EFTA00876099.pdf

From: Gregory Brown To: undisclosed-recipients:; Bce: [email protected] Subject: Fwd: Greg Brown's Weekend Reading and Other Things.... 12/23/12 Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 17:59:36 +0000 Attachments: That Terrible_Trillion Paul_Krugman NYT_December 16,2012.pdf; A Tix Reform to_Cul_Complexity,Screase_Faimessaawrence_Summers_TWP_Dece intier_f6„20127pdf; I_am Adam Lanz_a's_Mother Liza_Long_The_Blue_Review 12 17_12.pdf; wece fact; about_guns anct_mass_shootings_in_the_Unitea_gates_Ezra_Klein_TWP_D ecembeT 15,:2012.pdf; D;_concealed- weapon laws result in less crime Glenn Kessler TWP December 17„2012.pdf; South Kfrica:Since:Mindera Bill—Keller—NYT December 16„20O.pdf; In Oiler Countries„Laws_Aie Strict_and Wort NYT EdTtorial_December 17„2012.pdf ; averyc_Global Comebackii_Gourd Tile_AtEntic_fiecember_19„2012.idf; After Recessionjfore_Young_Adults_Are_Living_on_Street_Susan_Saulny_December_l 8„2012.pdf; National Rifle - Selling_- Association NYT_EItorial_becember_20,2012.pdf; IsIRA_Press_oonference„Wayne LaPierre_Calls_For_Armed_Police_Officers_At_Every_S chool Philip_Elliott Huff Post_f2 21 12.pdf; Civiliin analysts_gZnedietraeus.=i9s ear while_he_was_commander_in_Afghanistan_ Rajiv_dandrasekaran_December_18„20I2.plif Dear Friends As most ofyou know, week ago Friday there was an horrific national tragedy — the murder of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in New Town, Connecticut — has ignited a new discussion on violence in America. As a result, in kitchens and coffee shops across the country, we tearfUloi debate the many faces of violence in America: gun culture, media violence, lack of mental health services, overt and covert wars abroad, religion, politics and the way we raise our children. In a study by the Harvard School of Public Health this year researchers found a broad array of evidence indicating that gun availability is a risk factor for homicide, both in the United States and across 26 high-income countries. Case-control studies, ecological time-series and cross-sectional studies indicated that in homes, cities, states and regions in the US, where there are more guns, both men and women are at higher risk for homicide, particularly firearm homicide. And in countries where they have imposed strict gun control laws they work. In Japan, which has very strict laws, only 11people killed with guns in 2008, compared with 12,000 deaths by firearms that year in the United States. And firearm homicides in Australia dropped 59 percent between 1995 and 2006 after strict gun laws were enacted. "One guy tries to use a shoe-bomb and now everyone at the airport has to take off their shoes, while there have 31 school shootings since Columbine, but no change " Obviously guns alone don't kill but there is empirical evidence that stricter gun laws reduce gun violence, so if we are afraid of shoe-bombers, (although no one in the world have been killed by one), shouldn't we consider imposing stronger gun laws since 12,000 Americans die each year as a result of gun violence. As Conservative Joe Scarborough said on Monday on his MSMBC show, Morning Joe, the massacre in Newtown had forced him to rethink his "long-held" belief about gun rights. In a lengthy monologue, Scarborough talked about how shaken up he had been by the killing of 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Friday. He EFTA00876099 noted that his children's ages averaged that of some of the murdered victims. "From this day forward, nothing can ever be the same again," he said. "... Let this be our true landmark ... politicians can no longer be allowed to defend the status quo." He said that he was a "conservative Republican" who had been solidly aligned with the NRA during his time in Congress, and had previously held libertarian views on the Second Amendment. But he added that Friday "changed everything": "I knew that day that the ideologies of my past career were no longer relevant to the future that I want, that I demand for my children. Friday changed everything. It must change everything. We all must begin anew and demand that Washington's old way of doing business is no longer acceptable. Entertainment moguls don't have an absolute right to glorify murder while spreading mayhem in young minds across America. And our Bill of Rights does not guarantee gun manufacturers the absolute right to sell military- style, high-caliber, semi-automatic combat assault rifles with high-capacity magazines to whoever the hell they want. It is time for Congress to put children before deadly dogmas. It's time for politicians to start focusing more on protecting our schoolyards than putting together their next fundraiser. It's time for Washington to stop trying to win endless wars overseas when we're losing the war at home ... For the sake of my four children and yours, choose life and I choose change." Joe Scarborough: Newtown Shooting Made 'Ideologies Of My Past' On Guns Irrelevant (video): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/17/joe-scarborough-newtown-shooting n 2315100.html I urge you to see this video. The society now can go in one of two directions. Either we will just accept periodic shooting sprees as one of those unfortunate things that must be lived with -- like, say, the periodic flooding and death that results from global climate change? If we go that route, even our sweetest, safest elementary schools will be turned into fortresses. The remnants of our open society will be turned into a surveillance society. We will solve our unemployment problem by hiring millions more armed guards. Alternatively, we can finally get serious about gun control. But the leadership has to come from the president. Barack Obama has a gift for moving public sentiment. If ever there were a moment to use it, on behalf on murdered first graders and others who might be spared, that moment is now. This week in Moyers & Company Bill urges us to remember the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre