Nuclear weapons once preoccupied all Americans. During the Cold War, as the U.S. and the Soviet Union amassed arsenals, aimed them at each other, and held the world in a delicate balance appropriately abbreviated as MAD, global leaders realized the need to control nuclear weaponry even as they sought to attain or expand their capability. Today, more countries are members of the nuclear club, and more non-state actors are trying to join, but awareness about the danger of nuclear weapons seems disproportionately low. Before Zócalo and KCRW present Countdown to Zero, a documentary pressing for global disarmament, we asked four academics, writers, and scientists to explain just how dangerous the world is today, and how we can rein in loose nukes.

A threat that’s almost too big to measure

The term “loose nukes” isn’t very helpful for getting a fix on whether the United States is safe from a mass-casualty nuclear attack. That’s because the threat is protean.

First, there’s the problem posed by sheer volume. Take shipping containers, which are considered a prime means for smuggling nuclear weapons or fissile materials into the U.S. In 2007, 13 million containers arrived at our 361 major ports. Only six percent were physically inspected and eight percent were run through gamma ray scanners. Another three billion pounds of cargo arrives annually in the U.S. on passenger and cargo planes, from 94 countries with varying levels of stringency when it comes to inspection.

Then there’s the challenge of thwarting people engaged in nuclear terrorism. In 2005, the year the numbers rose to equal the pre-9/11 figures, 86 million people arrived at American airports and an additional 26 million entered as passengers or crews on ships. (And I haven’t even gone into the traffic across our borders with Mexico and Canada.) The United States also contains an array of tempting targets — skyscrapers, mega-malls, sports stadiums — and holds 31 cities with a population of at least 500,000.

There is also the difficulty of stopping the theft of nuclear bombs and fissile materials so they don’t travel to begin with. Here, too, the challenge has become more formidable because the nuclear problem has been transformed. During the Cold War we worried about maintaining deterrence, which has worked—so far. The other concern was the spread of the bomb. Here, too, the record is encouraging. In the early 1960s President John F. Kennedy opined that there would be up to 20 nuclear-armed states by 1975; there are fewer than half that today. But there’s reason to worry about the security of nuclear sites, particularly in Russia, North Korea, and Pakistan. Worse, the possibility of prolonged chaos, or even a breakdown of governmental authority, cannot be ruled out in Pakistan and North Korea.

So are we safer? Yes, in the sense that considerable attention and resources have been directed at the loose nukes problem since the collapse of the Soviet Union and particularly since 9/11. But given the problems I’ve discussed, the question of how safe we are can’t be answered with any certainty. Terrorist groups need only a single success; our security systems cannot avoid a single failure. A lasting solution, one at which the nuclear powers — especially the United States and Russia — have been miserable failures, requires developing a system for the international control of the nuclear fuel cycle and the development of a concrete plan toward verifiable disarmament.

—Rajan Menon is a professor of international relations at Lehigh University.

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Unsexy but necessary

President Obama and his staff twisted arms and convinced representatives of 46 nations to attend the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, D.C. this April, where they signed a pledge to put plutonium and highly-enriched uranium out of the reach of terrorists and rogue groups within four years. This goal was overambitious, of course, but it was designed to shake the bureaucratic stupor out of national atomic agencies, where inertia often reigns (including in the U.S. Energy Department).

It is an excellent start, and the world may never know if a catastrophe was averted because of this far-sighted initiative. Unfortunately, there is not much political coin that comes from this kind of work — just as there is very little that is sexy about bridge repair or road reconstruction — even though it makes for good public policy. Furthermore, those who combat loose nukes are, by definition, always fighting blind. It will always be impossible to say that somewhere in this wide world, somebody is not stashing away a cache of stolen uranium and plotting their own personal Armageddon, just as we can never know if Obama’s refusal to ignore this issue may have saved one city, or 10. What is clear is that another summit is an imperative. Press estimates put the total of unaccounted nuclear material already out there as enough to construct 120,000 bombs. The work goes on, as it endlessly must.

—Tom Zoellner is the author of Uranium: War, Energy and the Rock that Shaped the World.

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The danger at home

The problem of ‘loose nukes’ is often seen, mistakenly, as a result of poor security of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapon materials in countries like Russia or Pakistan. But nuclear weapons and weapon materials everywhere are insecure to some degree.

In August 2007, six U.S. nuclear armed cruise missiles were loaded onto a bomber and flown from Minot to Barksdale air force bases without authorization, and without the knowledge of those involved, and for 36 hours remained unaccounted for. U.S. nuclear weapon laboratories and weapon material storage and processing facilities also have been shown to be chronically insecure.

If one accepts that all nuclear weapons and nuclear weapon materials are at risk, the problem is enormous but the solution becomes simple. The United States and Russia have between them about 20,000 nuclear weapons, while the other seven nuclear armed nations have fewer than a thousand between them. The Obama administration has agreed with Russia as part of the New START Treaty that they will each deploy no more than 1,550 strategic weapons seven years after the treaty enters in force, but both countries will keep thousands more in storage. Both countries also have committed to large scale modernization of their nuclear weapon complexes and nuclear weapon delivery systems (bombers, missiles and submarines), and plan to keep nuclear weapons for many decades, which in the U.S. alone will cost almost $300 billion over the next two decades. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton now talks about “our goal of a world someday, in some century, free of nuclear weapons.”

At the same time, there are about 1,600 tons of highly enriched uranium in the world, enough for over 60,000 nuclear weapons, and 500 tons of plutonium, enough for a further 60,000 simple nuclear weapons. There is no international treaty banning the production of more nuclear weapon material.

The only sustainable solution to the problem of ‘loose’ nuclear weapon and nuclear weapon materials is not to have any weapon or weapon materials. John Kerry captured this simple idea in his 2004 election campaign, “Remember. No material. No bomb. No nuclear terrorism.”

—Zia Mian is a Research Scientist at the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School. He appears in Countdown to Zero.

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We can’t be completely safe

The threat is real and we are not fully prepared.

Globally, there are an estimated 1.6 million kilograms of highly enriched uranium and 500,000 kilograms of plutonium. Twenty-five kilograms of enriched uranium or eight of plutonium is needed for a crude nuclear bomb.

Between terrorist groups like Al Qaeda with nuclear aspirations, global proliferation networks that have spread nuclear materials and know-how — including to Libya and Iran — and international criminal rings, a nefarious cast of characters are pursuing and transferring these materials.

So what’s our strategy? It’s two-fold: non-proliferation and counter-proliferation

Non-proliferation is the lofty strategic goal of a nuclear-free world bound by treaties. Nuclear weapon states must reduce their arsenals; Iran and North Korea must fall in line; India, Pakistan, and Israel need to rejoin the non-nuclear ranks; and the non-nuclear states must stay the course.

Counter-proliferation is the other side of the coin — tactical measures to avert a nuclear incident. It begins far from our shores in a series of concentric protective circles. The outer-most circle involves securing the source — such as dealing with fissile material in Russia and quietly working with Pakistan to mitigate an insider or outsider threat to its arsenal. The next circle is screening materials before they head to our ports through programs such as the Container Security Initiative, without clogging up trade channels. Moving further in requires interdicting materials on the sea: the Proliferation Security Initiative. Then comes screening at ports of entry. Screening devices, however, are subject to false alarms — including from kitty litter. They’re a constant reminder of the weaknesses of our detection architecture. Finally, there are the security measures at high-risk locations and critical infrastructure within the U.S.

Each of these layers of protection is porous in a geo-political context where all things nuclear remain in vogue. So how prepared are we? There is always room for improvement, but as for 100 percent preparedness? There’s no such thing.

—Ziad Haider is a JD/MPA candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School and Georgetown Law and previously worked as Professional Staff on the House Committee on Homeland Security.

Spencer Wells, a geneticist and anthropologist, had studied the genetics of indigenous human populations for years when, after working on the PBS documentary about the Y chromosome, “The Journey of Man,” he found a home at National Geographic. “They said, ‘This is fascinating stuff. Now that you’re done with the film, what would you like to do next?’ It’s a great question to be asked,” said Wells, who is now the “Explorer-in-Residence” for the magazine. His work took him around the world and ultimately toward writing Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization, which, as he discusses below, argues that the switch to agriculture 10,000 years ago is the root of many a modern problem, from obesity to religious fundamentalism to social anxiety.

Q. What did you learn from the time you spent in hunter-gatherer societies?

A. As a relatively affluent, middle-class American going to visit these people who have virtually nothing, the first thing that strikes you is, how can they live like this? They must be so unhappy. But as you spend more time with them, you unwind from the Google and mobile-filled world and you realize they’re incredibly happy and have a wonderful lifestyle, though it’s increasingly under threat. Left to their own devices, they would be completely fulfilled. So you have to ask, why is everyone in the world today an agriculturalist? Ninety-nine point nine percent of us rely on agriculture rather than hunting and gathering. That led me to do some research, to ask, what led to that transition, and what effects did that transition have on us, physically and mentally? The early agricultural populations were less healthy than hunter-gatherers, so why did their way of life lose out?

It’s because with agriculture, you can grow more people, even if they’re not happier or healthier. That set in motion a lot of forces that I trace in the rest of the book.

Q. When did the transition from hunter-gathering to agriculture happen, and what effect did it have on humans?

A. Around 10,000 years ago. The world was coming out of from the last Ice Age, conditions were improving, the world was warming up and the human population started to expand somewhat in certain locations. People started to specialize in gathering particular grain species — wheat and barley in the Middle East, rice in China and India, corn in Mexico. They started to settle down into villages. Then an ice dam melted in North America. The water of Lake Aggasiz, which had been created by the melting of the Laurentide ice sheet, was released into the North Atlantic.  This killed the Gulf Stream, which brings warm water into the North Atlantic. It plunged western Eurasia back into Ice Age-like conditions, but population density had by that point increased beyond the ice age carrying capacity. So people had to innovate, and the innovation was agriculture.

