Vol. 1 No. 12 April 2003

Uncommon Denominator

The Newsletter of the Commonweal Institute

http://www.commonwealinstitute.org/

“I wish that strife would vanish away from among gods and mortals, and . . .

anger that swarms like smoke inside of a man’s heart and becomes

a thing sweeter to him by far than the dripping of honey.”

– Achilles, The Iliad

TALKING POINTS

With the apparent completion of the initial phase of the war in Iraq (the continuing skirmishes, both political and military, will continue for a while), the Uncommon Denominator would like take this opportunity to take stock of the situation. With both whimsy and gravity, we offer the following observations about the war:

Most Desirable Outcomes. A better life for the Iraqi people. A revitalized country that ably balances pluralism, self-determination, and civil liberties. Harmonious relationships with Iraq’s neighbors and the world community. A world in which the threats of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction are diminished. An American administration and public that are humbled rather than inflated by our display of military power.

Least Desirable Outcomes. The radicalization of large numbers of young Arab and Muslim men. Breakup of Iraq into warring fiefdoms. The acceleration of an informal diplomatic partnership among European and Asian nations designed to counterbalance American power. Proliferation of nuclear armaments. A successful effort by the American right to identify love of country with political conservatism, further stifling open debate.

Most Dangerous Prospect for the Iraqi People. That their country becomes the next Lebanon. Look at what happened the Beirut, the erstwhile cultural jewel of the Middle East, which was destroyed by internal factionalism and external opportunism. The risk to Iraq is that the U.S. will not fully commit to its reconstruction, which will require great patience and attention, an openness to other viewpoints and to methods of compromise, and a willingness to spend billions of dollars on other people’s welfare. Unfortunately, our track record in such places as Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Haiti is not so good. But the stakes are higher this time.

Most Narrowly Averted Catastrophe. The burning of hundreds of oil wells. This time, Iraq only set nine oil wells on fire. Horrific environmental and human damage would have resulted if American and British forces had not moved quickly to secure the wells in southern Iraq. While the motives for securing these wells are multiple – a fear of environmental disaster, a desire to protect the oil for the Iraqi people, and an interest in lubricating the global and American oil markets – the military and political leadership nonetheless deserve credit for this part of the campaign.

Worst Catastrophe That Could Have Been Easily Averted. The looting of Iraq’s national museum. A violation of the historical identity and cultural patrimony of Iraq on a scale unseen since the burning of the library at Alexandria in 48 B.C. Whether or not it was an organized outside job (as many believe), the disappearance of ancient Mesopotamian artifacts into private hands or into the international black market for antiquities could have been prevented. The military and its civilian leaders could have foreseen it. After all, they managed quickly to secure the Oil Ministry. (Close runners-up: the looting of some of Iraq’s hospitals, and the destruction of a number of archaeological sites).

Most Misleading Misnomer. “Coalition forces.” This is the standard phrase used in the American media but not in anybody else’s. Even if it’s just the 1st Infantry or the 101st Airborne or the 3rd Mechanized Division, what we hear is “coalition forces.” This is a significant distortion because it misrepresents the political context of war, where the main story was the failure of the United States to get more than token help from anybody except the Brits. (Honorable mention to “fierce battle,” often used when hundreds of Iraqis and no Americans died. The battles were fierce, certainly, from the perspective of those being shot at, but the term implies an engagement more balanced than a turkey shoot.)

Most Objectionable Euphemism. “Softening up.” Only one military official, to our knowledge, had the guts to say: “We’re not softening up the Republican Guard; we’re killing them.” Excited media commentators, nonetheless, blithely continued to use the creepy phrase, as though the military were softening up butter to make shortbread.

Most Likely American to Appear Next to Laura Bush as the Honored Guest at the 2004 State-of-the-Union Address. Hands-down: Jessica Lynch, the 19-year-old girl-next-door who survived a fierce battle with Fedayeen Saddam and gritted her way through more than a week of captivity as a POW.

Most Egregious Media Jingoism. The main award goes to Fox News, the American Al Jazeera, for its finger-jabbing conservatism and ideological uniformity. The award for individual jingoism, however, goes to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough (the former Republican Congressman from Florida), whose hour-long “news” show included (and probably still does include) such topics as “Are Democrats Unpatriotic?” and “The Left’s Latest Lies.”

Most Welcome Reappearance of an Old-Fashioned Word. “Ought,” with full credit to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. People “ought not to be surprised” that there was looting in Baghdad. The media “ought not to assume” that coalition forces will not encounter fierce battles while softening up the Republican Guard.

