This Week’s Report: “Cost of the Iraq War”

By Peter Katel, April 25, 2008

Are economic woes a casualty of unexpectedly high costs?

The fifth anniversary of the Iraq War hit just as the subprime mortgage crisis and rising unemployment in the United States were turning the economic situation bleak. Against this backdrop, a Nobel laureate economist and a federal budget expert linked the economic downturn to the war and calculated its eventual total financial cost at $3 trillion and possibly even more, plus the tens of thousands of Americans and Iraqis killed or wounded. President George W. Bush dismisses the linkage argument, contending the war creates job opportunities at home and that military spending in Iraq and Afghanistan amounts to only a “modest fraction” of the U.S. economy. But even Republican lawmakers have been asking why taxpayers are funding much of the rebuilding of oil-rich Iraq while it reaps billions in profits thanks to record-high oil prices. For its part, the administration says Iraq is now starting to bear more of the reconstruction costs.

  • Are war costs contributing to the current economic downturn?
  • Did the Bush administration low-ball projections of war costs?
  • Is the Iraq war worth the expense?

To read the Overview of this week’s report, click here.

To view this week’s entire report on CQ Researcher Online, click here. [subscription required]

To buy a PDF of the report, click here.

Coming Up in CQ Researcher

Cyberbullying
Child advocates say a growing epidemic of “cyberbullying” – the use of computers, cell phones, social-networking sites and other technology to threaten or humiliate others – is putting young people at risk, sometimes with deadly consequences. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has labeled “electronic aggression” an “emerging public-health problem.” Court precedents on school discipline and students’ First Amendment rights provide limited guidance to educators grappling with the emerging world of cyber communication, especially transmissions originating off school grounds. Nonetheless, many states and school districts are taking strong steps aimed at curbing cyber abuse. In Congress, bills to provide new funding for online-safety programs have been introduced, but conflicts have arisen over how federal money for such efforts should be spent.
By Thomas J. Billitteri


Financial Crisis
The shaky subprime mortgages creating widespread turmoil in the U.S. housing market are also feeding a worldwide credit crisis. Deploying complex computerized models, lenders have pooled credit instruments of all sorts – mortgages, credit card debt, corporate and government bonds – and sliced and diced the packages for trading in lightly regulated financial markets. The banks, investment funds and other players that trade in these markets say that “securitization” promotes economic liquidity by spreading and diversifying risk. Critics say the practices actually allow dubious loans to uncreditworthy customers to spread virus-like through worldwide financial markets. Banks in the United States and elsewhere are taking big write-offs as they are forced to revalue their holdings. The U.S. Treasury Department is proposing a major overhaul of financial markets regulation, but the sweeping plan offers little by way of immediate relief. In any event, any proposals for additional regulation will face stiff resistance from the financial community.
By Kenneth Jost


Debating Prostitution
Governments around the world are challenging traditional approaches to dealing with prostitution in an effort to eliminate the harms of prostitution, including minors being forced into sex work and attacks on prostitutes. In Sweden, the act of selling sex has been decriminalized, and police now target johns for arrest and prosecution. The plan wins plaudits from traditional feminist groups who say its focus on snuffing out demand is the surest way to eliminate the sex industry, which they argue inevitably promulgates violence against women. Germany, New Zealand and several Australian states have legalized certain forms of prostitution, such as brothels in specified districts. But advocates of sex-workers’ rights are skeptical of both approaches, arguing that only complete decriminalization and recognition of sex work as a form of labor like any other can end the social stigma that leaves prostitutes unprotected from disease and violence and unable to seek help for fear of arrest or harassment by authorities.
By
Marcia Clemmitt

Coming Up in CQ Global Researcher: "Women's Rights"

By Karen Foerstel

The historic World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 helped women around the world make major gains in political, economic and social power. A record number of governments have enacted legislation protecting women against violence, dozens of countries have established commissions on women to promote gender equality and more women then ever now serve in parliaments around the world. Despite these gains, women still hold only 16 percent of parliamentary positions, trafficking of women and girls is at an all-time high and countries that have passed women's-rights legislation admit they have had little success in enforcing those laws. Many advocates for women also fear that the globalization of economic and trade laws will further hurt women in Third World countries, pushing them deeper into poverty.

In the News: Clinton’s Pennsylvania Win stalls Democrats’ Nomination

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s decisive win over rival Sen. Barack Obama in the Pennsylvania primary keeps her bid for the presidential nomination alive. Clinton emerged approximately 10 percentage points ahead of Obama, with strong victories among her core constituencies. However, Obama maintains a substantial lead in pledged delegates, which his campaign officials claim is too great to overcome this late in the race. Clinton’s depleted funds further stifle her chances as she heads into the upcoming North Carolina and Indiana primaries on May 6. However, Clinton argues that Democrats should consider her wins in swing states and in the uncounted Florida and Michigan primaries before deciding which candidate should get the nomination.

To view the CQ Researcher Online report, "Women in Politics," click here. [subscription required]

To view the CQ Researcher Online report, "Electing the President," click here. [subscription required]

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To buy a PDF of the report "Electing the President," click here.

In the News: Africans Block Chinese Arms Shipment from Entering Zimbabwe

A Chinese ship attempting to deliver weapons to Zimbabwe’s military may return home after a coalition of trade unions, church leaders and human rights groups convinced southern African governments not to allow the weapons to be unloaded in their ports. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said the cargo will most likely return to China, even though the shipment is part of a “normal military trade.” The coalition argued that the weapons could increase violence within Zimbabwe, a landlocked country with no port of its own, where President Robert Mugabe has refused to release the results of a recent presidential election.

To view the CQ Researcher Online report, "China in Africa," click here. [subscription required]

In the News: Iran Agrees to Discuss Its Nuclear Activity

Iran has agreed to discuss its nuclear program with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The agency hopes to provide answers for countries that fear Tehran has an undeclared nuclear-weapons program, an allegation Tehran vehemently denies. Although Iran insists its uranium enrichment program is focused solely on generating nuclear fuel. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad warned against pressuring Iran on its enrichment programs, but he has agreed to discuss his country’s nuclear activities. The IAEA hopes to have the issue resolved in May.

To view the CQ Researcher Online report, "U.S. Policy on Iran," click here. [subscription required]

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Overview of This Week’s Report: “Cost of the Iraq War”

By Peter Katel

Two major events in American life intersected in March 2008. A major Wall Street investment bank collapsed. And the country marked the five-year anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

The demise of Bear Stearns came amid a national mortgage crisis that has helped precipitate an economic slowdown and rising joblessness. And the war’s anniversary prompted a grim accounting: more than 4,000 Americans killed, tens of thousands wounded (plus millions of Iraqis killed or forced to flee their homes) and some $700 billion in taxpayer money spent so far.

Experts differ on the eventual total cost of the conflict, but several projections approach or exceed $2 trillion.

As both parties gear up for the November presidential election, foes of the George W. Bush administration are insisting on a direct linkage between the big issues of the political season. “There are not two concerns in this coming election. There is one,” says economist Joseph E. Stiglitz of Columbia University in a conference call with reporters. “The war is very much related to the weakness of the economy.”