We survived. It made complete sense at the time to develop agriculture. The sting in the tail was that as population density increased, we overhunted the animals we survived on. So we had to domesticate some species. Most major infectious diseases that afflict humans were introduced then, from these domesticated animals. There was also a shift in the human diet away from a diverse gathered group of plants. Hunter-gatherers in the Middle East were eating over 150 plant species — fruits, nuts, berries, tubers as well as grains. Once they made the transition to agriculture, it went down to about eight plant species, with most calories coming from wheat and barley. Even today, 60 percent of the world’s calories come from wheat, rice and corn. Consumption of starch and simple sugars increased, and there was a massive increase in cavities right away, no matter where the population was — the Middle East, Asia, the Americas. As soon as people transitioned to agriculture, cavities quintupled. It’s an early sign that we were maladapted to the new way of life. That continues today — the obesity epidemic is an extension of that.

Q. Why did we evolve this way if it seems to have been bad for us?

A. Evolution is all about reproduction. In a Darwinian sense, agriculture was real winner. It produced more people. But of course, it’s not just about making more people, it’s a question of choosing the lifestyle that’s right for us. We’re still in the course of adapting to this radical cultural shift. For instance lactase, the gene that codes for the enzyme that digests lactose, the sugar in milk.  Certain populations that  domesticated sheep, goats, and cattle, and started drinking milk beyond childhood were selected to retain that ability.  As a result, most Europeans today have it. You can see evidence of this sort of culturally-driven selection in the human genome.

Q. What other modern problems came about because of our transition to agriculture — what were the mental impacts in particular?

A. There is some mental fallout. The predicted ideal human group size is around 150 people, according to the British evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar. That’s what the neocortex, which governs the ability to form social relationships, can handle. He predicted we should be living in groups no larger than 150. It remains an important figure — it’s the size of army companies, the size of traditional Hutterite farming communities in Canada (they are a bit like the Amish). Once you go beyond 150, the group fissions. If a group size exceeds 150 people, you need to create some sort of bureaucracy, a government, because otherwise you can’t keep track of all the social relationships.

Today, we’re living in cities with thousands and millions of people. But we’re actually disconnected from most of them. Imagine you’re in an elevator – you’re not chatting with anybody, you’re checking your Blackberry, perhaps, or staring at the floor numbers. You’re crowded, but disconnected. I argue that this creates unease.

We actually do see rising rates of mental illness. The World Health Organization predicted that by 2020, mental illness will be the second leading cause of death and disability after heart disease. Antidepressants are the most widely-prescribed class of drugs today. As I say in the book, for the first time in human history, we have to drug ourselves to feel normal. We used to do it, with shamans, for instance, to get out of the normal state of existence, to enter a mystical trance.  Now we do it to make it through the day.

Q. You discuss in Pandora’s Seed how fundamentalism can be traced back to these problems as well — can you elaborate?

A. Most think only of Islamic fundamentalism, but there is also Christian fundamentalism, particularly in the U.S. I argue that both are the product of the last 50 years or so, and are in part due to a sense that some people have that they’ve lost their purpose, a religious purpose, the overarching sense of what is ethical, in all-out race to create novelty and material wealth. Religious fundamentalism is perhaps a backlash against that, along with the increasingly secular world we live in. It’s an effort to go back to an earlier time, where mythos — received truths and traditions — was more important than logos, than rational thought.

Q. How can we repair some of these problems?

A. It’s not going to be easy — we have a lot of crises facing us in the 21st century.  We should, I argue, take some cues from surviving hunter-gatherers, and our distant ancestors, and try to want less. Look at the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, for instance. There are proximal causes to that — errors made by BP, perhaps coupled with a lack of regulation and oversight. But ultimately, the root cause is that we all need cheap gasoline. We as a society are ultimately to blame. Everyone is ringing their hands about climate change and so on, but really, part of the solution is simply to learn to want less – to live more efficiently, recognizing that there are limits to our previously unchecked growth.

Q. Is that enough, given that the problem seems part of our genes?

A. That is something that needs to underlie everything else we do. We also need to come up with better, cleaner sources of energy, pursue material wealth less, and develop better farming methods. I think all of that comes down to wanting less. What’s going to happen over the next half century, for the first time in 70,000 years, is we will be living in a population that’s no longer growing. The UN is predicting around 9.5 billion people by mid-century. That’s a lot of people, especially people who want to live the way the average American lives today. It’s simply untenable to imagine that. I think for all of us to survive, we have to get by on less and be more efficient with the resources we use.

Q. Are you optimistic about our ability to change in this way?

A. There is hope — that’s why I called it Pandora’s Seed. The myth of Pandora is that she opens the box, and all these plagues for humanity fly out. But she claps down the lid and saves hope. Hope lies in our remarkable ability to innovate. It’s what saved us time and time again throughout history. I think it’s going to allow us to create solutions, once we see the consequences of what we’re doing. We are fairly short-sighted as a species. But we’re at a point in our social evolution where we need to think longer-term in order to see the true costs, the unintended consequences of our actions.

*Photo of Spencer Wells by David Evans. Photo of wheat courtesy bernat….

Imtiaz Gul, author of The Most Dangerous Place: Pakistan’s Lawless Frontier, has been a reporter for 25 years, covering the eponymous region on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. “We had a sort of romance with these areas,” Gul said. “They excited me, not as barren, rugged terrain, but because of the people there.” Below, Gul chats with Swati Pandey about the history of the tribal areas, how militants infiltrated the region and the rest of Pakistan, and what the U.S. can do to help assuage a problem that, Gul says, is ultimately Pakistan’s to address.

Q. You’ve spent a lot of time in the tribal areas. What are your impressions of the region?

A. With the arrival of the militants in those areas, the situation changed in the sense that the arrival of the military, a lot of local people started leaving those areas. They have not been familiar with the presence of military in the past. History shows that the tribal areas of Pakistan never liked foreigners, outsiders. Very gradually these areas have turned into a battleground between the Pakistani army and militant groups. The army conducted not only dozens of operations there, but also increased its numbers. Because of this, many people have moved out of the tribal areas. More than a million people from different parts of it are today living in camps. The more that the army increases its numbers, the more it impacts social life in the area as well.

Q. How did militant groups gain a foothold there?

A. These areas are governed by a special set of laws introduced by the British in 1903. Under these laws, the people of the tribal areas are at the mercy of an administrator, a government representative, otherwise people are free to do anything. Traditionally, people in the tribal areas were involved in smuggling, drug trafficking, arms trading. There are no political parties allowed there. That’s how these areas easily became the center for militant organizations. But we also have to remember that in the early 1980s, the U.S. and other countries decided to confront the Soviet Union forces in Afghanistan. They used the tribal areas as a launching pad for the resistance fighters.

Q. Are those administrators still active today, and do they have any power?

A. They are there. they’re called the political agent, and there are seven of them in all. Theoretically they are in charge. But practically, it’s the military that calls the shots.

Q. What is Pakistan’s military presence in the tribal areas today?

A. It’s about 140,000 currently deployed on the border to Afghanistan. They’re manning about 900 checkpoints on this border, which is over 2500 kilometers long. Almost all of these check posts coordinate with the United States troops deployed across the border on the Afghan side. Whenever there is a need, both armies exchange information. But usually there are no joint military operations in the tribal areas.

Q. Are militant groups in the tribal areas making inroads into the rest of Pakistan?

A. The presence of militant groups in FATA and the tribal areas has had a very very negative impact on the rest of Pakistan. Number one, they are associated or inspired by Al Qaeda. Number two, these groups provide shelter to all those militants who may have connections inside Pakistan, but come to the tribal areas for training. Most of the suicide bombings that have hit Pakistan — more than 210 attacks in the last four years — have had a direct or indirect link with the tribal areas.

Q. How sympathetic are Pakistanis to these militant groups?

A. The general public is not sympathetic to the militants. Many of the Pakistanis may be sympathetic to Al Qaeda and to the Taliban, but the majority are moderate Muslims. However, the problems, such as governance, absence of the rule of law, unemployment, and poverty — they do serve as the prompters for many people to somehow view organizations such as Al Qaeda with sympathy if not direct support.

Q. How dangerous is that level of sympathy?

A. It can become dangerous in the medium to long run if the problems that people face continue. If governance can improve, if the economy can take off, if there are more employment opportunities, and if the government can really attend to the education sector, then we might see some improvement. Then it’s not a big problem and the real challenge lies in somehow controlling people within media, within other segments of the society who somehow directly or indirectly sympathize with a lot of conspiracy theories directed against the United States and other Western countries. These theories basically project the Americans and their allies as enemies of Muslims. They then try to stoke anti-American sentiment. Some people, because they face problems inside their own countries, fall victim to this propaganda. There’s an urgent need to develop a counternarrative to these conspiracy theories.

Q. Is the U.S. or Pakistan doing anything to that end — developing a counternarrative?

A. What they’re doing right now is fighting — the U.S. in Afghanistan, the Pakistanis in the tribal areas. There is not enough effort on the intellectual front. There is not enough intellectual intervention. One would wish they could do more.

Q. How is President Obama’s strategy working so far?

A. I think under Obama, the U.S. is now more sympathetic to the Pakistani considerations as far as taking on the militants is concerned. Cooperation between the two countries and their armies has never been better. The desire is for Pakistan to scale up its anti-militant operations and to narrow the space as much as possible for supporters and sympathizers for Islamist group. Pakistani civil society also wants this. It’s a difficult challenge because of the problems I mentioned earlier — the problems face by the common man.

Q. What about the U.S.’s increased use of drone strikes?

A. It’s working as far as taking out the bad guys is concerned. We’ve been told more than two dozen Al Qaeda people have been killed as a result of these attacks. A lot of people in the tribal areas — people who are fed up with militants, people who are sandwiched between the Pakistani military and militants, and youngsters in particular — are happy with the number of people who have been killed by the drone strikes. The issue remains a little controversial, however, because of the question of ownership. Right now it’s the CIA that does the drone strikes. Pakistanis believe that if the Pakistani army were to conduct these drone strikes, it would mitigate the concerns and criticisms that many people have about them. There is of course collateral damage, innocent people getting killed, but that is not as much the issue as ownership of the strikes.

Q. Is it likely that Pakistan will start conducting strikes?

A. Pakistan has been demanding that it should be provided with the technology to conduct its own drone strikes. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a statement earlier this year indicating that the U.S. may consider it, but I don’t see it happening in the near future.

Q. Why is the U.S. reluctant to share that technology?

A. The U.S. wants to keep control over the technology itself rather than passing it on to Pakistan.

Q. What are the challenges to bringing the tribal areas under control, given its long history of being left alone by the central government?

