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Fannie Mae: What's Politics Got To Do With It?

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 14:43:15 -0700

NewsHour - Jul. 05 - EmbedVideo(906, 482, 304);'Protecting Its Fannie: How Mortgage Giant Primed the Bubble, Covered Its Assets.'Paul Solman answers questions from NewsHour viewers and web users on business and economic news most days on his Making Sen$e page. Here's Tuesday's query:Name: B WildsQuestion: Other than politics can you think of any reason the miserable failure Fannie Mae is still trading and not being dissolved and shuttered? Paul Solman: "Other than politics"? When it comes to government, what else is there? Of course Fannie Mae's continued existence is a function of politics. So was its birth. It is an organization dedicated to the proposition that all men (and women) are created equal when it comes to home ownership. Since, in real life, events conspire to unequalize the access to buying a home, Fannie Mae was an attempt to right the balance. What it became was a political organization dedicated, as most organizations are, to its own continued existence and aggrandizement. The new book by the great New York Times reporter Gretchen Morgenson and housing expert Josh Rosner, "Reckless Engagement," tells the story with panache. (Note: you can watch the piece, 'Protecting Its Fannie: How Mortgage Giant Primed the Bubble, Covered Its Assets,' here or at the top of the page. Economist Joseph Stiglitz and Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., respectively named a hired justifier and staunch protector of the lending institution, also shared their thoughts with us.) I'm betting you won't think any better of Fannie or Washington after reading the book, or watching our piece. And the goal of home ownership is itself debatable. But "political" it surely is -- by definition. As it happens, bi-partisanly political.Journalist Alyssa Katz explained the politics in a book several years ago, "Our Lot," and in an interview shortly after its publication, segments of which made it into one of our more memorable pieces for the NewsHour. She sent us an update, which is posted below our 2009 exchange.Alyssa Katz: The idea that home ownership would make better people, better communities, healthier families, dated back to Herbert Hoover. Before he was president he was Secretary of Commerce and was really interested in helping not just the home building industry but at the same time having a positive impact on the people who would be buying homes, putting down roots, getting out of crowded cities and into comfortable places they could call their own. Hoover, as Secretary of Commerce, started an "own you own home" campaign and in towns across the country, Ladies Clubs would put together beautiful model homes and they distributed hundreds of thousands of pieces of literature explaining how one could go about doing it. It was the idea that free enterprise -- that having a mortgage to pay and having a sort of obligations and responsibilities of making those payments every month -- would make better people who were more responsible.Solman: But what about Franklin Delano Roosevelt? Alyssa Katz: Roosevelt stepped in to clean up the mess that the Depression left behind. What you had not just as result of Hoover's project. In the 1920s there was a big housing boom ,too many people became owners, financing was pretty freely available with the problem that mortgages only ran for roughly five years and then the payment in full everything would come due. When banks were solvent that wasn't a problem. A borrower could just go back and get a refinance but when the Depression hit not only did banks not have the funds but the property values had plummeted and homes were worth less than the amount owed on them, just like with underwater mortgages today. And so people went into foreclosure en masse. There were just millions unable to make their payments and losing their homes. So the Roosevelt administration stepped in with something called the "Homeowner's Loan Corporation" that refinanced the homes, provided longer term mortgages that the borrowers could pay, and based those mortgages on the actual property values, not the inflated 1920s values.Housing journalist Alyssa Katz, in 2009.Solman: So you mean all these proposals that we've been hearing in the last few years about how we should renegotiate the mortgages that currently exist, make them longer term and write them down to reflect the actual property values is what the Roosevelt administration did?Katz: More or less it's exactly what they did. The one difference between then and now is because the banks had already gone under, because the borrowers already had no more options, it was possible to just wipe the slate clean, do the refinancing and move on. The problem we have now is that because the mortgages have been bundled as securities owned by so many different investors, it's impossible to unravel that scheme without wiping out those investors. That's why we've seen a lot of hesitance now to go in and just say: Okay let's just lower the appraised amount, refinance and move on.Following the Homeowner's Loan Corporation, the Roosevelt administration set out how to figure out how to do mortgages right and they came up with the Federal Housing Administration which made possible, through an insurance program, 30-year mortgages that a borrower could pay off month by month in small chunks, rather than having to hustle and do everything in five years. The FHA ended up covering a half of all home buyers in the country. It enabled millions and millions of working people, who never before could have dreamed of owning a home, to go out and buy their first home. Solman: So where did the Republicans come in? This was all Democrats, right through Presidents Truman, Kennedy and Johnson.Katz: It had been for a long time and I think in a sense the Republicans wanted to claim a piece of their own. In the late 1960s, they seized the opportunity, had a moment in which cities were going up in flames as a result of urban riots and it was very clear that housing conditions, really poor housing conditions, were a big part of that. Martin Luther King identified that when his movement went to Chicago to deal with unrest there.So in 1966, a candidate for the Senate from Illinois [a moderate Republican businessman named Charles Percy] looked at the riots and thought: What can we do? And thought, if people only owned their homes instead of renting them, they would take more pride in them, and in themselves, and in their communities and perhaps home ownership could be the way that neighborhoods recovered. And so Percy floated this on the campaign trail and he won election and Congress loved the idea. When the bill he created came up for a vote, every Republican supported it and many many Democrats did. William F. Buckley called it "the Conservative answer to public housing." Think about it! In the Great Society, everything that government was doing was about more government, more programs for neighborhoods, more interventions and here was this possibility of bringing people into the free market, having private enterprise come in and help save cities.Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.Solman: The "government-sponsored enterprises" that buy or guarantee the mortgages made by banks, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, were created by Democrats in 1938 and 1968 respectively. Surely they are major culprits in this. Katz: Not really. Let me explain. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac played really central roles in changing how mortgages were underwritten, figuring out how can we get people who wouldn't have qualified for mortgages before into home ownership and this will be good for our market growth and in the proportion of home ownership.Solman: But that's the problem isn't it?Katz: Well it is except that those mortgages generally performed very, very well and even through the most recent crisis have continued to perform much, much better than other mortgages. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had a significant portion of the mortgage market but what you had happen towards the end of the 1990s and then the huge spike through the 2000s is that Wall Street came in with its own mortgage-backed securities that weren't part of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's operations sold directly to investors and were generally loans that were too risky for Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac to support and back in the first place.Solman: Well, weren't Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the key movers in the subprime market?Katz: They were important movers but only indirectly. Basically Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would purchase subprime mortgage-backed securities as investors. They themselves towards the very end issued some but by and large their own guidelines strictly limited them to prime mortgages and overwhelmingly their mortgages have performed relatively well.Solman: So they didn't create this subprime boom?Katz: They helped finance it as many other investors from around the world did and at one point they were the biggest investors in subprime mortgage-backed securities, but no, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had relatively strict underwriting guidelines, and also had requirements that when people took out their mortgages especially under special programs that would enable higher risk borrowers to get into ownership that they would have to go through counseling and have to really be prepared for that responsibility and that's what the subprime mortgage market didn't offer.That was Alyssa Katz's view as of last year. Her view now: Katz: The reason Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac continue to exist is that were it not for these entities, now under government conservatorship, home mortgages would likely be much more expensive and hard to come by than they are now because private investors are hesitant to finance long-term mortgages without the guarantees the government-sponsored enterprises have provided. Even if we were to accept that outcome, the impact of a severe decline in the availability of mortgage credit would have disastrous effects on the already battered real estate market, pushing prices further downward and making it impossible in many cases for homeowners to sell their property. Fannie Mae will almost certainly be shuttered down the road -- but not before an alternative housing finance system is in place. This entry is cross-posted on the Making Sen$e page, where correspondent Paul Solman answers your economic and business questions. Follow Paul on Twitter.

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40 Years After Leak, Weighing the Impact of the Pentagon Papers

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 22:33:00 -0700

NewsHour - Jun. 13 - Listen to the Audio JEFFREY BROWN: Next, the impact of the Pentagon Papers, then and now.June 1971: Vietnam dragged into its sixth year of major combat. Tens of thousands of Americans were already dead, and still thousands more protesting on the home front asked why. But to the world's surprise, the Pentagon itself had already secretly posed that question and others years earlier.And, on June 13, 1971, parts of its answers from a multivolume history of the war began to appear in The New York Times. It was a seismic event, the publication of a covert version of the war that ran counter to much of the optimistic talk that had permeated official statements for years.The Pentagon Papers, as they came to be known, were leaked to The Times by Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst. President Nixon and his administration went to the courts, which ordered The Times to cease publication.FORMER PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON: Let me explain very carefully that the principle of confidentiality, it either exists or it doesn't exist.JEFFREY BROWN: The Washington Post picked up publication. The paper's late publisher Katharine Graham described her difficult decision to publish them on the NewsHour in 1997.KATHARINE GRAHAM, The Washington Post: But the editor said, "We have to maintain the momentum." The issue here was the government's ability to prior restrain a print newspaper. And they felt so strongly about it, that I came down on the side of the editors.JEFFREY BROWN: But a 6-3 decision in the Supreme Court soon said the government had no right to stop the publication, a landmark First Amendment decision.Forty years later, that ruling comes into play in classified leaks, such as the recent effort spearheaded by the controversial anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks. And, today, 40 years to the day after the world got its first glimpse of parts of the Pentagon Papers, the National Archives released them in their entirety, completely uncensored for the first time.Though there is little expectation that much new information will be sifted from the trove, in this era of instant document dumps, one of the first of its kind still resonates.And for more on their, we turn Sanford Ungar, author of "The Papers & The Papers: An Account of the Legal and Political Battle Over the Pentagon Papers" -- a longtime journalist and editor, he's now the president of Goucher College -- and to presidential historian Michael Beschloss.Welcome to both of you.MICHAEL BESCHLOSS, presidential historian: Thanks.JEFFREY BROWN: Michael, take us back to that moment in 1971. How would you describe the immediate impact of the Papers, particularly on the politics of the Vietnam War?MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Well, people had -- many people who were critics of the war had a lot of their worse suspicions confirmed, that the Johnson administration had been very secretive and had not told the truth about key episode, and also learned about other things, like the Kennedy administration's involvement in the coup that led to the assassination of President Diem in November of 1963.But the more shocking thing was this. You know, before 1971, there was a feeling that government documents that were leaked or stolen or published against the will of the government, that was something the Soviet foreign agents did. That was something Alger Hiss or the Rosenbergs did.In fact, the Pumpkin Papers is one reason why the Alger Hiss archive, one reason why this was called the Pentagon Papers, so there was that connection. But this was the first time that this was really seen as an episode of patriotism. And ever since 1971, we have begun to believe the idea of a crusader who finds government secrets that shouldn't be secret, gives them to the public.Shortly after this was Watergate. We saw what bad secrets government can really keep.JEFFREY BROWN: Well, Sandy Ungar, you looked into this. The decision to publish by The Times was a hard one.SANFORD UNGAR, "The Papers & The Papers: An Account of the Legal and Political Battle Over the Pentagon Papers": It was a very carefully considered decision, three months locking people up in a hotel room, in hotel rooms in New York, review them. They wanted to be responsible, try to establish that the information wasn't going to harm the U.S. national security.It seems almost quaint now to think that people would spend so much time making that decision. And then, of course, when the first -- when a stay was granted to prevent continued publication, that's when Ellsberg took the Papers to the -- the then 40-year-old Daniel Ellsberg then took the papers to The Washington Post and, eventually, 19 newspapers over the -- the whole period of time.JEFFREY BROWN: And did it have an immediate impact in the -- in the culture, in the politics of the time?SANFORD UNGAR: Well, I think the key thing, Jeff, was that this moment came in the midst of this intense hatred between the Nixon administration and the media.There were investigations of reporters sources that were being taken before grand juries. Spiro Agnew, remember him, was giving speeches against the press, the -- you know, his alliterative references to the limousine liberals, the nattering nabobs of negativism and so on.And, so, in a sense, the Pentagon Papers fell into the lap of the Nixon White House. It didn't hurt the Nixon administration. It was not about their...JEFFREY BROWN: It wasn't really about them, right?SANFORD UNGAR: Wasn't about them.JEFFREY BROWN: Right.SANFORD UNGAR: Henry Kissinger, then national security adviser, was negotiating for the opening to China. And he said, if we don't do something about this -- of course, he happened to have an intense personal dislike for Daniel Ellsberg and some other people involved with him.MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: But those things are never involved in history, of course.SANFORD UNGAR: No. That's right.(LAUGHTER)SANFORD UNGAR: He said, if we don't do something about this, the Chinese will never trust us.So, reluctantly, almost with blinders on, the Nixon administration went into court, made claims about the danger to national security. The solicitor general at the time, Erwin Griswold, later said that he didn't believe the claims that he himself was advancing in the courts on behalf of the Nixon administration. It was essentially a political prosecution.JEFFREY BROWN: And you -- and, Michael, you referred to Watergate earlier. There was a tie with the creation of the Plumbers, right?MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Absolutely.JEFFREY BROWN: Yes.MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Of the Plumbers, this squad that the Nixon administration organized to go after leaks like this.And it is almost poetic. Almost exactly a year after the Pentagon Papers were published was the Watergate break-in, June of 1972. Richard Nixon has this famous meeting with H.R. Haldeman in which he's using government secrecy to cloak a crime. He is telling Haldeman, use the -- tell the CIA and the FBI to stay the hell out of this.(LAUGHTER)MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: This was national security -- exactly what people feared would happen and exactly the argument that they made for opening these secrets.SANFORD UNGAR: The whole reason the Plumbers were created was that -- and this is a very arcane piece of this -- but the White House didn't trust J. Edgar Hoover, who was then director of the FBI, to pursue this aggressively, because Hoover was a friend of Dan Ellsberg father-in-law, who was a toy manufacturer who used to give toys to Hoover to give to his employees for their children at Christmastime.JEFFREY BROWN: Really?SANFORD UNGAR: Now, it turns out Dan Ellsberg and his father-in-law didn't have a particularly close relationship.MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: The FBI...JEFFREY BROWN: That's an unexpected part of this.SANFORD UNGAR: That's right.JEFFREY BROWN: Yes.SANFORD UNGAR: So, they decided they needed another group to plug the leaks, and they created the Plumbers.JEFFREY BROWN: Now, when -- now, bring us forward here, 40 years later. I mean, when you consider the impact, one certainly -- you started to talk about it, the relationship between the government, which is seeking to -- citing the demands of national security, and the press...MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Sure.JEFFREY BROWN: ... citing a more informed citizenry.MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Well, the irony that it was The New York Times that first did this, because, in 1961, exactly a decade earlier, John Kennedy went to the publisher of The New York Times, who had told him that we have got this information that you are planning an attack on Castro's Cub at the Bay of Pigs. Do you want us to publish or not? Kennedy said, please don't. The Times said, OK, we won't.Later on, Kennedy said, I wished you had published it, because it would have stop head this fiasco from happening.That is how much things have changed.SANFORD UNGAR: Right.MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Nowadays, I would say that, for a publisher who is a boss of editors and reporters who come across information like this, the burden is much more on the government to show why something like this will cost lives or directly jeopardize American national security.And, oftentimes, if the government makes that argument, they do not win. In the old days, they almost always did.JEFFREY BROWN: And, yet, the struggle does go on.JEFFREY BROWN: I mean, even on Friday, we had a segment about the Obama administration...SANFORD UNGAR: That's right. Actually, the Obama administration, despite its commitment to openness in government and less classification, has -- has brought more prosecutions under the Espionage Act, a law passed in 1917, has always been attacked for its imprecision -- they have -- the Obama administration has brought more prosecutions under the Espionage for leaks than any other post-World War II administration, which is -- which is ironic.There is vast over classification to this day. There are still documents from World War I dealing with secret inks, German secret ink, that are classified, that are in the National Archives, and haven't been let out. It's -- it's crazy.JEFFREY BROWN: I mean, it's -- I was thinking just today, it's kind of ironic that the Pentagon Papers themselves were technically secret until today...MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Right. That's right.JEFFREY BROWN: ... even though the vast majority of it was well-known.MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: And that's oftentimes true of classified documents and one reason why there should be more openness, rather than closing these things up.SANFORD UNGAR: In fact, there is something new called the National Declassification Center at the National Archives. And they have been looking for some big projects to make a splash, came across the Pentagon Papers never having been declassified, decided they would work on this and go through the diplomatic volumes which Ellsberg never released, and then only serendipitously discovered the 40th anniversary was coming, and they would get them out on this occasion and make a splash.JEFFREY BROWN: Is there any chance that we learn something new in the -- as it comes out all in its clarity?MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Not much. It's 47 volumes. Sandy and I will read them overnight and come back with more tomorrow.JEFFREY BROWN: OK.JEFFREY BROWN: ... for tomorrow, yes.MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: But these were picked over pretty heavily by an awful lot of members of Congress and others.JEFFREY BROWN: Yes. Yes.SANFORD UNGAR: I think there are no smoking guns now.Historians, some historians writing about the war will find some nuances here that they didn't see before. But, even 40 years ago, a lot of these documents were old. There were things from the Truman administration, Eisenhower administration. And there's not much dramatic that is left.But it's nice to know that, 40 years later, documents that have been readily available for all these years are now officially unclassified.JEFFREY BROWN: All right.Sandy Ungar, Michael Beschloss, thanks very much.SANFORD UNGAR: Thanks, Jeff.MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Pleasure, Jeff.

