(From the Evangelism, Mission and Justice page of the Massachusetts Conference of the United Church of Christ web page)
May 2008
Dear Sisters and Brothers:
All practices of injustice impel us as people of faith to give vigorous witness to oppose them. Torture, as one of those practices, is so egregious, that if we fail to raise our voices and to act, the very stones will cry out. As Conference Ministers in New England, we are jointly issuing this pastoral epistle, A Call for Prophetic Witness to Abolish Torture, as a way of raising our voices. We are calling on you, clergy and members of United Church of Christ congregations in our six New England Conferences, to join with us in this witness to abolish US-sponsored torture.
Seared into our consciousness and consciences are the photographs of Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib Prison. One photograph of a man, draped in a black shroud, standing as if on an auction block, arms outstretched in a cruciform posture, with electric wires dangling from his extremities, has become iconic. The images have been shocking and harrowing. So too has been the knowledge that our own government has engaged in and tolerated torture. While publicly denying it, our government has promoted torture as policy and practice, including waterboarding, so called “enhanced” interrogation techniques, extraordinary rendition to countries that torture, and secret prisons where these horrible activities occur out of sight.
Such practices are illegal, in violation of the US Constitution and of international law, specifically the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture, both of which the US has signed. Equally as troubling to us as people of faith, such practices are immoral, a sin against our fellow human beings and a sin against God. Since we are all created in the image of God, in a real way every act of torture and prisoner abuse shatters and desecrates God’s image. In words from a resolution passed by the Reform Rabbinate, “ In every shriek of those in unbearable pain, in every crazed nightmare of those who are denied sleep for days and weeks at a time, in every muffled moan of those plunged under water for minutes at a time, trying not to breathe lest they drown, God is broken. God is defiled.”
The writer of the letter to the Hebrews 13:3b exhorts us to “remember those … who are being tortured, as though you yourself were being tortured.” We best “remember” those who are being tortured by working to abolish torture, without exceptions. We have included with this letter proposed actions steps that congregations and individuals within congregations can take. To facilitate and support us in this work, the national UCC Justice and Witness Ministries has created a website: www.UCCAgainstTorture.org. This website will link our work and witness to that of the National Religious Campaign against Torture, currently with a membership of over 150 faith-based organizations – national, regional, and local – reflecting the wide diversity of religious groups in this country. The United Church of Christ nationally is a Participating Member. As several of our Conferences are already endorsing members we encourage our congregations to do the same.
The time to mobilize and speak up is now. This is, we believe, a kairos moment. June is Torture Awareness month. During the months leading up to the presidential elections, we have the opportunity and obligation to persuade the next president to abolish US-sponsored torture, without exceptions. As the Statement of Conscience of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture states: “Nothing less is at stake in the torture abuse crisis than the soul of our nation.” And, we add, the souls of our nation’s people.
Grace and peace to you,
The Rev. Jim Antal, Massachusetts Conference of the UCC
The Rev. Charles Barnes, Rhode Island Conference of the UCC
The Rev. Carole Carlson, Interim, Vermont Conference of the UCC
The Rev. Davida Foy Crabtree, Connecticut Conference of the UCC
The Rev. David R. Gaewski, Maine Conference of the UCC
The Rev. Gary Schulte, New Hampshire Conference of the UCC
"The United States does not condone torture" --Condeleeza Rice
Condeleeza Rice has consistently told Congress that the US is not involved with torture, while at the same time discussing and condoning torture in private Oval Office conversations. Watch this video and then click on this link to sign a petition asking Senators Clinton, McCain and Obama to join us in calling on Secretary of State Rice to resign.
"If we let them get away with it, we did it."
--Judy Lotas
"If we let them get away with it, we did it."
--Judy Lotas
Action Alert
Action Alert: Tell Congress to Support the Jubilee Act!
Jubilee Justice is a Network Council Member of Jubilee USA, a network of organizations working to cancel the external debt of poor countries around the world. This is an exciting moment, as the most important debt legislation in 7 years - the Jubilee Act - will be voted on in Congress early this week!
Take action by calling your Representative TODAY!
Join us today as we call on Congress to pass the Jubilee Act and break the chains of debt for the world's impoverished countries (additional information below the call script).
