Former Vice President Al Gore Wednesday cited the absence of political will as a significant roadblock to fighting climate change, noting that while business leaders and citizens are willing to confront the issue, politicians are not.

“We do not have that much time,” Gore said during a discussion held by the Clinton Global Initiative on innovation. “We have to put a price on carbon directly or indirectly.”

Gore, who has attended thirty summits since penning “An Inconvenient Truth,” explained that Americans are currently releasing ninety million tons of carbon into atmosphere without acknowledging the impact.

The Vice President touched upon the upcoming climate change conference in Copenhagen, stating that it was very important for the U.S. to secure a deal, even if it isn’t initially perfect.

Securing this deal will be the responsibility of President Barack Obama, who Gore contends needs to aggressively urge the Senate to unite behind combatting climate change.

Gore warned that if unchecked, climate change will present a growing threat, claiming that food production can be slashed by half in some African countries coupled with decreased soil fertility.

In closing, Gore called upon the international community to embrace sustainable capitalism.

The Vice President was joined by a number of leading environmental experts.

Muhammad Yunus, Founder of the Grameen Bank, stressed the importance of spreading businesses that work for a concrete social objective. Yunus mentioned that there is already some progress being made by food companies, but suggested that social businesses should tackle medical problems plaguing countries like the People’s Republic of Bangladesh.

Jack Ma of the Alibaba Group discussed innovation in China. According to Ma, the future of Chinese industry lies in privately owned countries, such as the smaller “garage companies” started by his organization. 

 The Rockefeller Foundation’s Judith Rodin explained how innovation on a global level is becoming easier to track. According to Rodin, innovation has as systematic set of processes. Some of these processes such as user innovation and crowd thinking can be applied to social situations. Rodin also suggested collaborative competitions where competitors post their solution.

Rodin called for a business environment where companies can take risks and even fail. She also noted that the foundation is slated to launch an impact-investing network.

Former President Bill Clinton today kicked off the Clinton Global Initiative Plenary Session on Women. He entered to Also sprach Zarathustra, the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey. He started by giving some facts and figures about Sub-Saharan Africa and HIV, saying that getting HIV is like walking along and then suddenly having a concrete block dropped on you. He said these girls and young women are the best ambassadors because even though they have been sexually abused they refuse to live their lives as victims.

Clinton said that women do 66% of world’s work, but they produce 10% of the world’s income and own only 1% of the world’s property. 40% of the three billion people who work are women and 70% of agricultural labor is performed by women, but women lack independence. He also said that investing in women’s health could increase productivity in Africa by fifteen billion dollars per year.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a commitment to Rwanda and talked about how women have been active there. Bloomberg said he is involved in Southern Sudan and Congo, working with an organization called Women for Women. It is an attempt to get women to contribute to their countries.

President Barack Obama’s Ambassador At-Large for Global Women’s Issues, Melanne Verveer, said that empowering women combats extremism.

Ambassador Robert Zoellick said that he is trying to help with the Adolescent Girls Initiative, an organization that hopes to work with 3,000 girls and mentor them to make sure that education is connected to a job.

Zainab Salbi talked about wars and children. She said 80% of refugees in the world are women and children. Even after rape these women succeed because they have children. They are the ones who are keeping the children going to school. The only group of people who are keeping a society going are women, and they do not have a seat at the table and they are not being heard.

Rex Tillerson from Exxon Mobil talked about technologies. He said low technologies can impact on a local level. He said they are working on what types of technologies work.

Edna Ismail was the first nurse practitioner in Somalia. She said they do not even need advanced technology. The age that a woman marries and nutrition are important to overall health. Genital cutting information is not reaching the grandmothers and people who have kept this tradition. Senegal has passed a law outlawing this, but a law does not change behavior on a village level.

Diane Sawyer asked what the biggest failure was, and Zainab Salbi asked said it was a challenge. But girls at the age of nine get cows as a dowry. She said you must be able to educate women so that there is incentive for women to be educated so they are more valuable to the family than cows.