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The Great Stagnation: Why Hasn't Recent Technology Created More Jobs?

Wed, 18 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

NewsHour - By Gwen Ifill, Paul Solman, Tyler Cowen - May. 18 (Interview) - America's seemingly chronic economic crunch: stagnant wages, high unemployment, the endless job fair lines we have been showing you for years. But why is it happening?Economist Tyler Cowen's controversial answer has been making news. In a recent e-book, the New York Times columnist and longtime blogger blames the great stagnation on a slowdown in technological growth., "The Great Stagnation": If I think of the life of my grandmother, who was born in 1905, from the beginning of her life, even to the midway point, she saw enormous change -- the coming of electricity, the flush toilet, the automobile, radio, television, the typewriter, massive gains. The whole world changed.If I think of my own life, I was born in 1962, there's the Internet and computers, but not that much has changed. The rate of progress has slowed down. And this is our central economic problem today.PAUL SOLMAN: Sure, high-tech gadgetry abounds, says Cowen, but it hasn't transformed our economy and created new high-paying jobs, as past so-called industrial revolutions have.Take the ubiquitous iPod. It's created less than 14,000 jobs in the U.S., Internet giant Google, 20,000 employees, Twitter, a mere 300.TYLER COWEN: We have these series of myths. Because we have Internet or iPhone or a cell phone, we think we are, as a society, phenomenally innovative. But in terms of revenue and jobs, the Internet has not added as much value as most people think. The decade in which we have had the Internet, macroeconomically, has been our most miserable decade since the 1930s.PAUL SOLMAN: Want proof, says Cowen? Just look in his kitchen.TYLER COWEN: The core elements of this kitchen, the electricity, the sink, the cabinets, the oven, the stove, they all were common by the 1930s.PAUL SOLMAN: Wait. Wait a second, a microwave not in the 1930s.TYLER COWEN: Common in the 1970s. I hardly use that microwave. I do it just fine on the burners.PAUL SOLMAN: Oh, wait. Teflon, easy to use, washes that scrambled eggs right off.TYLER COWEN: Well, that's OK, but I use the wood, too. And these work just fine.PAUL SOLMAN: You mean to tell me that there's no improvement in a kitchen in the last 50, 60, 70 years?TYLER COWEN: There are improvements, but they're small improvements. Keep in mind, the 19th century kitchen was built around a live fireplace. Then, we had electricity, pumped water, gas and electric heating come in. Those were massive improvements.PAUL SOLMAN: Cowen thinks we have pretty much exhausted the last great wave of invention, or, to use an economics metaphor, plucked the low-hanging fruit.TYLER COWEN: The low-hanging fruit, it is the stuff that's easy to get. Earlier in our history, it was all that free fertile land. Later, it was fossil fuels. Later, it was sending all those smart kids through high school who had never been before.PAUL SOLMAN: But the once-easy pickings are now slim, says Cowen. Innovations take more effort than they used to.TYLER COWEN: Not so easy to get to. It's like all the science we have done that we have not yet turned into useful products.PAUL SOLMAN: Products that proliferated in the past and spurred the economy.TYLER COWEN: And cars are improving slowly, but not as rapidly as the car was an improvement over the horse.PAUL SOLMAN: Cowen points to recent visions of a future that's never materialized: the hoverboard, imagined as a 21st century staple in the 1980s film "Back to the Future II."KEIR DULLEA, actor: Do you read me, HAL?DOUGLAS RAIN, actor: Affirmative, Dave. I read you.PAUL SOLMAN: Space odysseys to Jupiter predicted for 2001, already a decade behind schedule, jet packs like the one high-flying 007 sported way back in the 1960s.And the big breakthroughs we have heard so much about like nanotechnology, gene therapy?TYLER COWEN: How close is nanotech to being a reality? No one knows, but it's not going to come tomorrow. The sequencing of the human genome. 10 years ago, people thought it would be done by now and creating a lot of useful products. It has been done. It's a great breakthrough. It deserves tremendous respect, but converting it into useful products has been very hard.PAUL SOLMAN: OK, bold thesis boldly made.But, if you're skeptical, you're not alone.ANDREW MCAFEE, MIT Sloan School of Management: IBM, Watson, people are already talking about the different markets where that could be applied, the different industries and job functions.PAUL SOLMAN: These MIT scholars are researching the digital economy, and think Cowen is dead wrong.ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON, Center for Digital Business, MIT Sloan School of Management: If anything the rate of change is not slowing down, it's accelerating.PAUL SOLMAN: Erik Brynjolfsson, who runs MIT's Center for Digital Business, thinks a new industrial revolution is in full swing. And if the jet pack hasn't yet transformed travel, it's now on the drawing board and in prototype, as are a host of once-futuristic technologies.ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON: Every technology goes through an S-curve, which means that, at first, it grows fairly slowly. Then there is a faster phase and then things get mature and level off. Tyler Cowen and a lot of the people who are focused on the great stagnation, I think, are sort of backward-looking at the mature technologies that are the peak of their S-curve, rather than the new technologies that are just emerging.PAUL SOLMAN: Brynjolfsson also thinks Cowen has the stagnation story backwards.ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON: The problem is not that we have had a stagnation of technology. Ironically, part of the problem is that technology is rushing ahead so fast that people are having trouble keeping up.PAUL SOLMAN: Today's high technology, that is, creates high-paying jobs, but mainly for the high-skilled. Just look at MIT's Media Lab.NEXI, robot: My name is Nexi. What's your name?PAUL SOLMAN: An expressive robot, a car with robotic wheels that spins on a dime, folds up, and stacks eight to a current parking space -- soon to come, self-parking.KENT LARSON, MIT Media Lab: So, you would pull up to your building, you would pat the car, turn it loose, and it would go and park itself.PAUL SOLMAN: Then there's the snap-on device to go with an eye exam app for your cell phone.RAMESH RASKAR, MIT Media Lab: You look through it, and after clicking on a few buttons, it can scan for your cataract. And it can also gives you data for the prescription for your eyeglasses.PAUL SOLMAN: Reactive ping-pong that senses where the ball hits the table, and, finally, the MIT Mood Meter, reading faces to assess state of mind, in this first version, reading your smile, however forced.Now I'm going to start smiling, and I'm going to smile broadly and more and more broadly. Is it in the green? Have I got to the green yet?MAN: Yes.MAN: Yes.(LAUGHTER)PAUL SOLMAN: If I squint...MAN: You're doing great. It's almost 100 percent.PAUL SOLMAN: Almost 100 percent.(LAUGHTER)PAUL SOLMAN: This work promises to be able to read everything from depression to lying. But, if it and when it does, the jobs created, as with all the other projects here, will be for the high-tech few, not the semi-skilled many.ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON: It's a big error to think that technology automatically improves everyone's lives evenly. It's entirely possible for technology to make the pie bigger, but not have that pie evenly divided.What's happened with the most recent wave of technology is what economists call skill-biased technical change, technology that benefits relatively more skilled workers and hurts the livelihoods of people who maybe who have high school educations. As a result, the median income has stagnated, even though overall wealth in the economy has grown quite substantially.PAUL SOLMAN: Tyler Cowen, of course, sees the problem differently: an innovation drought, relative to the industrial revolutions of the past and to other countries today.TYLER COWEN: The problem is, we have not come up with the bigger and better endeavors to reemploy people, power our own growth and have us be leaders in new and important areas.PAUL SOLMAN: But to Erik Brynjolfsson, the problem is the nature of progress itself these days.ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON: I'm an optimist about technological progress, but I'm not nearly as optimistic about our ability to keep up with it.We have got some real problems. I just want to make it clear that the problem is not stagnation. The problem is more serious in some ways, which is our basic human ability to keep up with technological progress. That problem is going to get worse and worse as technology speeds faster and faster.PAUL SOLMAN: Not a happy thought. But, then, neither is Tyler Cowen's. And, no matter who you believe, one thing is clear: Technology isn't creating jobs the way it used to.GWEN IFILL: A hard copy of the book "The Great Stagnation" comes out next month.

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Decades Later, Beatles Hits Continue to Draw Fans

Fri, 13 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

NewsHour - By Tim Riley - May. 13 (Interview) -

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30 Years After Bob Marley's Death | Art Beat | PBS NewsHour | PBS

Wed, 11 May 2011 12:30:32 -0700

NewsHour - May. 11 - Click above to view slide show.Today marks the 30th anniversary of the death of music legend Bob Marley. The Jamaican reggae star died young in 1981, at just 36 from cancer, leaving behind a legacy that reaches across all musical genres, ages and around the world.Earlier today I spoke to David Burnett, a photojournalist who was sent to Jamaica in 1976 by Time magazine to profile Marley, helping to introduce him to an American audience. A year later, Rolling Stone sent Burnett to cover Marley's "Exodus" tour, covering everything from concerts to quite down time.His portfolio, "Soul Rebel: An Intimate Portrait of Bob Marley," was collected into a book and published in 2009 by Contact Press.A transcript will be posted soon.

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What Does Widening U.S. Income Gap Mean for Future of Economy, Americans?

Fri, 06 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

NewsHour - May. 06 (News Analysis) - The jobs numbers for April were released on the same day, today, as a new report that finds executive pay is soaring once again.Jeffrey Brown picks up that part of the story.JEFFREY BROWN: The Associated Press, which released the study on CEO compensation, put it this way: In the boardroom, it's as if the great recession never happened.CEO pay, including salaries, bonuses, and stock options, was up 24 percent last year, to a level higher than 2007, just before the recession hit. The 10 highest-paid executives made a combined $440 million. Six of them came from the world of media and entertainment, including the heads of Viacom and CBS.The study came a day after the Fortune 500 list was released, showing corporate profits increased by 81 percent last year, or more than $300 billion.

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How Will Leadership Shuffle Affect National Security Policy?