In a best-selling new book, Stiglitz, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics, lays out the most detailed and sustained economic case against the Iraq intervention, which he and co-author Linda J. Bilmes calculate will cost the United States upwards of $3 trillion.

President Bush summarily rejects the war-economy link. “I think the economy is down because we’ve built too many houses,” he told the NBC “Today Show.”

Even some Bush administration critics share that opinion. The war “didn’t have much effect on the housing market or on the willingness or unwillingness of banks or others to provide credit,” says Robert D. Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman, Sachs (International), a Wall Street firm.

Still, the Democratic contenders for the presidential nomination, New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, are starting to echo some of the Stiglitz-Bilmes critique. And some of their fellow lawmakers, Republicans included, are taking up the simpler argument that the United States is spending money that the Iraqi government – a major oil producer – ought to be paying for defense and rebuilding.

“Isn’t it time for the Iraqis to start bearing more of those expenses, particularly in light of the windfall in revenues due to the high price of oil?” Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, asked Ambassador Ryan Crocker, the U.S. envoy to Iraq, during an April 8 hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“Senator, it is,” Crocker replied. He and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, said the Iraqi government has agreed to channel $300 million to U.S. authorities for reconstruction projects.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a vocal supporter of the Iraq intervention, endorses that approach. “The Iraqis . . . need to move a portion of their growing budget surpluses into job-creation programs,” he said at the same hearing, “and look for other ways to take on more of the financial burdens currently borne by American taxpayers.

President Bush had already signaled a shift toward insisting that the Iraqi government lessen financial dependence on the United States.

“The Iraqi government is stepping up on reconstruction projects,” Bush said in a March 27 speech at the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. “Soon we expect the Iraqis will cover 100 percent of those expenses. The same is true when it comes to security spending. Initially, the United States paid for most of the costs of training and equipping the Iraqi security forces. Now Iraq’s budget covers three-quarters of the cost of its security forces, which is a total of more than $9 billion in 2008.”

But Stiglitz and Bilmes calculate that the United States spends more than that – $12 billion – in just one month on Iraq operations. Their overall estimate of $3 trillion includes interest payments on the entirely borrowed funds for the war, and takes in the cost of Iraq (and Afghanistan) operations since 2001 – when the Global War on Terrorism was launched, the Afghanistan intervention began and pre-invasion planning for the Iraq conflict started up – through 2017. The Democratic staff of the Congressional Joint Economic Committee produced a nearly identical estimate of $2.8 trillion. And the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) came up with an estimate of $1.2 trillion to $1.7 trillion. The CBO’s total could rise to as much as $2.4 trillion if future interest payments on borrowed money are added. Scott Wallsten, a former economist at the World Bank and the American Enterprise Institute who has been tracking Iraq costs for years, told the congressional Joint Economic Committee that Iraq expenses would reach close to $2 trillion.

None of these estimates are easily compared with one another because the underlying calculations were based on different methodologies and time horizons; some also do not account for oil-price fluctuations, debt interest payments and the effects of inflation. Some of these contrasts are apparent in projections on the costs of veterans’ care.

In any event, however much the United States spends in the future, there’s no question that it already has spent far more than the administration ever projected. The closest thing to an official cost estimate ran to $60 billion tops, by Mitchell E. Daniels, then the head of the Office of Management and Budget, in December 2002. And a White House adviser, Lawrence B. Lindsey, then director of the administration’s National Economic Council, who in 2002 gave an unofficial projection of up to $200 billion, was fired shortly after that.

The administration’s projections “presupposed a relatively short conflict that would have had us out of there in a matter of months,” says Dov Zakheim, who was assistant secretary of Defense and the Pentagon’s budget chief in 2001-2004. Instead, “The war became a lot more intense than people anticipated, and the thing has gone on a lot longer than people anticipated.” Zakheim is now a vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton, a McLean, Va.-based consulting firm.

Cost figures and economic theories notwithstanding, the Iraq-costs debate ultimately turns on issues of national security policy.

“We’re supporting a vital national interest, which is a stable Middle East,” says James Jay Carafano, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant-colonel and a military affairs and foreign policy specialist at the conservative Heritage Foundation. Of the Stiglitz-Bilmes thesis, he says, “These are political arguments, not economic arguments. It’s not even saying ‘I’ve done this economic analysis and it has political implications.’ That’s prostitution, as far as I’m concerned. [It amounts to] ‘I’m going to prostitute my craft for politics.’ “

In an interview later, Stiglitz says, “We’ve obviously hit a raw nerve.” He adds that he and Bilmes make clear they oppose the war. But they began laying out their thesis in a 2006 paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonpartisan, nonprofit forum. “It was open for people to give us comments, which is in the nature of an academic process. We were very careful in responding to issues that were raised in open debate. The remarkable thing, from the Heritage Foundation or from the administration, is that they won’t come up with their own numbers.”

White House press secretary Dana Perino said in March, when asked about Stiglitz’s calculations: “I’m not going to dispute his estimates. . . . But it’s very hard to anticipate, depending on conditions on the ground and circumstances, how much the war is going to cost.”

In any case, war critics aren’t the only economists studying Iraq. Even before the invasion, a trio of economists at the University of Chicago began examining projected costs of the war against the alternative – maintaining military operations to enforce United Nations sanctions against Iraq (referred to as “containment”). The analysts calculated that containment would have cost $297 billion while military action would cost $414 billion.

“The cost of the war is certainly far in excess of the baseline cost that we estimated for containment,” the study’s leader, Steven J. Davis, concedes. But Davis, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, disputes the idea that the underestimate by him and his colleagues strengthens the Stiglitz-Bilmes argument. “Their whole premise is that, in the absence of war, things would have been fine and dandy in the Middle East,” something he calls a “questionable assumption.”

A military-spending specialist agrees decisions on going to war can’t be reduced entirely to dollars and cents. “It’s not like investing in real estate,” says Steven M. Kosiak, vice president for budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonpartisan think tank. “You have to take into account all kinds of things that are not budgetary or economic; there may be times when it is worth going to war even if there is a high budgetary cost.”

Still, President Bush has not been relying on that argument alone in recent comments about the costs and economic effects of the war. “I think, actually, the spending on the war might help with jobs, because we’re buying equipment and people are working,” he told the NBC “Today Show.”

But the classic World War II argument that military spending benefits the entire economy is finding little resonance among lawmakers managing a $239 billion federal budget deficit, whose constituents fear recent economic developments and hear that no plans exist to end the war.

As Hormats points out, “War spending is a highly inefficient way of boosting U.S. jobs and growth; spending on roads, bridges, energy research and education at home would have a far more beneficial and enduring effect on the economy than artillery and tanks.”

“We must ask ourselves,” said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said at a February hearing of the Joint Economic Committee, “is it worth spending trillions of dollars on such an uncertain and unpredictable outcome?”

To view the entire report on CQ Researcher Online, click here. [subscription required]

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This Week's Report: “Public Defenders”

by Barbara Mantel, April 18, 2008

Do indigent defendants get adequate legal representation?