A. This is a large area along the border with Afghanistan. It is very thinly populated — perhaps less than two million people live there, under the laws that the British introduced. I think there’s an urgent need to change the status of these areas by extending the law of the land, so that people living in the tribal areas get a sense of belonging to Pakistan as equal citizens. If we extend the law of the land, it narrows the space for nonstate actors — for all the people using the area for their narrow ends, the militants, the smugglers, the criminal gangs.

Q. Are the people of the tribal areas supportive of changing the law that governs them?

A. People are fed up with that law, which has been in effect since the early 1900s. They want it abolished. This demand, this craving for a just system, has also resulted in an increase in Islamization. It is one of the reasons for religious radicalism in that area. It encourages the creation of religious groups, which create their own fiefdoms. The government has been giving lip-service to the idea — even the president announced last August to change the status of the tribal areas, or at least make big amendments to the laws that govern them. But so far, nothing much has happened.

Q. What else can the U.S. do to help extend control to the area?

A. I think any support, any help in reaching out to the people, addressing their issues, is always welcome. The U.S. can also help with financial resources.

But the real challenge rests with the government of Pakistan. They need to demonstrate a commitment to the people, and try to change the law, or extend the constitution of Pakistan and extend fundamental rights to these areas. This is essentially a challenge to the Pakistani government, the ruling elite. Outsiders can help facilitate and expand the influence of the government, and also help reach out to people through the media. But fundamentally the Pakistanis themselves are responsible for this in the first place.

We have to keep in mind that if you don’t treat common people as equal citizens in special status areas, then there is always the possibility of nonstate actors like militant groups coming up and taking things into their own hands. This is what happened in Pakistan, in the tribal areas. Let’s hope that sooner rather than later the status of these areas changes, and that the people there are treated as equal citizens and weaned away from support of militant organizations.

*Photo of the Afghanistan/Pakistan border region courtesy the U.S. Army.

National health reform, a brick of a bill at over one thousand pages, took a year of bruising negotiations to become law. As the country waits for its measures to kick in — the promise of lower-cost care, broader coverage, and tighter insurer regulations — Zócalo asked five local health care advocates and doctors, what does health reform mean for the future of California’s economy? Read their answers below, and join us on July 15 to learn more about what the law means for small businesses, insurers, doctors, and all Californians.

It’s about security

For our health care system, it’s the best of times, and the worst of times. Celebration over the new federal health reform law has been muted because of the crisis of the moment — our economic recession and resulting budget crisis. Governor Schwarzenegger has proposed health cuts that would not just imperil lives and harm our health care system, but would undermine our efforts at an economic recovery. The health cuts would be magnified due to the loss of federal matching funds, and would lead to the loss of over 42,000 jobs in both our health system and our wider communities. Most tax and revenue solutions would have less economic impact, and allow us to preserve these jobs along with basic health and human services.

Thankfully, the new federal law does provide some help. It prevents the state from making the worst of the cuts, and has already started providing new federal dollars in a variety of areas: tax credits to help small businesses cover their workers, $250 checks to seniors trying to afford prescription drugs, grant programs for community clinics, public health efforts, and medical professional training.

Over the next 10 years, California will see over $124 billion from the new law, much of it going directly to low- and moderate-income families to help them afford health care. This not only protects so many of our families from medical debt and bankruptcy, but provides funding and stability to our health system — which is one of our state’s major employers.

The new law will provide new energy for our economy. By preventing health insurers from denying care for pre-existing conditions, we allow a new generation of solo entrepreneurs to start their own businesses without worrying if they can’t get coverage.

At its core, the new law is less about health and more about providing economic security. It guarantees that families can get coverage without having to pay more than a percentage of their income in premiums. And it promises that such coverage will be there when we need it — without loopholes, rescission practices, or annual and lifetime caps that leave people with huge medical debt. This assurance will have profound benefits not just for our families and communities, but provides a stronger basis for economic growth moving forward.

—Anthony Wright is the Executive Director for Health Access California.

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Local policy can help L.A.

Health reform is central to building a California economy that works for everyone. The vast number of uninsured or underinsured Californians has put a heavy strain on local and state government at a time when public resources are stretched to the limit. Health reform that ensures medical coverage for all Californians will reduce this pressure, while at the same time helping the overall economy by stabilizing the workforce and providing consumers with a greater degree of economic security. Affordable, high-quality health care that leads to healthy communities is essential to an economy that leaves no one behind.

While national healthcare reform is a great step in the right direction, innovative local policy solutions are also crucial. Here in Los Angeles, the city council approved a policy last fall that has resulted in new healthcare coverage for an estimated 5,500 airport workers and family members. The policy sets requirements for companies operating at Los Angeles International Airport, which is one of the city’s largest publicly owned facilities and a major economic engine for the L.A. region. Because thousands of low-wage workers now have health benefits on the job, they no longer have to rely on government programs for their care, saving the public an estimated $30 million over five years. Families now have access to life-saving medical care, and have more financial resources available to cover their daily needs. With family health benefits, thousands of working families have gained greater financial stability in a time of economic crisis, strengthening the economy for us all.

—Carolina Briones does research and policy work for Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy.

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Keep doctors in good financial shape

Health reform has the potential to be a boon to California’s workforce and economy, but for that to happen, the state and federal governments must follow through on their initial commitments and provide stable funding to ensure patients get access to care.
Reform will generate $124 billion in federal support for California’s health care system, according to a House committee analysis, and it will save the state $13 billion in health care costs over the next 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office estimates.

A lot more Californians — about 6.5 million to be exact — will have insurance coverage and be able to see a doctor regularly. The key to reform’s success is backing it up with enough support to keep physicians economically viable and participating.

Without reasonable reimbursement rates, as we have seen in Medi-Cal, physicians can’t afford to participate, and that hinders patients’ access to care. Indeed, many Medi-Cal patients struggle to find a doctor to treat them, and some have to wait months to see a specialist.

Fortunately, one element of federal reform includes significantly increasing Medi-Cal’s physician rates — but only for two years. Access must be maintained, if we want to optimize the benefits of reform.

By covering 80 percent of California’s uninsured, health reform will keep more of the state’s workforce healthy and productive. This will reduce the burdens on emergency rooms, which today are overcrowded with uninsured patients. That will save taxpayers money because it’s much cheaper to treat patients at doctors’ offices than in the ER — and it’s more effective to treat them when problems first arise instead of later, after conditions worsen.

Overall, reform offers enormous opportunity, but to maximize its economic benefits — and deliver effective preventive care — the government must live up to its promise and ensure patients can get access to physicians.

—Dev GnanaDev is a former President of the California Medical Association and Chief Medical Officer at Arrowhead Regional Medical Center.

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We’ll see broad benefits in the long-run

The new health care reform law brings immediate benefits to many California residents and businesses, and in the long run it will help stabilize health care costs that currently burden working families, business, and government.

For starters, the new law immediately provides $250 to seniors to offset the Medicare Part D prescription drug program’s “donut hole,” the coverage gap that 380,000 California seniors fall into. The prescription drug cost protection will fully close the donut hole by 2020. In addition, many very small businesses can receive tax credits to make health insurance for their workers a little more affordable.

The financial benefits of the reforms will actually grow over time, as tighter regulations over health insurance companies’ rates and benefits kick in and subsidies begin to help moderate-income families purchase health insurance. At the same time, expansion of Medi-Cal and increased Medi-Cal payments to doctors and other providers will increase access to care and financial security for low-income families and individuals.

The reforms also begin a long process of lowering health care’s ever rising cost curve. The reforms will change provider reimbursement to encourage greater productivity, incentivize providers to achieve and share in savings, and establish “accountable care organizations” to promote coordinated, higher quality and less costly care – small steps, but they are an important beginning. The reforms will create more pressure for better quality, safer health care, and more effective and less wasteful health care services — which eventually will bring broad economic benefits to California.

Health care reform also gives needed attention to investments in individual wellness and community prevention to reduce the growing burden of chronic disease that saps health and diverts economic resources to deal with diseases that are preventable. The new health care reform law is a beginning, not an end point, and its economic benefits for California will grow.

—E. Richard Brown is Director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.

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No more desperate measures

I recently cared for a woman at a free clinic who was diagnosed with breast cancer while serving time in prison for a relatively minor offense. Immediately after she was diagnosed, the prison released her to fend for herself in the California medical jungles filled with many hospitals, but little care. After months of trying to find a cancer doctor to treat her, and a surgeon to operate, she was left with only one choice. If she wanted to live, she would need to commit a crime that would return her to prison where she would receive the life-saving care she needed. This is exactly what she did.

For some, health care is to our economy what fresh water is to life. Without it we are left to fend for ourselves, to try to make do and to hope that what we get is high enough quality to keep us alive.

Illness can tear a family apart not only by fear, infirmity, and sadness but by economics. Nearly half of Californians have had serious burdens placed on them as a result of medical bills. Without access to affordable health care, Californians will delay seeking needed medical care, skip medical tests or procedures, not fill prescriptions or cut pills in half. The result is that people become less healthy and less fit to work and thus less able to access health care — a vicious cycle. Is it fair that sick people without adequate health insurance who decide to seek care are hounded by collection agencies, use up all their life savings, have to sell their homes, go without heat or food, or are forced to declare bankruptcy?

Health care reform will help make California economically competitive, healthy, and compassionate. Reform will increase quality through the elimination of waste and the application of “best practice” to health delivery. Once a drug, surgery, or treatment is proven to work, it will become the standard of care. Doctors will no longer choose drugs or surgical devices based on gifts and favors provided by pharmaceutical companies or device manufacturers. Treatments will be evidence-based, and doctors will need to know which treatments work and which don’t. Economics can play a large role in providing incentives for doctors and hospitals to play ball fairly. Given a level playing field, those who perform best will get paid more and people, being seasoned consumers, will select doctors and hospitals that have better outcomes.

Health care reform means a healthier, more equitable, more compassionate, and more economically sound California.

—Michael Wilkes is Vice Dean of Medical Education at UC Davis.