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 18:46:31 -0700

NewsHour - Apr. 28 - Listen to the Audio JIM LEHRER: President Obama presents a revamped national security team.The shuffle has been in the works for some time. And today, the president made it official in the White House East Room.PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I have worked closely with most of the individuals on this stage, and all of them have my complete confidence. They are leaders of enormous integrity and talent who've devoted their lives to keeping our nation strong and secure. And I am personally very, very grateful to each of them for accepting these new assignments.JIM LEHRER: Today's announcement was triggered by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, a holdover from the Bush administration. He told the president last year he wanted to step down this summer and has now fixed his departure for June 30.CIA Director Leon Panetta was the president's choice today to succeed Gates at the Pentagon. Panetta would be the oldest person to become secretary of defense at 72 years old. He's served in government for decades, as budget director and White House chief of staff in the Clinton administration, and before that, as a longtime Democratic congressman from California.LEON PANETTA, CIA director: As the son of immigrants, I was raised to believe that we cannot be free unless we are secure.Today, we are a nation at war. Yet, this is also a time for hard choices. It's about ensuring that we are able to prevail in the conflicts in which we are now engaged. But it's also about being able to be strong and disciplined in applying our nation's limited resources to defending America.JIM LEHRER: The nominee to replace Panetta at the CIA: Army Gen. David Petraeus. The general is now overall commander of the International Security Assistance Forces in Afghanistan. Prior to that, he ran the U.S. Central Command, and he oversaw coalition forces in Iraq during the surge of U.S. troops there.GEN. DAVID PETRAEUS, International Security Assistance Force: I've had the privilege of working very closely with the quiet professionals of the Central Intelligence Agency. I have seen first-hand their expertise, their commitment to our nation and their courage in dangerous circumstances. Their service to our country is of vital importance.JIM LEHRER: The president wants U.S. Marine Lt. Gen. John Allen to take over in Afghanistan. Allen is Petraeus' former deputy at CENTCOM. He joined the Marine Corps in 1976 as a commissioned officer after graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy.LT. GEN. JOHN ALLEN, International Security Assistance Force: I understand well the demands of this mission.And Mr. President, if confirmed by the Senate, I will dedicate my full measure to the successful accomplishment of the tasks and the objectives now set before us.JIM LEHRER: Gen. Allen would be joined in Afghanistan by a new U.S. ambassador, taking the place of Karl Eikenberry, who's expected to leave shortly.Ryan Crocker is being nominated for the posting in Kabul. Crocker is a career diplomat who retired from the State Department after serving as U.S. ambassador to Iraq.RYAN CROCKER, U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan-designate: The challenges are formidable, and the stakes are high; 9/11 came to us out of Afghanistan. Our enemy must never again have that opportunity.JIM LEHRER: The personnel changes come as U.S. forces in Afghanistan are set to begin pulling out in July. But recent incidents won't make that any easier.Yesterday, an Afghan pilot shot and killed eight American soldiers and a U.S. contractor at the Kabul airport. It was the seventh such attack this year. On Monday, more than 400 prisoners, mostly Taliban, escaped from a prison in Kandahar, after digging a 1,000-foot-long tunnel. And there are reports that Pakistan is pressing Afghan President Karzai to scale back his country's reliance on the U.S.Those challenges and others will confront the president's new team once they clear Senate confirmation. White House officials indicate they hope to have Panetta in place at the Pentagon by July 1 and Generals Petraeus and Allen in their new positions by September.Some analysis now from Jessica Tuchman Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She served in the Carter and Clinton administrations. John McLaughlin, former CIA deputy director and then acting director, he now teaches at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. And Army Gen. Jack Keane, Army vice chief of staff from 1999 to 2003, he now has his own consulting firm.First, just in general, General, what do you think of the new team?GEN. JACK KEANE (RET.), U.S. Army: Well, they're good choices. They're very capable.And I think it says a lot about continuity. Three of them are already serving in national security. And they have got a lot of experience with it. And we're bringing Ryan Crocker back into government, absolutely one of the most accomplished diplomats operating in this region we've ever had. So, it's -- they have made all solid choices.JIM LEHRER: All solid choices?JESSICA TUCHMAN MATHEWS, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: Oh, yes. And individual ability, continuity, ability to deal with Congress, I think, and ability to sell the plan in Afghanistan, those were -- that's what they were looking for here.JIM LEHRER: What do you see?JOHN MCLAUGHLIN, former acting CIA director: Yes, very much so.I can't think of anyone more prepared to step in behind Bob Gates than Leon Panetta. And at CIA, there is always a little anxiety when a popular, respected director like Leon Panetta leaves, but I'm confident they will embrace Gen. Petraeus.JIM LEHRER: Jessica, Jessica Mathews, what about the idea that -- though, that there is no new face here? It is continuity. And is continuity always a good thing, when you don't have any fresh faces, any fresh thinking that comes with it?JESSICA TUCHMAN MATHEWS: Well, I would say that the flip side of continuity is fresh ideas.And if -- if you develop a sense in an administration that only insiders can see what they are doing, can understand it, can execute it, then I think, pretty soon, you get a -- sort of a feeling of circling the wagons, both the perception of it and the reality of it. And that's a -- that's a weakness that every administration has to guard against.So, I think there is a cost to always and only looking inside.JIM LEHRER: Do you agree?JOHN MCLAUGHLIN: Well, I see it a little differently. I think the world itself today guarantees that there is no continuity. So, in other words, whatever team is there -- and these are all qualified, proven people -- they are going to have to deal with turmoil in the world and transition.So, there is no plan someone can put on the table and say, we're going to follow that ceaselessly and without any change over the next period of time. So...JIM LEHRER: But nobody should expect any dramatic differences with the total -- what the team itself has been doing and what the new team will do, correct?GEN. JACK KEANE: Well, that's correct, in terms of what is in front of them.JIM LEHRER: Policy and stuff, yes.GEN. JACK KEANE: Sure.But, I mean, listen, we deal with strategic surprise continuously. We just had it again with the revolutions that are taking place in the Middle East. Most people did not have that on their charter. So, having experienced, capable professions that have been through crisis before, I think, bodes well here to deal with it.My only reservation about all of this is taking Petraeus away from Afghanistan at this critical time while we're trying to change the momentum in that war and how much he means to that. That is my single reservation with it.JIM LEHRER: And he would be replaced by Gen. Allen. You have some questions about Allen or just -- just leaving Petraeus...GEN. JACK KEANE: No, no questions about Allen. Allen is overseeing that war from CENTCOM. He is Gen. David Petraeus's recommendation. He has got a tremendous reputation himself.It's just that this is a very critical time. And let's be frank about it. I mean, Petraeus is the best we've got. And we're right in the middle of turning this war around.JIM LEHRER: And the same thing has been said about Bob Gates, the secretary of defense, that he's going to be very tough to replace by anybody, even Leon Panetta. Do you agree?JESSICA TUCHMAN MATHEWS: I do. And I have a slightly different view, I think, than John did about Panetta.Obviously, nobody comes close to him in Washington experience, at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, on the Hill and in the White House, as chief of staff. And he knows budget-cutting. But he doesn't know defense, per se, right?And, you know, coming in not knowing the culture of that building and the substance of the thousands of issues that he has to deal with is to come in, I think, with one hand tied behind your back. It's -- it's - you've got two wars. You have got huge a budget cut coming; in the Pentagon, issues of -- I mean, cuts of bone and of fat are all tangled up. You can -- there is plenty of waste.JIM LEHRER: And machines as well.JESSICA TUCHMAN MATHEWS: But you have to have a vision of what kind of military you are trying to build in order to get the cuts to make sense. And he's coming in, really, without experience on those issues.So, I think there's a real challenge there.JIM LEHRER: Speaking as a military man, how do you see that? Is Panetta really the man to run the Department of Defense?GEN. JACK KEANE: Well, first of all, Gates is really tough shoes to fill.JESSICA TUCHMAN MATHEWS: Yes.GEN. JACK KEANE: He's one of the most effective secretaries we have ever had. So, that would be tough, no matter who you are picking.But what I like about this is, look, Panetta has got a real solid reputation for good judgment, common sense, works well with people, listens to people. At the same time, he's been on this national security team, listening to all the policy formulation and development that's been taking place.So, his knowledge is very high coming in, even though he specifically doesn't know how those departments are running. I think his spin-up will be pretty quick.JIM LEHRER: Sure.JOHN MCLAUGHLIN: ... because I think one of the things we have to remember here is that the CIA, since 9/11, has been essentially a war-fighting machine.And so Leon Panetta, by virtue of his time there, has been very close to the military. And there's no closer relationship, by necessity, in Washington -- or should be -- than between the CIA director and the secretary of defense.JIM LEHRER: Do they get along? Did Gates and Panetta, Gates as secretary of defense, and Panetta as head of the CIA, did they work well together, play well together, as they say?JOHN MCLAUGHLIN: Absolutely, very closely together. Before they came to office, they knew each other well. And after coming to office, they were very close.JIM LEHRER: Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but the general consensus was that when Panetta became head of the CIA, some of the folks in the agency doubted whether or not he was qualified to come in. And he was looked upon as somebody, a politician who had come in and may not be the right person.He did -- did he, in fact, win over the troops of the CIA?JOHN MCLAUGHLIN: He did very much so. There's a bit of a myth that the CIA will not embrace an outsider. They will if it's someone who is as respected and connected and savvy as Leon Panetta.But to be fair, I mean, he didn't know a lot about intelligence when he came. He was a very quick study. And he did the thing that a CIA director has to do in order to succeed. And that was, he listened. And he didn't bring a lot of people with him. He brought in one person with him. He came in...JIM LEHRER: One outside person with him?JOHN MCLAUGHLIN: Only one person came with him, his chief of staff.JIM LEHRER: Everybody else that is under him at the CIA now are people who were already in office?JOHN MCLAUGHLIN: Yes.JIM LEHRER: Is that unusual?JOHN MCLAUGHLIN: It is unusual. And -- but it sends a message to the troops there that this is a person who is going to rely on them, look to them, show them a lot of respect.You know, the CIA is always in the midst of controversy, so they are always looking for someone who can defend them, stick up for them. And he's done that. And he's learned his brief very well. So...JIM LEHRER: What do you think about turning the CIA over to a military man, Petraeus?JESSICA TUCHMAN MATHEWS: I think there's an issue there as well.You know, the vast majority of our 16 intelligence agencies are military, are within the Pentagon chain of command. They are inside it. The CIA is the leading policy-making intelligence -- or policy-involved intelligence agency, and the one whose charter has got to be most political, dealing with a lot of issues that are not military-related, not tactical and not war-fighting-related.I think as a trend, it's probably not a healthy one, if in addition to all the other military intelligence agencies, we end up with the CIA being more and more led by military. This -- an awful lot of issues that the CIA needs to be smart about that are outside of the military purview...JIM LEHRER: And out of what you would consider Petraeus' experience up until now?JESSICA TUCHMAN MATHEWS: Certainly.JIM LEHRER: Do you agree, General?GEN. JACK KEANE: Well, I think running the Central Intelligence Agency, the military should be exception, not the norm.And I think, in this case, the exception is probably understandable. I mean, Gen. Petraeus has been involved in two wars, intimately involved with dealing with the Central Intelligence Agency. And some of the absolute, hands-down best professionals that they have are operating in this region.I think his attraction to the agency -- not speaking for him, but just knowing him pretty well -- is two things. One, as John clearly pointed out, the agency's fighting a covert, clandestine war against radical Islam and al-Qaida. And Gen. Petraeus has been involved in that himself. He gets the opportunity to continue that and bring some of his unique skill sets to that.And also, it contributes to policy formulation. And I know Gen. Petraeus has strategic interests in doing that as well.JESSICA TUCHMAN MATHEWS: I think it's worth just mentioning...JIM LEHRER: Sure.JESSICA TUCHMAN MATHEWS: ... that, in this context, that three of the four directors of national intelligence have been military men. And these are the boss of the head of the CIA. So, there is a -- there is a -- something...JOHN MCLAUGHLIN: I have got nothing -- I have got nothing against civilian leadership at CIA.But, at the same time, I would say, over time, since 1947, we have had seven military officers as heads of the CIA. And many of them have done quite well, Gen. Bedell Smith in the early years and Gen. Mike Hayden more recently.Something I would say to people at CIA right now about this general is this is a general who is a soldier-scholar. He's got a Ph.D. from Princeton. And so he's able to move in many different worlds. And I would see him being very comfortable on both the analytic and the operational side of the agency.JIM LEHRER: Finally, why did they bring back Ryan Crocker, do you think?JESSICA TUCHMAN MATHEWS: You can't do better.JIM LEHRER: No? You really can't do better?JESSICA TUCHMAN MATHEWS: I don't think so. I mean, he's been ambassador. He's had the experience in Iraq. He's been ambassador in Pakistan.JIM LEHRER: But none in Afghanistan. But none in Afghanistan.JESSICA TUCHMAN MATHEWS: He's been ambassador in Pakistan.JIM LEHRER: OK.JESSICA TUCHMAN MATHEWS: That is really more important than Kabul and -- for the outcome in Afghanistan. And he's been all over the region. He has the language skills. He has everybody's respect for how he has delivered.JIM LEHRER: Do you wonder why he took the job?JESSICA TUCHMAN MATHEWS: Yes.(LAUGHTER)JESSICA TUCHMAN MATHEWS: I think...JIM LEHRER: It's really a tough job.JESSICA TUCHMAN MATHEWS: You know, I think -- I said at the outset I thought delivery of the message about the policy was very much on their minds in these appointments.But my guess is -- and I don't know -- that he finally agreed to do this because of how serious he thinks the situation there is.JIM LEHRER: Quick word from you about Crocker. What do you think about Crocker?GEN. JACK KEANE: Oh, I think he was indispensable to turning the situation around in Iraq. He's absolute, hands-down the finest diplomat I have seen in an operational setting where everything is on the line.He works so well with the military. The civil-military relationship that he had with Petraeus is the best I have ever observed. And there's no doubt that will continue, initially with Petraeus here, and also with General Allen.JIM LEHRER: You feel good about Crocker, too?JOHN MCLAUGHLIN: Yes, I have worked with him in the past. And he, among other things, is a superb leader of an embassy mission. Everyone in the mission feels like part of a team when he's in charge.JIM LEHRER: OK. All right. Thank you all very much, all three.

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Building a Plastic Bottle School

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

NewsHour - Apr. 07 (News) - When former Peace Corps volunteer Laura Kutner was asked to help find funding to finish constructing two classrooms in the elementary school where she worked in Guatemala, she decided to use -- or rather reuse -- a common piece of trash.