There are a million young women in the sex trade. The United States passed one of the first laws to prevent human trafficking. It is hopeful because the business community is getting involved. One cent of every development dollar goes to girls.

Some programs make the payments directly to women, such as incentives to go to school. Must turn incentives so that the legal structure reflects the situation.

TRNS Bureau Chief Ellen Ratner interviews Loralee Choate with BlogHer.com. Choate says that the Obama administration has really opened itself up to the blogosphere, and cites a conversation with White House Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett regarding healthcare reform as an example. (10:18)

 

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TRNS Bureau Chief Ellen Ratner interviews Elisa Camahort Page of BlogHer.com about the role the blogosphere has played in covering the Obama administration. (6:42)

 

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If I were running communications at the White House, I would have the president get right out in front of the American people and explain why we need health-care reform. I would have him explain why we need it now and the costs in dollar and human terms if we don’t do it. He has made an address to Congress, but he hasn’t said what happens to our country if we don’t have health care or what it costs us as a country to do nothing.

I saw the repercussions of doing nothing firsthand when I spent 15 years working in mental health and addictions. It is true that there is some end-of-the-line help for people, such as local mental-health clinics, state hospitals or locally funded versions of a state hospital, but these services are overwhelmed and are often the first to get cuts. Medications are often available for people on Medicaid, but many people do not qualify, as they are the working poor without health insurance.

In just this one area of health care, it is penny wise and pound foolish to not provide services as depression, anxiety and psychotic illness can slide out of control quickly if left untreated. Early intervention is the key to cost control later. Having worked in just this one aspect of health care, I saw what happens to untreated illness. Health professionals have screamed prevention and early intervention from the rooftops, and no one paid attention. But this week a study was released showing mortality increases for those that do not have health insurance.
The study was published in the American Journal of Public Health by Harvard University researchers and showed that Americans without health insurance were significantly more likely to die.

Earlier studies completed in the early ’90s showed a 25 percent increase in chance of dying without health insurance. The new study backed up that earlier research but showed that the risk of dying was actually 2.5 times higher than the earlier study found. This works out to a 40 percent higher likelihood of death without insurance.

There has been supporting data from other studies such as the congressionally funded Institute of Medicine, or IOM. This week’s study found that as many as 42,686 people died in one year because of lack of health insurance. That is almost 10 times the deaths experienced in the war in Iraq and close to what we lost in Vietnam. It is way too many mothers, fathers and productive Americans lost for no reason other than money.

What is astounding is that these statistics do not even consider the people unable to work because of illness or who need care from family members who then have to take off of work. This is not rocket science. How many people do you know who put off going to the doctor when they are ill because of costs? All of us know people who are facing those decisions.

Early intervention is the key in so many diseases, and President Obama’s plan allow 90 percent of people who do not have health insurance to be able to obtain it. It would allow people to get health care and tests that make a difference. Middle-aged people would be able to get a colonoscopy. Those with high cholesterol would be able to get find out if drugs would help, and people with diabetes would be able to stem the process of the disease before they lost limbs.

I am on the board of Lighthouse International, a non-profit dedicated to helping people with vision disabilities. We screened more than 100 people in the talk-radio industry during one of Talkers Magazine’s conferences. Almost one-third of the attendees had some kind of previously undiagnosed eye problem, such as a retinal tear or macular degeneration. Those are costly diseases, as many people can’t work if they can’t see. Lack of ability to pay means people won’t seek out care and get treatment while they still can.

Now is the time to make the facts and figures known to every American about the cost of failing to enact health-care reform. It costs in productivity, and if we are going to compete on the world stage, we must have what other developed westernized countries have: health care.

-Ellen

When I was in the drug and alcohol treatment business, my old boss, who was a whiz at modern management, used to describe unmotivated staff members as “fat, dumb and happy.”