Over the years, several landmark Supreme Court decisions have established the right of an indigent defendant to the assistance of counsel at public expense. But today critics say the nation’s public defender system is in crisis. Roughly 80 to 85 percent of all criminal defendants in state courts, where most crimes are prosecuted, are indigent and represented by some kind of public counsel at an annual cost to states and counties of more than $3.5 billion. But many public defense lawyers and researchers argue that much more needs to be spent because funding for many indigent defense systems is “shamefully inadequate.” Excessive caseloads, high turnover of underpaid lawyers, poor training and supervision and judicial interference are also blamed for many of the deficiencies. According to one expert, in some poorly funded systems in the field, a single public defender handles 1,000 cases a year.

  • Do indigent defendants in criminal cases receive adequate representation?
  • Are public defense lawyers beholden to judges and politicians?
  • Should states rather than counties fund and supervise indigent-defense services?
To read the Overview of this week’s report, click here.
To view this week's entire report on CQ Researcher Online, click here. [subscription required]
To buy a PDF of the report, click here.

Coming Up in CQ Researcher

Cost of the Iraq War
The fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq hit just as economic news in the United States turned bleak. Unemployment is growing, the home foreclosure crisis continues and the economy is either in recession or close to it. Against this backdrop, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and a federal budget expert published a book linking the economic downturn to the war in Iraq – whose eventual, total cost they calculated at $3 trillion – and maybe even more. President George W. Bush dismisses the linkage argument, arguing that the war creates employment and that Iraq war spending amounts to only a “modest fraction” of the U.S. economy. But even Republican lawmakers have been asking why taxpayers are funding the rebuilding of oil-rich Iraq while it reaps billions in record-high oil prices. For its part, the administration says Iraq is starting to bear more of the reconstruction costs.
By Peter Katel

Cyber Bullying
Child advocates say a growing epidemic of “cyber bullying” – the use of computers, cell phones, social-networking sites and other technology to threaten or humiliate others – is putting young people at risk, sometimes with deadly consequences. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has labeled “electronic aggression” an “emerging public-health problem.” Court precedents on school discipline and students’ First Amendment rights provide limited guidance to educators grappling with the emerging world of cyber communication, especially transmissions originating off school grounds. Nonetheless, many states and school districts are taking strong steps aimed at curbing cyber abuse. In Congress, bills to provide new funding for online-safety programs have been introduced, but conflicts have arisen over how federal money for such efforts should be spent.
By Thomas J. Billitteri


Financial Crisis
The shaky subprime mortgages creating widespread turmoil in the U.S. housing market are also feeding a worldwide credit crisis. Deploying complex computerized models, lenders have pooled credit instruments of all sorts – mortgages, credit card debt, corporate and government bonds – and sliced and diced the packages for trading in lightly regulated financial markets. The banks, investment funds and other players that trade in these markets say that “securitization” promotes economic liquidity by spreading and diversifying risk. Critics say the practices actually allow dubious loans to uncreditworthy customers to spread virus-like through worldwide financial markets. Banks in the United States and elsewhere are taking big write-offs as they are forced to revalue their holdings. The U.S. Treasury Department is proposing a major overhaul of financial markets regulation, but the sweeping plan offers little by way of immediate relief. In any event, any proposals for additional regulation will face stiff resistance from the financial community.
By Kenneth Jost

In the News: Bush Sets New Greenhouse Emissions Goal

President Bush has called for the United States to stop the growth of greenhouse-gas emissions by 2025 and has challenged other countries – specifically China and India – to abandon trade barriers on new energy-related technology and set emissions benchmarks of their own. The announcement comes before an international conference on climate change convenes in Paris this week, although Bush did not specify how his 2025 goal would be reached. He announced a similar objective in 2002, calling for an 18 percent reduction in the growth of greenhouse gases relative to economic growth by 2012. He says the U.S. is meeting the target and that it’s time to move forward. Critics have denounced the current goal, accusing Bush of derailing legislation that would curb emissions further.

To view the CQ Global Researcher Online report, "Curbing Climate Change," click here. [subscription required]

In the News: One-Fifth of Vets Have Mental Problems

About one-in-five U.S. troops is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or serious depression from serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, according to the Rand Corporation think tank. An equal number have suffered brain injuries. The survey shows that only half of the more than 600,000 military personnel who have shown symptoms have sought treatment. The results appear consistent with several government reports, but the Department of Defense has not released the official number of people who have been diagnosed or treated for mental problems. The Pentagon’s failure to release data on the studies was the primary reason for the study – the first large-scale, private assessment of its kind – according to Rand.

To view the CQ Researcher Online report, "Wounded Veterans," click here. [subscription required]

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In the News: Pope Visits America

Pope Benedict XVI arrived this past week in Washington, D.C., on the first leg of a week-long trip to the United States, the first trip to the nation’s capital by a pope since 1979. During a meeting with President Bush and in a speech to American Catholic bishops, he confronted some of the most contentious issues surrounding the Roman Catholic Church. He called on the church in the United States to strengthen marriage, fight religious skepticism and heal its followers after widespread sexual-abuse scandals involving priests, which he labeled a “deep shame” and “gravely immoral behavior.” He performed a Mass at Washington’s new baseball stadium and went on to New York – where he was scheduled to hold a similar Mass at Yankee Stadium – before returning to the Vatican.

To view the CQ Researcher Online report, "Future of the Catholic Church," click here. [subscription required]

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Overview of This Week’s Report: “Public Defenders”

Twenty-one years ago, an intruder broke into a home in Billings, Mont., and brutally raped an 8-year-old girl. The police created a sketch of the rapist based on the victim’s description, and an officer thought it resembled a young man in town, 17-year-old Jimmy Ray Bromgard, who had recently been jailed on an assault charge. Eventually, the victim picked out Bromgard in a lineup.

But the young girl told officers she was only “60 to 65 percent” certain she had picked the right man and at trial said she was “not too sure.”

The prosecution’s case rested on the victim’s identification and the discovery of several hairs found on her bed sheets. The manager of the state’s crime laboratory testified there was less than a one-in-10,000 chance the hairs belonged to someone other than Bromgard – a statistic, it turned out, the state’s witness had fabricated.

Bromgard’s court-assigned lawyer never hired a forensic expert, nor did he conduct an independent investigation. He filed no motions to suppress the shaky identification, gave no opening statement, prepared no closing statement and failed to file an appeal. Convicted, Bromgard spent more than 14 years in prison before the Innocence Project used DNA analysis of semen stains to show Bromgard was innocent.

There have been hundreds of similar cases in the United States. A University of Michigan study located 328 exonerations between 1989 and 2003. The report said there are perhaps tens of thousands more “miscarriages of justice” in that time period that have gone undetected: “rape convictions that have not been reexamined with DNA evidence; robberies, for which DNA is useless; murder cases that are ignored because the defendants were not sentenced to death; assault and drug convictions that are forgotten entirely.”

“There is simply no better way to prevent wrongful convictions than to provide competent defense counsel,” said Peter Neufeld, co-director of the Innocence Project, in testimony before Congress several months after Bromgard was exonerated. “Competent counsel can uncover police practices responsible for misidentifications, coerced or false confessions and fraudulent forensic science.”