Most Heartening Moment. A variety of moments, really, when our young people in uniform showed themselves to be free of the racial hate that war can bring out in people. There were orders to be culturally sensitive, of course, but the Uncommon Denominator believes that the vast majority of soldiers have genuinely avoided the kind of racism that developed in Viet Nam or even in World War II. That’s a good sign for our country.

Least Expected Good News for Latin Americans and Africans. The United States, which has always been the leading opponent of debt forgiveness, now wants a number of nations, including Russia, to forgive billions of dollars of Iraqi debt as a way of contributing to the reconstruction effort. Although the concept of “odious debts” and debt forgiveness is a complicated issue, with cogent arguments on different sides, it is still true that the people of such countries as Mozambique and the Dominican Republic would be well served by debt forgiveness. It is also true that the money owed by most of these Latin American and African countries is pennies next to the tens of billions owed by Iraq.

WIT AND WISDOM

“More looting in Iraq today and that’s just by Fox News. A TV engineer for Fox News has been charged with trying to smuggle stolen Iraqi paintings into the U.S. No wonder they got so much good video of all those people looting, they were right there with them. Well, let's just hope his jury is 'fair and balanced' as Fox News.” – Jay Leno

AROUND THE CORNER

Where medical knowledge goes, perhaps environmental policy should follow. Over the past half century, as we know, modern medicine has increasingly emphasized a proactive, preventive approach to bodily affliction. Better to cut cholesterol, the thinking goes, than to call the heart surgeon. The same thinking underlies a recent concept in ecology called the “precautionary principle,” which aims at identifying environmental risks and implementing policies that will head off environmental damage before it occurs.

In the 1980s, the precautionary principle began appearing in policy statements and mechanisms in Europe and Canada, and it has been written into international treaties such as the North Atlantic Treaty, the Maastricht Treaty on the European Union, and the 1992 Rio Declaration from the UN Conference on Environment and Development (Agenda 21), to which the United States is a signatory. In 1998, at the Wingspread Conference on the precautionary principle, an international gathering of scientists, government officials, lawyers, labor representatives, and environmental activists formulated some of the principle’s key components:

§ When an activity or policy potentially threatens human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken, even if certain cause-and-effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.

§ The burden of proof regarding environmental damage falls not on the public but on the specific proponents and actors behind a given activity or policy.

§ Application of the precautionary principle must be open, informed, and democratic, and must include potentially affected parties. It must also involve an examination of the full range of alternatives, including no action.

Simply put, the precautionary principle embodies a philosophy of “better safe than sorry” in matters of commerce, industry, environmental law, and public health.

So how can the precautionary principle be put into practice? One approach is an open, public review process for evaluating new products and technologies before they are manufactured and marketed – similar to the current system of vetting new pharmaceutical medicines. In addition to protecting public health, this review process promotes transparency in decision-making and greater accountability in the private sector. Another precautionary approach is to require insurance bonds from private entities whose proposals have the potential for causing environmental damage. This would provide a means of offsetting or covering the monetary costs of clean-up or repair. (Compare this to the Superfund approach, where taxpayers, not polluters, are footing the bill for a variety of environmental disaster sites, while the perpetrators walk away with money in their pockets). In each case, the fundamental idea is to create powerful incentives for private actors to anticipate and avert the environmental harm that their products or activities might cause down the road, rather than making a mess and then trying to duck responsibility.

These incentives are carrots as well as sticks; they are based not just on regulation but on the market. Certainly some new products might be more expensive to bring to market, at least in the short term. But there are long-term savings overall to the business community when no harm is done to the environment or to the public health – savings in terms of litigation, public reputation, and mandated environmental restoration. Indeed, new, cleaner technologies have become increasingly important and popular exports for countries that have begun incorporating the precautionary principle into their economies. In the United States, even companies without great environmental track records are discovering the economic advantages of sustainability – including Texaco, Dow, and Hewlett-Packard. The rapidly emerging field of biomimicry – taking lessons from nature as a basis for innovation – promises to be a rich source of technological concepts that will be more friendly to living systems.

There’s still a long way to go, and the precautionary principle per se is not always the motivating factor for cleaner, greener business practices, but the signs are encouraging. (For news on this front, check out a company called Clean Edge, whose mission is “to help companies and investors understand and profit from the clean-tech revolution and to catalyze the development of clean-tech companies and markets.”)

For more information on the precautionary principle, take a look at: the Science and Environmental Health Network (SEHN), AG Biotech Infonet, and the Environmental Research Foundation. A particularly useful document is SEHN’s Precautionary Principle Handbook, a practical implementation guide for communities and environmental groups.