by name. He also rejects the notion of doubling down on guns and body armor as a response, and encourages all of us to work hard on realistic and moral solutions. "Laws are hard to come kg, civilization just as hard Bill says. -Bur democracy aimsfor a moral order as just as possible — which means laws that protect the weak, and not just the strong. - Today I ask everyone to remember: Charlotte Bacon, 6 Daniel Barden, 7 Rachel D'Avino, 29 Olivia Engel, 6 Josephine Gay, 7 Ana Marquez-Greene, 6 Dylan Hockley, 6 EFTA00876100 Dawn Hochsprung, 47 Madeleine Hsu, 6 Catherine Hubbard, 6 Chase Kowalski, 7 Jesse Lewis, 6 James Mattioli, 6 Grace McDonnell, 7 Anne Marie Murphy, 52 Emilie Parker, 6 Jack Pinto, 6 Noah Pozner, 6 Caroline Previdi, 6 Jessica Rekos, 6 Avielle Richman, 6 Lauren Rousseau, 30 Mary Sherlach, 56 Victoria Soto, 27 Benjamin Wheeler, 6 Allison Wyatt, 6 We have to reject stupidity — such as the state senator in Missouri, a life-time member of the National Rifle Association, who is pushing a bill to require that all first graders be enrolled in the NRA's gun safety course. First-graders. Six and seven years old — and the state senator in Tennessee's Republican legislature who wants to introduce a bill that would allow the state to pay for secretly armed teachers in classrooms — Arming teachers and bulletproofing kids is not the answer. Instead, we should embrace laws to register all guns. License all gun owners. Require stringent background checks. Get tough on assault weapons of any kind. Crack down on high-capacity ammunition as the President has now proposed. And then, enforce the laws. Because after the Newtown killings, a sixth-grader at an elementary school near Salt Lake City brought a gun to school, saying he wanted to protect himself and his friends. Instead, allegedly, he used it to threaten some classmates. If you're reading this, the Mayans were wrong. Whereas the truth is that they would only have been wrong if they'd actually predicted the end of the world, which scholars are pretty sure they didn't. The Maya were obsessed with time, which they saw as moving in vast cycles. They developed a sophisticated and accurate calendar, and the inscriptions indicate they calculated that a major time cycle — and thus, some people have inferred, the world — would end on Dec. 21, 2012. In the world of doomsday anticipation, there's no better source of information than an ancient soothsayer. Anything written in hieroglyphics pretty much has to be true. But experts say the inscriptions in question had nothing to do with cosmic fate and everything to do with local politics. David Stuart, director of the Mesoamerica Center at the University of Texas — and discoverer of one of the two Dec. 21 references — has explained that the date represents the 13th turn of a long cycle known as a bak'tun. In 696 A.D., when the hieroglyphs were carved, the ruler Yuknoom Yich'aak K'ahk' — standard pronunciation — was trying to enhance his power and legitimacy by associating his reign with an important turning of time's vast wheel. All that happens on the appointed date is that the next cycle begins. For the Last Days crowd, however, this was mere fine print. A new study finds that unbelievers make up the world's third-biggest "religion." And even if they didn't, most of us do not worship the Mayan gods. While present-day descendants of the Maya were unconcerned — "The world will not end," priest Alfonso Ek told USA Today — there was genuine panic in isolated parts of the non-Maya world.ln Russia, there was so much hubbub over the Dec. 21 "prophecy" that a government minister felt compelled to announce that the planet was in no imminent peril. In some remote cities there was reportedly a run on supplies such as candles and dried foods. There was reportedly a bit of panic buying in parts of China, apparently sparked by the popularity there of the EFTA00876101 Hollywood movie "2012" — a what-if blockbuster starring John Cusack that imagines all manner of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods and other calamities. Supposedly, it all has to do with neutrinos from a solar flare that somehow heat up the Earth's core. For world-enders of a New Age bent, much of the focus was on the village of Bugarach in the French Pyrenees. It happens that a famous local mountain — the Pic de Bugarach — is flat-topped, like the Devil's Tower in Wyoming, which was the setting for Steven Spielberg's alien-encounter classic "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Some New Agers see Bugarach as another likely landing spot for extraterrestrials. And what better day for them to arrive than Dec. 21, 2012? The mayor of Bugarach feared such an invasion of free spirits wanting to be beamed up that he declared the whole mountain off-limits and dispatched police to enforce his edict. We have to ask what is it that humans find so compelling about impending oblivion? Why, to some people, the prospect of sudden and utter doom seems almost comforting? But for some people it is probably due to boredom with their current lot in life. While for most people, one day is pretty much like the next. — What if something really big happened? — What if I were there to see it? How awesome would that be? We have always lived in apocalyptic times. As long as there has been a world, people have been expecting it to end. But so far it has entirely failed to oblige. Dorothy Parker noted this phenomenon. "Eat and drink and laugh and lie," she wrote, "Love the reeling midnight through. For tomorrow we may die — but, alas, we never do." So if you are reading this Happy New Baletun, everybody. THIS WEEKEND'S READINGS As Paul Krugman wrote in his article The Terrible Trillion, this week in The New York Times, that in dealing with the deficit, the trillion dollar number is so mindboggling that people get fixated on the number alone instead of dealing with underlying problems that are causing this huge deficit. Yes, America