The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution establishes the right to counsel in federal criminal prosecution. Through a series of landmark decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court has extended that right to all criminal prosecutions – state and federal, felony and misdemeanor – where a conviction can result in imprisonment. If someone cannot afford to hire an attorney, the court must assign one. Counsel can be a staff public defender, a private lawyer who accepts such cases for a fee or a contract lawyer who has won a bid to provide these services. Roughly 80 to 85 percent of all criminal defendants in state courts, where the bulk of crimes are prosecuted, are indigent and represented by some kind of public counsel. The annual cost to states and counties is more than $3.5 billion a year.

But many public defense lawyers and researchers argue that much more needs to be spent because too many indigent defense systems are in crisis. “I know that because I spend my life traveling around the country and visiting public defenders and court systems,” says Robert Spangenberg, whose firm has conducted research for justice organizations in every state. “We have public defender systems in the country where one public defender will handle 1,000 cases in a year,” he says. “What kind of representation could one provide with that caseload?”

In 2004, the American Bar Association (ABA) published a report on the state of indigent defense after holding a series of public hearings. Among its findings:

  • Funding for indigent defense is “shamefully inadequate,” often leading to overwhelming caseloads and ineffective representation;
  • Lawyers are often poorly trained and poorly supervised;
  • Prosecutors “too often” seek waivers of counsel and guilty pleas from the unrepresented accused;
  • Judges and elected officials often exercise undue influence over indigent defense lawyers.

But not all agree with the ABA’s conclusions. David LaBahn, director of the American Prosecutors Research Institute, a division of the National District Attorneys Association, says indigent defendants receive adequate representation. “Public defenders are publicly funded, they are well trained and they have access to a great amount of resources to defend their clients,” he says. They often offer better representation, he says, than a private lawyer hired by a lower-middle-class person who does not qualify for indigent defense.

Besides, says LaBahn, where funding is tight, prosecutors suffer, too. “Both public defenders and prosecutors are burdened by high caseloads and high turnover.”

Florida is a case in point. “I shouldn’t be asking my parents for money,” said Allison Haney, a prosecutor in South Florida who tries rape, robbery and the occasional murder case for an annual salary of just $50,000 while shouldering more than $100,000 in law school loans. Assistant Public Defender Ayana Harris also relies on her parents to help pay bills. “It makes me feel like I’m not a complete adult,” said Harris.

Low salaries lead to high turnover. The Miami-Dade County State Attorneys Office lost just under half its lawyers in 2005 and 2006; the public defender’s office lost a third.

With economists warning the U.S. is in or will soon enter a recession, this is a particularly difficult time for public defenders to go hat in hand to county and state governments. The 28 states that fully fund their public defense systems may be in better shape than the rest that rely on a mix of state and county funding, since states have a wider range of revenue sources than localities.

Still, it’s a tough year for states, too, with seven particularly hard hit, according to Raymond C. Scheppach, executive director of the National Governors Association. “They are primarily the states that rode up the housing bubble and are now riding it down,” says Scheppach, “and are pretty much in recession.” The seven are California, Arizona, Nevada, Florida, Michigan, Ohio, and Minnesota. About a dozen oil and farm states are doing just fine, he says, benefiting from the run-up in oil and commodity prices. The rest may not yet be in recession, but their tax revenues are definitely slowing.

Some public defender systems already have been told to make cuts, and at least one is fighting back. In Illinois, the Cook County Public Defender, whose territory includes Chicago, sued the Cook County Board president after his staff was trimmed from about 485 in recent years to as low as 430 in 2007. In Kentucky, the governor has proposed budget cuts for both public defenders and county prosecutors while recommending increased funding to expand a state prison. Kentucky expects the number of state prison inmates to grow 6 percent over the next two years, an increase of 1,000 inmates. And that’s on top of a 12-percent surge last year, the largest of any state.

In fact, a recent study reports that after three decades of growth in America’s prison population, for the first time more than one in every 100 adults is now in jail or prison – the highest rate in the world, according to the Pew Center on the States. It is not an increase in crime or population growth that’s behind this disturbing figure, however, but the policy choices of federal and state governments, according to the Pew report. For instance, the war on drugs has resulted in hundreds of thousands of convictions, wrote Robert M.A. Johnson, the prosecutor for Anoka County, Minn., in a recent issue of Criminal Justice magazine. In addition, he noted, “What was once bad or reckless behavior, such as child endangerment or failure to secure a firearm, which might have exposed a wrongdoer to civil liability, is today becoming a criminal offense punishable by incarceration and fines.” No wonder caseloads for public defenders are often unmanageable.

To view the entire report on CQ Researcher Online, click here. [subscription required]

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This Week’s Report: “D.C. Voting Rights”

by Colin Soloway, April 11, 2008

Should Washington citizens have a vote in Congress?

This November, in addition to electing a new president, Americans will vote for a third of the Senate and every member of the House. The 535 lawmakers in Congress represent the interests of 300 million citizens on vital issues from war and peace to taxes and spending. But the District’s 580,000 residents have no such representatives to vote their interests. Last year the House passed a bill to provide the District with a full vote in the House for the first time in 200 years, but a Republican filibuster blocked the measure in the Senate. Voting-rights advocates argue that there is no constitutional barrier to representation, while opponents insist the Framers clearly intended not to give the District a vote in Congress. In the final analysis, however, advocates blame party politics for Washington’s voteless status, saying Washington is heavily Democratic, and Republicans are loathe to giving them more muscle in Congress.

• Should the District of Columbia have voting representation in Congress?

• Does Congress have the power to grant the District a House seat?

• Are sectional and party politics blocking District voting rights?

To read the Overview of this week’s report, click here.
To view this week’s entire report on CQ Researcher Online, click here. [subscription required]
To buy a PDF of this report, click here.

Coming Up in CQ Researcher

Public Defenders
Critics say the nation’s public defender system is in crisis. Through a series of landmark decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court has established the right of an indigent defendant to an attorney. Roughly 80 to 85 percent of all criminal defendants in state courts, where most crimes are prosecuted, are indigent and represented by some kind of public counsel at an annual cost to states and counties of more than $3.5 billion. But many public defense lawyers and researchers argue that much more needs to be spent because too many indigent defense systems are in crisis. “We have public defender systems in the country where one public defender will handle 1,000 cases in a year,” says one expert in the field. In addition to funding, deficiencies in the system are blamed on excessive caseloads and a high turnover of underpaid lawyers.
By Barbara Mantel

Cost of the Iraq War
The fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq hit just as economic news in the United States turned bleak. Unemployment is growing, the home foreclosure crisis continues and the economy is either in recession or close to it. Against this backdrop, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and a federal budget expert published a book linking the economic downturn to the war in Iraq – whose eventual, total cost they calculated at $3 trillion – and maybe even more. President George W. Bush dismisses the linkage argument, arguing that the war creates employment and that Iraq war spending amounts to only a “modest fraction” of the U.S. economy. But even Republican lawmakers have been asking why taxpayers are funding the rebuilding of oil-rich Iraq while it reaps billions in record-high oil prices. For its part, the administration says Iraq is starting to bear more of the reconstruction costs.
By Peter Katel