Please take the simple steps below -- and help change the lives of millions:
1. Find out who your Representative is by entering your zip code at www.house.gov (upper left corner).
2. Call the Capitol switchboard at .
3. Ask to be connected to your Representative's office. The receptionist will answer. Introduce yourself as (your name), a constituent from (city, state).
4. I am calling today to urge Representative________ to vote yes on the Jubilee Act (HR2634), which will be considered on the House floor this week. This bill would expand eligibility for debt cancellation to 67 impoverished countries. Without debt cancellation these 67 countries will not be able to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). (If you'd like, add an additional sentence about why this issue is important to you). Do you know how Representative _________ plans to vote on the Jubilee Act?
5. Be sure to thank the receptionist when you are finished.
6. Email Danielle at Jubilee with the results of your call - Danielle@jubileeusa.org.
7.Thank you for taking action - now forward this message on to 10 friends & urge them to make the call too!!
Background Information:
Today, the world's most impoverished countries spend more than $100 million each day in debt payments to wealthy governments and financial institutions like the World Bank and IMF. In countries where the majority of the population lives on less than $1 per day, this money should be spent on clean water, basic health care, and education, not sent to the world's wealthiest financial institutions.
In 2000 and again in 2005 world leaders came together to cancel billions of dollars of debt in dozens of impoverished countries around the world. The money freed by debt cancellation so far has been used to fight global AIDS, enroll children in school, provide clean water, improve rural infrastructure and more. But there is still much more that needs to be done - dozens of impoverished countries around the world are still waiting for debt justice!
The most important and prophetic debt legislation in 7 years, the Jubilee Act will expand access to debt cancellation to all the countries that need it to fight extreme poverty. Without debt cancellation, it will be nearly impossible for many countries to achieve the UN Millennium Development Goals to cut extreme poverty in half by 2015.
The Jubilee Act also requires that debt cancellation be provided without harmful economic policy conditions attached, calls for the initiation of a responsible lending framework, and requires a debt audit in countries like South Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo which have a heavy burden of odious debt.
For more information contact me at JubileeJustice@aol.com or go to www.jubileeusa.org
Jubilee Justice is a Network Council Member of Jubilee USA, a network of organizations working to cancel the external debt of poor countries around the world. This is an exciting moment, as the most important debt legislation in 7 years - the Jubilee Act - will be voted on in Congress early this week!
Take action by calling your Representative TODAY!
Join us today as we call on Congress to pass the Jubilee Act and break the chains of debt for the world's impoverished countries (additional information below the call script).
Please take the simple steps below -- and help change the lives of millions:
1. Find out who your Representative is by entering your zip code at www.house.gov (upper left corner).
2. Call the Capitol switchboard at .
3. Ask to be connected to your Representative's office. The receptionist will answer. Introduce yourself as (your name), a constituent from (city, state).
4. I am calling today to urge Representative________ to vote yes on the Jubilee Act (HR2634), which will be considered on the House floor this week. This bill would expand eligibility for debt cancellation to 67 impoverished countries. Without debt cancellation these 67 countries will not be able to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). (If you'd like, add an additional sentence about why this issue is important to you). Do you know how Representative _________ plans to vote on the Jubilee Act?
5. Be sure to thank the receptionist when you are finished.
6. Email Danielle at Jubilee with the results of your call - Danielle@jubileeusa.org.
7.Thank you for taking action - now forward this message on to 10 friends & urge them to make the call too!!
Background Information:
Today, the world's most impoverished countries spend more than $100 million each day in debt payments to wealthy governments and financial institutions like the World Bank and IMF. In countries where the majority of the population lives on less than $1 per day, this money should be spent on clean water, basic health care, and education, not sent to the world's wealthiest financial institutions.
In 2000 and again in 2005 world leaders came together to cancel billions of dollars of debt in dozens of impoverished countries around the world. The money freed by debt cancellation so far has been used to fight global AIDS, enroll children in school, provide clean water, improve rural infrastructure and more. But there is still much more that needs to be done - dozens of impoverished countries around the world are still waiting for debt justice!
The most important and prophetic debt legislation in 7 years, the Jubilee Act will expand access to debt cancellation to all the countries that need it to fight extreme poverty. Without debt cancellation, it will be nearly impossible for many countries to achieve the UN Millennium Development Goals to cut extreme poverty in half by 2015.