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Latino Weight Boom on the Horizon

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 13:54:45 -0700

NewsHour - Apr. 05 - Obesity rates are rising in several countries. Flickr photo/Keith McDuffee.If we consulted the health statistics kept by the rich countries club, the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the OECD, we might not be too surprised to find that the United States has the highest rate of obesity, at 30.6 percent. What country, would you guess, is number two? It's Mexico, with an adult obesity rate of 23 percent.That's a new development on a couple of levels. It's a sign of Mexico's economic progress that the country is a member of the OECD. It is perhaps a symptom of that new found wealth that Mexicans are digging their graves with their knives and forks almost as fast as their NAFTA neighbors next door. The old verities about American obesity and immigrant health -- that newcomers arrived slim and became fat after taking on the American way of eating -- are falling by the wayside as obesity rates creep higher in "sending" countries.A program I host on HITN TV, Destination Casa Blanca, took a look at obesity and Latinos in the United States. A stunning number of Latinos in the United States, from the Caribbean, Central America, and South America are obese or overweight, and their U.S.-born children are growing up with weight problems. On the first anniversary of Michelle Obama's Let's Move program, we asked, are the numbers moving in the right direction?The short answer is ... sorta. The rate of increase in weight problems has slowed. Schools are taking gradual steps toward improving the meals they serve, and including more physical education in the required curriculum. But the trends that push on weight problems have not changed: increasingly sedentary youth, the easy availability of highly caloric food, less walking and biking to school.Pick up the paper, and you'll see all kinds of solutions. Student market gardens have sprung up around the country. Cooking classes for kids seek to teach new food habits and deliver basic information on nutrition and healthy eating. However those programs are still pilots and experiments in most places, small-scale and low-impact in too many places. Away from the bib lettuce and kale is the real world of school systems struggling to keep unit costs for feeding students low. This results in chicken tenders, french fries, pizzas and soda. Maria Gomez, executive director of Mary's Center in Washington D.C., pointed out the association of a little more weight with success and affluence was one barrier to slimming down. Grandparents are happy to see fat babies. People new to the country who may have been food insecure back home, suddenly find they have access to more meat, more cheese, more cooking oil. More of everything, more often.Sin taxing soft drinks is smothered in the cradle every time it's suggested. Watch closely as a long list of industry-sponsored organizations channel consumer anger at any attempts to create disincentives to drinking highly sweetened drinks. Notice also, the outraged housewife loading groceries on the checkout counter is never obese in the anti-tax commercials. Neither are her kids.In China, 20 million people died from famine from 1959 to 1961. The number of obese Chinese grows 30 to 50 percent every year. Granted, that growth rate is based on a very small base. The vast majority of the country's people are still what an American would call "thin." But the lifestyle changes rocking China promise that rate of increase will continue, until the base isn't so small any more.Americans are already where the rest of the world is heading. It will be interesting to see if this country can start to solve the problem as the rest of the world realizes a sizable majority has a weight problem. At a time when the U.S. is wrestling with how to cover tens of millions currently uninsured and underinsured, the coming Latino weight boom is a particular challenge. Latinos in the United States face rapidly growing obesity and come from the demographic group with the lowest rates of health insurance.The growing waistlines, and the growing Latino presence, will offer special challenges to an overburdened health system, as they loom larger in high-cost age cohorts. Today the largest single age group among Latinos is 0-5 years of age. A few decades down the road waits high rates of diabetes, hypertension, and other obesity-related conditions that could drive up the whole nation's health care bill. Saving a few pounds now will save a lot more dollars later.In the countries with fast-growing economies in Latin America, Asia, and Eastern Europe, millions are following Americans into massive waistlines and big threats to national health. One peculiar wrinkle sees food companies providing more and more fattening food, in more places, during more hours of the day, while the governments of these same countries run public service announcements over radio and television urging people to eat less and exercise. The public is in the middle and, for the moment, hearing the food company's flashy advertising more clearly than it hears the bitter pill of exercise and healthy eating. Look out world --obesity is going to become one of the most frightening health crises of the 21st century.This entry was cross-posted with Destination Casa Blanca and the Huffington Post.

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Can U.S. Product Makers Manufacture a Profit?

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 10:50:07 -0700

NewsHour - Apr. 04 - Name: Paul MenzelQuestion: I understand that it is more profitable for hi-tech companies to have their devices manufactured overseas (primarily Asia) than to manufacture them domestically. Could these companies manufacture their products in the U.S. and still make a profit even if it is less than what they would receive from overseas manufacture? What sort of differences in profitability are we talking about?Paul Solman: Differences in cost and thus in profitability vary from company to company, country to country. Labor costs are obviously cheaper in poorer places; taxes are lower in lots of places; so too are costly government regulations. (Think of "toxic toys" from China.) Remember how a competitive market system works, though. The most profitable firm is the one that most lowers its costs and thus takes business from its rivals, all else equal. Therefore it attracts the capital to keep expanding. In theory, "less profitable" eventually becomes not profitable as customers and investors move on. Sunny-side-of-the-streeters point to the virtues of such competition: pieces of clothing were often heirlooms in the 18th century; 6-penny nails were about six-pence per hundred when first named -- about ten dollars in today's money. Small consolation, I realize, for those who lose their jobs in this process of "creative destruction." But that's how the system works. A country may well decide that profitability -- ie, the market -- should not be the sole arbiter of industrial location. Suppose some country were to make toys with slave labor, say, or concentration camp internees. Their costs would presumably be lower, their profits higher. But we in turn would presumably retaliate by slapping a huge import tax on their products (a 'tariff') or banning their goods entirely.A 1926 Ford Model T hubcap is imprinted with "Made in USA." Photo via flickr user Infrogmation.As it is, we negotiate 'side agreements' into trade treaties to encourage the ever-elusive 'level playing field.' And appeals are made to domestic consumers with 'Made in America' or 'fair trade' labels. That is: Do you want better wages/cleaner environment/safer regulation abroad? Well, then, pay for it. In which case, profits will equalize between America and 'unfair' competitors abroad.

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Unemployment Rate Drops in March, but Economic Recovery Remains Fragile | PBS NewsHour | April 1, 2011 | PBS

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 21:07:19 -0700

NewsHour - Apr. 01 - Listen to the Audio RAY SUAREZ: The unemployment numbers released today were better than expected, and the Obama administration hailed the good news as a sign of a stronger economy.The nation saw its second consecutive month of steady growth on the jobs front, news the president praised, while still remaining cautious.PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The unemployment rate has now fallen a full point in the last four months. And the last time that happened was during the recovery in 1984, where we saw such a significant drop in the unemployment rate.Now, despite that good news, everybody here knows we've got a lot more work to do. There are still millions of Americans out there that are looking for a job that pays the bills.RAY SUAREZ: The Labor Department announced the economy added 216,000 new jobs in March. There were 14,000 fewer government jobs, but that number was balanced out by private employers, who added 230,000 jobs. As a result, the unemployment rate fell to its lowest level in two years, 8.8 percent.Testifying before the Joint Economic Committee of the House and Senate this morning, Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Keith Hall called the news promising.KEITH HALL, Bureau of Labor Statistics: For more than two months, we have had pretty steady job growth. It's been around 135,000, 140,000 a month. And, in the last two months, it looks like we may be getting an acceleration in job growth, which would be a good sign.RAY SUAREZ: But Republican leaders jumped in, voicing concerns that the strong report won't sustain continued job growth.REP. JOHN BOEHNER, R-Ohio, speaker of the House: Today's job report is welcome news, but Washington needs to do a lot more to end the uncertainty and get our economy moving again.It's clear that we need to cut spending, we need to stop unnecessary regulations, end the threat of tax hikes and pass the trade bills that are out there. And these are the pillars of a Republican plan that will actually create jobs in America.RAY SUAREZ: The long-term unemployed continue to struggle, with more than six million people out of work for six months or longer, and some could be facing an end to their unemployment benefits soon. In recent weeks, Michigan, Florida and Arkansas have taken steps to cut the duration of assistance to the out-of work.And Missouri, a state with a jobless rate over 9 percent, has decided to stop accepting federal money dedicated to extending payments. Benefit eligibility for thousands there will end tomorrow.The labor picture certainly seemed brighter in March, but there are still a number of questions many economists are asking.We explore this with Joel Naroff, the president of Naroff Economic Advisers -- he joins us from Philadelphia -- and Catherine Mann, a professor of economics and finance at Brandeis International Business School. She joins us from Boston.And, Professor, when you look at the numbers overall, what are they telling you for this month?CATHERINE MANN, Brandeis University International Business School: Well, I think what we're seeing is a virtuous cycle developing in the services sector.Now, of course, that's the most important part of the economy. It's the part of the job-creation engine that really has been lagging for quite a few months now. Manufacturing has been solid. And that's excellent and good. But until we get a virtuous cycle developing in services, particularly the upper-income services, like business, professional and technical, we're not going to have a self-sustaining recovery.And we are seeing job growth there. I think, as companies start getting contracts, they start hiring workers to fulfill those contracts, I think we're starting to see that virtuous cycle develop.RAY SUAREZ: Joel Naroff, we're often told when we do this segment once a month, don't look at just one month.OK. Take a look at the last couple of months and this latest set of numbers. What do you see?JOEL NAROFF, Naroff Economic Advisers: Well, that's where the really good news is.If you like a -- take a look at the last two months, you're seeing that the private sector has really begun to shift gears. They have been very, very cautious about hiring. Businesses have been very, very uncertain about where this economy is going, whether this recovery would really pick up steam.But now we're seeing a couple of hundred thousand or more jobs created a month in the private sector. And they're very broad-based. We're seeing 60 to 65 percent of the industry showing job gains. That tells me that this isn't just a one-off situation. It tells me that the extended growth that we have seen over the last 20 months has now reached the point where businesses have to start hiring.And that's the best part about it. It is broad-based. It's stronger. And the last few months are really a sign that we could be shifting gears in this economy.RAY SUAREZ: Professor Mann, does this last month also say something, perhaps, about durability? Because the March numbers come in the wake of a European debt crisis, eruptions across North Africa and the Middle East, spikes in the price of oil, and yet, people were still hiring.CATHERINE MANN: Well, I think it's a little bit too early to say that we haven't been hit by any of these issues from the global economy.I think it's a little early to say that the oil price hikes that we're currently experiencing won't damage this job creation, in part because 45 -- or basically a quarter of the job creation is coming in retail, food services, food away from home, that sort of thing, leisure and hospitality, where the consumer spending that we have seen coming from the tax reductions and so forth, those have really powered those consumer-based job creation.Now, with the oil price hike and the gas hike, what you're seeing is more and more of the -- the benefits of consumer spending going to the oil companies and to gasoline. And so, that has a potential for damaging this economic recovery.And I think it is way too early to consider what might be the consequences for global trade and so forth of the disruption to the supply chains emanating from the terrific tragedies in Japan. It's too early to tell about that.RAY SUAREZ: Joel Naroff, it looks from the numbers like we're really dealing with a two-tier pool of unemployed people, the long-term jobless and everyone else.Talk a little bit about that number, because it still remains troublingly high.JOEL NAROFF: It's troublingly high. It's not going down. Indeed, to an extent, it's actually rising.When you take a look at the unemployment rates for those who are on extended unemployment, they're not coming down at all. That's where really the problem's existing. And that's really an indication of how tough it is to find a job in this economy right now.And, you know, a lot of business are still hiring people who are working in other business. We need to take a look at the unemployed, because there is an awful lot of skills that are out there that are just not being put to use.And the longer you are on unemployed, it appears that the more difficult it is to get a job. And that's not good news for the long-term unemployed at this point.RAY SUAREZ: Well, earlier in this cycle of increased joblessness, people were talking about employers looking at the long-term unemployed or learning to look at the long-term unemployed in a different way. It sounds like you're not seeing that yet.JOEL NAROFF: Well, I'm not sure it's happening yet.I think employers do understand that being unemployed, being unemployed for an extended period of time is not necessarily an indication of the ability and the capabilities of a particular worker, and they're looking at the unemployed in a different way.But that doesn't necessarily mean that they're going out there and finding them and hiring them. A lot of the people who are looking, they have the connections, if they're still working, and there's still a lot of work that needs to be done to bring these long-term unemployed people really into the market, where they can find the jobs and make the connections necessary to get the openings that are coming up.RAY SUAREZ: Professor, as we mentioned earlier, this month's numbers featured a continued decline in government employment. With the phasing out of the stimulus monies, is that going to be the shape of things to come for a long time?CATHERINE MANN: Well, the decline in government employment is entirely at the state and local level. There was just a 1,000-person increase at the federal level.There's clearly going to be more job loss at the state and local level, because the budgetary situations facing the states' governments continue to worsen, not improve. And so, coming down the pike, there's going to be more tightening, not less, at the state and local level. So, you know, that's not the place to look for job creation.RAY SUAREZ: And states are signaling they may have trouble paying their unemployment insurance, even with federal loan promises to continue paying those benefits. What do you make of that?CATHERINE MANN: Well, I think one of the things that might be happening here is, for the states with the most difficult situation, both economically and perhaps politically, they're saying to their long-term unemployed, go sit in somebody else's state. Go look for a job someplace else. There aren't being -- aren't jobs being created here in my state. Go find a job in another state.It's an interesting sort of exporting your joblessness that usually we talk about in the global context, but we can certainly talk about it in the state-to-state context as well. And I think there's some of that going on. How much of it is economic, how much of it is a political issue, I think that's an interesting political economy question to ask.RAY SUAREZ: But, Joel Naroff, if you want to go look in another state, you won't necessarily be able to sell your house, if you still own one.JOEL NAROFF: Well, that's exactly the problem.It's a nice idea to try and export your unemployed. The only problem is, is that the unemployed probably can't sell their house. They are probably underwater on it or they don't have enough equity to sell it and to buy another home. And that's one of the real big problems we're finding has been a consequence of the housing market collapse.With prices down, people have become housebound. They're immobile. And a lot of the growth that's occurred over the last few decades in this country has been because people are able to move, quickly can get rid of their homes and move to another place, another opening. And, right now, that's just not the case.And so, people are stuck in two ways. They're stuck in their homes and they're stuck because there's not enough jobs in their areas and it's a tough environment for a lot of people.RAY SUAREZ: Joel Naroff and Catherine Mann, thanks for both joining us.CATHERINE MANN: You're welcome.JUDY WOODRUFF: The unemployment drop sent both oil prices and stock values up.On Wall Street today, the Dow Jones industrial average gained 57 points to close above 12,376. The Nasdaq rose eight points to close at 2,789. For the week, the Dow gained 1.3 percent; the Nasdaq rose 1.4 percent. The jobs report also pushed oil prices up to nearly $108 a barrel, a new 30-month high.

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Arming Libya's Rebels: Overdue Idea or 'Disaster in the Making'?