Cyber Bullying
Child advocates say a growing epidemic of “cyber bullying” – the use of computers, cell phones, social-networking sites and other technology to threaten or humiliate others – is putting young people at risk, sometimes with deadly consequences. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has labeled “electronic aggression” an “emerging public-health problem.” Court precedents on school discipline and students’ First Amendment rights provide limited guidance to educators grappling with the emerging world of cyber communication, especially transmissions originating off school grounds. Nonetheless, many states and school districts are taking strong steps aimed at curbing cyber abuse. In Congress, bills to provide new funding for online-safety programs have been introduced, but conflicts have arisen over how federal money for such efforts should be spent.
By Thomas J. Billitteri

Coming Up in CQ Global Researcher: Women’s Rights

The historic World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 helped women around the world make major gains in political, economic and social power. A record number of governments have enacted legislation protecting women against violence, dozens of countries have established commissions on women to promote gender equality and more women then ever now serve in parliaments around the world. Despite these gains, women still hold only 16 percent of parliamentary positions, trafficking of women and girls is at an all-time high and countries that have passed women's-rights legislation admit they have had little success in enforcing those laws. Many advocates for women also fear that the globalization of economic and trade laws will further hurt women in Third World countries, pushing them deeper into poverty.
By Karen Foerstel

Look for the report on May 5, 2008 at the CQ Global Researcher, click here. [subscription required]

In the News: Haitians Riot Over Rising Food Prices

Hungry Haitians stormed the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince this week demanding the resignation of President Rene Preval over food prices that have risen about 40 percent since last year. Outnumbered U.N. peacekeepers battled rioters with rubber bullets and tear gas but couldn’t stop the looting and arson in the capital. Rising food costs pose a particular threat to Haiti because widespread hunger persists even in the best of times. Preval has called for tax cuts on imported food to help stem the violence. The World Food Programme has collected only 15 percent of the $96 million in donations it says Haiti needs this year and has issued an emergency appeal for more.

To view the CQ Researcher report, "Haiti’s Dilemma," click here. [subscription required]
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In the News: American Airlines Cancels 900 Flights

Safety inspections led to three straight days of mass flight cancellations this week by American Americans. About 900 flights – 35 percent of the airline’s daily total – were cancelled on April 10, following 1,600 the previous two days. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officials wanted to ensure that American complied with a federal directive relating to how wires should be bundled in the wheel wells of its MD-80 jets. The inspection comes after increased scrutiny by Congress over whether the FAA has ensured that all flights in the United States are safe. The airline has offered refunds to passengers scheduled to fly during those days. Alaska and Midwest Airlines underwent similar inspections, but had far fewer cancellations.

To view the CQ Researcher report, "Future of the Airlines," click here. [subscription required]
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In the News: Colombia Trade Pact Sent to Congress

President Bush has sent a proposed free-trade agreement with Colombia to Congress despite long odds for approval. Democratic critics say the accord does not do enough to protect workers in both the United States and Colombia from foreign competition. The Bush administration contends the measure would benefit Americans by opening a large market to U.S. goods and would reward Colombia – an ally that is striving to end its narcotics trade and overcome political instability – by allowing its products to enter the United States duty-free. In a related development, Mark Penn, the chief campaign strategist to Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., resigned amid revelations his public relations firm is working to secure approval for the measure, which Clinton opposes.

To view the CQ Global Researcher report, "The New Latin America", click here. [subscription required]

To view the CQ Researcher report, "Electing the President", click here. [subscription required]

Overview of This Week’s Report: “D.C. Voting Rights”

April 17, 2008

As members of the 299th Combat Engineer Company, Specialists Marcus Gray, Isaac Lewis and Emory Kosh cleared landmines from assault lanes during the invasion of Baghdad in 2003. When the Iraqis damaged a crucial bridge across the Euphrates River, they helped build a temporary span.In most ways, the 299th was typical of hundreds of Army Reserve and National Guard units across the country. They volunteered to serve, and several members of the unit were injured in accidents or in insurgent attacks. But Gray, Lewis and Kosh were different. They are residents of Washington, D.C., which has no voting representation in either the House or the Senate. In effect, they had no say in the nation’s decision to go to war, unlike other Americans.

“Its like you all can use me for this, but my voice is not going to be heard in anything else,” says Gray, 25, now a staff sergeant. “Everybody should have a right to have their voice heard in one way or another.”

In January 2005 Gray, Lewis and Kosh went to Capitol Hill to ask lawmakers why, after risking their lives to bring democracy to Baghdad, they should be denied a basic democratic right in the capital of the United States. “The maximum is what my buddies and I are pledged to give,” said Lewis at a press conference. “We believe that voting representation is not too much to ask in return.” Seven soldiers and Marines from Washington had died in Iraq and Afghanistan as of April 2007. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s non-voting delegate to the House of Representatives, shares the frustration of Gray and her other constituents. “This is an insult and a disgrace – to be denominated a second-class citizen with no say,” she says in an interview. “Your folks are in Iraq now, and Eleanor Norton is going to Arlington National Cemetery to bury people and you didn’t have a say on whether they go or not.”

For more than 200 years District residents have had no vote in Congress. In 1787 the Constitution envisaged a new seat of government, a federal district in which Congress would have absolute authority. But the Framers of the Constitution failed to include any provision for the democratic rights of the residents of the new capital. By oversight or intent, the Constitution’s silence has left District citizens as the only Americans who pay federal taxes but have no voting representation in Congress – giving those Americans who live closest to the Capitol the least influence inside it.

The District has been a unique political entity in America since its conception – not part of any state and controlled exclusively by Congress and the federal government. Congress’ control is so absolute that for 100 years the District had no elected local government and was run by commissioners appointed by the president and answerable to those on Capitol Hill. In fact, District residents have been allowed to elect their own mayor and City Council only for the past 34 years. And Congress still maintains line item control over city finances, not only for federal funds but locally raised revenues as well, which make up the majority of the budget. Congress also has the power to impose or annul any laws passed by the city government.

With the District enjoying a booming economy and more effective local government, congressional committees have granted Washington somewhat greater autonomy in recent years. Nevertheless, it remains effectively a colony of the federal government, with no vote in the decisions of that government.

Since 1970 the District has been allowed a non-voting delegate to the House, who can introduce legislation, serve on and vote in some committees but cannot vote on the House floor to pass or reject laws.

“What determines the direction of the country is the final vote,” said Norton, who has served as delegate since 1991. “And the people who live in the capital do not have that. There is no way in which that can be considered to be equality of treatment among citizens of the United States.”

The issue of District voting rights is intertwined with the issue of race and congressional rule of a city that has had a large black population since before the Civil War and a black majority since the mid-1950s. Many residents see representation as an unfinished chapter of the nation’s two-century journey towards full civil rights for all Americans.

“No taxation without representation,” while not enshrined in the Constitution, has nevertheless been a fundamental American principle since it was first shouted in 1763 in protest against taxes imposed by a distant British Parliament on unrepresented American colonies. While other states’ license plates celebrate their natural beauty, history, state motto or tourist attractions, District tags read simply “WASHINGTON, DC TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION.” In February 2008 the U.S. Mint rejected the city’s design for its “state” quarter, which also included the slogan.