The Jubilee Act also requires that debt cancellation be provided without harmful economic policy conditions attached, calls for the initiation of a responsible lending framework, and requires a debt audit in countries like South Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo which have a heavy burden of odious debt.
For more information contact me at JubileeJustice@aol.com or go to www.jubileeusa.org
Poor Haitians Resort to Eating Dirt
By JONATHAN M. KATZ - Jan 29, 2008
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — It was lunchtime in one of Haiti's worst slums, and Charlene Dumas was eating mud. With food prices rising, Haiti's poorest can't afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies. Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country's central plateau.
The mud has long been prized by pregnant women and children here as an antacid and source of calcium. But in places like Cite Soleil, the oceanside slum where Charlene shares a two-room house with her baby, five siblings and two unemployed parents, cookies made of dirt, salt and vegetable shortening have become a regular meal.
"When my mother does not cook anything, I have to eat them three times a day," Charlene said. Her baby, named Woodson, lay still across her lap, looking even thinner than the slim 6 pounds 3 ounces he weighed at birth.
Though she likes their buttery, salty taste, Charlene said the cookies also give her stomach pains.
"When I nurse, the baby sometimes seems colicky too," she said.
Food prices around the world have spiked because of higher oil prices, needed for fertilizer, irrigation and transportation. Prices for basic ingredients such as corn and wheat are also up sharply, and the increasing global demand for biofuels is pressuring food markets as well.
The problem is particularly dire in the Caribbean, where island nations depend on imports and food prices are up 40 percent in places.
The global price hikes, together with floods and crop damage from the 2007 hurricane season, prompted the U.N. Food and Agriculture Agency to declare states of emergency in Haiti and several other Caribbean countries. Caribbean leaders held an emergency summit in December to discuss cutting food taxes and creating large regional farms to reduce dependence on imports.
At the market in the La Saline slum, two cups of rice now sell for 60 cents, up 10 cents from December and 50 percent from a year ago. Beans, condensed milk and fruit have gone up at a similar rate, and even the price of the edible clay has risen over the past year by almost $1.50. Dirt to make 100 cookies now costs $5, the cookie makers say.
Still, at about 5 cents apiece, the cookies are a bargain compared to food staples. About 80 percent of people in Haiti live on less than $2 a day and a tiny elite controls the economy.
Merchants truck the dirt from the central town of Hinche to the La Saline market, a maze of tables of vegetables and meat swarming with flies. Women buy the dirt, then process it into mud cookies in places such as Fort Dimanche, a nearby shanty town.
Carrying buckets of dirt and water up ladders to the roof of the former prison for which the slum is named, they strain out rocks and clumps on a sheet, and stir in shortening and salt. Then they pat the mixture into mud cookies and leave them to dry under the scorching sun.
The finished cookies are carried in buckets to markets or sold on the streets.
A reporter sampling a cookie found that it had a smooth consistency and sucked all the moisture out of the mouth as soon as it touched the tongue. For hours, an unpleasant taste of dirt lingered.
Assessments of the health effects are mixed. Dirt can contain deadly parasites or toxins, but can also strengthen the immunity of fetuses in the womb to certain diseases, said Gerald N. Callahan, an immunology professor at Colorado State University who has studied geophagy, the scientific name for dirt-eating.
Haitian doctors say depending on the cookies for sustenance risks malnutrition.
"Trust me, if I see someone eating those cookies, I will discourage it," said Dr. Gabriel Thimothee, executive director of Haiti's health ministry.
Marie Noel, 40, sells the cookies in a market to provide for her seven children. Her family also eats them.
"I'm hoping one day I'll have enough food to eat, so I can stop eating these," she said. "I know it's not good for me."
------
Congregational Reading: God of Justice for the Poor
Leader: Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees
People: Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied
Leader: Woe to those who deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless.
People: Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy
Leader: What will you do on the day of reckoning, when disaster comes from afar? To whom will you run for help? Where will you leave your riches?
People: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Based on Isaiah 10:1-3 and Matthew 5:3,6,7
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — It was lunchtime in one of Haiti's worst slums, and Charlene Dumas was eating mud. With food prices rising, Haiti's poorest can't afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies. Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country's central plateau.