does have a long-run budget problem, thanks to our aging population and the rising cost of health care. However, the current deficit has nothing to do with that problem, and says nothing at all about the sustainability of our social insurance programs. Instead, it mainly reflects the depressed state of the economy — a depression that would be made even worse by attempts to shrink the deficit rapidly. The first thing we need to ask is what a sustainable budget would look like. The answer is that in a growing economy, budgets don't have to be balanced to be sustainable. Federal debt was higher at the end of the Clinton years than at the beginning — that is, the deficits of the Clinton administration's early years outweighed the surpluses at the end. Yet because gross domestic product rose over those eight years, the best measure of our debt position, the ratio of debt to G.D.P., fell dramatically, from 49 to 33 percent. Right now, given reasonable estimates of likely future growth and inflation, we would have a stable or declining ratio of debt to G.D.P. even if we had a Igor) billion deficit. You can argue that we should do better; but if the question is whether current deficits are sustainable, you should take $400 billion off the table right away. That still leaves $600 billion or so. What's that about? It's the depressed economy — full stop. First of all, the weakness of the economy has led directly to lower revenues; when G.D.P. falls, the federal tax take falls too, and in fact always falls substantially more in percentage terms. On top of that, revenue is temporarily depressed by tax breaks, notably the payroll tax cut, that have been put in place to support the economy but will be withdrawn as soon as the economy is stronger (or, unfortunately, even before then). If you do the math, it seems likely that full economic recovery would raise revenue by at least $450 billion. Meanwhile, the depressed economy has also temporarily raised spending, because more people qualify for unemployment insurance and means-tested programs like food stamps and Medicaid. A reasonable estimate is that economic recovery would reduce federal spending on such programs by at least We billion. Putting all this together, it turns out that the trillion-dollar deficit isn't a sign of unsustainable finances at all. Some of the deficit is in fact sustainable; just about all of the rest would go away if we had an economic recovery. And the prospects for economic recovery are looking pretty• good right now — or would be looking good if it weren't for the political risks posed by Republican hostage-taking. Housing is reviving, consumer debt is down, employment has improved steadily among prime-age workers. Unfortunately, this recovery EFTA00876102 may well be derailed by the fiscal cliff and/or a confrontation over the debt ceiling; but this has nothing to do with the alleged unsustainability of the deficit. Which brings us back to ONE TRILLION DOLLARS. We do indeed have a big budget deficit, and other things equal it would be better if the deficit were a lot smaller. But other things aren't equal; the deficit is a side-effect of an economic depression, and the first order of business should be to end that depression — which means, among other things, leaving the deficit alone for now. And you should recognize all the hyped-up talk about the deficit for what it is: yet another disingenuous attempt to scare and bully the body politic into abandoning programs that shield both poor and middle-class Americans from harm. As Lawrence Summers wrote in The Washington Post this past week in an op-ed titled, A tax reform to cut complexity, increasefairness, who makes several suggestions to the U.S. tax code to raise revenues, add fairness and reduce complexity. So far the debate has focused on scaling back provisions of the tax code that have favored activities traditionally deemed valuable. There is talk of reducing relief for charitable contributions, taxes paid to state and local governments, home mortgages, employer-provided health insurance and more. Reasonable arguments can be made in each case. But taking only the "limit tax incentives" approach to reform has several major defects. • First, if reform is designed to avoid perverse outcomes, such as the crushing of charitable contributions or more pressure on state budgets, then it will raise only limited amounts of revenue. • Second, this approach will address very little of the code's complexity and is unlikely to do much for recovery, as it will do little to increase demand. • Third, it will do little to address concerns about fairness because the richest taxpayers actually make relatively little use of deductions and credits. What's needed is an element that has largely been absent to date: the numerous exclusions from the definition of adjusted gross income that enable the accumulation of great wealth with the payment of little or no taxes. The issue of the special capital gains treatment of carried interest — performance fee income for investment managers - is only the tip of a very large iceberg. Far too many provisions favor a small minority of very fortunate taxpayers. They effectively permit the accumulation of wealth to go substantially underreported on income and estate tax returns, which forces the federal government to consider excessive increases in tax rates if it is to reach any given revenue target. Whether their primary concern is preserving incentives for small businesses, closing prospective budget deficits or protecting the social safety net, all parties should be able to agree that it should not be possible to accumulate and transfer large fortunes while almost entirely avoiding taxation. Yet this is all too possible today. Here are some issues the Obama administration and Congress should consider in light of the magnitude of prospective deficits and the extraordinary good fortune of those at the top of the income distribution: • Current valuation practices