Moreover, the United States is the only country in the world that denies the citizens of its capital representation in its national legislature, according to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The intergovernmental human rights and democracy organization, co-founded by the United States, called on the United States to grant the District equal voting rights. In introducing a bill to give the District full representation, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, I-Conn., called the District’s voteless status “not only a national embarrassment, it is a grave injustice and at complete odds with the democratic principles on which our great nation was founded.”

A majority of Americans don’t know the District lacks voting representation. A 2005 poll commissioned by voting-rights advocates found that 78 percent of Americans were not aware that District residents did not enjoy the same voting rights as their fellow citizens – and 82 percent of those who were unaware supported full representation for the District.

It is hard to find anyone who publicly opposes some sort of voting representation for the District, at least in principle. But there remain strong disagreements among politicians and lawyers over how to grant representation.

Remedies to the District’s disenfranchisement range from legislation to a constitutional amendment to the granting of statehood to the retrocession of all but the central governmental core of the capital to the state of Maryland. Hundreds of different proposals have emerged over the past two centuries, but all have faced practical, political and constitutional objections, and none has succeeded. A constitutional amendment granting the District a full congressional delegation passed both houses of Congress in 1978 but failed to be ratified by the necessary three-quarters of the states.The latest attempt to give the District a vote in Congress was last year’s District of Columbia House Voting Rights Act. In what Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, D-Conn., termed “an exquisitely balanced compromise,” the measure, S 1257, would have provided the District a single seat in the House of Representatives, paired with a new seat for Utah, which claimed it had been cheated of a seat by undercounting in the 2000 census. The bill won the endorsement of a broad spectrum of legal scholars, including notable conservatives such as former U.S. Solicitor General Kenneth Starr and former Assistant U.S. Attorney General Viet Dinh, a principal author of the USA Patriot Act.

The bill passed the House with wide bipartisan support and had the support of a majority of the Senate, including eight Republicans. But at the last minute the GOP leadership blocked a floor vote on the measure, effectively killing it.

The bill’s supporters accused the Republican leadership of sacrificing citizens’ fundamental democratic rights, blocking the bill on partisan political grounds simply because the District is overwhelmingly Democratic and 60 percent black. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., insisted his opposition was not meant to disenfranchise voters but only to protect the Constitution from “a bill that constitutes, in my view, a fundamental assault against it.”

“District residents who want to vote need to amend the Constitution,” McConnell said, “not cut out parts of it they don’t like.”

Currently, the bill is stalled, but voting-rights advocates are vowing to renew efforts to get it passed this spring, despite threats of a veto from the White House.

To view the entire report on CQ Researcher Online, click here. [subscription required]
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Behind the Story: Separatist Movements

by Kathy Koch, Managing Editor, CQ Global Researcher

As I watch news clips of the worldwide protests accompanying the Olympic flame's journey across the globe, I cannot help but enjoy a tiny moment of smugness over the uncanny timeliness of this month's CQ Global Researcher on "Separatist Movements." As I learned while editing the report, Tibet's separatist struggle is only one of 70 such movements – two dozen of which are currently considered "hot spots."

Of course, I had heard about Kosovo's declaration of independence in February and watched as unhappy Serbians reacted angrily by torching the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade. But until I read the report, most other separatist movements were just mysterious struggles by ethnic groups I knew almost nothing about – Kurds, Moros, Tamils, Basques, Uyghurs (who the heck are the Uyghurs?) -- living in a slew of unpronounceable regions. Where and what are Transdniestra, Nagorno-Karabakh, Xinjiang, Abkhazia and Republika Srpska?

Who knew a story on separatist movements could turn out to be so interesting? For instance, I soon learned that:

• The international community has no clear, consistent policy on separatist movements. It embraces some, while ignoring others. In fact, international laws take utterly conflicting positions within the same documents – endorsing the right to "self-determination of peoples" on one hand and espousing countries' rights to protect their "territorial integrity" on the other.

• Thanks largely to separatist movements, the number of recognized independent countries worldwide has jumped sixfold since the mid-1800s, including a huge increase just since the end of World War II. The U.N. recognizes 192 countries today -- compared to 51 in 1945.

• If they gave a prize to the country that has disintegrated into the most new nations, the former Soviet Union would win, of course, having produced 15 new countries. But I hadn’t realized that the former Yugoslavia has morphed into seven new countries since 1991. And at least one of those new countries – Bosnia and Herzegovinia (yes, it's a single country) – has a province, Republika Srpska, that's making noises about separating into yet another nation.

• And what's this about staid Belgium splitting into two countries? And who knew there are 36 secessionist organizations now at work inside the United States and that a group of dissident Lakota Indians declared their independence from the United States last December? Will it ever end?

The report delves into a host of questions raised by this proliferation of independence movements. For instance: Is all this ethnic and religious "separateness" a good thing? Could all these tiny countries ever be economically viable? What is driving this disintegration into smaller and smaller, ethnically or religiously homogeneous countries? Coming from such a large, diverse country as the United States, I just want to ask -- a la Rodney King -- "Can't they all just get along?" And what about the other ongoing trend -- towards greater regionalism? After all, isn't the mantra in today's increasingly globalizing world that we are living in a "global community" where advances in air travel and the Internet are rendering borders irrelevant? So why are all these countries splitting into smaller units – while at the same time scrambling to join regional organizations like the European Union, ASEAN, the African Union and a slew of new trading blocks. Aren't these trends counterproductive?

Creating this report was challenging on several fronts. For instance, when we wanted to create a graphic showing the growth of the number of independent countries worldwide over time, we were stumped. Where does one go to find out how many countries existed in the 19th century? We eventually found a State Department historian, who dug up the Stateman's Yearbook, which McMillan began publishing annually in 1864. The book listed only 32 countries in 1864 and 55 countries in 1900 – but with a bunch of interesting caveats. For instance, the 1864 book unabashedly stated that it included only the "states and sovereigns of the civilised world." No nations in Africa -- the interior of which was largely unmapped at that point -- were listed. And the Confederate States were listed as a separate country.

And creating a map and list of the active separatist movements around the world was equally challenging. As far as we could tell, no mainstream media has taken a comprehensive look at ongoing separatist movements as a worldwide phenomenon. Their reporters generally cover only one movement at a time. (That's what makes the CQ Global Researcher such a perfect venue for this story.) So our reporter Brian Beary worked with information from the Unrepresented Nations and People's Organization and CQ's Political Handbook of the World 2007 to draw up a list of the 22 most active separatist movements around the world. It makes interesting reading.

To view the report, click here. [subscription required]

“‘Get over it’ and Experiment”

by Marc Segers
I managed to escape the CQ Press booth at PLA in Minneapolis last week just in time to catch Michael Stephens and Jen Maney’s amazing talk on Web 2.0. And for the rest of the conference, the plane ride home, and now back at my desk one phrase is stuck in my head.

Throw out the culture of perfect

For years now, I and a number of my comrades at CQ Press have talked about creating a blog for the CQ Researcher. CQ Researcher has even published a report on blogs (subscription required) in 2006. Great ideas for blogs have come and slipped away after a chorus of the following questions. Do these sound familiar?