The mud has long been prized by pregnant women and children here as an antacid and source of calcium. But in places like Cite Soleil, the oceanside slum where Charlene shares a two-room house with her baby, five siblings and two unemployed parents, cookies made of dirt, salt and vegetable shortening have become a regular meal.
"When my mother does not cook anything, I have to eat them three times a day," Charlene said. Her baby, named Woodson, lay still across her lap, looking even thinner than the slim 6 pounds 3 ounces he weighed at birth.
Though she likes their buttery, salty taste, Charlene said the cookies also give her stomach pains.
"When I nurse, the baby sometimes seems colicky too," she said.
Food prices around the world have spiked because of higher oil prices, needed for fertilizer, irrigation and transportation. Prices for basic ingredients such as corn and wheat are also up sharply, and the increasing global demand for biofuels is pressuring food markets as well.
The problem is particularly dire in the Caribbean, where island nations depend on imports and food prices are up 40 percent in places.
The global price hikes, together with floods and crop damage from the 2007 hurricane season, prompted the U.N. Food and Agriculture Agency to declare states of emergency in Haiti and several other Caribbean countries. Caribbean leaders held an emergency summit in December to discuss cutting food taxes and creating large regional farms to reduce dependence on imports.
At the market in the La Saline slum, two cups of rice now sell for 60 cents, up 10 cents from December and 50 percent from a year ago. Beans, condensed milk and fruit have gone up at a similar rate, and even the price of the edible clay has risen over the past year by almost $1.50. Dirt to make 100 cookies now costs $5, the cookie makers say.
Still, at about 5 cents apiece, the cookies are a bargain compared to food staples. About 80 percent of people in Haiti live on less than $2 a day and a tiny elite controls the economy.
Merchants truck the dirt from the central town of Hinche to the La Saline market, a maze of tables of vegetables and meat swarming with flies. Women buy the dirt, then process it into mud cookies in places such as Fort Dimanche, a nearby shanty town.
Carrying buckets of dirt and water up ladders to the roof of the former prison for which the slum is named, they strain out rocks and clumps on a sheet, and stir in shortening and salt. Then they pat the mixture into mud cookies and leave them to dry under the scorching sun.
The finished cookies are carried in buckets to markets or sold on the streets.
A reporter sampling a cookie found that it had a smooth consistency and sucked all the moisture out of the mouth as soon as it touched the tongue. For hours, an unpleasant taste of dirt lingered.
Assessments of the health effects are mixed. Dirt can contain deadly parasites or toxins, but can also strengthen the immunity of fetuses in the womb to certain diseases, said Gerald N. Callahan, an immunology professor at Colorado State University who has studied geophagy, the scientific name for dirt-eating.
Haitian doctors say depending on the cookies for sustenance risks malnutrition.
"Trust me, if I see someone eating those cookies, I will discourage it," said Dr. Gabriel Thimothee, executive director of Haiti's health ministry.
Marie Noel, 40, sells the cookies in a market to provide for her seven children. Her family also eats them.
"I'm hoping one day I'll have enough food to eat, so I can stop eating these," she said. "I know it's not good for me."
------
Congregational Reading: God of Justice for the Poor
Leader: Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees
People: Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied
Leader: Woe to those who deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless.
People: Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy
Leader: What will you do on the day of reckoning, when disaster comes from afar? To whom will you run for help? Where will you leave your riches?
People: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Based on Isaiah 10:1-3 and Matthew 5:3,6,7
Iraq’s 100-Year Mortgage
By Linda J. Bilmes
Reprinted from Foreign Policy Magazine, March/April 2008
The price tag for caring for the Americans who fight this war could exceed what it costs to wage it.
March 19 marks the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The American death toll—nearly 4,000 soldiers in Iraq and almost 500 in Afghanistan—is well known. Much less attention has been paid to the enormous number of troops who have survived and returned home with serious injuries. Here, the numbers are truly staggering. More than 70,000 have been wounded in combat, injured in accidents, or airlifted out of the region for emergency medical care. More than a third of the 750,000 troops discharged from the military so far have required treatment at medical facilities, including at least 100,000 with mental health conditions and 52,000 with post-traumatic stress disorder. According to a recent U.S. Army estimate, as many as 20 percent of returning soldiers have suffered mild brain injuries, such as concussions. More than 20,000 troops have survived amputations, severe burns, or head, spinal, and other serious injuries.