built into the tax code make it possible for investment partners to end up with $50 million or more in tax-free individual retirement accounts when most Americans are constrained by a $5,000 annual contribution limit. • Our estate tax system is broken. Assets passed to relatives or other personal relations are often badly misvalued relative to what they cost on an open market. The total wealth of American households is estimated at more than $60 trillion. It is heavily concentrated in very few hands. An estimated $1.2 trillion, or 2 percent, is passed down each year, mostly from the very rich. Yet estate and gift taxes raise less than $12 billion, or 1 percent of this figure, annually. • If a family's home rises in value by more than a $500,000 exclusion over the course of its dwelling, then the owners pay capital gains tax on the difference between the value now and the value at purchase. But real estate investment operators, who sell properties whose value is measured in the hundreds of millions - if not billions — of dollars, are able to take tax deductions for "depreciation" on their properties. They are then able to sell these properties at an appreciated price while avoiding capital gains tax through what EFTA00876103  is known as a "like kind exchange." This is in fact a sale. Why should international companies be able to locate the lion's share of their foreign income in low-tax jurisdictions such as Bermuda, the Netherlands and Ireland and avoid paying taxes? There are sound arguments for a preferential rate on capital gains. But is there real justification for allowing those who do not need to sell their assets to finance retirement to avoid capital gains taxes entirely by including them in their estates? These rules that permit the taxes of the most fortunate Americans to be far less than commensurate with their good fortune have the virtue of being relatively comprehensible. Many others, involving issues such as derivative accounting, pooled interests and leveraged leases, are neither easily explainable nor easily justified. The failure to tax capital gains at the point of death costs the federal government about $50 billion a year. Since its removal would raise money in the future, and induce earlier and greater realizations of capital gains in the short term, its removal would probably add more than $500 billion over a 10-year period. i believe it is plausible to raise $1 trillion over the next 10 years by going after provisions that cause what adds to wealth and spending not to be regarded as income. It is said that the greatest scandals are not the illegal things thatpeople do but the things that are legal. This is surely true with respect to a tax code in urgent need ofreform. Three days before 20 year-old Adam Lanza killed his mother, then opened fire on a classroom full of Connecticut kindergartners, writer Liza Long's 13-year old son Michael (name changed) missed his bus because he was wearing the wrong color pants. "I can wear these pants," he said, his tone increasingly belligerent, the black-holepupils ofhis eyes swallowing the blue irises. "They are navy blue," I told him. "Your school's dress code says black or khakipants only" "They toldme I could wear these," he insisted. "You're a stupid bitch. I can wear whatever pants I want to. This is America. I have rights!" "You can't wear whatever pants you want to," I said, my tone affable, reasonable. "Andyou definitely cannot call me a stupid bitch. You're groundedfrom electronicsfor the rest of the day. Now get in the can andI will take you to school." Liza Long lives with a son who is mentally ill. She loves her son. But he terrifies her. "A few weeks ago, Michaelpulled a knife and threatened to kill me and then himselfafter I asked him to return his overdue library books. His 7 and 9 year old siblings knew the safety plan—they ran to the car and locked the doors before I even asked them to. I managed to get the knifefrom Michael, then methodically collected all the sharp objects in the house into a single Tupperware container that now travels with me. Through it all, he continued to scream insults at me and threaten to kill or hurt me. That conflict ended with three burly police officers and a paramedic wrestling my son onto a gurneyfor an expensive ambulance ride to the local emergency room. The mental hospital didn't have any beds that day, and Michael calmed down nicely in the ER, so they sent us home with a prescriptionfor Zyprexa and afollow-up visit with a localpediatric psychiatrist. We still don't know what's wrong with Michael. Autism spectrum, ADHD, Oppositional Defiant or Intermittent Explosive Disorder have all been tossed around at various meetings with probation officers and social workers and counselors and teachers and school administrators. He's been on a slew ofantipsychotic and mood altering pharmaceuticals, a Russian novel of behavioral plans. Nothing seems to work. At the start of seventh grade, Michael was accepted to an acceleratedprogram for highly gifted math and science students. His IQ is off the charts. When he's in a good mood, he will gladly bend your ear on subjects rangingfrom Greek mythology to the differences between Einsteinian and Newtonian physics to Doctor Who. He's in a good mood most of the time. But when he's not, watch out. And it's impossible to predict what will set him off This problem is too bigfor me to handle on my own. Sometimes there are no good options. So youjust prayfor grace and trust that in hindsight, it will all make sense. I am sharing this story because I am Adam Lanza's mother. I am Dylan Klebold:r and Eric Harris's mother. I am James Holmes's mother. I am Jared Loughner:v mother: I am Seung-Hui Cho's mother. And these boys—and their EFTA00876104 mothers—need help. In the wake of another horrific national tragedy, it's easy to talk about guns. But it's time to talk about mental illness. According to Mother Jones, since 1982, 61mass murders involvingfirearms have occurred