• Question 1: Who will write the blog? Who has time?

• Question 2: Will anybody read it?

• Question 3: Will it do everything or anything we really want it to do?

• Question 4: Who has the time to even think about this?

Jen Maney urged librarians at PLA to “Get over it….Experiment.. . .Play . . . It's what your users are doing already.” It’s time for CQ Press to finally put that well established culture of perfect in our back pocket and begin to experiment, play, and interact with our users.

“The library is participatory” as Michael Stephens proclaims. The mission of this blog is to open CQ Researcher up to be more participatory. What topics should we cover in the coming months? What’s your opinion on the latest pro/con question? What ideas do you have for making CQ Researcher better? We will share some of the behind-the-scenes, sausage-making that goes into CQ Researcher. And we will blog about how a current news story or an issue in library land remind of a long lost CQ Researcher report? But most importantly we will play.

Let us know what you think.
Email me at cqresearcherblog@cqpress.com

This Week’s Report: “Preventing Memory Loss"

by Marcia Clemmitt




Are we on the way to curing age-related dementia?

As the nation’s baby boomers age, they are increasingly worried that their memories will deteriorate – and with good reason. An estimated 10 million boomers will develop Alzheimer’s disease or another memory-destroying neurodegenerative condition in the coming years. Policy makers and health officials worry that the resulting bulge in the number of sufferers will burden the nation’s already strained health-care system. In the wake of these concerns, a vibrant brain-fitness industry is offering a variety of ways to help people keep their brains healthy, including the use of cognition-enhancing drugs and exercise. But many experts say much of what the public is being told is of limited value, at best. Intensified brain research begun years ago at the National Institutes of Health is just now beginning to produce data that scientists hope will advance efforts to prevent memory loss, but they worry that flat federal funding since 2003 may compromise the drive for solutions.

• Do we know how to retard age-related memory loss?

• Is memory loss a bigger problem today than in earlier generations?

• Are we on the way to curing Alzheimer’s disease?

To read the Overview of this week’s report, click here.
To view this week’s entire report on CQ Researcher Online, click here. [subscription required]
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Coming Up in CQ Researcher

D.C. Voting Rights
By Colin Soloway
This November, in addition to electing a new president, Americans will vote for a third of the Senate and every member of the House. The 535 men and women in Congress represent the interests of some 300 million citizens on the vital issues of the day, from war and peace to taxes and spending. But when Congress convenes next March, nearly 600,000 Americans will have no representatives to vote in their name and in their interests. Last year the House passed a bill to provide District of Columbia citizens a full vote in the House for the first time in over 200 years. The resolution is currently stalled in the Senate under threat of a Republican filibuster. Advocates of voting rights argue that there is no constitutional barrier to representation in either the House or Senate. But opponents insist that since the District is not a state, its citizens are not entitled to representation under the Constitution.

Public Defender System

By Barbara Mantel
Do indigent defendants get adequate legal representation? Over the years, several landmark Supreme Court decisions have established the right of an indigent defendant to a court-appointed attorney. But today critics say the nation’s public defender system is in crisis. Roughly 80 to 85 percent of all criminal defendants in state courts, where most crimes are prosecuted, are indigent and represented by some kind of public counsel at an annual cost to states and counties of more than $3.5 billion. But many public defense lawyers and researchers argue that much more needs to be spent because too many indigent defense systems provide inadequate representation to poor people. According to one expert in the field, there are public defender systems in the country where a single public defender will handle 1,000 cases in a year. In addition to funding, deficiencies in the system are blamed on excessive caseloads, high turnover of underpaid lawyers, poor training and supervision and judicial interference.

The U.S. and the ‘New’ Russia
By Roland Flamini
When Russian voters elected a new president on March 2, the outcome was hardly in doubt. First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, 42, is both genuinely popular and had the backing of the incumbent, Vladimir Putin. The Bush administration is hoping Medvedev will improve current U.S.-Russian tension. In 2001, Bush said he looked Putin in the eye and saw a man who was “straightforward and honest.” But it was downhill from there. Relations between Washington and the Kremlin got steadily worse after Iraq, with some experts warning that further worsening could lead to a new Cold War. The contours of U.S.-Russian differences have emerged in disagreements over how to deal with Iran’s nuclear ambitions, in diplomatic stand-offs over Kosovo, Ukraine and Georgia (Russian neighbors who want to join NATO), in disputes over gas and oil pipelines and above all in the Bush administration’s plan to put an anti-missile system in Eastern Europe. Caught in the middle as usual is Europe, the historic battlefield of Russian expansionism. French President Nicolas Sarkozy expressed the general concern – increasingly reflected in the polls – that “ Russia is imposing its return on the world scene by playing its assets, notably oil and gas, with a certain brutality.”

Coming Up in CQ Global Researcher

Separatist Movements
by Brian Beary
Some 30 new countries have been born over the past two decades – and more than a hundred new ones are clamoring for recognition. Most of the new nations have emerged from the ashes of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Their independence has been quickly recognized, and most today are functioning states. Yet around the world, many de facto states are not recognized, such as Kosovo, Somaliland, Taiwan, Transdniestra and Nagorno-Karabakh. Meanwhile, dozens of ethnic communities, such as the Kurds and Tamils, want a self-governing homeland. Why have some states and separatist movements secured international support and others not? Is separatism a consequence of the spread of democracy and human rights or symptomatic of a rise in localism, provincialism and nationalism? What is the best policy to adopt towards separatist movements? And what impact does the emergence of regional integration movements like the European Union have on separatism?

To view the report, click here. [subscription required]

In the News: Cuban Television to Broadcast Foreign Content

Cuba will begin operating a 24-hour TV channel with mostly foreign content, the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television (ICRT) has announced. The initiative will provide Cubans with more variety amid recent criticism by intellectuals over poor television programming in the socialist nation. ICRT Vice President Luis Acosta said the new channel will provide content from about a dozen countries, but did not specify details. The move comes at a time when President Raul Castro has begun lifting what he calls “excessive prohibitions.” Since becoming the country’s first new leader in nearly half a century – succeeding his ailing brother Fidel – Castro has allowed Cubans to buy mobile phones, computers and DVD players and stay at hotels formerly reserved for tourists.

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In the News: Few American Students Write Proficiently

Only one-third of eighth-grade students and one-quarter of high-school seniors in the United States write proficiently, according to the results of a nationwide test released this week. The test, federally administered in 2007, shows modest gains in the writing skills of low-performing students since the last time a similar examination was given in 2002. The skills of high-performing eighth- and 12 th-graders, however, remained flat. Girls outperformed boys at both grade levels, while New Jersey and Connecticut were the two top-performing states, with over half their students demonstrating proficiency. Despite the results, authorities at the National Assessment of Educational Progress – the board that oversees the test – praised the slight gains given recent indicators suggesting a decline in Americans’ writing abilities.