Some critics of the precautionary principle fear that it will cut into corporate profits. Others, operating at a somewhat higher level, argue that it will stifle the spirit of innovation that has yielded products beneficial to the well-being of humankind. That does not have to be the case, however, if the precautionary principle is implemented in a sensible and forethoughtful way. And after all, those critics who are concerned about entangling red tape are engaged, even if they don’t realize it, in the very dynamic that the precautionary principle advocates: one of vigorous, multi-sided debate about the potential future consequences of a particular course of action. That’s the whole idea, and the stakes are too high, for ourselves and for future generations, not to take it seriously.

The public campaign against cholesterol hasn’t ruined the dairy industry (although hopefully it will decrease the demand for heart surgeons), and a preventive approach to environmental problems won’t destroy the economy – indeed, it will strengthen it over the long run. Besides, no one has yet figured out how to do a bypass operation on the environment.

QUOTED!

“It’s the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times and you think, my goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?” – Donald Rumsfeld, on the looting of the Iraqi National Museum

CHECK IT OUT

With so many middle-class Americans invested today in the stock market, the money either flowing into – or out of – mutual funds has become a central force in the United States economy. It has created a heightened interdependence between the corporate world and “ordinary” Americans, both of whom prosper when the stock market rises and suffer when the market falls. Yet since mutual funds, by their nature, place Joe Investor’s money in a variety of different stocks of which he might not even be aware, Joe Investor could be unwittingly supporting companies whose business practices run contrary to the social and environmental values that he holds dear.

Fortunately, in order to get a handle on his stock market investments and direct them toward companies he wants to support, Joe won’t have to sit up late at night at the kitchen table poring over P/E ratios and quarterly reports like Lyndon Johnson choosing bombing targets in Vietnam. What he can do instead is check out the Social Investment Forum, a organization that provides information, contacts, and resources on socially responsible investing.

The mutual funds profiled in Social Investment Forum’s site are those which screen their investments according to criteria other than financial performance, such as a company’s track record in human rights, environmentalism, or labor relations. Generally, these funds rule out or restrict investments in particular kinds of companies altogether (e.g., the tobacco industry), and proactively invest in others (e.g., those which support their local communities). For instance, the American Trust Allegiance Fund does not invest in alcohol, gambling, or tobacco, and avoids pharmaceuticals and biotechnology; the Green Century Balanced Fund invests “primarily in the stocks and bonds of select companies that have clean environmental records, many of which also make positive environmental contributions;” the Women's Equity Mutual Fund invests “in securities of companies that satisfy certain social responsibility criteria and are proactive toward women's social and economic equality.”

All this information, and much, much more, is available through the Social Investment Forum. Check it out.

HAPPENINGS

CI President Leonard Salle has prepared a report on the potential impact of a new bill in the California legislature that would increase classroom size in grades K-3. He estimates that the bill, if passed, could result in the layoff of as many as 6,000 teachers. Beyond that, moreover, it would turn back the clock on the state’s recent efforts to recruit elementary school teachers, both wasting millions of dollars that were spent on recruitment in the 1990s and severely damaging California’s fragile image as a state committed to public education. The report will be distributed to the media the week of April 21, and is also available online.

A salon for supporters of the Commonweal Institute will be held on May 10, 9:30-11:30 a.m., at a private home in Portola Valley, CA. The salon will be an opportunity for people to learn about the latest developments at CI and to talk about ways of advancing the organization. For more information, please contact coordinators Mary Alvord and Magda Dennard at mandm@batnet.com.

One of Commonweal Institute’s allies, Campaign for America’s Future, is planning a “Take Bake America” conference, to be held June 4-6 in Washington, D.C. The goal of the conference, according to co-directors Robert Borosage and Roger Hickey, is “to bring together over 1,000 progressive leaders and activists from across the country in the nation’s capital to discuss a bold progressive strategy for meeting America’s challenges – and to forge a common campaign to take back our country.” If you can attend, or know people who might be able to, it’ll be worth checking out. For information, contact Tasha Spindler, CAF Communications Director, at 202-955-5665 or spindler@ourfuture.org.

ENDORSEMENTS

“Quality information is the basis on which all good policy must be built. Commonweal Institute’s mission, to research, educate and communicate on issues of importance, is key for policymakers and activists alike.” – Joan Blades, Co-Founder, Moveon.org

GET INVOLVED

If you agree with Joan Blades (see above), there are a number of ways you can help the Commonweal Institute achieve its goals.

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