throughout the country. Ofthese, 43 of the killers were white males, and only one was a woman. Mother Jonesfocused on whether the killers obtained their guns legally (most did). But this highly visible sign ofmental illness should lead us to consider how many people in the US. live infear; like I do. When I asked my son's social worker about my options, he said that the only thingI could do was to get Michael charged with a crime. "Ifhe's back in the system, they'll create a paper trail," he said. "That's the only way you're ever going to get anything done. No one willpay attention to you unless you've got charges." I don't believe my son belongs in jail. The chaotic environment exacerbates Michael's sensitivity to sensory stimuli and doesn't deal with the underlyingpathology. But it seems like the United States is usingprison as the solution ofchoicefor mentally ill people. According to Human Rights Watch, the number ofmentally ill inmates in U.S. prisons quadrupledfrom 2000 to 2006, and it continues to rise—infact, the rate ofinmate mental illness isfive times greater (56 percent) than in the non-incarceratedpopulation. With state-run treatment centers and hospitals shuttered, prison is now the last resortfor the mentally ill—Rikem Island, the LA County Jail and Cook County Jail in Illinois housed the nation's largest treatment centers in 2011. No one wants to send a 13-year old genius who loves Harry Potter and his snuggle animal collection to jail. But our society, with its stigma on mental illness and its broken healthcare system, does not provide us with other options. Then another tortured soul shoots up afastfood restaurant. A mall. A kindergarten classroom. And we wring our hands and say, "Something must be done." Something must be done. time for a meaningfid, nation-wide conversation about mental health. That's the only way our nation can ever truly heal." Lint Long: God help me. God help Michael. God help us all. As Ezra Klein wrote in his article Twelve facts about guns and mass shootings in the United States this week in The Washington Post — here are the facts: 1. Shooting sprees are not rare in the United States: Since 1982, there have been at least 61 mass murders carried out with firearms across the country, with the killings unfolding in 30 states from Massachusetts to Hawaii. And in most cases, the killers had obtained their weapons legally. 2. 15 of the 25 worst mass shootings in the last 50 years took place in the United States: In second place is Finland, with two entries. 3. Lots of guns don't necessarily mean lots of shootings, examples being Israel and Switzerland: In recent years both have tightened their gun laws substantially, 4. Of the 11 deadliest shootings in the US, five have happened from 2007 onward: That doesn't include Friday's shooting in Sandy Hook, Connecticut whose death toll at 27, would make it the second- deadliest mass shooting in US history. 5. America is an unusually violent country. But we're not as violent as we used to be: Death due to assault is half of its all time high in the mid-1970s, but more than triple that of developed countries and more than four times if you take out Estonia, Mexico and Brazil. 6. The South is the most violent region in the United States: There are 7.1 per 1000 assault deaths in the South verses a low of 4.2 per 1000 in the Northeast. EFTA00876105  7. Gun ownership in the United States is declining overall: Currently approximately around 44% down from almost 51% in 1970 for legal gun ownership. 8. More guns tend to mean more homicide: The Harvard Injury Control Research Center found that there's substantial evidence that indicates more guns means more murders. 9. States with stricter gun control laws have fewer deaths from gun-related violence: Last year, economist Richard did a study that States with tighter gun control laws appear to have fewer gun-related deaths, even when Higher populations, more stress, more immigrants, and more mental illness were factored in. 10. Gun control, in general, has not been politically popular: "The percentage in favor of making the laws governing the sale of firearms `more strict' fell from 78% in 1990 to 62% in 1995, and 51% in 2007," rej ts Gallup. "In the most recent reading, Gallup in 2010 found 44% in favor of stricter laws. I am sure that there is more support for gun control since last Friday's latest shooting. 11. But particular policies to control guns often are: An August CNN/ORC poll asked respondents whether they favor or oppose a number of specific policies to restrict gun ownership. And when you drill down to that level, many policies, including banning the manufacture and possession of semi-automatic rifles, are popular. 12. Shootings don't tend to substantially affect views on gun control: After the shootings: Even after the mass shootings at Virginia Tech in 2004, Tucson, Arizona in 2011 and in Aurora, Colorado in July 2012 there has been little change in support for more gun control laws. WHY? Only with gun violence do we respond to repeated tragedies by saying that mourning is acceptable but discussing how to prevent more tragedies is not. "Too soon," howl supporters of loose gun laws. But as others have observed, talking about how to stop mass shootings in the aftermath of a string of mass shootings isn't "too soon." It's much too late. Ezra Klein Last Sunday on "Fox News Sunday," (Dec. 16, 2012) Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) said: "The facts are every time guns have been allowed, concealed-carry has been allowed, the crime rate has gone down." Gohmert said of slain principal Dawn Hochsprung: "I wish to God she had had an M-4 [assault rifle] in her office, locked up so when she heard gunfire, she pulls it out and she didn't have to lunge heroically with nothing in her hands, but she takes him out, takes his head off before he can kill those precious kids." First of all, wasn't the first victim of the shooting rampage last Friday — Nancy Lanza, was