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Uneven impact

Health care is big business, accounting for over 20 percent of U.S. GDP. It makes up a similar percentage of California’s economy. Medicine is mostly practiced, however, at the local level. Consequently, the impact of reform is likely to be felt unevenly. Health reform in itself won’t dramatically increase the amount of money spent on health care, but the way it is distributed within the system will change. Reform’s early effects in California will be felt on a sector by sector and even on a hospital-by-hospital basis. Large private urban hospitals, which will probably consolidate, should do well. So will clinics, which receive a new boost of federal funding under federal legislation. Public hospitals are likely to struggle as their patients move into private coverage and their reimbursements may decline. Device makers, whose products will be taxed to help pay for the cost of the bill, may have their wings clipped.

The “heart” of health care reform was and remains increasing insurance coverage and making it affordable. This should translate into relief, at the household level, for those Californians, especially childless adults, who have been struggling to afford insurance on the individual market and previously haven’t qualified for Medi-Cal, California’s Medicaid program.

The “brains” of the bill, so to speak, are about changing the way we pay for and deliver care over time. Current fee-for-service payment policies tend to encourage a high volume of treatments and not necessarily those that will most benefit a patient at the lowest cost. Scores of demonstration projects, pilot programs, and innovation centers funded through federal reform seek to reverse this practice. However, health care is a source of well-paying jobs in hard times; medical “waste” is, famously, always someone’s income. But should the “value for spending” bandwagon gain momentum, it should especially benefit California’s integrated health systems (like Kaiser Permanente) and medical groups that been leaders in this effort.

—Leif Wellington Haase is Director of the California Program of the New America Foundation, and author of A New Deal For Health.

*Photos of Dev GnanaDev and Michael Wilkes by Aaron Salcido. Photos courtesy Anthony Wright, Carolina Briones, and E. Richard Brown. Photo of President Obama courtesy The White House.

Joe Mathews, a fourth-generation Californian and frequent Zócalo moderator, joined forces with his fellow New America Foundation scholar Mark Paul to write California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It. “We’re colleagues, but we’re very different people. We’re from different ends of the state. He’s a baby boomer and I’m not. He has worked in government and politics, and I would never do that in a million years. He’s definitely a liberal, I’m not,” Mathews said. “But we both had this incredible shared frustration with the state of conversation and action about good government and reform.” Below, Mathews chats with Swati Pandey of Zócalo about why the state is broken, what Schwarzenegger has done about it, why Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown aren’t helping, and how to get out of the mess.

Q. How did we get into this mess, and are we doing anything right?

A. I think we make pretty good policy in some areas that involve majority votes in the legislation. We’re actually representing the people of California in those areas. We do things in a timely manner, and if things get screwed up, it’s clear who messed up and they can be held accountable. That’s not too terrible.

But our problems started in 1849, in the sense that we didn’t have a real founding. We had this very strange beginning of the state that no other state had. It’s the curse of bigness and suddenness. We were this big place, we were far away, and we went from nothing to the whole world showing up because we had a gold rush. We were immediately a state without going through any of the processes. We had a constitution but it was worthless. We’ve never gotten it right. Californians have never been people who have engaged in their government. We do things in hurried, improvised, angry spasms. We’ve always gotten away with it because we’re bigger and faster-growing and better looking than everybody else. We could get away with it because the state changed so fast, and so much wealth was coming in. We would have a bust, and people would talk about fixing things in a real way, but before we figured out how, the new boom was on, so who cared? We’ve had this 160-year adolescence.

This is the moment — and by moment, I mean 20-year period — where we have to have a real founding. We are no longer a state of arrival. We’re a state where most people arrive in maternity wards, though many people still come here and many people leave here. It’s very significant that California is finally a place where most people are from here. We’re not going to be bailed out by some new arrival of wealth. We have to educate our own people. We have to find a new generation of homebuyers well-off enough to buy the homes of people retiring.

It’s not going to change our character. We will always be a big, diverse, crazy place with crazy politics doing things that make the rest of the world scratch their heads. We just need to do all that in a democratic way, making sure that people doing crazy things can be held accountable, and allowing us to make decisions and balance budgets in a timely fashion. But we haven’t reckoned with things. We’re stuck.

Q. What got us stuck with this system?

A. We passed Proposition 13, which centralized authority for a really big, diverse state in a small number of people in Sacramento. Then, through a series of measures passed on top of that, we created this system that limited options for the handful of people that we gave all the power to. We put a small number of people in charge of money and taxation and spending, and then tied their hands behind their backs. We’ve created this kind of ratchet, as we call it in the book, on any matter that involves money. It’s a system that can’t really be operated by anybody.

There’s an aspect of this that fits in with the larger conversation in the country of being “too big to fail.” It’s clear now that with banks and some other institutions, when they get so big, it’s hard to run them. If those people screw up, it can create all sorts of problems for all sorts of folks in a way that isn’t fair. It creates an unacceptable level of risk. The argument for breaking up big banks is that it spreads risk.

California has the same problem. By centralizing, by robbing people of control and making it hard to govern, we’ve created an unacceptable level of risk. We need to restore local control of taxation and spending. There will always be some Maywoods — some places that screw up. But you need to spread the risk around. It would be much better for the state, and for the people who manage their lives and cities wisely.

Q. How do voters and elected officials relate to each other? Why would Californians vote to give more authority to politicians they otherwise seem to want to restrain?

A. Well, Proposition 13 didn’t say, “Let’s make Sacramento the center of all fiscal authority,” so there was no real vote for that. People warned that it was going to happen.

But there is this mutual cycle of contempt. Voters don’t trust politicians, whether local or state, so they try to tie the hands of politicians. That’s what Prop. 13 was all about. That’s how it was sold. And it tied the hands of local folks who set property tax rates. But when the state got that power, we tied their hands — you can’t touch this spending, you can’t touch this tax.

So what the folks in power spend time doing is trying to subvert and get around the restrictions we’ve put on them. they find it harder and harder to do, and they end up doing things people don’t like — backdoor fees and tax increases. And that makes everyone more mad, and we impose more restrictions. That’s the cycle we live with. It needs to stop.

Part of this happens because of the way the media approach the California story. The message is always: You’re getting screwed. That narrative needs to be replaced with a big full-length mirror that says, “Maybe you’re being screwed, but nowhere near as much as you’ve screwed yourself.” Once people understand that, then reform will come more easily. I think you’re talking about a 10 to 20 year process of public opinion being changed and actual action taken. And then in 20 years they’ll say, “Twenty years ago there was that book that started it all….”

Q. Have we begun that process, and if so, how far along are we?

A. I think you’ve seen the beginning of it with the recall of Gov. Gray Davis and the vote for Arnold Schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger would never say this, because his persona is built on this idea that everything is possible, but ultimately what he said to us in three separate elections is that the current system doesn’t allow him to legislate or govern in any sane way. He’s been saying that for seven years. He’s been trying different ways to say it and to fix it, and he has the advantage of being right.

The good government people have been working for years, too, to push for redistricting and an open primary. The effort to get a constitutional convention, even if it failed, is the beginning. Mark and I disagree with the California Forward people on some of their prescriptions, but what they’re doing right is building an interest group, something long-term to fight for the system. We need a real, sustainable public opinion campaign.

The best people at that is the California Teachers Association. They’re always on air talking in messages even when there is no political issue they’re working on. You hear from them when school starts — they’re talking about teachers, about giving them better pay and more freedom. Over the course of doing this they really have changed public opinion. Proposition 98, which they see as a very important thing and I think has been a disaster, passed with 50 percent of the vote but today something like 70 percent of people support it.

They’ve moved public opinion, and there needs to be the same effort with the state as a whole. We’ve created this political system and our elected officials are scapegoats. They do a great job being scapegoats — they’re awful, as any good scapegoat should be. But we need a broad public education campaign. For instance, people think most of the budget is spent on prisons and not on education, and that’s just not the case. Right now, our messaging is small and indirect. We need a lot of money and  a lot of time and a lot of smart campaigns. Maybe then, in ten years, you can go and have a constitutional convention or a revision conversation. Then you just have to hope the changes are the right ones. This is a really opportune moment and I wish people were doing more. This book is our effort to do something. There’s a moment when everyone knows something’s wrong and everyone’s paying attention. They may not show up to vote, but they’re paying attention. Now’s the moment to explain what’s going on.

I don’t think the people running for office right now are helping with this, unfortunately. Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown—every time they open their mouths they make things worse. They’re lying to us. They’re saying it’s just about controlling spending. They’re saying, “If we got a different person, me, in there, everything would be fine.” The best thing Meg Whitman can do for the state is end her campaign and put that money into the changing of public opinion. She could spend $100 million to send our book to every Californian. We would do it for a discount! But instead what she’s saying is often completely misleading and distorted. She’s giving people false information about the state, and that’s profoundly problematic. Brown is in some ways worse. He says things about Proposition 13 being the greatest thing that ever happened. He knows better, more than anyone alive. But he’s running for office.

The one political endorsement that I will ever issue is, don’t vote for governor this year. Not voting, leaving it blank, has value. In California, the requirement for a qualifying initiative or referendum is the support of a percentage of the number of people who voted in the most recent gubernatorial election. If you don’t vote for governor, you’re making it easier to pass referenda in California. You’re making it easier for people to come up with bad ideas, of course, but you’re also easing the way for good ideas.

Q. Does California need a new constitution?

A. We need a new one. The old one is a mess. It’s very long. People say India and Alabama have famously long constitutions, too. Constitutions should be simple. We have lots of things that don’t belong in it — from special tax rates to the kind of gill nets you use in commercial fishing.

We probably need to start over. Everyone’s scared of the blank page, but we should start with a blank page. Rather than negotiate every edit with every interest group that likes something in the Constitution, we can start anew. I think it’ll be politically easier. It’s also something we’ve never done. I don’t count the 1849 rogue convention where they plagiarized Iowa’s constitution and took out all the explanations of how to pay for things. We need a founding. We should invite people and let people dress up and make it a big party. I think anyone who wants to show up should come. Given the level of civic engagement in the state, I don’t think it’ll be an unmanageable number of people.

There are people doing some of this already. There are efforts online — Mark is involved with one. I always compare it to fantasy football. People who are really addicted to this — not me, not me, I swear — know that before the draft, you can do a mock draft to plan, to strategize. You create this in a wiki sort of way, with 12 other random people. We need that functionality for constitution writing in California.