These numbers are largely due to the extraordinary advances in battlefield medicine in recent years. Far more soldiers are surviving even grievous injuries than in previous conflicts. The ratio of wounded in combat to killed in Iraq is 7 to 1; in Vietnam, it was 2.6 to 1, and in World War II, 2 to 1. If all injuries are included, such as those from road accidents or debilitating illnesses, Iraq has produced 15 wounded for every single fatality. This higher survival rate is, of course, welcome news, but it leaves the United States with a legacy of providing medical care and paying disability benefits to an enormous number of veterans and their dependents for many decades to come. During the past six years, more than 1.6 million troops have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Even in the most optimistic scenario, assuming that the majority of U.S. troops are withdrawn by the end of 2009, the cost of providing for Iraq War veterans will match what we have spent waging the war: approximately $500 billion. If U.S. forces remain deployed at a higher level, the cost of caring for veterans will eventually exceed $700 billion.
When we think about the costs of war, we tend to focus on the here and now. But in what is already the second-most expensive conflict in U.S. history, after World War II, the costs of Iraq will persist long after the last shot is fired. Benefits were still being paid to World War I veterans until January 2007, when the last veteran receiving compensation died, nearly 90 years after the war ended. The United States pays more than $12 billion each year in disability benefits to Vietnam veterans, a figure that continues to climb, 35 years after the U.S. pullout. If these past wars are any guide, Americans will undoubtedly be paying for Iraq for at least the next 50 years.
The purpose of U.S. policy toward war veterans is, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, “to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan.” To do this, the government provides two main benefits: medical care and financial compensation to those who have disabilities incurred or aggravated during active military service. The consequence is that the United States faces a daunting financial burden, as well as a steep logistical challenge, in providing medical care and disability benefits to all who need or are entitled to them.
Part of the challenge is that the Department of Veterans Affairs’ medical system simply lacks the capacity to cope with the demand of returning troops. The government expects 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans to seek treatment this year alone. If the current conflict follows the pattern of the first Gulf War in 1991, about 800,000 returning veterans will eventually require medical care—more than a few for the rest of their lives. Moreover, the government is ill-equipped to handle the near epidemic of mental health cases resulting from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Even using conservative estimates, the long-term cost of providing medical care alone to Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans over their lifetimes could approach $285 billion, depending on how long the soldiers are deployed.
After the 1991 Gulf War, some 44 percent of its veterans applied for disability benefits; today, nearly 17 years later, the United States pays more than $4 billion each year in disability compensation to 169,000 veterans from the 1991 Gulf War. We have already paid five times as much in disability pay for that conflict as we did to fight it. Even under the conservative assumption that veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan apply for disability benefits at the same rate as those from the first Gulf War, the cost could reach $390 billion during their lifetimes.
Other parts of the government will also pay a long-term price for the war. Veterans who can no longer hold down a job, due to physical or mental injuries, are likely to qualify for Social Security disability compensation (adding another $22 to $38 billion to the bill). For others, the injuries they have suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan will eventually swell the rolls of Medicare, as the long-term effects of injuries and chronic illnesses appear.
Staggering though they are, these costs only represent the impact of the war on the U.S. federal budget. The many social and economic costs that the government does not pay, such as the loss to the economy of so many young, productive Americans and the costs paid by state and local governments, communities, and private medical providers, could add another $415 billion to the total cost to the economy.
Americans have so far focused only on the ballooning short-term price of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But we have not yet counted the cost of caring for veterans, replenishing military equipment, and restoring the armed forces to their pre-war strength. This war will prove one of the costliest in U.S. history—one whose bill we pass to the generations that follow.
Linda J. Bilmes, a lecturer at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, is coauthor, with Joseph E. Stiglitz, of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008).
Reprinted from Foreign Policy Magazine, March/April 2008
The price tag for caring for the Americans who fight this war could exceed what it costs to wage it.