killed by her own gun and shot by her own son whom she lived in the same house with. In The Washington Post this week Glenn Kessler, gave Representative Gohmert Three Pinocchios: Gohmert's statement was declarative and sweeping: "Thefacts are eve'', time guns have been allowed, concealed-carry has been allowed, the crime rate has gone down." Of all of the people that I have met in my life, there is no one more special than Nelson Mandela and I am sure this is true for everyone else (from Bill Clinton, Michael Jackson to Bono) who was gifted the opportunity to meet him as well. As Bill Keller wrote in his article South Africa Since Mandela this week in The Washington Post — IN 1994, shortly after Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as the first president of all South Africans, one of the local newspapers ran an interview with him under a huge, boldface headline: "MANDELA: I'M NOT EFTA00876106 `MESSIAH.' " That this would be considered banner news testified to the degree of myth and the unreality of expectations that attended the man. Mandela is now 94 and hospitalized, recovering from gallstone surgery and a lung infection. But his most valuable gift to South Africa was a culture of patient compromise. He did not triumph over apartheid by spending 27 years in prison and then cashing in his moral superiority. He triumphed by spending 27 years in prison and then doing an elaborate deal with the men who put him there — a deal that temporarily protected the jobs, the lands and the industrial wealth of the white minority, a deal that made the disenfranchised majority wait patiently for their reparations, a deal that minimized the flight of white capital and expertise and averted a prolonged blood bath. He was, in short, a politician, of a sort that was rare in the African National Congress then and is in woefully short supply today, here and in Washington: a politician with high purpose, a clear eye on the future, an immense generosity of spirit and deep reserves of discipline and resourcefulness. For what he left in his wake was not really a government yet, or even a genuine political party, but a liberation movement, with the mentality, customs and culture of constant struggle. History tells us that such liberation movements do not so easily make the transition to stable democracies. Think of the heritage Tito, the tyranny of Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, the long nightmare of the Bolsheviks or Kwame Nkrumah's descent into authoritarian rule in Ghana. Examples abound. Even our own revolution required a civil war to settle things. Liberation movements are held together and defined by what they are against. The African National Congress, which is marking its centenary year, was from its early days a conglomeration of interests and ideologies, from rainbow-coalition idealists to black nationalists who chanted for the blood of white farmers, from Communists to Westemizers, from guilt-ridden white liberals to power-hungry opportunists. It had exile factions and in-country factions, prison factions and underground factions. It was inevitable that, once the shared enemy of white oppression was conquered, they would fall to quarreling over the direction and the spoils. I watched this first hand, as he was denied his first-choice of Cyril Ramaphosa as his deputy and successor and being a party man (compromiser) settled for Thabo Mbeki whom it is said, he didn't like or trust. But he remained a party man at heart — to such an extent that he let the party elders choose as his first deputy president and successor a man, Thabo Mbeki, whom Mandela did not much like or trust. (It was rumored that after retiring, Mandela took sensitive conversations outdoors because he believed Mbeki had bugged his home.) Mbeki was not as awful a president as he expanded a safety net to a lot of desperate people, and contributed to a first-world business climate that made outside investors feel welcome. But ultimately he fell into a kind of paranoid isolation — the most horrifying symptom being his insistence that the rampaging South African AIDS crisis was a white-invented myth. The party stripped him of his office in a grotesque ritual humiliation — the kind of knives-out display that is customary for liberation parties feeling their power. On top of this, like Larry Holmes who followed Muhammad Ali there was little chance for Mbeki to ever fill Mandela's shoes and everyone knew this adding to his paranoia. Mbeki's surrnsor Jacob Zuma, singular accomplishment has been to make Mbeki look like a paragon of virtue, having diverted many millions of dollars of state money and special-interest largess to enlarge a lavish homestead in a region, Nkandla. The newspaper headlines in South Africa post daily scream of scandal, beginning at the very top with President. One crude measure of South Africa's moral decline is to compare Zuma's fortress — helicopter pad, tennis courts and soccer field, planned underground bunkers — with the retirement refuge Mandela built, its blueprint copied from the warden's cottage at the prison on Robin Island — for the very Mandela-esque reason that the floor plan was familiar. Liberation movements — prizing ends over means — are not always particular about their friends or scrupulous about their transactions. President Mandela left no record of being on the take, but he was always accessible to the businessmen who tithed to the A.N.C. And yes he turned a blind eye to regimes (Kaddafi, Mugabe, dos Santos) that backed the A.N.C. in exile. In the 18 years since coming to power the A.N.C. government has created a substantial black middle class and a smaller, conspicuous cadre of black privilege. But it has not — perhaps could not have — significantly narrowed the gulf between the shack-dwelling underclass and everyone else. This inequality breeds serious resentment, violent protests over undelivered services, strikes, fatalism. The urgent question now is whether the movement