Q. Given the state of the state, how did California become a model for the rest of the country?

A. I don’t know if we’re a model, but, I think the Gold Rush is the answer to that question, ultimately. We were this place of dreams that was talked about and watched from afar from our very beginning. Sometimes people pay less attention to us — we ebb and flow. We’re so big now, and so important. Obama seems to be trying to do it, but really, you can’t bring back the American economy without the California economy. That’s something I don’t think Obama quite understands, or he’d be doing more for us.

We’re less a model than we are an alternative. It’s the [Carey] McWilliams metaphor — we’re the great exception. We’re a parallel country within the country, separated by distance and some pretty big mountains from power and the rest of the country. Sometimes we do things that people want to do the exact opposite of, and sometimes they want to follow us. Certainly for the last generation we have been a technology capital, and that has a way of spreading our values and thinking. We’re also a pop cultural capital, and that has a way of giving us an outsize footprint in the world. And we’re just better looking. Really. That’s a fully-researched claim, with the full force of a think tank behind it. I mean, aren’t we?

*Photo of flag courtesy welshbaloney.

Gary Fine thinks rumors deserve a better reputation. “The people who spread them shouldn’t be insulted or denigrated,” he said. “We all spread rumors of various kinds, and the rumors we spread tell us what we believe, what we feel we can’t talk about directly.” Fine began studying rumors at a crucial time, in the 1960s, when gossip abounded about the Kennedy assassination and race riots. He continued studying rumor and race in his book Whispers on the Color Line, discovering that gossip contributed to making “racialized pools of knowledge.” In his latest book, The Global Grapevine: Why Rumors of Terrorism, Immigration, and Trade Matter co-authored with Bill Ellis, Fine explains how rumors start — from conspiracy theories about 9/11 to the hygienic habits of immigrants — why they matter, and why they could make a society more healthy.

Q. You’ve examined rumors about race and government conspiracy. Global Grapevine takes up rumors about terrorism, among others. What inspired this particular study?

A. After Whispers on the Color Line was published in 2001 I wanted to continue my rumor research. The issues of terrorism were front and center. In some ways, it went back to my earliest interest, which was beliefs about the Kennedy assassination. Here you had this event of enormous national trauma, but it was an event that was at least somewhat ambiguous. It was open to different kinds of understanding. Were the 9/11 attacks caused by a large scale Arab or Arab American conspiracy? Some people believed that. Others believed it was the Israelis, the Mossad, or Jewish Americans who were behind the attack. In both of those cases, people suggested, incorrectly, that on 9/11 there were no Arab Americans in the area, or that there were no Jewish Americans in the area. The rumors were in some sense like the race rumors — they were the flip image of each other. Whatever one believed beforehand made it possible to believe these rumors afterwards.

Now the third set of rumors related to these other two was that the U.S. government was in some way either behind the attacks or knew about the attacks. This gave rise to what’s sometimes called the 9/11 truth movement — the truthers. In all of these cases, one of the things about rumor that is important, particularly conspiracy rumors, is that there is so much information available. Facts are promiscuous. Whatever belief you find plausible, there is material that will support it.

I go back to the Kennedy assassination. If you thought it was communists, there was evidence. If you thought it was oil men, there was evidence. If you thought it was Lyndon Johnson, the mafia, you name it, there was evidence. There were facts you can bring to bear. And so it is with 9/11 conspiracy theories. The question is, what do you do with those facts? When do you say these facts make enough of a case that I am prepared to entertain seriously the idea that these attacks were caused by a large Arab, Israeli, or U.S. government conspiracy.

What we do not do is to judge who is truly correct. As we write about rumors of terrorism, immigration, and trade, Bill and I have our opinions. But the book is not a debunking of rumor. It is a book that works through and helps us understand rumor.

Q. How does a rumor start, and how does it spread?

A. That has been a traditional problem in rumor scholarship. It is very difficult of course to be there at that first moment. But we have a number of models for how a rumor starts. One model, and one that is popular among the public, is that there is someone who is a liar and is deliberately fabricating false information. It’s the model of propaganda, in which you have spies deliberately spreading information. It is certainly possible that, particularly in wartime, you will find some of this deliberate spreading of rumors.

A second model simply says that rumors happen when people are in situations of ambiguity. They’re trying to understand what happened, why it happened. People in general feel very uncomfortable until they have an understanding of how this particular traumatic event occurred. They are gathering information and trying to make sense of it. As a result, they say, these facts taken together suggest this claim. And they begin talking about that claim. As it spreads, it solidifies. It changes from being speculation to being truth.

A third model is that of misunderstanding or misinterpretation. As in the children’s game of telephone, someone will make a statement — perhaps true — and the person passing it on will change it a little, and the next person will change it a little more. You move from something that might have been true to something that is false as it is retold. To give you an example, there is the story of Arab Americans celebrating after 9/11. It’s hard to know exactly where that came from. It might have been a lie. It might have been an attempt to make sense of things. Perhaps one person did celebrate or cheer or say something positive — something like “America got what it deserves” — and someone heard it, spread it, and suddenly it becomes several people, a group, a crowd celebrating.

In terms of rumors spreading, we talk about the politics of plausibility and the politics of credibility. The politics of plausibility refers to the rumor itself. How plausible does it seem? Does it fit in with those other things that we know and believe about our society? Does it make sense to us that Arab Americans might celebrate 9/11? For some people it is implausible; for others, it is plausible. So this latter group is ready to spread that story.

The politics of credibility has to do with whom we heard the rumor from. If we’re going to pass on a story, we are likely to say the person we heard it from is in a position of knowing about the rumor. If we hear something from Jon Stewart, we might think, “This isn’t true, it’s a joke,” so we wouldn’t spread it. We always make these judgments. It can vary person to person. For some people, hearing something from Keith Olbermann is credible, for others, hearing it from Sean Hannity is. Each of us has our judgments based on our belief and experiences.

Q. What makes a rumor stick?

A. It is largely a function of whether they are plausible and whether they serve needs — whether they make sense out of a world that would otherwise be ambiguous. We talk about beliefs about immigrants, either documented or undocumented. For over 100 years in the U.S. there has been a belief that immigrants bring disease with them. About thirty years ago, when the AIDS epidemic was just starting, the rumor was that a large part of the spread of AIDS was due to Haitians. They were one of the so-called “4H groups.” Today, we see that as being implausible. At the time, we saw the connection. Similarly, H1N1 was originally called the Mexican flu. And earlier, leprosy was seen as being brought to the U.S. by immigrants, as was typhoid.

Q. How do rumors translate to real world — whether the violence of the 1960s or the anti-immigrant laws of today?

A. In looking at rumors that deal with immigration, we need to look at rumors that occur in various communities. One of the examples we use are rumors in Latino communities. Very often we’re able to trace rumors that suggest immigration agents are going to swoop down on a particular day and round up all the undocumented workers to deport them. On those days, people don’t show up for work. Suddenly, and usually to the surprise of the employers, half of their workforce isn’t there. Likewise, in white communities, there is this belief, a strong belief, about Latinos in violent gangs — particularly Mexican, Salvadoran, or Dominican gangs.

One of the things about rumor that makes it important is that it provides an opportunity for people to talk about beliefs, but to do it in such a way that they don’t have to defend their beliefs. Consider someone who mistrusts Central American immigrants. To say “I don’t like these people” is dangerous. It could easily be considered racist. But to talk about a particular crime that a particular Central American gang engaged in, well, that’s just talking about the news. That separates you from the charge of racism. And so rumors work very effectively to separate individuals from the implications of their belief.

Q. Is there a chance that rumors could spur violence today, as they did in earlier decades?

A. For a number of reasons, we have less civil disorder than we used to. It’s not that we have none — there are always aggrieved communities that are potentially a tinderbox. In 1992 in Los Angeles, after the Rodney King arrest and convictions, there were riots, as there were in Miami about 20 years ago. At the moment, we don’t see either the left or the right engaging in violent action, but you certainly see anger in many communities. At this point, partly because there are new tools of policing and more cameras, and because people are able to buy into the system more than before, there’s less chance of civil disorder than would have been true in the 1960s.

Q. What are the rumors we spread about trade?

A. This has to do with American fears about our economic dominance. These are rumors that claim that products we get overseas are dangerous in one way or another. We point to a number of different stories. About a decade ago, Barry Glassner published a very influential book, The Culture of Fear. What Glassner argues in the book is that often we are afraid of the wrong things — those rumors that we believe direct our attention from things that are more important. In terms of trade rumors, we will pick on a particular product that was manufactured overseas, and we will say there was a snake in the lining of that coat or blanket. It will be our means of talking indirectly about our fear of Asian economic competition. Rather than thinking about what we need to do to increase the quality of American products, increasing American manufacturing, or developing a world system economy in which nations play different roles, we create these stories that suggest that outsiders are dangerous. Rumors about trade are entirely consistent with rumors of immigration — those people and those things beyond our border cannot be trusted.

Q. Can rumors ever be helpful, say, when it’s about consumer safety or crime?

A. Rumors can serve positive functions in a number of different ways. One of the arguments Patricia Turner and I made in Whispers on the Color Line is that they provide us an opportunity to talk with each other about those things that we didn’t know the other believed. It provides a moment of education. I think that is true in terms of our argument in Global Grapevine as well, particularly with regard to immigration. Here are the fears — fears that may not be legitimate, but fears that are genuine — that whites have and that Hispanics have or Asians have. We can use these rumors as a starting point.

Rumors are also valuable in that they are attempts to deal with ambiguity. They warn us. That’s why we wrote the book—to get people to pay attention to rumors. They’re something like a canary in a coal mine. The rumors we hear tell us about the fears and concerns we have. And of course, rumors are not necessarily nasty things, such as rumors about one’s company giving bonuses this year. There is a study of gossip, for instance, that finds that more gossip is positive than negative. If you define gossip as any communication about an absent third person — Jane is pregnant, Karen might be getting a promotion — a lot of it is positive. In our book, we’re looking at social problems, so we tend to focus on those rumors that deal with conspiracies, violence, and economic concerns.

Q. What is the strangest rumor you have ever encountered?

A. We talk about rumors in the book about various groups eating fetuses — that in some cultures fetuses are considered a delicacy, according to the rumor. These are rumors about defining insiders and outsiders. To go that far, though, is startling. There are more widespread rumors about, say, Vietnamese people stealing cats and dogs and eating them. But these rumors about fetuses take it a step further and enter a pretty bizarre world.