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

NewsHour - By Jim Lehrer: - Mar. 30 (News Analysis) - In Washington, Secretary of State Clinton said late today the administration has not decided yet whether to arm the rebels. That issue has been under intense discussion lately.And we join that debate with Emira Woods, co-director of the Foreign Policy in Focus Program at the Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank in Washington, and Mansour El-Kikhia, chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He's a longtime Libyan human rights activist.And, Professor Kikhia, what do you think? Should the rebels be armed?MANSOUR EL-KIKHIA, University of Texas at San Antonio: Well, you know, I'm an advocate, of course. And I think I really have thought of this for a long time.In fact, I brought -- I was talking to the head of the security forces in Benghazi, the Abdul -- anyway, I talked to him. And he gave me a list of things he needed. And I supplied it to the American administration, and just simple things, like body armor, like hats, like your hats and boots, and some stuff for protection. And they were studying it, been studying it for three weeks.You know, you can't win against Gadhafi's armor. He has something like 3,500 tanks, rocket launchers, very, very, very tough indeed. And the American foreign policy really is really funny in this sense. They say that Gadhafi is illegitimate on the one hand, and then they don't want to do something about helping remove him.Well, this is a decision that America has to make, not Libyans, Libyans are saying: We need your help. We want you to help us remove this ogre. And it's up to you now.How long it takes, I don't know.JIM LEHRER: Ms. Woods, how do you feel about it?EMIRA WOODS, Institute for Policy Studies: Well, the world has watched the tyranny of Gadhafi and his machinery. And it would be a shame to watch the continued slaughter of innocent civilians. But I do think that arming the opposition could probably be a disaster in the making.What you have is a standing U.N. resolution, Resolution 1970, called for an arms embargo of Libya, called for an explicit effort to not have a region that's already awash with arms.And, let's remember, the arms in Libya, much of it was supplied by American arms dealers. But to now arm the other side could leave civilians in even greater harm's way. So, we are all very much in solidarity with the people of Libya, especially after we have seen this spring arise in Tunisia, in Egypt.But arming the opposition, it's moved them from being pro-democracy forces, to being rebels, to now being fighters, to even being child soldiers. And I think we have to be concerned, concerned about the flood of weapons and what that means to civilians, concerned about private military contractors, the Blackwaters of this world, and what that could bring to an already tense situation, but also concerns about this fragile coalition that's been cobbled together.Let's remember, the African Union has been probably the loudest voice, basically calling out in opposition to the airstrikes and in opposition to a very militarized solution to this crisis, underscoring the need for a political resolution. It may not be the hammer of the military that resolves this one, but a combination of particularly political and also economic pressure on the regime.JIM LEHRER: Professor, how do you respond to that?MANSOUR EL-KIKHIA: Well, I'm sorry. I tend to disagree.I think Yves Montand once said that pacifists tend to think that wolves are vegetarians. They're not. These words will not deter Col. Gadhafi from destroying the cities that he goes into. This is one. And, secondly, the arms embargo, you're not really impacting Gadhafi, because as you can see, he has enough arms to blow up the whole country at will.It's the people who need the arms most that don't have it. The other factors, you're talking about international law. International law, it can be interpreted in many, many, many ways. And these people who are fighting Mr. Gadhafi are, in fact, civilians. Yes, they're not -- they're not -- now, we have the professional soldiers.And professional soldiers don't have the weapons that they can use against Gadhafi. Therefore, they have to shuffle back all the tanks, the bad tanks that have been hit by the coalition to try to fix them and put them up so they can meet Gadhafi.But they're no match for this huge amount of military hardware that this regime has. And the regime will use it to the utmost, to his utmost capacity. The idea that he's up for some compromise or for -- that's not Gadhafi. It means you don't know Gadhafi.We know him. We have lived with him for 30 -- for 40 years. We know what he's capable of. And much of the world has seen what he is capable of in the last four weeks.JIM LEHRER: You heard that, Ms. Woods. There's no compromising with Gadhafi. He has to be destroyed military. You heard what the professor said.EMIRA WOODS: Well, clearly, as a Liberian, we know well the history with Gadhafi. It goes back to support of Taylor.And many of us thought that there would not be a resolution to the crisis when Taylor had his grip on the Liberian people. I think, in the case of Libya now, what we see is an incredible people's movement that has come to the fore, just as it came to the fore in Tunisia and in Egypt.But we have to understand it's also rising in other countries. It's Djibouti. It's Yemen. It's around the world you have now these uprisings of people. And will the international community respond by arming all sides in each of those conflicts? I don't think so. I think we need to think of other tools in our international toolkit to respond to crises like this.JIM LEHRER: But what about the professor's specific point? If the rebels, if the citizens are not armed, they're going to be destroyed by Gadhafi's army, because they're outmanned and they're outarmed?EMIRA WOODS: I think, clearly, we have to use all means to protect the civilians. I think that was Resolution 1973 of the U.N., to protect the civilians.But arming the civilians takes a step further that was not in Resolution 1973, takes a step further, from protecting to actually creating combatants in a conflict and arming them. And again, many of these combatants are young. They are poorly trained. They are child soldiers.And in a situation like this, we want to make sure that we first do no harm. Arming these opposition forces could well undermine their movement and create even more chaos for civilians on the ground.JIM LEHRER: What do you think about that? Would it create more chaos and undermine the movement, Professor?MANSOUR EL-KIKHIA: No. Please, I want to make something very clear, first of all.I'm not advocating arming those kids, the 17-year-old children. We have three generals. We have Abdul Fatah Younis. We have El-Hariri. And we have Mousa (INAUDIBLE). These are the heads of the armed forces in Libya, which are professional soldiers that have, in fact, defected from Gadhafi, and they are professional soldiers. And they know how to use those weapons.This is what I'm advocating. I'm not advocating giving those weapons to those young kids. Those young kids are moving there on just -- on pure energy and hatred for Gadhafi. What I'm talking about, giving the weapons and arms and particularly anti-tank weapons to those professional soldiers whom we do have in Libya. I mean, you're talking about solutions.What other solution? I'm sorry. Give me a solution. You want to tell Gadhafi, Mr. Gadhafi, stop?JIM LEHRER: I was going to say, yes...MANSOUR EL-KIKHIA: Or are you going to have American troops? Yes.JIM LEHRER: I was just going to say, let's ask Ms. Woods.You said, well, there's got to be other means. What other means are available?MANSOUR EL-KIKHIA: Yes.EMIRA WOODS: Well, I think there are a number of means being put forward.First, tighten up these financial sanctions. There is a machinery that holds Gadhafi in place, that has held him in place for 42 years. That machinery needs to be unwoven. So all of the network of bankers, we know already bankers throughout this world that have actually held Gadhafi in place, need to be held accountable, need to apply pressure at this critical moment.There are particularly oil dealers and multinational oil corporations that have a huge sway in what happens in Libya. They have had for decades, in spite of Gadhafi's seemingly madness, right? And they have had incredible sway.They need to be held accountable. They need to also be on the right side of history here. And I think it is critical to use all levers of power that we can, not only military, but look at financial, look at economic, look at political pressures that can also potentially create an exit strategy for Gadhafi to make sure that there is a real resolution of this conflict.JIM LEHRER: And stop the retreat of -- the forced retreat of the rebels, as it was just reported by Lindsey Hilsum on the road going back to Benghazi? You think that -- those means that you talk about can stop that?EMIRA WOODS: Well, none of us have a crystal ball. It's difficult to say what will happen. Either we arm them and there's chaos, or we don't arm them and it could be a very tumultuous role ahead.But, clearly, what we need to do is to continue to use all of the tools in the toolkit to support the pro-democracy forces. Remember where they started. Remember the values of what they bring, standing for a change in an economic system that has not served their needs, standing for a change in a political system that has repressed them for decades.JIM LEHRER: All right.EMIRA WOODS: This is an amazing window of opportunity in history, and we need to use it well.JIM LEHRER: Let me finally ask you, Professor, in a word, do you think that will work? Do you think that will stop Gadhafi's troops?MANSOUR EL-KIKHIA: No, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.Those bankers are not going to stop -- are not going to stop Gadhafi's army from moving forward in the next two days and bombing Benghazi again.Listen, there's one Arabic saying which is really wonderful over here. If you see the lion's fangs showing, don't think the lion's smiling. I'm sorry. I mean, I would love to believe in the goodness, but I know I'm dealing with a nasty, nasty man who's bent upon destruction.JIM LEHRER: All right, thank you both very much.EMIRA WOODS: A pleasure. Thank you.MANSOUR EL-KIKHIA: Thank you.

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The Effects of Oil Production Turmoil: What We Pay For At The Pump| The Rundown News Blog | PBS NewsHour | PBS

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 12:39:52 -0700

NewsHour - Mar. 23 - Ever wonder why a gallon of gas will cost $3.21 today, $3.12 yesterday and maybe $3.79 next week? The price of the gas at the pump fluctuates mainly with the price of crude oil, plus a time lag. The price of crude itself bounces around due to all sorts of influences, exaggerated if not caused by the huge amount of speculation in the oil market.Crude is not the only factor in price, however. The Department of Energy's price breakdown as of February 2011: 65 percent crude oil, 14 percent refining costs, eight percent distribution and marketing, and finally 13 percent federal and state taxes. So, at first glance, fully a third of the price would seem to depend on factors other than the cost of crude, factors whose price shouldn't vary much from week to week, even year to year. But a closer look suggests that the impact of supply disruptions, such as we're now seeing in North Africa, can actually far exceed 65 percent of the price, because they affect refinement and distribution as well. So, what are the effects of production turmoil? (Turm-oil; Short-term oil? There's a joke in here somewhere waiting to made.) Click here to view a larger version of this image.Crude oilFirst, the price of a barrel of crude -- 42 gallons-worth of oil -- depends largely on international markets, reacting to demand (higher in summer), supply, and speculation based on both. The crisis in North Africa, including Operation Odyssey Dawn in Libya has obviously constrained supply. Wells have been hit in Libya. Companies have shut down operations to safeguard against attack, pipelines being especially inviting targets.But the price of crude also depends on speculators. There's a controversy over the extent to which this is true, which I've written about at some length when oil last peaked. For this post, suffice it to say that if investors think the price will rise and back their prediction with bets in the futures market, driving up the future price, that in turn affects the decision of oil producers today: to pump or not to pump. (This from an old college friend who is one of those producers.) And thus can speculation affect supply.Indeed, it's mighty hard to argue supply and demand alone drove the price of crude from $30/bbl in 2004 to over $140/bbl by the middle of 2008 back down to $33/bbl barely six months later.Meanwhile, the price of crude has risen back up to above $105 a barrel at the moment- a 24 percent price jump since the beginning of protests in the Middle East and North Africa began in mid-January. Prices at the pump reflect this spike, reaching their highest levels ever for this time of the year. Since December 2010, before fears about the crisis hit the market, prices have jumped almost 20 cents per gallon. The rule of thumb: a 2 1/2 cent rise at the pump for ever extra dollar per barrel. (Roughly, $1/bbl divided by 42, the number of gallons/bbl.) RefiningThe cost of refining oil makes up 14 percent of the price of gasoline. When a barrel of oil is refined, the 42 gallons are distilled down to about 20 gallons of gasoline. But different types of oil require different kinds of refining.The importance of Libya is that it produces the easiest type of oil to refine, fittingly called "sweet crude." Sweet crude oil is so called because of its extremely low sulfur content, which suits it for manufacturing gasoline, and especially for diesel, as removing sulfur is costly. Oil with high sulfur content is called "sour." Unfortunately, the world is more sour than sweet. A further cost factor: Refineries in the United States have the capacity to process sour oil, but many in Europe and Asia do not. And Europe uses far more diesel than we do in America.When the price of sweet spurts, there's more demand for sour. That in turn raises sour's price.The supposed price savior is Saudi Arabia, which publicly promised to produce more oil if the situation in Libya continues to deteriorate. The catch? Most of Saudi Arabia's spare oil is sour, so most of the refineries on which European and Asian countries rely are ill-equipped to process it and soften the price blow. Thus the more turmoil in Libya, the higher the price of refining oil.DistributionAlthough distribution, marketing and retail costs make up the smallest percentage of gas prices (eight percent), distribution is one of the biggest concerns for oil companies right now. If the crisis spreads to the Middle East (and it's already in Bahrain and Yemen), it threatens to affect key oil transit points for tankers to and from refineries. Of particular concern is the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway through which about 40 percent of the world's oil traffic passes. Though there have been protests nearby and at the Suez Canal, there are currently no signs of them closing down. As with so much of the oil story, the worry with distribution comes from fear of the future, rather than the current reality on the ground. And again, that prompts speculators to buy for future delivery, for producers to hold off production until prices rise...a self-fulfilling prophecy of upward-spiraling prices. As the danger rises, so does the price.TaxesTaxes on gasoline are the second-largest contributor to prices. On each gallon of gas, the federal excise tax, also called the fuel tax, is currently 18.4 cents. State and local taxes account for regional variation. As of the beginning of last year, they averaged about 22 cents per gallon, with a high of 47.7 cents per gallon in California as of January 1. Eleven states also levy sales taxes on top of federal and state gas taxes. And county and town taxes can drive costs up further. There has long been talk of raising the federal gasoline tax, flat at 18.4 cents since 1993. (18.4 cents in 1993, simply adjusted for inflation, would be about 28 cents today.) Not much such talk at the moment, but the Canadian province of New Brunswick did raise its gas tax on Tuesday.Finally, for those who think U.S. gas taxes are high already, here are the comparable figures from England: gasoline taxes of about four dollars a gallon, up from something like $2.50 a gallon in the early '90s. This entry is cross-posted on the Making Sen$e page, where correspondent Paul Solman answers your economic and business questions. Follow Paul on Twitter.

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New Meningitis Vaccine Could be Model for Future Drugs

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

NewsHour - Mar. 19 (News) - The rollout of a new meningitis vaccine developed specifically with poor countries in mind began Monday in western Africa. Health officials hope to vaccinate more than 12 million people in Burkina Faso by the end of the year and millions more in Mali and Niger over the next few months.The three countries are part of the meningitis belt, a strip of sub-Saharan Africa often hit with outbreaks of the disease, which infects the thin lining surrounding the brain and spinal cord.Meningitis can cause loss of hearing, severe brain damage, or death--more than 5,000 people died of meningococcal meningitis in 14 African countries in 2009. The new vaccine is the first designed specifically for Africa--it costs less than 50 cents for a dose, and provides a decade of prevention. There are currently other meningitis vaccines used in African countries during meningitis outbreaks, but they cost up to $80 a vaccine and only provide two or three years of protection, according to the World Health Organization."We needed a vaccine that is affordable within the context of meningitis belt countries, which are some of the poorest countries in Africa," said Christopher Elias, president of the international nonprofit PATH, which partnered with WHO in 2001 to develop the vaccine.The new vaccine is also the first that can be used on infants. With financial support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation*, the groups worked independently from the large pharmaceutical companies in the United States and Europe, and ultimately manufactured the vaccine through a company in India, keeping costs lower."[Meningitis A], that's the epidemic that strikes Africa and there was no market for the pharma industry to want to introduce a vaccine," said Jean-Marie Okwo-Bele, director of the Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals Department at the World Health Organization.This new development model has "tremendous potential," said Elias, and could applied to other diseases in the future that greatly affect the developing world, but may not be attractive from a business perspective. The World Health Organization is currently looking to apply it to a new generation of the polio vaccine, while PATH is working towards new rotavirus and pneumonia vaccines. The process highlighted that having the buy-in from African countries from the beginning was a major advantage."These people here know better than anybody how dreadful this disease is," said Okwo-Bele. "It's a vaccine specifically designed for Africans, requested by Africans."*For the record, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation underwrites the NewsHour's global health coverage.