March 19 marks the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The American death toll—nearly 4,000 soldiers in Iraq and almost 500 in Afghanistan—is well known. Much less attention has been paid to the enormous number of troops who have survived and returned home with serious injuries. Here, the numbers are truly staggering. More than 70,000 have been wounded in combat, injured in accidents, or airlifted out of the region for emergency medical care. More than a third of the 750,000 troops discharged from the military so far have required treatment at medical facilities, including at least 100,000 with mental health conditions and 52,000 with post-traumatic stress disorder. According to a recent U.S. Army estimate, as many as 20 percent of returning soldiers have suffered mild brain injuries, such as concussions. More than 20,000 troops have survived amputations, severe burns, or head, spinal, and other serious injuries.
These numbers are largely due to the extraordinary advances in battlefield medicine in recent years. Far more soldiers are surviving even grievous injuries than in previous conflicts. The ratio of wounded in combat to killed in Iraq is 7 to 1; in Vietnam, it was 2.6 to 1, and in World War II, 2 to 1. If all injuries are included, such as those from road accidents or debilitating illnesses, Iraq has produced 15 wounded for every single fatality. This higher survival rate is, of course, welcome news, but it leaves the United States with a legacy of providing medical care and paying disability benefits to an enormous number of veterans and their dependents for many decades to come. During the past six years, more than 1.6 million troops have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Even in the most optimistic scenario, assuming that the majority of U.S. troops are withdrawn by the end of 2009, the cost of providing for Iraq War veterans will match what we have spent waging the war: approximately $500 billion. If U.S. forces remain deployed at a higher level, the cost of caring for veterans will eventually exceed $700 billion.
When we think about the costs of war, we tend to focus on the here and now. But in what is already the second-most expensive conflict in U.S. history, after World War II, the costs of Iraq will persist long after the last shot is fired. Benefits were still being paid to World War I veterans until January 2007, when the last veteran receiving compensation died, nearly 90 years after the war ended. The United States pays more than $12 billion each year in disability benefits to Vietnam veterans, a figure that continues to climb, 35 years after the U.S. pullout. If these past wars are any guide, Americans will undoubtedly be paying for Iraq for at least the next 50 years.
The purpose of U.S. policy toward war veterans is, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, “to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan.” To do this, the government provides two main benefits: medical care and financial compensation to those who have disabilities incurred or aggravated during active military service. The consequence is that the United States faces a daunting financial burden, as well as a steep logistical challenge, in providing medical care and disability benefits to all who need or are entitled to them.
Part of the challenge is that the Department of Veterans Affairs’ medical system simply lacks the capacity to cope with the demand of returning troops. The government expects 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans to seek treatment this year alone. If the current conflict follows the pattern of the first Gulf War in 1991, about 800,000 returning veterans will eventually require medical care—more than a few for the rest of their lives. Moreover, the government is ill-equipped to handle the near epidemic of mental health cases resulting from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Even using conservative estimates, the long-term cost of providing medical care alone to Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans over their lifetimes could approach $285 billion, depending on how long the soldiers are deployed.
After the 1991 Gulf War, some 44 percent of its veterans applied for disability benefits; today, nearly 17 years later, the United States pays more than $4 billion each year in disability compensation to 169,000 veterans from the 1991 Gulf War. We have already paid five times as much in disability pay for that conflict as we did to fight it. Even under the conservative assumption that veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan apply for disability benefits at the same rate as those from the first Gulf War, the cost could reach $390 billion during their lifetimes.
Other parts of the government will also pay a long-term price for the war. Veterans who can no longer hold down a job, due to physical or mental injuries, are likely to qualify for Social Security disability compensation (adding another $22 to $38 billion to the bill). For others, the injuries they have suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan will eventually swell the rolls of Medicare, as the long-term effects of injuries and chronic illnesses appear.
Staggering though they are, these costs only represent the impact of the war on the U.S. federal budget. The many social and economic costs that the government does not pay, such as the loss to the economy of so many young, productive Americans and the costs paid by state and local governments, communities, and private medical providers, could add another $415 billion to the total cost to the economy.
Americans have so far focused only on the ballooning short-term price of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But we have not yet counted the cost of caring for veterans, replenishing military equipment, and restoring the armed forces to their pre-war strength. This war will prove one of the costliest in U.S. history—one whose bill we pass to the generations that follow.
Linda J. Bilmes, a lecturer at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, is coauthor, with Joseph E. Stiglitz, of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008).