Our strong appetites for every fish from tuna and salmon to orange roughy and monkfish are upsetting ocean ecosystems and polluting the seas, as Jonathan Gold discussed at a Zócalo event. We asked five food lovers – Kogi Chef Roy Choi, photographer Charlie Grosso, Teenage Glutster Javier Cabral, Eater LA’s Kat Odell, and Artbites’ Maite Gomez-Rejón – to tell us: What is the cruelest food you’ve ever eaten? Read their answers below.

What’s so cruel about killing a goat?

Whale meat is the new black. Or is it the appearance of being sympathetic that’s the new black?

When I was in college everybody wore Amnesty International T-shirts and had World Wildlife Federation and Greenpeace stickers but they hung out at pet stores, ate bologna, and went to the zoo. Everybody was against Apartheid yet they clutched their purses when I and my homies from the hood would roll up.

We can eat cows and pigs and chickens and turn a blind eye. But foie gras and whales are cruel? What about all the senseless turkeys we kill for Thanksgiving, our national holiday that glorifies the myth of the Puritan warm heart? Rattlesnakes and alligators and buffalo to be hip. Ducks, crabs, lobsters, tuna, sea bass, lamb, baby cows, squab, quail, trout, elk — these are all beautiful creatures yet we eat them and kill them in abundance.

I’ve killed a goat with my own two hands. I chased him around a dirt field in the desert, wrestled him to the ground, got him in a head lock, looked him in the eye, and slit his throat. We hung him, skinned him, drained his blood, gutted him, butchered him into primals, then sub-primals. We packed him up and took him across the border to Mexicali where we made birria, the most delicious birria.

This was not a cruel moment for me. It was seven in the morning and I learned about the spirituality of cooking and what my responsibility is as a chef. I did not kill this goat out of haste or carelessness. This was a tradition that my dishwasher Salvador’s family has been doing for many generations and he trusted me enough to show me. I had to dig deep to see how special this animal was to the cycle of life and when I looked in his eyes I took his spirit and he became a part of me.

This may sound cruel, but it is not.  It is only cruel because it makes you cringe. What is cruel is killing animals on mass-production levels. What is cruel is being numb to the destruction of life.

Buddhist philosophy extols the virtue of living without hurting other forms of life. I try to live that way. I don’t step on spiders or deliberately run over people on the street in my car.

I am making steps each day as a chef to try and serve more vegetables and buy the most humanely raised meat that I can. It is hard, but it is not impossible.

I killed a goat. But that is not the cruelest thing. The cruelest thing is a Chicken McNugget.

—Roy Choi is the chef of Kogi.

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Better to eat than to waste

A favorite dish at any Chinese banquette is the shark fin soup. I have eaten plenty of it, year in, year out. Ever since I was young, I knew it was a delicacy. It was special because we didn’t see it often and there was always a bit of ceremony when it is served. I often thought it was just called “Shark Fin” soup and the bits of stringy gelatinous strands were just made out of some unknown matter. After all, Chinese cuisine is filled with imaginative names for various foods. The tapioca balls in the ever-so-popular Boba tea were called “Frog Eggs” when I was young. Frog legs were called “Field Chicken,” and given how much it does taste like chicken, I really believed that it was some form of free-range bird.

It was not until I was much older that I realized that Shark Fin is not a euphemism for anything. Shark fin actually is the fin of a shark. Then at some cousin’s wedding banquet one day, I discovered that the sharks are often caught, their fins cut off, and then released back into the water to meet their untimely ends. I think I was appalled. Yet I believe I finished my portion of the soup that night.

What trumps cruelty-free in the Chinese mind is the waste-not mentality — especially when your grandparents left everything behind in 1949 and porridge is usually what is for lunch. I am certain that I have had shark fin soup since that fateful day when I learned of the shark’s sad end. However, as most of my relatives are now married and my life veers in a direction where Chinese banquettes are few and far between, it has been quite a few years since I have had any shark fins.

Would I eat it again? I think I would. Not because I have no compassion for the shark but because not consuming my bowl of soup in a banquette of a hundred would not have stirred the consciences of the restaurant or the other guests. The only conscience that would be disturbed by my meager objection would be my own — at the fact that I wasted good, clean, edible food.

—Charlie Grosso is a photographer whose latest exhibit is Wok the Dog.

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Is it cruel if the prawn is drunk?

As if I don’t get this question asked enough by my fast-food fueled classmates and homies as soon as they discover my food-oriented ways!

It was during my innocent early years of food blogging. I had just turned 18. A select group of food bloggers were called up for this British Television series. The theme was the “Seven Deadly Sins” and this particular episode was for “gluttony”.

And it was television drama at its finest! They portrayed us as some sort of food fetishists who would only eat raw food, and I’m not talking about raw vegan food. We went to a seafood restaurant out in Rowland Heights. There were some native Chinese speakers among us who had heard about their “off the menu” items. And when the dishes came, I think I knew why they were strictly off the menu.

The first dish was “Drunken Shrimp”, where a brimming bucket-full of kicking and screaming prawns were drowned in a pool of potent rice wine. They were done as soon as they were drunk and plastered. You would fetch one of the less-twitchy ones, break its head off, peel off its sticky shell, eat the sweet fresh meat, then suck its brains out like you were sucking a double-wide boba straw. But! Nothing is really cruel when you’re drunk right?

Which brings me to what I think is the most inhumane thing I’ve ever eaten in my entire eating career: live lobster sashimi. This dish made full use of those murky lobster tanks that are synonymous with seafood Chinese restaurants. The chosen lobsters were brought to our table for our approval, taken to the back of the house for five minutes at most, then brought back to the table, severed in half and facing each other. Not to mention still pinching with all their translucent flesh scooped out and served on their dislocated tails, all ready for our top-of-the-food-chain chow down. Their beady eyes followed our chopstick ends and they attempted to defend themselves one last time as we nonchalantly reached over for their ultra-fresh sinewy flesh.

None of us really got paid for anything, but we ended up scoring a several thousand dollar sushi meal at a prestigious sushi restaurant. And that was good enough for me!

—Javier Cabral is the Teenage Glutster.

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Like butter

Hm, good question! Cruelest, well, certainly veal and foie gras can be filed under cruel foods. What a lot of people don’t know about me is that I was a vegetarian for seven years in high school and part of college, simply because I didn’t believe in eating animals. However, toward the end of college I decided I wanted a career in food and that there was no way I could write about food and not eat meat. So, right now I eat anything and everything, though when I am not at a restaurant I do tend to gravitate to veggies. Since I eat out so frequently for work, I eat a lot of foie gras and I do have to say I love it. There are more humane ways to produce foie that have been mostly explored in France, and it’s a shame that people in the U.S. don’t consider this alternative method (save for Dan Barber at Blue Hill). Every time I eat foie, I do feel a tinge of guilt about what I am eating, but I also feel as though it’s my duty as a food editor to eat everything. To me, foie is like this savory, unctuous butter, it simply melts in your mouth and easily fancies up simple crostini. Some of the best foie I’ve had has been at WD-50 in NYC, I love Bouchon’s tub (that jar is huge!) of foie, I’ve had good foie at Cut, oh and I just love the foie gras cotton candy lollipops at The Bazaar.

—Kat Odell is editor of Eater LA.

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Crueler than Annie Hall

The cruelest food I’ve ever eaten is live lobster at Sanuki No Sato, housed in an obscure strip mall in Gardena. Did I mention the lobster was live, as in alive? When my friends and I somewhat nervously placed our order I romantically imagined the famous lobster scene from “Annie Hall” being reenacted in the kitchen. Always game for trying new foods — especially those that will give me a good story to tell — I was anxious for our lobster’s arrival. When it came to the table it was enormously regal, its eyes staring straight at us, antennas moving as if pleading for help, its now useless armor cut open revealing perfectly sliced flesh. Lobster sashimi. In my head, Diane Keaton screamed.

I was at once horrified and couldn’t get my chopsticks ready fast enough to dig in. It tasted of the essence of the sea, in all its bountiful glory. It was… fresh.

Did I feel guilty trying it? Yes. Would I try it again? I don’t think I’d want to look into those teeny tiny black eyes again but if presented sliced and on a plate, sure. Does that make me a horrible person, or a mere honest human full of contradictions? I wonder what Alvy Singer would think.

—Maite Gomez-Rejón teaches art and culinary history through ARTBITES.

*Photo of Roy Choi by Aaron Salcido. Photos courtesy Charlie Grosso, Javier Cabral, Kat Odell, and Maite Gomez-Rejón. Photo of lobster courtesy Dalboz17.

In The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, Peter Beinart argues that an overestimation of power has led the U.S. into three wars. We asked four scholars of foreign policy — Princeton’s Julian Zelizer, UCLA’s Kal Raustiala, American University’s David Vine and Temple University’s Richard Immerman — for their responses to a question sparked by Beinart’s argument: Is American foreign policy too ambitious? Read their distinct takes below.

Yes, we’re too ambitious.

American foreign policy has usually been too ambitious and policymakers have been willing to bite off more of the world than we can chew.

During the progressive era, some leaders wanted to remake and “modernize” other civilizations. During World War I, Woodrow Wilson sought to promote new concepts of self-determination and international cooperation. During World War II, we set out to defeat fascism.  During the Cold War, our politicians wanted to defeat international communism and any allied government.

On a few occasions, the ambition has produced successful results. Certainly, during World War II America’s arsenal of democracy succeeded in its goals against Germany, Italy, and Japan.

But more often the nation fell short of what it wanted to do. The result has been that the government tempered its ambitions and dealt with the realities of what America’s resources could accomplish. Unfortunately, those moments have come only after the nation made serious and costly mistakes by overextending ourselves and causing more problems abroad than we could solve. This was the story of Vietnam, which did generate an era of greater restraint in the 1970s with the advent of détente.

Now we are coming off a period where national hubris was strong. The nation is deeply committed in two ambitious conflicts that seek to remake civil society to diminish the treat of terrorism. Thus far, President Obama, despite his campaign rhetoric, has demonstrated that he shares some of the same ambition that convinced President George W. Bush to go into Iraq and Afghanistan.

—Julian Zelizer is a Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University and author of Arsenal of Democracy.