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In the News: Senate Panel Criticizes Department of Homeland Security

Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee criticized the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for pressuring reluctant states into adopting new federally approved driver’s licenses. Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., accused DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff during a hearing of “bullying” states into compliance with the Real ID program with threats of blocking citizens’ travel by rejecting licenses as a proof of identification while boarding airplanes. Leahy urged a more productive negotiating process with the states. The program, intended to strengthen the authenticity of driver’s licenses, was conceived as a security measure after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Seventeen states have already passed legislation rejecting Real ID, citing concerns over costs and privacy. Current DHS guidelines give them until May to comply with the program at the risk of having their driver’s licenses no longer accepted as federal identification.

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Overview of This Week’s Report: “Preventing Memory Loss”

When I was getting ready to go to the basketball game this afternoon, I was brushing my teeth with my battery-operated toothbrush,” and “I couldn’t remember how to turn the toothbrush off,” wrote 50-year-old Kris Bakowski of Athens, Ga., in a Feb. 24 entry in her “Dealing with Alzheimer’s” blog.

“I decided that I would just put it in the sink and . . . the batteries would . . . wear out . . . my husband would come home and shut it off, or . . . I would remember before I went to the game what I was supposed to do. . . . What fun I have sometimes!” wrote Bakowski, a former journalist and marketer who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) at age 46. She is among the estimated 5 to 10 percent of America’s 5.2 million Alzheimer’s sufferers diagnosed with the memory-destroying disease before age 65.

Bakowski’s story, chronicled with remarkable humor and acceptance, makes painfully clear the crucial – often unrecognized – role memory plays in our lives. “On my ‘foggy days’ nothing seems to really be in focus,” she wrote. “I don’t think clearly . . . not enough to really throw me off, but enough to know that I am not myself.”
Memory is “without doubt our most important possession, our most critical capacity,” said James L. McGaugh, a professor of neurobiology and behavior at the University of California, Irvine. “Memory is the ‘glue’ of our personal existence.” The experiences of each immediately past moment are memories that, “like individual frames of films that create moving pictures, merge with current momentary experiences to create the impression of . . . continuity in our lives,” he said.

But memory declines – gradually but surely – as we age. Worldwide, 84 million people are expected to have age-related memory loss by 2040.

Today’s multitasking, sleep-deprived and stressed-out culture, built around our ever-present cell phones, actually “contributes to long-term memory loss,” says Gary W. Small, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

The multiple distractions of electronically based lives are handled by the front parts of the brain – the mind’s “executive controller” – and studies have found that multitasking contributes to brain inefficiency and also “likely puts our bodies and brains into a stress response, cranking out the hormones that can damage the hippocampus memory centers,” the seat of memory encoding and consolidation, Small wrote.

Ultimately, about one-in-eight baby boomers – around 10 million Americans – will develop AD or another memory-destroying neurodegenerative disease. The cost of their care will be staggering.

Total annual care for a Medicare enrollee with Alzheimer’s or other dementia averages $13,207, compared to $4,454 for an enrollee without AD today, says Stephen McConnell, senior vice president for advocacy and public policy at the Alzheimer’s Association.

The high cost reflects the compromised care for other conditions a patient may have, McConnell explains. For example, if a doctor diagnoses diabetes and prescribes diet changes and exercise, the AD sufferer won’t remember or understand how to follow instructions, he says.

It’s no surprise, then, that the National Institute on Aging (NIA) has heavily promoted brain research as part of its elder-health agenda over the past decade and a half. NIA’s effort to bring researchers into the aging field is “a wonderful success story for the government,” says Valerie F. Reyna, a professor of human development and psychology at Cornell University. “They encouraged people to come over from other areas and effectively created a whole field.”

A freeze on health-research funding that began in 2004 may compromise that progress, many advocates argue.

Federal dollars spent on AD research fell by over $10 million annually between 2003 and 2007. That “pales in comparison” to the estimated $100 billion in federal funds spent to care for AD patients, according to a 2007 report by the Booz Allen Hamilton consulting firm for the Center for Health Transformation, a think tank headed by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga. Thus “for every dollar spent on care, less than one cent (0.65 cents) goes toward treatment and prevention,” the report added.

Nonetheless, a flood of research over the past decade has shed important new light on memory and dementia.

“We believe there are dozens and dozens of promising treatments that may enter clinical trials in the next few years,” says Eric Reiman, a professor of psychiatry and director of Alzheimer’s research at the University of Arizona.

Basic federally funded research is turning up potential AD treatments to the point where “every pharmaceutical company worth its salt is in on this now,” says Guy McKhann, a professor of neurology and neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University. Potential approaches include a vaccine or antibody to soak up the toxic products of metabolism that turn into plaques and tangles that choke the brains of AD sufferers, he says. Another possibility is “a drug to change the metabolism” of proteins so that they don’t become deadly in the first place, McKhann says.

“Earlier [AD] treatments have been targeted at the brain’s neurotransmitters” – chemicals that carry signals between neurons – beefing up those transmissions even in brain cells dying of disease, to prolong the neurons’ ability to function a bit longer, says Murray Grossman, an associate professor of neurology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Now, understanding of Alzheimer’s has advanced to include the abnormal proteins involved in the actual deterioration of brain cells, Grossman says. “But there are multiple proteins involved,” so there’s unlikely to be “one, single magic bullet,” he says.

Nevertheless, if scientists have turned up the right protein during the past decade-and-a-half of intense research, a “risk-reducing therapy” for AD could be available in as little as 12 years, Reiman says.

Understanding of memory itself – and the role of aging in its slow decline – has progressed as well, but here the complications may be even greater.

“We refer glibly to memory as if it might be one thing, but . . . it’s much more complicated than that,” said Harvard University Professor of Psychology Daniel L. Schacter. Support has grown over the past 20 years or so for “the idea that there are fundamentally different memory systems operating within the brain,” he said. For example, the “working memory,” which holds a few facts in mind for a brief period – such as when someone looks up a phone number – may be a fundamentally different and separate process from long-term memory.

With some 75 million aging baby boomers worried about losing their memories, a thriving business in “brain fitness” products – from nutritional supplements like the herb ginkgo biloba to “brain coaches” to motivate us to mental exercise – is springing up on the Internet. But research has produced little concrete information about how to preserve memory in old age.

“We do know there are specific nutrients that affect the brain,” says McKhann. “But do we know a specific diet that we can all follow? No.”

Nevertheless, small research studies and abundant anecdotal evidence back the effectiveness of some measures, says Small. For example, a two-week UCLA program that trains people on brain exercises and counsels more physical exercise and a light, heart-healthy diet has been shown to improve participants’ brain functioning, including on memory tasks, mainly by increasing “brain efficiency,” says Small. Brain scans showed that participants following the program, including its 15 minutes of daily brain exercises, developed more efficient activity in a front portion of the brain heavily involved with “working memory,” Small says.

Meanwhile, scientists say that pharmaceutical research may turn up memory-enhancing drugs that would work in the general population.

Making such drugs available to everyone could create a new branch of medicine – “cosmetic neurology” – according to Anjan Chatterjee, an associate professor in the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania. But the wide use of central-nervous-system drugs would raise both safety and ethics issues, he said.

Memory-enhancing drugs raise the specter of “another economic divide” in an education system that already favors the haves over the have-nots, said McGaugh. “The rich kids get the pill in the lunch box, and the poor kids don’t.”

To view the entire report on CQ Researcher Online, click here.[subscription required]
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