Ethanol subsidies push up the price of corn tortillas
(Reprinted from caller.com)
Mexico this week removed the last tariffs on U.S. and Canadian farm products as called for by the North American Free Trade Agreement. The removal of the tariffs is a gamble by Mexicans that the positives of globalization will outweigh the negatives, especially in the case of corn, the historical food staple that has fed the people of Mexico for centuries.
The playing field for Mexicans in the corn markets would be fairer, however, if the United States didn't continue to ladle outrageous subsidies on corn producers even as corn prices soar. Those prices are a direct outgrowth of the demand for corn-based ethanol, which itself is a creation of the farm lobby and presidential politics.
Only the most plain-speaking presidential candidate would have taken on the corn subsidy before this week's caucuses in Iowa, a heavy corn growing state, either to suggest that the subsidy is an anachronism from the Depression era or that U.S. tariffs on sugar-based ethanol from Brazil should be removed to drive down fuel prices. Not likely.
Protestors who blocked the international bridge at El Paso this week were wrong about globalization being the bogey man of Mexican farmers. Other Mexican farmers, such as those who grow tomatoes, winter vegetables and avocados, have found a new market in American supermarkets because of NAFTA.
Likewise, American consumers get the benefit of fresh produce and more food choices. The demonstrators, who dispersed after a few hours, do have a valid point regarding corn. American vegetables and fruits don't get federal farm subsidies, but corn does and will continue to get federal support in the recently passed farm bill. That makes for an uneven playing field that leaves poor Mexican farmers further out in the cold.
The subsidies undermine faith in the power of free markets and open trade. Globalization already has fewer friends in Congress than it had when NAFTA was negotiated in 1993. Democratic presidential hopefuls are acting more like Lou Dobbs, the cable television free trade alarmist, than Bill Clinton who signed NAFTA and called it essential to America's ability to compete across the world.
In Mexico, those same views are heard by those who say that Mexico is on the short-end of the globalization stick.
Ironically, Mexico has done more, in many ways, to erase barriers to free trade than the United States. Mexican administrations removed the price supports for corn that protected small corn farmers and artificially kept prices low for tortillas. As a result, tortilla prices have soared, putting political pressure on President Felipe Calderon. But Calderon, aside from some action on putting a ceiling on tortilla prices, has resisted demands that Mexico tinker with NAFTA.
Mexico will have to do more. A protected market has kept Mexican corn producers from being more efficient and from leaving behind the tiny plots that simply can't match the production of American corn farmers. But anti-NAFTA critics mostly say that if American corn producers are protected by subsidies, so should Mexican farmers. The losers there would be consumers in Mexico and the United States.
Defenders of subsidies point out that Americans produce yellow corn, not the white corn that Mexicans produce for domestic consumption. But markets make no differentiation; all corn prices are distorted by subsidies and the demand for ethanol.
One fear is that Mexican corn farmers, unable to compete, will be forced to leave rural areas and eventually wind up as illegal immigrants. It would be tragically ironic if Iowa corn subsidies result in more undocumented workers in a Des Moines meat- packing plant.
Globalization, despite NAFTA critics in Mexico and the United States, can't be stopped; overall, more people benefit when trade is allowed to flow fairly and freely. There's nothing fair, however, about American crop subsidies.
http://www.caller.com/news/2008/jan/06/ethanol-subsidies-push-up-the-price-of-corn-in-a/
Mexico this week removed the last tariffs on U.S. and Canadian farm products as called for by the North American Free Trade Agreement. The removal of the tariffs is a gamble by Mexicans that the positives of globalization will outweigh the negatives, especially in the case of corn, the historical food staple that has fed the people of Mexico for centuries.
The playing field for Mexicans in the corn markets would be fairer, however, if the United States didn't continue to ladle outrageous subsidies on corn producers even as corn prices soar. Those prices are a direct outgrowth of the demand for corn-based ethanol, which itself is a creation of the farm lobby and presidential politics.
Only the most plain-speaking presidential candidate would have taken on the corn subsidy before this week's caucuses in Iowa, a heavy corn growing state, either to suggest that the subsidy is an anachronism from the Depression era or that U.S. tariffs on sugar-based ethanol from Brazil should be removed to drive down fuel prices. Not likely.
Protestors who blocked the international bridge at El Paso this week were wrong about globalization being the bogey man of Mexican farmers. Other Mexican farmers, such as those who grow tomatoes, winter vegetables and avocados, have found a new market in American supermarkets because of NAFTA.