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We’re too ambitious and not ambitious enough.

For at least 200 years Americans have debated how ambitious our foreign policy ought to be. John Quincy Adams famously wrote that the United States “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” Adams thought this was a good thing, and lots of others since have too. I am not of that persuasion. And in any event, in 2010 it is neither possible nor desirable to radically change our global footprint.

That said, some aspects of our foreign policy are too ambitious, while others are not nearly ambitious enough. One area where we are too ambitious is in our quest to control and stabilize the sources of oil and gas around the world. Our intense need for fossil fuels has led us to lean heavily on the Middle East, with many pernicious consequences. Of course, to ease up on our footprint in the oil-producing world requires as much, or more, of a domestic policy change as it does a foreign policy change. But we need to see that our addiction to oil is a national security issue.

Likewise, we should be more ambitious when it comes to tackling climate change — a deadly serious problem with potentially major repercussions here and abroad. We also need to push harder on the global framework for infectious diseases, and on smarter approaches to development around the world—not just economic development, but political development. Today, weak states are in many respects a greater threat than strong states. These are all areas where we can and should be more ambitious, not less.

—Kal Raustiala is Director of the UCLA Ronald W. Burkle Center for International Relations and author of Does the Constitution Follow the Flag?

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Let’s ask the people who bear the costs.

Given the tens of thousands dead, wounded, and displaced in Afghanistan and the millions dead, wounded, and displaced in Iraq since 2001, I wonder how an Iraqi or Afghan would answer this question. So too, I wonder how the family of a dead or maimed member of the U.S. military would respond?

These are some of the many who have borne the costs of U.S. foreign policy in recent years.  It is long past time that their voices, as well as the human consequences of such policies, move to the center of foreign policymaking.  For too long, U.S. foreign policy has been led by elites who have paid scant attention to the human costs of policies that have led to more than 200 overseas military operations since World War II and total annual military spending now exceeding $1 trillion (about the same as the rest of the world combined).

Of course, everyone in the United States has borne the costs of this militarized foreign policy — in the hundreds of billions spent on warmaking that could have gone to defending the nation’s territory, to building stronger diplomatic relationships, and to ensuring the health, education, jobs, and well-being of Americans.

Attending to the human costs of foreign policy suggests that this question isn’t the one we should be asking.  Unless one’s answer is a simple “no,” the question suggests the United States needs a moderation of its foreign policy, an adjustment, rather than the transformation that is urgently needed.  The question should then be, How do we transform U.S. foreign policy away from policies that have led us repeatedly into bloody, unnecessary wars, away from out-of-control military spending that continues to push the nation deeper into debt even in a time of economic crisis, away from occupying other countries, and toward a human-centered foreign policy based around non-aggression, diplomacy, international cooperation, and the protection of human lives as the best way to protect the security of the United States and, ultimately, the world?

—David Vine is a professor of anthropology at American University and author of Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia.

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Let’s ask a different question.

To ask whether U.S. foreign policy is too ambitious is the wrong question. Certainly Americans must recognize the limits of their power, and the premise of American exceptionalism can readily produce an arrogance of power. Yet although “ambition” has become a value-laden term, it should be policy neutral. At issue is how Americans define and calibrate the sources of their power, and to what ends — and what purposes — they apply that power.

The architects of American foreign policy have been normatively ambitious. They have sought greater security and prosperity; they have sought more territory and markets; they have sought empire. The consequences of that ambition, however, have varied. So have the drivers and objectives. Woodrow Wilson surely overreached by proclaiming that America’s entry into World War I would make the world safe for democracy, and the League of Nations lacked the domestic and global support required of it to be effective. But in hindsight the world is a better place because of Wilson’s ambition. In fundamental respects Richard Nixon was less ambitious than John Kennedy or (internationally) Lyndon Johnson. He recognized that Americans would never pay any price and bear any burden. Yet regarding China, to cite but one illustration, Nixon achieved more than either of his predecessors imagined.

In the contemporary environment American foreign policy needs to be if anything more ambitious. It must recognize that to focus on geopolitics, terrorism, and nuclear non-proliferation is necessary but not sufficient. Just as important for foreign policy are such concerns as global debt, resource management, and environmental degradation. Moreover, even in crisis areas like Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan the problem is not ambition. Policy must be smarter, and resources exploited more effectively. Any military surge, for example, should be matched by a civilian surge. Too ambitious? I think not.

—Richard Immerman is Director or the Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy at Temple University and author of Empire for Liberty.

*Photo above courtesy hellosputnik. Homepage photo courtesy Crisologo.

Juliet Schor, a professor of sociology at Boston College, has long studied American excess, from how much we work (in her book The Overworked American) to how much we spend (The Overspent American) to how much we shop (Born to Buy). Her latest book, Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth, takes up moderating both economic and ecological excesses by using the eponymous new concept of sustainability. “Plenitude, this way of living, it’s a new model,” she said. “It’s an emerging trend that I believe is going to grow pretty significantly in coming years.” Below, Schor explains what plenitude is, why our big-is-better economy is bad for us and for the Earth, and why economists should talk to environmentalists a little more often.

Q. What does the word ‘plenitude’ mean to you, and why did you choose it?

A. Much of the discourse about the environment, and increasingly about the economy too, is austerity-minded. Economists talk about tradeoffs, and the idea that if we want more nature, we have to have less of something else — that protecting the planet is a sacrifice. That kind of thinking, I wanted to argue, is wrong in this case. Not that there are never tradeoffs — of course there are.

One of the big messages of the book is that living in a different way could make us better off, and protect the planet. What’s good for human beings is also good for the planet. The kind of destructive economy that we have is also one that is not meeting the needs of people. I wanted to choose a word that would call attention to the possibility and potential that we have in this world if we are willing to open our minds to making some big changes.

Q. You describe that destructive economy as “business as usual.” What does this mean—what are we doing wrong, and how did it come to be?

A. The term comes from the climate change discourse. It refers to the path of emissions that we will stay on if we don’t do anything differently. It’s a suicidal path for humans, and for many of the species on Earth. I use the term because I think the economic model — the kinds of companies that we have in this country, in the global economy — are also taking us down a path that has similar implications on a wider range of issues, not just climate but also biodiviersity and ecosystems and human wellbeing. What I mean by the business-as-usual economy is the larger corporations and institutions that dominate our economy and our political system — the so-called free market model, the market-dominating model — that have dictated our policy menu and our thinking about economics in this country since about 1980.

Q. What’s wrong with that bigger-is-better thinking, and why do we tend to believe that bigger companies are more efficient?

A. The modern industrial system has had a long-term movement toward bigger — bigger factories, bigger companies, bigger economies. We’ve gone from regional to national and global capitalism. What I argue is that there are many reasons to think that the advantages of large scale are being eroded, and the potential and the effect of smaller-scale enterprises and economies is on the ascendency. There are a couple of dimensions to this. One has to do with the environment. It’s only because we have been ignoring the ecological costs of a global production system and a global agricultural system that we have developed as far in this direction as we have. If we had to pay the true costs of the transportation and energy, we wouldn’t have moved as quickly in this direction. These are false efficiencies.

The impacts of these large, concentrated entities on our political system are also damaging. It’s hard to maintain democracies when you have these very large corporations that have so much political power. We’ve seen what happens in the financial sector when companies get too big to fail. We have privatization of gains and socialization of losses—the worst of capitalism and socialism put together.

What the new information technology allows us to do is shrink scale in a lot of different areas, precisely because information flow is so cheap. Economists have long wondered why it is that we have corporations that do so many different things. If you think about it, a corporation, internally, doesn’t operate on market principles. So what is it that has led to these big command-control institutions? Transaction costs is a common explanation. Those have been wiped out by the possibility of networks. We can go to a smaller scale. This is a big part of why you see so much innovation and dynamism and employment growth in small- and medium-sized businesses. The big ones are failing. They’re dinosaurs.

Q. How has this way of doing business changed our day-to-day lives and our communities?

A. One of the main things I talk about in the book is the increasing market-centricity of daily life. If you take the average person or household in the U.S. over the last 30 years, they have been devoting more and more energy to the market. On average, we are working longer hours, buying more things rather than doing and making, and commodifying our leisure time. The market has come to dominate many more spheres. One of the big trends is the commercialization of our intimate lives — we purchase services. We used to purchase goods, and services were done within households or among friends. Now, people are more likely to purchase services, particularly emotional or care-taking services. That has profoundly altered the experience of daily life. It’s part of the hollowing out of communities, as people are less and less economically dependent on each other. That’s what you had before — people doing each other favors, existing in a denser web of reciprocal connection. That’s been an important part of the decline of community.

Q. Is this web of connection back on the rise because of the recession?

A. Yes. The recession altered the calculus of time and money in this country. It made money scarcer and time more plentiful. It’s a reversal of what had been happening previously, that shift toward more hours of work and buying more services. You have people who have more time, and they are connecting with others. That’s dovetailing with a whole movement of people who previously recognized threats to the planet, and were attempting to reverse many of those trends — people creating local food economies, revitalizing local communities, creating local time banks where people trade services. You offer babysitting and in return you can get someone who cooks great meals. I have a grad student who is participating in a new time bank in the Boston area — she’s getting data analysis done in return for cooking meals. There is a revival of these sorts of things. We can expect that to continue because I don’t see the labor market returning to normality.

Q. What else do you see happening in the long-run, in terms of the larger-scale economy?

A. Twenty-six million people in the U.S. are underemployed, unemployed, or marginally attached to jobs. That’s a really big number. the dominant approach now is to just rely on overall or aggregate growth. But that won’t work. We’re going to have a long-term unemployment problem in this country. We don’t know  exactly how it will play out. What I do feel certain about is that relying on the business-as-usual market to take care of this huge number of unemployed is not realistic. We’re going to see more of a shift toward self-reliance — more making and doing and acting at a local level, more efforts like the inner-city cooperatives to create new business opportunities. I do think the labor market disequilibrium will create a lot of small-scale entrepreneurial activity, much of it, by the way, green. That’s one of the really hopeful things about it.

Q. To what extent are economists and environmentalists talking to each other? It seems like that’s what’s needed to get us out of this recession.