that is Mandela's bequest to his country can mature into a more credible government before the public runs out of its famous patience and starts looking for a new messiah. Finally: Having been going to South Africa since 1975, unlike Bill Keller, I have yet to meet a Black in South Africa who speak of apartheid times with nostalgia. "I beg you to accept that there is no people on Earth who would not prefer their own bad government to the good government of an alien power" Mahatma Gandhi In the Editorial - In Other Countries, Laws Are Strict and Work - in the New York Times this week they point to a Harvard School of Public Health study of 26 developed countries that wherever there are more firearms, there are more homicides. In the case of the United States, exponentially more: the American murder rate is roughly 15 times that of other wealthy countries, EFTA00876107 which have much tougher laws controlling private ownership of guns. There's another important difference between this country and the rest of the world. Other nations have suffered similar rampages, but they have reacted quickly to impose new and stricter gun laws. Australia is an excellent example. In 1996, a "pathetic social misfit," as a judge described the lone gunman, killed 35 people with a spray of bullets from semiautomatic weapons. Within weeks, the Australian government was working on gun reform laws that banned assault weapons and shotguns, tightened licensing and financed gun amnesty and buyback programs. At the time, the prime minister, John Howard, said, "We do not want the American disease imported into Australia." The laws have worked. The American Journal of Law and Economics reported in 2010 that firearm homicides in Australia dropped 59 percent between 1995 and 2006. In the 18 years before the 1996 laws, there were 13 gun massacres resulting in 102 deaths, according to Harvard researchers, with none in that category since. Similarly, after 16 children and their teacher were killed by a gunman in Dunblane, Scotland, in 1996, the British government banned all private ownership of automatic weapons and virtually all handguns. Those changes gave Britain some of the toughest gun control laws in the developed world on top of already strict rules. Hours of exhaustive paperwork are required if anyone wants to own even a shotgun or rifle for hunting. The result has been a decline in murders involving firearms. In Japan, which has very strict laws, only it people killed with guns in 2008, compared with 12,000 deaths by firearms that year in the United States — a huge disparity even accounting for the difference in population. As Mayor Michael Bloomberg stressed on Monday while ratcheting up his national antigun campaign, "We are the only industrialized country that has this problem. In the whole world, the only one." NYT: Americans do not have to settle for that. Although it is the 21g Century and slavery in almost everywhere was abolished in the 19th Century as J.J. Gould wrote this week in his article Slavery's Global Comeback in The Atlantic, it is.... And it is coming back big time. Contemporary slavery is real, and it's terribly common -- across Southeast Asia, and around the world. It is said that today the global slave population is somewhere between 20 to 30 million people. Most of these people are in sedentary forms of slavery, such as hereditary collateral-debt bondage. Although a large percentage having been unwittingly trafficked though the promise of opportunity by predators through varying combinations of deception and coercion, very mobile, very dynamic, leveraging communications and logistics in the same basic way modern businesses do generally. After the earthquake of 2010 devastated Haiti, Hispaniola was quickly overrun with opportunistic traffickers targeting children to sell into domestic slavery or brothels. Others are children literally sold by parents or relatives in order to pay off debt or to lessen their economic burden. The highest ratios of slaves worldwide are from South and Southeast Asia, along with China, Russia, Albania, Belarus, and Romania. There is a significant slave presence across North Africa and the Middle East, including Lebanon. There is also a major slave trade in Africa. Descent-based slavery persists in Mauritania, where children of slaves are passed on to their slave-holders' children. And then there is the North Korean gulag system, which holds 200,000 people, is essentially a constellation of slave-labor camps. As pervasive as contemporary slavery is, it only came into focus as a global issue until recently. There are a couple of big reasons why -- one having to do with the scale of the problem, the other with the idea of slavery itself. In which case, assuming even the rough accuracy of 27 million, there are likely more slaves in the world today than there have been at any other time in human history. For some quick perspective on that point: Over the entire 350 years of the transatlantic slave trade, 13.5 million people were taken out of Africa, meaning there are twice as many enslaved right now as there had been in that whole 350-year span. EFTA00876108 Right after the end of the Cold War, people in Western cities -- in Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, London, New York -- started noticing something pronounced about migration patterns out of the just-collapsed Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc: The "immigrants" were disproportionately young women and girls. It didn't take much time to realize that they were prostitutes, while it took much longer to understand that they weren't operating freely; and that criminals were trafficking them out of Eurasia effectively as black-market goods, like opium or Kalashnikovs. Slavery is such an ugly word that for "gender-based violence" or "rape as a weapon of war" to describe what goes on in eastern Congo -- rape becomes the more comfortable word than slavery. As such over the past 15 years, "trafficking