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U.S. House Votes to Cut NPR Funding

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

NewsHour - Mar. 18 (News) - The House of Representatives approved a measure Thursday to bar federal funding of National Public Radio. The bill also prohibits public radio stations from using federal grant money to pay dues to NPR.The 228-192 vote came mostly along party lines, with most Republicans backing the proposal and nearly all Democrats opposed. Republicans said it was time for the federal government to get out of the radio business. "I'm a strong believer in the free market," said Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., the bill's sponsor. "I'd like to see NPR rework its business model and begin to compete for all of its income."The effort to cut funding comes a week after conservative activists secretly recorded an NPR executive making derogatory comments about Tea Party supporters. The ensuing controversy led to the resignation of NPR CEO Vivian Schiller.House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said taxpayers no longer wanted to spend money on the content NPR provides. "The problem is, we've seen NPR and its programming often veer far from what most Americans would like to see as far as the expenditure of their taxpayer dollars. That's the bottom line. Nobody is on a rampage. Nobody is trying to say that we don't like NPR for NPR's sake," Cantor argued.Democrats, meanwhile, accused Republicans of trying to control the airwaves. "Under the guise of saving taxpayer dollars what they're doing is silencing NPR -- not because it saves money, but because it is not on the same ideological frequency of the extreme right," said Rep. John Larson, D-Conn.Others Democrats chided Republicans for wasting valuable time that could be spent on more important matters. "The Republican Party -- no one can say they're not in touch, they get it," remarked Rep. Anthony Weiner, sarcastically. "They understand where the American people are. The American people are not concerned about jobs and the economy or what's going on around the world. They're staring at the radio saying, 'Get rid of Click and Clack.' Finally my Republican friends are doing it. Kudos to you!"Weiner was referencing "Car Talk," NPR's automotive advice program hosted by the Tappet brothers.The legislation passed Thursday faces an uphill climb in the Senate, where the Democratic majority is likely to oppose it. President Obama also made public his objections to the effort to chop NPR's funding Thursday, releasing a statement saying the action "would result in communities losing valuable programming."On Tuesday, the House passed a three-week temporary spending bill with $6 billion in cuts, including $50 million from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports NPR and PBS.That funding had already been identified by the president for elimination in his budget request for the upcoming year.

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Mexico Drug Cartels Moving in on Guatemala Routes

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 12:31:01 -0700

NewsHour - Mar. 15 - Mexican drug cartels are carving out new territory in northern Guatemala, adding another layer of violence and crime to a country with one of the highest murder rates in the hemisphere.In December the Guatemalan government declared a two-month state of siege in the rural province of Alta Verapaz, bordering Mexico, in order to crack down on the growing influence of the notorious Mexico-based Los Zetas cartel."Drug traffickers have us cornered," Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom told the country's Congress in January. "Just the weapons seized in Alta Verapaz are more than those of some army brigades."The state of siege deployed hundreds of Guatemalan soldiers in the region and allowed them to carry out searches and detain suspects without warrants. By the final day in February, 18 people allegedly involved in Los Zetas were arrested and reported crimes decreased by 50 percent, said Leslie Pérez, spokesperson for Guatemala's Interior Ministry.But many question if those gains can last now that the initiative has ended."We are aware the these criminals are waiting for us to retreat so they can return, but no security units will leave," Colom told journalists.While residents said the siege did, at least temporarily, drive away many of the powerful cartel figures, people still fear a return to the previous levels of violence, said Lorne Matalon, a reporter for Public Radio International's "The World." Matalon was in Coban in February to cover the results of the siege."[Before December] there were weekly if not daily shootouts in the town square between rival drug dealers. There are numerous reports of women being snatched off the street and stuffed into dark SUVs," he said. "[The cartels] rule by fear, they would make sure that you could see them in the streets of Coban…. they knew they were beyond the reach of the law."Guatemala already had a massive problem with organized crime, especially in Guatemala City, but the Mexico drug cartels are a new, well-resourced threat looking to cash in on the country's strategic placement on the drug trade trail through Latin America. The country contributes to more than 60 percent of the cocaine trafficked to the United States from the region, according to the U.S. State Department.With Mexico beefing up efforts against the cartels within its borders, and the U.S. helping clamp down on illegal trafficking by air and water, the land routes through Guatemala are even more attractive."The climate in Mexico has gotten more competitive and so the forms of crime these groups are engaged in have expanded and there is a push to take control of strategic routes," said Nick Miroff, a Washington Post reporter who was in Guatemala last month and regularly covers the issue in Mexico. "Drug shipments are coming up from Colombia or Panama, landing in Honduras then coming over land."Add those factors to the weak institutions and justice system in the country and Guatemala is "the perfect place to commit a crime," said Adriana Beltrán, head of the citizen security program at the Washington Office of Latin America, a nonprofit that promotes human rights in the region."The likelihood of you being arrested and facing trial for any act is low," she said. "You have a private sector that often refuses to pay taxes, problems of corruption, oversight and accountability."Even Guatemala's newly-appointed attorney general, Claudia Paz, agrees."Guatemala's state is a very weak state. It doesn't have the resources to face problems as grave as that of narco-trafficking," she said. "For traffickers to move down here was very easy because there are some areas of this country where practically there is no presence of the state."Under the Merida Initiative approved in 2008, the United States has appropriated nearly $1.6 billion to help Mexico and the countries of Central America and the Caribbean combat organized crime groups and strengthen institutions. But less than 20 percent of the funds were allotted to Central America, with the vast majority going to Mexico.Citing the deteriorating security situation in Central America, an additional $165 million in U.S. assistance was designated for the region through the Central America Regional Security Initiative, formed in 2010."We understand that Central America is a bridge for many criminal elements," a senior State Department official told the NewsHour. "Therefore it would be virtually impossible or extremely difficult to contain criminality or violence in Mexico or the Caribbean or Colombia without being able to manage or improve the situation in Central America."The Guatemalan government has made some promising progress, including increasing resources for security, but more could be done, the official said, "including reforming the police and improving the ability of the government to prosecute effectively the crimes."Perez said a state of siege is being considered in other parts of the country but no decisions have been made yet. The military is keeping a presence in Alta Verapaz in the meantime, but in areas where there are not soldiers, drug cartels could face little opposition, said Matalon."The government's complete absence from vast remote areas means there is a power vacuum of sorts that Los Zetas have been able to exploit it," he said."They offer 'plato o plomo, money or bullets'. In essence they say to farmers whose land they want 'You can sell to us and leave this area walking, or you can refuse and you will be carried out of here feet first.'"

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In Guatemala, Family Planning Clashes with Religion, Tradition

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 23:19:00 -0800

NewsHour - Mar. 08 - Listen to the Audio JEFFREY BROWN: Now, the second of Ray Suarez's global health reports from the Central American nation of Guatemala.Tonight, Ray looks at the many obstacles to family planning in that traditional society.RAY SUAREZ: Every day, Evelyn Roquel travels the rugged countryside of Guatemala's highlands teaching women about birth control. In a population where the fertility rate is the highest in Latin America, it's a daunting task.Evelyn works for Women's International Network for Guatemalan Solutions, called WINGS. Not surprisingly, the highest fertility rates are in the hardest-to-reach areas of the country, places reached mainly by boat, like the villages that surround Lake Atitlan.EVELYN ROQUEL, Women's International Network for Guatemalan Solutions (through translator): I travel to very far-off places. I typically go to places several times over and over again. When I first come to a community, I am met with a lot of resistance, but I keep coming.RAY SUAREZ: Here, populations are overwhelmingly Mayan and overwhelmingly religious. Women typically have eight, nine, 10 children.EVELYN ROQUEL (through translator): The culture and mind-set here makes birth control very difficult to discuss. It's so embedded that the number of children is what God gives you; it's out of your hand. So, for most women, this is a very new theme, which breaks with their traditional cultural values.RAY SUAREZ: On this day, Evelyn is greeted by a huge crowd of women in San Marcos. It's a scene that plays out again and again as Evelyn travels throughout the region.Most of the women here have no idea what birth-control methods are available to them, much less how to obtain them. But they are experts on their own lives. When Evelyn shows the crowd a picture of a pregnant woman with an infant on her back and a toddler in her hands, the reaction is immediate. They know women in that situation. Some of them have lived it themselves.Family planning isn't always a question of fewer pregnancies. Better spaced childbirth is better for their health and their children.Evelyn Roquel says they're brave just to show up.EVELYN ROQUEL (through translator): In these communities, it's the men who make the decisions about family planning. These women here, most do not have the support of their husbands. Many times, they come to me and say their husbands will accuse them of sleeping around and being prostitutes if they use birth control.RAY SUAREZ: In fact, it's such a sensitive subject that Evelyn's own safety is at risk. She requires women who ask for treatment or just for more information to sign a document proving they're voluntary participants. Those who are illiterate provide fingerprints.EVELYN ROQUEL (through translator): I am Catholic and Mayan myself. I sing in my church choir. But I believe that giving a woman the ability to decide the number of children she wants is critical. It's vital for her health.RAY SUAREZ: The United States government seems to agree. The Obama administration recently announced it wants to make family planning a top priority for global-health funding.Dr. Rajiv Shah is the administrator for USAID.DR. RAJIV SHAH, United States Agency for International Development: Family planning has been underinvested in and is absolutely critical to the safety, security and stability of many of the countries we work in around the world.There's so much data that shows us that as total fertility rates go down in countries, the health and welfare of children, families and, frankly, of the community overall goes up.RAY SUAREZ: Health officials say family planning saves lives.In the towns and villages strung along the shoreline of Guatemala's Lake Atitlan, you will find some of the Western Hemisphere's largest indigenous communities and the hemisphere's highest rates of maternal mortality, death in childbirth. But when you talk to women about their lives, it's easy to understand why so many continue to risk early death with eight, nine, 10 pregnancies.Concepcion Ramirez Riyanda's mother, Maria, died while giving birth to her 11th child. At the time, Concepcion was 19 years old and was given the responsibility of raising her seven younger siblings. Concepcion's now husband, Diego Chichom Ramirez, says the family was devastated.DIEGO CHICHOM RAMIREZ (through translator): When Maria, their mother died, the family disintegrated and was torn apart.RAY SUAREZ: But even with this firsthand tragedy, Concepcion defers to her husband about any family planning. Diego refuses birth-control interventions.DIEGO CHICHOM RAMIREZ (through translator): We will follow God's will. We believe this is natural law. And we have heard too many stories about birth control, like injections and pills that cause cancer.RAY SUAREZ: Stories about the dangers of birth control are often linked to religion, where family-planning methods such as monthly pills, tubal ligation, and IUDs have long been against church teachings.Oscar Julio Vian Morales is Guatemala's archbishop.OSCAR JULIO VIAN MORALES, Archbishop of Guatemala (through translator): The problem is the kind of birth control methods that are used, like forcing families to sterilization for life. Foreign governments should not insist on less children but on more education, more health services and work.RAY SUAREZ: For their part, health officials say family planning is one strategy to help turn around Guatemala's dire health needs. Years ago, more children meant more hands to work the land. But generation after generation, farms are divided into smaller and smaller plots. There's less food to harvest.And with big families comes more mouths to feed. Nearly half the population of Guatemala suffers from chronic malnutrition.DR. RAJIV SHAH: You know, if you look at Guatemala, 46 percent of children are stunted. And that means if you just put them against a wall and draw a line, they are, on average, significantly shorter than they should be for their age. And that is reflective of certain -- a certain type of chronic nutritional deficiency.RAY SUAREZ: At Hospitalito Atitlan, a small private hospital funded largely by international donations, malnutrition is a common sight. This 4-year-old weighs only 18 pounds, and she's lost one pound since August.Andres Botran is a former secretary of nutrition for the previous Guatemalan government.ANDRES BOTRAN, former Guatemalan secretary of food security: Malnourished children have 12 points less of I.Q. than a normal child. We will have a great majority of the population with diminished mental capacities. That is a risk not only for economic development, health, et cetera, et cetera, but the viability of our democracy.RAY SUAREZ: Even if women want birth control, getting contraceptives to remote areas poses a logistical challenge. So, mobile units are dispatched by the Guatemalan family-planning association, APROFAM.The group transforms local office space into operating rooms, offering tubal ligations and slow-release hormone implants.Dr. Lisbeth Contreras is one of the gynecologists for APROFAM.DR. LISBETH CONTRERAS, APROFAM (through translator): We cover the whole country, but it's difficult. There is a huge demand. These are bad financial times in Guatemala. And it's hard for families who have many children.RAY SUAREZ: Forty-three-year-old Dora Ileana Orellana came with her daughter-in-law, Julia Maria, to the clinic. Dora has a child the same age as her grandson, less than 2 years old, her seventh child.DORA ILEANA ORELLANA (through translator): My body can't hold children anymore. I'm too weak. Already, I have headaches. My bones hurt. And I'm worn out from housework.RAY SUAREZ: Both grandmother and daughter-in-law receive Jadelle, a hormone implant in the upper arm which acts much like birth control pills.DORA ILEANA ORELLANA (through translator): My mother had 13 children. But times are harder now. Everything is really expensive. And sometimes I'm in trouble because I have no money to feed my family.RAY SUAREZ: Over 40 percent of Guatemala's population is younger than 15. Family-planning advocates realize they must target the young.Here, in a community outside Antigua, school-age children become voluntary peer educators, steering their classmates away from early parenthood. This program is also run by WINGS.Janeen Simon, the executive director of WINGS, says schools are a platform for both genders.JANEEN SIMON, Women's International Network for Guatemalan Solutions: It's important for the kids to be comfortable talking about the topic amongst their peers of both sexes.This is a very machista society here, where the men, the boys are brought up to believe that they have rights over the girls or the women. And I think that helps also if -- if they're learning together and they can see that -- the power that the girls have through their -- through their education and their intelligence and their wisdom.RAY SUAREZ: Programs like these are likely to gain traction from the administration's Global Health Initiative. But with strong opposition from Congress on the overall levels of foreign aid, any future funding remains unclear.