A. It’s happening on the fringes of the economic profession. Mainstream economists have changed their tune on climate change in the last couple of years. Before about 2006, the average economist probably thought we shouldn’t do much about climate change, that it wasn’t a serious problem. It’s telling that it took them this long to really take it seriously. Now the consensus in the profession seems to have changed. People are recognizing how serious the need is to address climate change. For the most part, though, not many mainstream economists have taken that insight and thought about it more broadly. There are a small number of economists who are in conversation with ecologists and scientists more generally. It’s interesting — if you look at the financial regulation debate, there’s virtually no discussion about ecological issues. If you look at the unemployment debate, people a little bit more on the left are saying government needs to do more on that, there’s still not nearly the level of awareness of environmental issues that one would think there would be. There’s still a big gulf between economic and ecological conversations. My book hopes to bridge that.

Q. What sort of effect can individual or local efforts like the kind you described have?

A. Well, we have to get prices right. That’s a fairly standard economic insight about the environment. If you don’t price natural resources, if you allow people to use them freely and degrade, pollute, and destroy them freely, you won’t have a sustainable outcome. These are things that need to be done at the global and national level, to integrate nature into economic thinking and economic decision-making. That can’t be done at a local level. There are other things that can be done at a national level that can have a profound impact at the local level. Health insurance reform is one — if people are no longer tied to a job to get health insurance, that frees them up to do a lot more. We really do need to think seriously of altering the balance between the big global corporations and the global capitalist economy and the local, the regional. We’ve gotten very much out of balance with those. We need growth in local, regional, small-scale sustainable economies. Obviously, we also need the big corporations to get a lot more sustainable in what they do. They’re not off the hook.

*Photo above courtesy Ed Yourdon.

Richard Immerman has studied American empire for decades — since college at Cornell, where he worked with the famed historian of American empire, Walter LaFeber. But the notion of American empire, Immerman said, “was a very contested concept at that point, and it still is.” Below, Immerman, author of Empire For Liberty: A History of American Imperialism From Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz, talks with Swati Pandey about what American empire is, who built it, and how Barack Obama is handling his role in it.

Q. We tend to think of “American empire” as a postwar concept, or at least a 20th century one. How old is the American empire, by your count?

A. I argue it is as old as the United States. We were conceived as an empire, particularly as defined at that point by the British Empire. Those like Benjamin Franklin, who is the first character in my book, conceptualized the U.S. as perfecting an empire along the lines that the British had established. It was a very difficult decision for Franklin to break off from the British Empire, or to advocate that the colonies break off from that Empire. He only concluded that they must after he determined that the British Empire had gone awry, had gone off in a counterproductive direction, and consequently the U.S. would be able to build on that in a more perfect way. That’s where the concept of liberty fits in.

Q. What was the founders’ idea of liberty? Was it primarily an individual value, or a broader one?

A. On an abstract level, they did think of liberty as an intrinsicvalue. It was fundamental to American ideals and the American identity. Liberty was to a large extent the raison d’etre for independence, based on the notion that the British had subverted America’s liberties. For that reason, an American empire — the growth and development of it, the existence of it — would be based on this notion of liberty, and the notion that empire and liberty were mutually reinforcing, whereas ultimately some have come to argue today that they’re mutually exclusive. As I argue in the book, the concept of liberty becomes more contested, and the notion of empire changes over time. That leads to the collision of the concepts.

Q. When did our notion of what empire meant start to change?

A. There’s an irony there as well. Americans defined themselves as an empire, used that term virtually interchangeably with “state” or “nation,” up through the Civil War period. During that time, the notion of empire tended to be more instrumental — it had to do with political control. As a consequence it was much more of a benign concept. Empire becomes more pejorative, or freighted with negative baggage, as the 19th century wore on, after the Civil War. This is particularly true when “empire” becomes associated with the new imperialism associated with the Old World in the latter part of that century, and as the U.S. becomes more engaged, if you will, in the imperial scramble — in what some people would refer to later as the “Great Aberration.” When empire becomes associated with or likened to imperialism — and imperialism was never a benign term—then empire takes on a more pejorative connotation. Interestingly, it’s at this point that Americans become more adamant in disassociating themselves with empire — notwithstanding that one could argue in the pre-Civil War period, as the U.S. developed its continental empire, it behaved in a more ruthless and violent manner.

Q. And what about our idea of liberty?

A. Liberty never had this type of instrumental definition. Liberty was an ideal. It obviously incorporated freedom and other notions that are very positive in terms of our values, but it’s hard to really pinpoint what it is. Prior to the Civil War, the Union thought it stood for liberty in terms of opposing slavery. Those in the South also thought they were the supporters of liberty — in terms of states’ rights and keeping the federal government at arm’s length. In that sense, it was always, as I said, contested.

In terms of the Civil War — and the wars today — the issue really is whether one state can impose “more liberty” on another. That itself is so inherently contradictory and tension-ridden. The notion of self-determination is associated with liberty on the one hand, but it raises problems on the other hand depending on how people behave, and how receptive or acquiescent the other polity is to American influence.

Q. It seems these fundamental concepts were particularly transformed during the Civil War and the decades after — you highlight two lesser-known empire-builders from those times, William H. Seward and Henry Cabot Lodge. Why did you choose them?

A. William H. Seward is actually a fascinating case. Of all the primary players in my book he is the least known, and yet in many ways he’s extremely important. Seward represents the types of contradictions I’m writing about. He rises to political prominence in the antebellum period as a staunch abolitionist, or at least an opponent of slavery. I would place him in the abolitionist camp. He opposes, for example, the Compromise of 1850, and does not believe that the house can be divided in two. He’s considered a champion of liberty based on certain conventional definitions. Yet even at that time, he’s an avid proponent and ultimately an architect of a broad, expanding American empire, particularly a commercial overseas empire, which would include other peoples, for example Hawaii or Cuba. He sees that expansion as positive, as enabling and facilitating the growth of American ideals and values that he associates with liberty. And yet in doing that, he will obviously at least curtail liberty of the indigenous people. Seward is probably the individual most associated with what is often called the “New Empire,” the American overseas empire built in the latter part of the 19th century.

Henry Cabot Lodge is quite different from Seward in that he’s an avid proponent of an assertive nationalism. He also advocates empire expansion in the name of liberty. But someone like Seward would argue that the type of expansion would not subjugate people — that they would naturally be attracted to the U.S., and therefore it’s not an issue of imposing anything. Lodge, who is a much more bellicose type of nationalist, really doesn’t think in those terms. Expansion is an extension of American greatness and power, which he would define also as the extension of American liberty. He’s much more associated with, let’s say, Teddy Roosevelt — that type of aggressive and to some extent militaristic policies.

Q. Your book focuses on figures other than presidents — why?

A. To a large extent, in the writing of American history, we tend to personalize it, to base it on the presidents. I’m not arguing that presidents are not significant — they absolutely are. But there are many other players in the story who are equally or even more important, and reflect political, cultural and other dynamics even more so than presidents do. I thought it was important to reach down to another layer in the American story and identify these people.

Q. When did American empire become militaristic?

A. Except under particular defined moments — under Lodge in the latter part of the 19th century, to some extent in the early Cold War period, then also more recently — the American empire is never militaristic in the sense of relying primarily on military instruments or coercion. The use of the military is, ideally, a short-term resort to achieve an objective. There have been various times when the U.S. has relied very heavily on military means, certainly when it created its continental empire. But subsequent to that it has been based on economic tools, cultural and ideological affinities, and diplomacy, and the notion that it is based on the voluntary association of other peoples. Part of the reason America has had a difficult time controlling its empire is because it denies it is an empire.

Q. Does an economic empire do better at preserving liberty?

A. Liberty is in the eye of the beholder. The statesperson, the architect, would say this is an empire based on free choice. It’s built on the notion of the liberal order, that is, the free exchange of not just goods but ideas. Others of course argue that choice is much more constrained. States or people who choose are not necessarily “free.” I’m not arguing that commercial expansion, that free trade, even the notion of a globalized world is inherently bad in one way or another. It’s really about the forms it takes, and how often these commercial empires breed the type of environment that ultimately leads to the use of military force.

Q. If we’ve been an empire so long, would you say it’s a good thing, or an essential quality of our country?

A. I would say liberty broadly defined is a good thing — that notion of seeking to assist and enhance the development of other peoples is generally good. Americans have by and large defined liberty, or defined America, as an exceptional nation that is more adept, or more mature, or more capable of exercising liberty as a public good than other countries. So the result of this notion is that it’s difficult to expand a concept like liberty, or to export it to other people, especially people who Americans believe are incapable of using liberty responsibility. That’s where the collision arises, and it’s been apparent throughout American history, whether with Native Americans and other ethnic groups within the U.S., or internationally. Our intentions are generally good — to bring other people these ideas and values that are integral to the American identity. But then we become disillusioned as soon as we start to think those people cannot act responsibly within the environment of liberty, and therefore require more guidance, to use a euphemistic word.

Q. So far, do you believe Obama is shrinking American empire?

A. He’s sort of denying it. I argue in the book that the contradiction, the collisions I see becoming most manifest is with Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib or other examples in which America is behaving clearly in a way that it associates with forces against liberty, but doing it in the name of liberty. We’re subverting our own values. Obama campaigned very strongly on the notion that such behavior was incompatible with American ideals. And yet, we have seen very little change in the country’s behavior since he took office. I would not argue at this point that America is less committed to empire than we were before Obama.

Q. Would it be possible for Obama, or any president, to effect a retreat, or shift away from empire for the country?

A. It would be very difficult for America to retreat in the sense of withdrawing from the Middle East, or elsewhere in the world. American interests as well as its ideals are really now integrally related to the world. As other states develop in terms of not just power but also their commitment to a type of global order — even a liberal global order that the U.S. associates with itself — then we might be able to have more shared responsibility for maintaining stability throughout the world.

Q. Is there anyone in the Obama administration who you identify as an architect of empire in the way of the six figures you profile in your book?

A. No one now comes to mind. I don’t see anyone in the Obama administration who played the role that Paul Wolfowitz played in the Bush administration — a sort of public intellectual who has really thought about these issues for a long, long time. In terms of Wolfowitz, although I’m quite critical of what he did, he’s a remarkable character in certain ways. I almost give him a begrudging respect because of how he has thought about these issues. I don’t see anyone in the current administration who’s comparable.

Photo above courtesy Phil’s Photostream.