Likewise, American consumers get the benefit of fresh produce and more food choices. The demonstrators, who dispersed after a few hours, do have a valid point regarding corn. American vegetables and fruits don't get federal farm subsidies, but corn does and will continue to get federal support in the recently passed farm bill. That makes for an uneven playing field that leaves poor Mexican farmers further out in the cold.
The subsidies undermine faith in the power of free markets and open trade. Globalization already has fewer friends in Congress than it had when NAFTA was negotiated in 1993. Democratic presidential hopefuls are acting more like Lou Dobbs, the cable television free trade alarmist, than Bill Clinton who signed NAFTA and called it essential to America's ability to compete across the world.
In Mexico, those same views are heard by those who say that Mexico is on the short-end of the globalization stick.
Ironically, Mexico has done more, in many ways, to erase barriers to free trade than the United States. Mexican administrations removed the price supports for corn that protected small corn farmers and artificially kept prices low for tortillas. As a result, tortilla prices have soared, putting political pressure on President Felipe Calderon. But Calderon, aside from some action on putting a ceiling on tortilla prices, has resisted demands that Mexico tinker with NAFTA.
Mexico will have to do more. A protected market has kept Mexican corn producers from being more efficient and from leaving behind the tiny plots that simply can't match the production of American corn farmers. But anti-NAFTA critics mostly say that if American corn producers are protected by subsidies, so should Mexican farmers. The losers there would be consumers in Mexico and the United States.
Defenders of subsidies point out that Americans produce yellow corn, not the white corn that Mexicans produce for domestic consumption. But markets make no differentiation; all corn prices are distorted by subsidies and the demand for ethanol.
One fear is that Mexican corn farmers, unable to compete, will be forced to leave rural areas and eventually wind up as illegal immigrants. It would be tragically ironic if Iowa corn subsidies result in more undocumented workers in a Des Moines meat- packing plant.
Globalization, despite NAFTA critics in Mexico and the United States, can't be stopped; overall, more people benefit when trade is allowed to flow fairly and freely. There's nothing fair, however, about American crop subsidies.
http://www.caller.com/news/2008/jan/06/ethanol-subsidies-push-up-the-price-of-corn-in-a/
Joe Stiglitz on George Bush
In this month’s Vanity Fair, Joseph Stiglitz has written a powerful critique of the economic policies of the Administration of President George Bush. Stiglitz, as you may recall, was the Chair of Bill Clinton’s Economic Advisors, then Chief Economist for the World Bank, Nobel Economics prize winner, and now a professor of economics at Columbia University.
The article was entitled "The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush." Here is an excerpt from that article. For the entire article, click here.
When we look back someday at the catastrophe that was the Bush administration, we will think of many things: the tragedy of the
I can hear an irritated counterthrust already. The president has not driven the
And it gets worse. After almost seven years of this president, the
Up to now, the conventional wisdom has been that Herbert Hoover, whose policies aggravated the Great Depression, is the odds-on claimant for the mantle “worst president” when it comes to stewardship of the American economy. Once Franklin Roosevelt assumed office and reversed
Suicides Immigration and the Farm Bill
If you've had trouble wrapping your brain around the complicated Farm Bill being debated in Congress right now, this might help. Just think of two things: Suicides in India and Mexican migration to the US
You've probably heard something of the suicide story. Grizzly, stories of farmers in the rural areas of
It's an epidemic that has been growing for over a decade and is at least in the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands.
Now, there are a lot of causes for poverty in India, and not all of them relate to you and me, but one of them does. For years our country has been pushing
Those subsidies are an incentive for our farmers to over produce on a handful of select crops—mainly wheat, corn, rice, and soybeans—and then dump them on the world market at prices even starving farmers in India, Africa and Latin America can't compete with. Our over-production depresses world prices and literally lowers the incomes of farmers all over the world.
Then there's
Hundreds of thousands of Mexican farmers have lost their farms. Some moved into the cities, some now work in sweat shops, some sell tee-shirts and chicklets to tourists at beach resorts, and thousands attempt to get into the
Ironically, recently after our economic policies decimated the Mexican corn farming industry, and encouraged consumers to become dependent on cheap subsidized
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