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Go Fish? Not in Pacific Ocean Sanctuaries off California's Coast

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 19:06:53 -0800

NewsHour - Mar. 02 - Listen to the Audio MARGARET WARNER: Next, the battle over protecting the ocean and how that's playing out in California.NewsHour correspondent Spencer Michels has this report, a joint project with KQED's science show, QUEST.SPENCER MICHELS: Just before dusk this time of year, the fishing boats return to San Francisco from the Pacific, their cargo of Dungeness crabs headed for stores and restaurants all along the Pacific Coast.But fishermen are nervous that newly created ocean sanctuaries are about to eat into their catch.ED TAVASIEFF, fisherman: You get to a point where you say, is this fishery viable any longer? Is it worth it for me to go out there and catch a handful of fish?SPENCER MICHELS: Fisherman Ed Tavasieff and others are worried about dozens of areas off the coast that California has either designated off-limits to fishing or has limited the take.Environmentalists say these marine-protected areas, as they're called, are necessary because of overfishing and pollution.WARNER CHABOT, League of Conservation Voters: Our biggest challenge is 90 percent of the big fish on the planet are already gone. You know, 75 percent of the fish species in most of the world's oceans are fished to their absolute limits.MARIA BROWN, Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary: It's human disturbance. It's pollution. It's development along our shores, that we're encroaching on habitats.SPENCER MICHELS: Maria Brown is superintendent of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary off San Francisco.MARIA BROWN: Twenty, 30 years ago, we thought the ocean was limitless. Solution is the dilution to pollution, we heard. And what we have realized over time is that ocean isn't limitless. It's the blood supply of the planet. And it's being affected over and over again by death by a million cuts.SPENCER MICHELS: In December, the state Fish and Game Commission narrowly voted to establish 36 protected areas along the state's southern coastline, more than 350 square miles. That's more than 15 percent of southern coastal waters where commercial and sport fishing is either restricted or forbidden. Plans for northern waters will be in place by 2012.When it all gets done, it will be a watershed moment for the state, according to Ken Wiseman, executive director of the California Marine Life Protection Act Initiative, a partnership between the state and private groups.KEN WISEMAN, California Marine Life Protection Act Initiative: There are big reserves, and there are specific ones in Florida or in New Zealand, but never before have we done an entire network, where the whole state is connected along all 1,200 miles of the coastlines. And I think it's going to really set a trend and have a healthier ocean.SPENCER MICHELS: California actually began trying to preserve the ocean nearly 100 years ago. But the areas chosen for protection were too small and didn't work very well. This time, the zones are bigger, and teams of scientists have advised the state on which areas to protect, which species are crucial and how to monitor the zones to see if they are working.There are no markers or boundary lines on the surface of the ocean. Fishermen and others are expected to read notices and use GPS to stay out of protected areas. As for the fish?I asked Steve Weisberg, a biologist with the California Ocean Protection Council.Do you think a fish is going to know that this is a protected area, and over that line, they could catch me? STEPHEN WEISBERG, California Ocean Protection Council: There are -- there are MPAs that have been done in other parts of the world where scientists have actually gone and tagged the fish. And after a while, the fish do figure out where the boundaries are, and you actually see them maintaining themselves within the boundaries.SPENCER MICHELS: Mark Carr, a professor of marine ecology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, has advised the state on marine protected areas since the program got going several years ago.MARK CARR, University of California, Santa Cruz: They're really more like the national parks on land, where people only go there to enjoy the natural environment and to recognize that we are protecting intact ecosystems for future generations.SPENCER MICHELS: Carr also thinks the protected areas will be useful as a baseline to see how a healthy region compares to the rest of the ocean.One of Carr's main interests is underwater kelp forests, whose health he considers a major factor in supporting sea life. He and his crews dive into the ocean and count what's down there.MARK CARR: We want to make sure there's plenty of kelp that produces plenty of habitat to support all of the other fish and the invertebrates in the system. And so we send these crews in that are trained to count the invertebrates, the algae and the fishes, using scuba to characterize the relative number of each of the different species.SPENCER MICHELS: While environmentalists are thrilled at the expansion of protected areas, many fishermen remain unhappy. In the two years of countless meetings up and down the coast, fishermen, surfers, businessmen, conservationists have sparred.MAN: Fishermen aren't trying to hide anything. We just want to make a living. That's all, just feed our families and put food on the table. No one's getting rich anymore. Sardine days are over with.MAN: We're doing everything we possibly can to keep the big fish on the reef.SPENCER MICHELS: Among those who testified against the protected areas is Larry Collins, president of the Crab Boat Owners Association.LARRY COLLINS, Crab Boat Owners Association: There's places that I have put my crabs traps in for the last 20 years that I'm not going to be able to set my crab traps there anymore.There's places that I sometimes go salmon trolling. You know, sometimes, they're there this week or that week. I won't be able to go in there anymore. It just lessens your options.SPENCER MICHELS: Besides creating problems for fishermen like him, Collins thinks the marine protected areas won't do much good.LARRY COLLINS: There's no need for them. There's no need for them at all. It doesn't make any sense to protect one little part of the ocean. You got to protect the whole thing.SPENCER MICHELS: But protecting crucial zones does, in effect, protect the whole thing, argues biologist Mark Carr.MARK CARR: Marine protected areas are thought to be such a crucial tool for what is called ecosystem-based management, because a protected area will protect all the species that interact with one another within an ecosystem, rather than just one little piece at a time, species by species.SPENCER MICHELS: Even so, Ken Wiseman says he takes seriously the concerns of fishermen like Larry Collins.KEN WISEMAN: I say to Larry and his colleagues who we invited to come on down and say, let's figure out how we can minimize that damage to your industry. At the same time, let's talk about how we can do the long-term investment that makes sure you have fish for you and your grandkids.But I think we have worked pretty hard to make sure that nobody was put out of business.SPENCER MICHELS: But that's not going to help him for the next two or three, four years?KEN WISEMAN: This is only 16 percent of -- of the coastal area, so he's got 84 percent where he can still fish. And along that 16 percent, it's going to be a lot healthier and he will be fishing a lot longer.SPENCER MICHELS: Despite the huge effort to set up these protected areas, there is one obvious potential flaw: The state doesn't have enough money to enforce the rules.There aren't enough game wardens. And so they're going to have to rely on a network of agencies, plus the public, including fishermen, to keep an eye out for violations.MARK CARR: The people that are being regulated, particularly the fisherman, both the commercial and the recreational fishers, really have to buy into this idea and have to help police and enforce the protected areas as well.SPENCER MICHELS: Despite disagreements and some legal action, the zones are becoming law. Scientists say it will take at least five years of close monitoring before they know how effective marine protected areas are in restoring health to the ocean.

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New Wave of Protests Hit Arab Nations

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 13:15:00 -0800

NewsHour - Feb. 16 - By: Francine Uenuma A fresh spate of protests taking place in Arab countries is raising questions about whether other North African and Middle Eastern governments may see upheaval mirroring those in Tunisia and Egypt. In Libya, hundreds of anti-governmen

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In Sudan, Possible New Country Poses Health Care System Challenges

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 23:28:00 -0800

NewsHour - Jan. 03 - Listen to the Audio GWEN IFILL: Next tonight: the health care challenges that threaten to overwhelm an African nation as it prepares to cast a critical vote on independence.Special correspondent Jeffrey Kaye reports from Southern Sudan.JEFFREY KAYE: On the banks of the Nile River in South Sudan, entrepreneurs pump water to fill up tankers. Private water collection and sales from rivers and wells is big business here, particularly during the dry season. But, for customers, the water often comes at a high cost.DR. JUSTIN BRUNO, Al Sabah Hospital: It is a good business for them, but this is spreading diseases.JEFFREY KAYE: Dr. Justin Bruno directs the Al Sabah children hospital in the town of Juba.JUSTIN BRUNO: The water is not treated. It is just flowing naturally. And then it comes into the tanks and the tankers sell it to the people. And the people just drink them. It's not boiled. It's not treated.JEFFREY KAYE: And what happens as a result?JUSTIN BRUNO: Diarrheal diseases. People get acute diarrhea. People get what are bloody diarrhea and typhoid fever. And that is rampant in this town and in Southern Sudan.JEFFREY KAYE: And you can trace that right back to those tanks?JUSTIN BRUNO: Right back to the river water.JEFFREY KAYE: Patients suffer not only from preventable diseases, but, even if they make it to a health care facility, often from inadequate treatment.This is essentially the waiting room of the only children's hospital in South Sudan. The health care system, such as it is here, is barely functioning. Most people have no access to health care. So, the challenge is not so much to improve the system. It's to create one.JUSTIN BRUNO: The most pressing medical need is lack of medical supplies. The medical supplies is not enough for the patient.JEFFREY KAYE: What do you mean?JUSTIN BRUNO: The medications are not enough for the patients.JEFFREY KAYE: Besides the lack of drugs, the hospital's single X-ray machine is broken. It shares a storage room with a busted blood bank refrigerator. There's no ultrasound or C.T. machine. And even though there's an emergency ward, the hospital has no anesthesia.Inpatients here, most suffering from malaria, malnutrition, respiratory infections and diarrhea, often share beds or sleep on the floor.Mary Camisa (ph) walked here barefoot from her village 50 miles away, carrying her 3-year-old son suffering from convulsions brought on by cerebral malaria.JUSTIN BRUNO: They are very far distances to walk in. Some, they often drive two days to arrive here to get health care services here. So, we need to decentralize more these health centers, so that they're closer to the people.JEFFREY KAYE: South Sudan's dire health conditions are reflected in a recent United Nations compilation of what it calls ‘scary statistics.' Most people have no access to safe drinking water or sanitation. Malaria is hyperendemic. A 15-year-old girl is more likely to die in childbirth than finish school.Katie Morris is a program manager for Catholic Relief Services, which, among other projects, provides support for 43 health facilities in Southern Sudan.KATIE MORRIS, Program Manager, Catholic Relief Services: If you look at it by the numbers, it paints quite a grim picture. Maternal and infant mortality are among the highest in the world. Vaccination coverage is among the lowest for children and -- and pregnant women. It's a very sad picture.JEFFREY KAYE: Changing that picture will be among the biggest challenges facing an independent South Sudan if, as expected, people here vote to separate from the North in a referendum that begins January 9.Even now, South Sudanese officials are planning how to build a medical system, virtually from scratch. Member of parliament Dr. Martha Martin heads the legislature's health committee.DR. MARTHA MARTIN, Southern Sudan Legislative Assembly: So, we need to think about rural areas to be developed. Develop them through the primary health care.JEFFREY KAYE: A family doctor trained in Cuba, Martin says family health centers can be used as building blocks of a national system.MARTHA MARTIN: If have primary health care, you won't have difficulties when you have somebody. You receive first the patient in the center. You give them the first aid and then you send them to a big hospital. The patient will be saved.JEFFREY KAYE: So the first thing to do is develop a primary health care system?MARTHA MARTIN: We have to have a good, big hospital, well-equipped.JEFFREY KAYE: It's an ambitious undertaking. Clinics like this one, the Saint Kizito primary health care center in the town of Juba, are scattered throughout the country. But less than 30 percent of South Sudan's population has access to health care services. And, like the hospitals, many clinics also lack resources. When we arrived at the health center, women were waiting to have their children vaccinated. The mud floor clinic has no running water, no toilets, no delivery routes, no doctor. Medications were running low, and the staff of 10 shared two stethoscopes.This clinic is funded by the Catholic Church. Outsiders, including the U.S. government, the U.N., evangelical groups, and aid organizations, pay for most of South Sudan's health care.KATIE MORRIS: Over 60 percent of the health facilities in Southern Sudan are supported financially and in some cases operationally by international or national non-governmental organizations. So, the idea is that, over time, the government capacity will grow and that they will be able to absorb some of these facilities and take staff on to their payroll.JEFFREY KAYE: What few services the government currently provides are inefficient. After several hours at the Saint Kizito clinic, many women had given up waiting for vaccinations. The serum hadn't come, so patients had drifted away.Some clinics are trying to reduce maternal and child mortality rates by sending community health workers into villages. In the shanty neighborhood of Lologo on the outskirts of Juba, midwives from a U.S.-funded clinic visit huts to provide women with pre- and post-natal instructions and care. One in seven pregnant women in South Sudan is likely to die as a result of the pregnancy. Fourteen percent of children die before their fifth birthday.Midwife Rajibia Ahmad says simple lessons can save lives.RAJIBIA AHMAD, Midwife, Lologo Clinic: I will come here to see the baby, to see the mother, to check them, and to give her -- answer the question again, give them hygiene, how to eat, how to birth the baby.JEFFREY KAYE: Breast-feed.RAJIBIA AHMAD: Yes, breast-feeding.JEFFREY KAYE: Ahmad had delivered baby Emanuel (ph) seven days earlier. That's a rare occurrence in South Sudan, where only 10 percent of births are attended by a health care worker. The midwives urge pregnant women to deliver their babies in the clinic, to use clean water, and to avoid putting ashes on severed umbilical cords, a traditional treatment.Officials say they are optimistic about building a health care system in South Sudan. South Sudanese professionals who trained abroad during decades of civil war are returning to the country to practice medicine, among them, Dr. Bruno, who attended medical school in neighboring Uganda, where, as a teenager, he had fled by foot, a yearlong trek from his home. Bruno believes that independence might lead to less spending on the military and more on health.JUSTIN BRUNO: At the moment, more than 50 percent of our resources, of our budget go for security.JEFFREY KAYE: To the military?JUSTIN BRUNO: For the military.If independence comes, the reverse will be true. There will be less spending in the army and then there will be more spending in health care system and other service delivery. So, independence will mean a lot of development coming in, a lot of health care system improving, because the fact the money that go for security will have been put in development, the special health care system.JEFFREY KAYE: How much South Sudan spends on its military is likely to depend in part on whether the independence vote and its aftermath will be peaceful. In any event, economic development should go a long way to help reverse the abysmal health statistics by spurring the creation of water and sanitation systems. South Sudan's interim constitution guarantees free primary health care to all, clearly a long-term goal.For now, officials and health workers are combating preventable diseases with more basic steps: education, better nutrition, and simple drugs.