in persons" and "human trafficking" have been used as umbrella terms for activities involved when someone obtains or holds a person in compelled service. Slavery today is driven by the same political, technological, and economic forces as globalization itself. Although slavery has been around since the birth of mankind, there have been three major anti-slavery movements in the modern era prior to the nascent contemporary one. The first was started in 1787 by Anti- Slavery International -- or as it was called at the time, the Society for Effecting the Termination of the Slave Trade -- in London. Twenty years later, the slave trade in the British Empire was finished. This worked completely through social mobilization; in fact, it was one of the first major social movements in the West. The second anti-slavery movement was marked by the most decisive moral leadership in U.S. history, but it was also thwarted by a total social division between the North and the South, with virtually total Southern intransigence, and culminated an enormous war that resulted in upward of three-quarters of a million deaths and new troubles for the United States' former slaves that have cast a long shadow since. The third movement is less well known but offers a precedent for contemporary abolitionism that may be in some ways as compelling as the first. This was the global movement, which included luminaries like Mark Twain and Sarah Bernhardt, against the enslavement of between 5 and 10 million people in the Congo as the personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium. The purpose of this enslavement was to feed new technologies, particularly pneumatic rubber tires. What stopped this movement was the new technology of the portable cameras that enabled abolitionists to do magic-lantern shows/documentaries in big theaters across Europe and America -- detailing the destitution in the Congo and the routine physical mutilation of slaves who failed to meet their "rubber quotas," which truly freaked viewers out and helped mobilize the public broadly. After this anti-slavery campaign captured the photos it captured and showed them, Leopold, who had completely denied everything until then -- and he could, because there was no way to prove what he was doing -- gave up, ended the enslavement, and, in 1908, relinquished the Congo to the Belgian government. As for the fourth, the most optimistic view says that as massive as slavery is today, it's also on the edge of its own extinction, needing only the right push. If the global slave population is 27 million, it's still 27 million out of a total of 7 billion, making it -- and here's the paradox -- the smallest fraction of the global population to be enslaved ever. If slavery generates between $30 billion and $45 billion a year to the global economy, it's a big industry, but it also amounts to the smallest ratio of the global economy ever represented by slave labor and slave output. While slavery has grown in absolute terms, it's shrunk in relative terms, and so, the theory goes, it's increasingly vulnerable. But the fact that there is around 30 million humans living in absolute slavery/forced labor and the more than 100 million plus living in "near slavery" in the 21st Century should be seen as a disease akin to Small Pox and Polio that has to be eradicated as soon as possible. .... And by keeping a light on slavery in every or in any form will hasten its eradication. EFTA00876109 As Susan Saulny wrote this week in The New York Times - After Recession, More Young Adults Are Living on Street. Across the country, tens of thousands of underemployed and jobless young people, many with college credits or work histories, are struggling to house themselves in the wake of the recession, which has left workers between the ages of 18 and 2.4 with the highest unemployment rate of all adults. Those who can move back home with their parents — the so-called boomerang set — are the lucky ones. But that is not an option for those whose families have been hit hard by the economy, including Mr. Taylor, whose mother is barely scraping by while working in a laundromat. Without a stable home address, they are an elusive group that mostly couch surfs or sleeps hidden away in cars or other private places, hoping to avoid the lasting stigma of public homelessness during what they hope will be a temporary predicament. These young adults are the new face of a national homeless population, one that poverty experts and case workers say is growing. Yet the problem is mostly invisible. Most cities and states, focusing on homeless families, have not made special efforts to identify young adults, who tend to shy away from ordinary shelters out of fear of being victimized by an older, chronically homeless population. The unemployment rate and the number of young adults who cannot afford college "point to the fact there is a dramatic increase in homelessness" in that age group, said Barbara Poppe, the executive director of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness. The Obama administration has begun an initiative with nine communities, most of them big cities, to seek out those between 18 and 24 who are without a consistent home address. New York, Houston, Los Angeles, Cleveland and Boston are among the cities included in the effort. Los Angeles first attempted a count of young adults living on the street in 2011. It found 3,600, but the city had shelter capacity for only 17 percent of them. "The rest are left to their own devices," said Michael Arnold, the executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. "And when you start adding in those who are couch surfing and staying with friends, that number increases exponentially." Boston also attempted counts in 2010 and 2011. The homeless young adult population seeking shelter grew 3 percentage points to 12 percent of the 6,000 homeless people served over that period. For generations, services for the homeless were directed to