Utilizing the latest management techniques, he would cajole, educate and motivate staff to a higher level of development unless it was hopeless. If that were the case, it was time for them to get off the bus and go elsewhere. Larry’s theory was that we had become way too comfortable and self-satisfied in our country, and it was time to get competitive and be uber-productive. It worked. While we were going strong we were at the cutting edge of addiction treatment.

I was quickly reminded of Larry and his management lessons when I saw some of the recent statistics on Doug Henwood’s Left Business Observer site. President Obama’s speech last Wednesday discussed fear and the goal of American’s to deal with our fear by shaping the future. Some of the data I saw shows a real need to be as industrious as we were in the years after World War II and to take a much more active hand in shaping our future. Growing up in the post-Sputnik era, I saw firsthand the technique to teach math change on a dime. Old math and science textbooks were thrown out, and local school boards moved to ditto sheets and quick printing until new textbooks could be written. No, this time the Russians haven’t put a satellite up in the sky, but our competition might as well have. The statistics are sobering, and it is time to do something different.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, has released its 2009 indicators report, and much of it is not pretty in regard to the good ol’ USA. Henwood has taken the time and effort to put graphs and numbers in understandable data.

We are near the top in terms of income level, but still way too many Americans live in poverty. No, we are not in the category of the Sudan/Darfur type of poverty, but in Western World terms it is poverty. Poverty is defined says Henwood as less than half of the household median income. A poor household in the United States has an income 38 percent below the poverty line. What is truly amazing is our work ethic. In this sense, we are not “fat, dumb and happy.” Twenty-five countries were measured in regard to hours worked per year. The United States was first with 301 hours more than average, which equates to more than seven weeks of additional work. You might say that shows our productivity, but it also comes out to seven weeks of work time that parents do not get to spend raising their children. That translates into less time cooking nutritious meals, reading to children and helping with homework. It also means more stressed parents. It “trickles” down, as Ronald Regan used to say.

Working parents generate more daycare costs, but knowing what we know now about brain development, it is essential that young people develop neural pathways in the brain so they can learn more complex concepts in the later years. Only 58 percent of our 3 to 5-year-olds are enrolled in formal preschool programs while Mexican children have a preschool enrollment of 70 percent! France and Spain have a 100 percent and 98 percent preschool enrollment respectively. How can we possibly compete with countries that are teaching reading and reading readiness while our children are watching television as their parents are working those extra hours?

It is not surprising that our health care bill is going to break the bank. We are ranked 24th out of 30 countries in life expectancy, and we are the most obese of all the countries surveyed. Fat equals health-care problems, and that is expensive to treat. The United States is one of the only countries where people in their 20s are not taller than people in their 40s. That is one of the greatest indicators of lousy nutrition. School lunches, fast food from overworked parents and way too many choices from the processed food industry create an unhealthy country.

We also rank highest in lifetime prevalence in mental illness. According to Henwood’s statistics, we take the lead in all of the mental problems – anxiety, mood, substance abuse and impulse control.

So, by my former boss’s standards we are not fat, dumb and happy, but we are fat and not so smart. Along with health care reform, we need lifestyle reform, and we need it urgently. Other countries that we should be ahead of will outpace us. American society needs to change at all levels – as individuals, families and communities.

Congress comes back into town this week. Over the past five weeks, House and Senate members alike have probably spent some time with their families and a lot of time in their district offices hoping they would not be ambushed at town hall meetings by angry members of the opposite party. It must be fun to be a member of Congress, except when you are faced with angry constituents. Then you wonder why you ever ran for office. It is a job that comes with great responsibility. It means passing laws and putting forth legislation that advances America and moves it further down the road.