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A Conversation with Director Judd Apatow

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 18:32:36 -0700

NewsHour - Oct. 25 - Listen to the Audio JEFFREY BROWN: Now: a filmmaker on learning to be a comic, having success in Hollywood, and not wearing suits. If there is a king of comedy right now in Hollywood, you could argue it is Judd Apatow. The 42-year-old writer, director and producer is the force behind films that, combined, have earned $1.5 billion in recent years, including megahits like "The 40 Year Old Virgin"...ROMANY MALCO, actor: Are you a virgin? SETH ROGEN, actor: You're a virgin!STEVE CARELL, actor: I am -- shut up. JEFFREY BROWN: ... and "Knocked up."KATHERINE HEIGL, actor: I have something I really need to tell you. I'm pregnant. SETH ROGEN: With a baby? JEFFREY BROWN: His leading characters might be young men who can't or won't grow up, the humor, well, sophomoric. ACTRESS: So, ready? STEVE CARELL: Yes. (SCREAMING)STEVE CARELL: I'm sorry. I'm sorry. JEFFREY BROWN: But the formula is working. And Apatow insists, his movies do have a serious purpose. JUDD APATOW, director/producer: I feel the responsibility to make things which on some level have something positive to say. So, although there is a lot of people that are acting immaturely, shall we say, but, to me, what it is really about is trying to figure out how you are going to be a good person and how you are going to fit into society. And most...JEFFREY BROWN: You do care about that? I mean, that's...JUDD APATOW: Yes. Well, that's all I care about, really. I just think it's funnier to start with people in the worst possible place. JEFFREY BROWN: Apatow's latest pursuit is actually quite high-minded, a book called "I Found This Funny," a collection of his favorite works by writers, from past masters F. Scott Fitzgerald and Flannery O'Connor, to contemporary humorists David Sedaris and Steve Martin. The proceeds benefit a nonprofit writing and tutoring program called 826 National. When we talked recently at his modest Los Angeles office, Apatow admitted that he himself came to love reading only as an adult. JUDD APATOW: I was a big TV kid. When I was a kid, I would go home at 3:00 and watch TV straight through to the end of Letterman at 1:30 in the morning. I was obsessed with comics. And I would watch Jerry Seinfeld and Jay Leno and study them as if it was Tolstoy. JEFFREY BROWN: Apatow is indeed a serious student of comedy. And that too began as a kid on Long Island, when he managed to pick the brains of leading comedians appearing at a local club. JUDD APATOW: I started a radio show where I interviewed comics. And I interviewed Leno and Seinfeld and John Candy and Father Guido Sarducci and Garry Shandling, all when I was 16. And they kind of told me what to do. Here is how you get on stage. Here is how you write a joke. Here is how you come up with an idea for a sitcom. And they thought it was for the radio, but they didn't realize it was only for me, and I wasn't even airing almost any of the interviews. (LAUGHTER)JEFFREY BROWN: If, as Apatow says, his comedy obsession helped get him through the pain of growing up, it's that very pain that is the obsession of his professional comedy. His breakthrough came as producer and writer of the TV show "Freaks and Geeks," a funny and sometimes agonizing look at teenagers trying to cope and coexist in a suburban high school. ACTOR: I'm sorry. Did I crush your Twinkies?JEFFREY BROWN: The show was canceled after just 12 episodes, but developed a cult following and lives on, on cable and DVD. ACTOR: Oh. Well, you know, I was just bending down to talk to him and I accidentally leaned on it. JUDD APATOW: A lot of the turning points happen in high school and in college, and it defines a lot of how you see the world and how you decide to defend yourself from the world. Some people, you know, they -- their defense mechanism is, I'm really smart or I'm sexy or I'm the leader. And other people, you know, they hide or they make jokes. And we are all figuring out what our plan is going to be. PAUL RUDD, actor: Do you know how I know you're gay?SETH ROGEN: How? How do you know I'm gay?PAUL RUDD: Because you macramed yourself a pair of jean shorts. JEFFREY BROWN: And those young men in his recent movies glued to video games, avoiding relationship and responsibilities, they're still trying to figure out who they are going to be. JUDD APATOW: Most people are really fighting to not be adults. And, when it happens, it's a big transition. And a lot of that is just awful. It's awful to have to get a job and, you know, really be responsible for other people. And it is funny, too. Like, we're all kind of little idiot kids trying to act like we know what we are doing. Look at you. You are in a suit. You are trying to look like you know what you are doing. JEFFREY BROWN: I know. Yes, yes, yes. JUDD APATOW: And you do. JEFFREY BROWN: Is it working?JUDD APATOW: It's not. It's not working. (LAUGHTER)JEFFREY BROWN: Of course, Judd Apatow may not wear a suit, but he is a grownup, a family man who runs a successful business, a stressful, demanding business. And he remains unapologetic about criticisms that his comedy aims too low. JUDD APATOW: There are people who want Noel Coward, and there are people who want "Superbad." And, you know, I just think all entertainment and art is just -- it's just a grab bag. Just take what you like. JEFFREY BROWN: And don't expect serious drama any time soon. JUDD APATOW: I don't think I'm going to get so mature that I lose touch with the whatever wounded part of myself that feels the need to be funny. I'm already old enough that I realize that's not going to happen. I wish...JEFFREY BROWN: This is you, huh?JUDD APATOW: Yes, I wish it did happen. I wish there was a moment where, like, I feel great and all my wounds are healed, and now I will do drama. But it's not happening. (LAUGHTER)I still feel like a weird kid who is about to take a punch in the face. So, I think it's permanent. JEFFREY BROWN: Judd Apatow's next film, called "Bridesmaids," is due out in the spring. His story collection, "I Found This Funny," has just been released.

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Portraits of Iraqis and Their Dreams

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

NewsHour - Aug. 24 (Interview) - Iraqis' feelings about their country's future is best reflected in what they say about their own personal dreams. The younger ones appear less scarred -- their parents' and grandparents' generations seem far more so. Here's a sampling of people we've met in our travels and their hopes:Haneen ImadAge:19Hometown: BaghdadOccupation Baghdad University student; oud player (listen)Dream: To create a group of female oud musicians from all over the Middle East.Ghazi EssaAge: 52Hometown: BaghdadOccupation: Engineer, director of Doura Power Station, BaghdadDream: To be able to give the Iraqi people all the electricity they need. Dr. Samina Abdul GhaniAge: 45Hometown: FallujahOccupation: PediatricianDream: To come to the hospital one day and find what I need, so I can care for my patients like a doctor in any normal country in the world.Naiem Mahdi Al-ShatriAge: 71Hometown: BaghdadOccupation: BooksellerDream: For Iraq to be a country of education and reading again.Kamar Hashem Mohammed Al NomaneAge: 6Hometown: South BaghdadOccupation: Photographer, honorary member of Iraqi Photographers AssociationDream: To grow up to be a professional photographer.View a slide show of Kamar.Photos by Larisa Epatko

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Health Reform Misinformation Persists; Medicare Solvency Now Stronger

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

NewsHour - By Judy Woodruff, Kathleen Sebelius - Aug. 02 (Interview) - With more measures from the health care reform law set to take effect, more states are filing legal challenges as well. Judy Woodruff talks to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius for more on the latest health care reform developments and what consumers may see next. JUDY WOODRUFF: We take a closer look now at these developments and the battle over the law with the secretary of health and human services, Kathleen Sebelius. Madam Secretary, thank you for being with us. U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary KATHLEEN SEBELIUS,: Good to be with you, Judy. JUDY WOODRUFF: So, four months in after the law passed, and still such vehement opposition out there. Half the states are trying to repeal this in one form or another. How do you explain this? KATHLEEN SEBELIUS: Well, I think, first of all, this has been a long and very partisan debate, full of lots of misinformation. So, there are a lot of people who still don't know what's in the law, don't know what exactly it means to them and their families. And what we're trying to do is actually get information, get some tools, as the president said, whether it's the new Web site, healthcare.gov, which is really pretty dazzling -- it gives people information that they have never had before in one place -- or, you know, mailing information to seniors. Once people know what the law means to them and their families, that their adult child stays on their plan, or that no longer will a child with a preexisting condition be able to be kicked out of an insurance plan by insurers, they become much more enthusiastic about what actually the Affordable Care Act does. JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, I want to ask you about that, because the president did say that in the run-up to the passage of this legislation. He said, once people knows what's in here, they are going to like it. But the polls still show, yes, there is some more support, but over 50 percent of seniors still say they are disappointed in this law. KATHLEEN SEBELIUS: Well, when you think about what happened to seniors during the course of this debate, it borders on outrageous. Senior, I would say, were really targeted with a whole series of misinformed statements that were designed to scare them about the law, to get them to actually call on their members of Congress and Senate to stop it, starting with everything from death panels, which still most seniors think are part of the Affordable Care Act. JUDY WOODRUFF: Is that right? Most seniors still think that? KATHLEEN SEBELIUS: Absolutely. The recent polling says that seniors think this actually was passed into law. Seniors think that there is a change in their guaranteed benefits under Medicare. Nothing could be further from the truth. The guaranteed benefits are not only stronger than ever. We're going after fraud and abuse in a way that has never been focused on. And the Medicare solvency is much stronger than it was before the law was passed. JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, I want to ask you about that in a minute. But today's ruling by a Virginia judge, saying that this -- this challenge to the constitutionality of the law can go forward, what about the argument that is being made that it's not constitutional to tell people they must buy health insurance? KATHLEEN SEBELIUS: Well, I think, when you think about it, Judy, first of all, it's not a surprise that the ruling came today. I mean, what it basically does is, now there can be a debate on the merits of the case. So, it's really a threshold argument: Did the attorney general have standing to go ahead? JUDY WOODRUFF: What do you mean it's not a surprise it came today? KATHLEEN SEBELIUS: Well, I think that, being portrayed as somehow a major ruling, all the judge said is, come to court and then talk about the merits of the case. We're convinced that there are -- strong constitutional basis for this. And the interstate commerce, which is the purview of the federal government, governing business that travels back and forth across states, when you think about health care, there is a lot of interstate commerce. A lot of the health markets are regional. And people pay -- taxpayers pay for every dollar of uncompensated care. For everyone who comes through an emergency room door, that goes on to the backs of taxpayers and lots of people who pay insurance policies and pay more for those who are uncompensated. JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, meanwhile, you have Republicans who are saying, whatever happens in the courts, they're going to continue to try to chip away at this legislatively. They're going to try to deny funding for big chunks of this. Do you ever worry that you are out there trying to defend something that's going to be hollowed out? KATHLEEN SEBELIUS: Well, I hope we are able to engage in a straightforward manner this fall in that debate. I think it's fine for Republicans to go to their constituents and tell parents who have a child under the age of 26, your son or daughter, we want to take back their right to enroll in your insurance policies. We want to make sure that insurance companies, Mr. Republican Congressman or Congresswoman, are going to be able to kick your sick child out of a plan. We want to make sure that seniors will not see their prescription drug doughnut hole closed over time. That's a debate I welcome and I hope that we are able to talk about. Repealing this bill means taking benefits away from lots of Americans who are really relying on this change, once and for all, to get some tools into their own hands. JUDY WOODRUFF: On the savings that you have been talking about today that will be realized for Medicare, Republicans like Charles Grassley -- you have got -- and the insurance industry now saying the cuts that will come to private Medicare plans will result in huge increases in premiums for seniors, which will then force them to give up their Medicare. KATHLEEN SEBELIUS: Well, I don't think that's accurate, first of all. The data shows that about a fourth of Medicare beneficiaries choose Medicare Advantage plans. We have more companies offering Medicare Advantage right now than we have ever had before. We anticipate... JUDY WOODRUFF: These are the private... KATHLEEN SEBELIUS: These are the private choices. So, you can either choose traditional Medicare or a Medicare Advantage plan. But we have overpaid by about 14 percent. And everybody else in Medicare pays for that overpay -- pays more for their Medicare policies, no additional health benefits to the people who choose. And all we're saying is, gradually, over time, that overpayment should stop. We think there's going to be plenty of choices. JUDY WOODRUFF: And what is going to happen to those seniors who are in these plans? KATHLEEN SEBELIUS: They will absolutely have the choice of those plans. Those plans will stay in effect. They will stay in the market. In fact, the Centers for Medicare Services has issued a notice to companies, saying there will not be a cut next year. There will be a flat line for Medicare Advantage plans, so come in with your package of proposals. Come in with your bid. But we think there are going to be plenty of options for seniors who want to continue in a Medicare Advantage plan. JUDY WOODRUFF: Let me ask you about another headache out there, and that is Medicaid funding for individuals, the poor. A number of states, governors are coming to you, to the Obama administration, saying, wait a minute, this law means that we don't have the flexibility to deal with these rising Medicaid costs. Our budgets are being stretched and strapped. What are you saying to the states that are struggling with this right now? KATHLEEN SEBELIUS: Well, first of all, as you know, I was one of them, until very recently, governor of a state, watching the Medicaid budget. And this is a federal-state partnership, no question about it. I mean, the first thing we need to do is get Congress to act on the extension of the assistance for Medicaid programs across the country. That's been pending now for months and months and months, and tonight again came a near vote in the Senate. It's now been pushed off to Wednesday. But that's a huge step forward for states, to pass the FMAP, the federal matching plan. Secondly, in 2014, when the Affordable Care Act has an expanded Medicaid opportunity for lots of adults who don't qualify, it's paid for 100 percent by federal funds for the first four years and then gradually recedes to a 90 percent federal funding. So, this is a huge number of people who currently are coming through the doors of emergency rooms in states. States are picking up costs for all kinds of health-related costs. And the federal government is saying, we think we should cover everyone, and we think we are going to pay for it, states, and help you in this partnership. JUDY WOODRUFF: So many, many questions out there. And we thank you for dealing with some of them with us. Secretary Sebelius, thanks so much. KATHLEEN SEBELIUS: Sure.

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