. Harsh laws and deportations may satisfy the popular hunger for instantaneous immigration reform, but the result will be a legacy of anguish and resentment among millions of people who aren't going anywhere.

Last year's reauthorization of Head Start was cause for celebration. Congress gave overwhelming, bipartisan support to the successful preschool program, and the president agreed that it should be renewed, even strengthened. Sadly, the celebration was short-lived. It has since become clear that educating this country's poor children gets paid lip service -- not the money that's needed to do the job.