Given this responsibility, I think Congress should not go home in late October/early November unless they pass some major legislation in several areas. This may require that the leadership keep Congress in session no matter how much campaigning needs to be done or how much lawmakers are itching to get home to raise money for the mid-term elections. I propose the following agenda for the remainder of this year:

Limit spending

Of the 12 appropriations bills, none have been passed and five have been passed by the Senate with no conference reports completed. (Conference reports are what comes from meetings between the House and Senate). Congress often runs out of time to submit these reports and, therefore, the two chambers combine many of their bills into a huge omnibus appropriations bill. So much pork and projects are stuck into that kind of bill that it becomes too heavy to carry and too long for anyone to read. We elect Congress to spend money carefully, but this is no way to do so. I say, stay in and get the individual bills passed without having to revert to an omnibus bill.

Pass health care

There will be meetings taking place on both sides of the aisle about what citizens want for health care when Congress returns this week. All of the advertisements, tea parties and union outreach don’t change the fact that people want to afford health insurance. Our small company, the Talk Radio News Service, has been trying to obtain insurance for two years. Finally, we found a company that said it would insure us, only to then double the rates shortly thereafter. Public option or not, people want to be able to purchase health care at a reasonable rate.

It is interesting to note that former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, a physician and former governor, said that the Democrats are unwilling to take on the trial lawyers right now in the health-care debate. That is too bad because everyone in the health-care industry, Democrat or Republican, agrees that there has to be some limits on lawsuits. Doctors can’t afford the malpractice insurance in certain specialties, and some of the awards are off the charts. Congress should not go home without addressing tort reform as part of health-care legislation.

Create jobs

With the possibility that the national unemployment rate will rise to 10 percent or higher in the near future, there needs to be a real program to get people back to work. Shovel-ready projects are well and good, but they do not grow our economy. There are many ways to make sure we get jobs for people: One way is to make money available for training in high-tech jobs. Another is to stop bending to the will of the large broadband companies and to begin to encourage local communities to develop their own broadband accessibility. Broadband means jobs and the ability to compete worldwide. Congress needs to pave and pay for the road to the information highway. There are other ways Congress can help create jobs aside from infrastructure projects and government employment, but it is going to take creativity and both parties working together to do it.

Get serious about going green

There is too much back and forth about cap and trade. It might be way too political to pass this year. However, some of the oil-rich countries are realizing that oil can’t go on forever, and they are buying up our brain resources, in the process taking ownership of patents for technology developed by American citizens. This will make us beholden to those same oil-rich countries for green technology. Congress needs to start finding and funding those promising technologies so they are owned by Americans.

Spending, health care, jobs and green energy are just four areas that need congressional attention. Let’s hope our representatives stop carping and impeding legislation in the name of scoring points at the polls and start working on getting it all done this week when they arrive back in town.

In this day and age of neurobiology (understanding of brain chemistry and neuro-anatomy), it is shocking to have an organization such as the Heritage Foundation release a report called “Adult Time for Adult Crimes – Life Without Parole for Juvenile Killers and Violent Teens.” It is not “compassionate conservatism;” it shows a lack of knowledge in regard to basic brain development.

I am not so naïve that I believe if a juvenile commits murder at 16 years old, that the day he or she reaches 21 they should be a get-out-of-jail-free card. But life sentences for a child or teen that commits an act of even horrendous violence when they are a teenager? Why keep them in for life? It is highly improbable that a disturbed young person who is in the prison system 24/7 can control his or her behavior for years at a time to “fool” the prison staff that they are remorseful and non-violent when they actually are not. There are cases where people have been freed and then commit horrible crimes, but juveniles are generally studied and evaluated frequently while incarcerated. By the time they reach adulthood, the criminal justice system knows a lot about them. The offenders who remain capable of violence years after committing the crime should be placed in a humane and structured prison/mental hospital facility.

According to the Heritage Foundation report, 43 states, the District of Columbia and the federal government have laws allowing for life without parole for juveniles. Although I think these laws in themselves are horrendous, why, if it is law in a super majority of states, is this is an issue now? The Heritage report states that it is because there is coordinated lobbying going on to change this. Maybe that is true, but more likely it is another way for conservatives to get on the “tough on crime” bandwagon as it always stirs up the base. It worked in California and drove voters to the polls. California prisons are now filled beyond human capacity due to the three strikes law. They can’t afford to keep their prison system in operation, but the voters were happy that California would not be “soft on crime.”

This entire proposal ignores how these young people became violent in the first place. Authors Robin Karr-Morse and Meredith S. Wiley in their book about violent and murderous juveniles, “Ghosts From the Nursery,” studied incarcerated young people. They write, “We can see that there are many kinds of ghosts from the nursery. Some result from biological factors such as head injuries or learning disabilities. Others emerge from familial experiences such as child abuse, domestic violence, or the impact of maternal depression or rejection. As children grow older, larger societal factors, such as chronic community violence, may compound the damage from earlier experiences. One factor by itself rarely creates antisocial outcomes in human development … a majority take root in the nursery, where few people are looking.”

The fact is that most juveniles who commit crimes have been abused, dropped or shaken in their early years or may have some congenital form of mental illness. That does not translate to the notion that society should let offenders out to roam free. It does mean that giving a life sentence to a juvenile is not justice; it is barbaric.

A psychologist I know said the rental car companies are about the only entities that understand brain development. They don’t rent cars to people who are younger than 25. The part of the brain that makes thoughtful decisions is not fully developed until the mid-20s. Therefore, putting someone in jail for life at the age of 16 or younger makes no sense except to the “tough on crime” crowd.

My advice is for the authors of the Heritage Foundation report to spend some time learning and understanding the roots of violent behavior and to study brain development before they continue to tout “life without parole” for even the most violent criminal acts by adolescents. Our laws that allow 14-year-olds to be incarcerated for life are at odds with other Western countries and put us in the company of countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran. Hopefully those are not countries we want to emulate in terms of how they treat other humans. It is time our criminal justice system adjusted itself to what we know about human behavior and the brain. It is time we acted based on science and not just pure retribution.

Morning meeting with White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs

Health Care:
Helen Thomas opened up with saying that “no one knows where you stand”. Mr. Gibbs answered that he was “standing right here”. Then he said he “would do this one more time.” Gibbs was then asked who had written about what the President said in the weekend town hall meeting about the public option. He said they were not giving up on the public plan and that the President will work with anyone in any party who wants to work constructively on health care reform. He said that they continued to be helpful that they can get bi-partisan support. He also said that the bi-partisan route was up to Republicans and that the President had spoken to the Senate Finance Committee. He said they had an 80% agreement on what is going on. He disputed today’s New York Time’s “go it alone” story.

Gibbs also said that they wanted to see as many people on both sides of the aisle who want to deal with a problem that can’t be ignored. He said that what comes out of the House is not where the Senate may or may not start when crafting their bill and the differences would be decided in conference. He said they have several more weeks to go until they have a vote on this. Gibbs asked why on August 19th is there a declaration that there will be only 51 votes? When asked why the President doesn’t put his foot down, Gibbs said “I can’t see it but I bet his foot is down.” Asked about why he isn’t having a summit, Gibbs answered that if it makes us all better to call it that…. we’ll call it the pre-fishing summit. Gibbs said the President would orbit the Moon if he thought it would help.

President’s Vacation:
The President has nothing scheduled in terms of speeches etc during his vacation and they would rely on surrogates.

Michael Smerconish:
Will be doing part of his show tomorrow at the White House and will take calls with the President. Gibbs said that “he was someone who the President had communicated with during the campaign and that they had an invitation to do the show. No other hosts had been considered.

President Clinton:
Former President Clinton will meet with President Obama and NSC/State department staff on the situation in North Korea and his talk with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.
The White House will release a still photo from the meeting. President Clinton has had previous meetings with the NSC staff but not with President Obama. Asked if President Clinton would give remarks to the press at the stake out, Gibbs replied that he does not control who comes to the stake out anymore. President Obama has spoken with President Clinton only one time about North Korea which was when the two women landed in the United States on August 5, 2009. (more…)