Editorial: Homeland Security’s New Chief

The Senate has confirmed Jeh Johnson, once the Pentagon's top lawyer, to lead the Department of Homeland Security. Mr. Johnson brings a sharp legal mind and reputation for probity to the job. He will need both to manage the department, a daunting agglomeration of agencies and missions and chronic management problems.

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Every year the Government Accountability Office publishes a "high-risk list" of federal agencies and departments that it considers "most in need of transformation." Homeland security has appeared on that list, year after year, for failing to become "a single, cohesive and effective department that is greater than the sum of its parts." It has many parts: 22 agencies were folded into homeland security in 2003; today the department has more than 240,000 employees handling terrorism prevention, disaster response, immigration (legal and illegal) and many other things. Staffing vacancies are high. Morale is low.

What most needs fixing is immigration enforcement. Under Mr. Johnson's predecessors, the department's continually shifting strategies against illegal immigration had two things in common. They were ineffective and cruel. The administration of George W. Bush specialized in high-profile deportations. In one notorious instance, the government professed itself shocked to find Hispanics without papers working in a meat plant in Iowa, so it swooped in and removed them, devastating scores of families and the town they lived in.

The Obama administration promised greater prosecutorial discretion to focus more on removing violent and dangerous criminals, but, nevertheless, it ramped up deportations to record levels. Deportations roared along at about 400,000 a year, a record number that smelled like a quota. Though the rate has subsided in the last year, thousands of noncriminals and minor offenders are still being swept into the dragnet, while complaints persist of overzealous, unconstitutional enforcement.

Although comprehensive reform lags in Congress, Mr. Obama has taken some steps to take the pressure off unauthorized immigrants who pose no threat, including a laudable program to defer the deportations of some young immigrants. Though he has been accused of intruding into Congress's authority, the program is a legitimate stopgap to protect a group of potential citizens who have been stranded by Congressional inaction. Mr. Obama and Mr. Johnson should find ways to expand it.

In a Dec. 12 letter to Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, Mr. Johnson said deferred deportation had been a success and promised to keep it that way. He added, "I do not believe that deportation quotas or numeric goals are a good idea," and he promised to investigate reports of abusive conditions at detention centers. These are good signs.

Mr. Johnson has little experience with immigration. But the homeland security deputy secretary confirmed on Friday, Alejandro Mayorkas, does. Mr. Mayorkas is the director of Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency within homeland security that handles legal immigration. Under Mr. Mayorkas's capable leadership, it has done a good job in managing the deferred-action program. Mr. Mayorkas, an immigrant himself, looks to be an excellent partner for Mr. Johnson in beginning the formidable job of bringing the department's immigration policies and practices into line with its mission.

13.26 | 0 komentar | Read More

Opinionator | Private Lives: Eczema and Holy Water

Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives.

My 9-month-old son's first time on a plane — a 10-hour journey from J.F.K. to Istanbul — was a disaster. The dry air of the cabin, the confinement and possibly some allergen on the in-flight menu all contributed to an unprecedented eruption of his eczema. It was demoralizing. His skin had been cracking and inflamed for months, but we had taken such pains with it — daily applications of heavy cream and austere dietary restrictions — in anticipation of introducing him to his relatives in Turkey.

We stayed at my mother-in-law's on the European side of Istanbul. After just a few days, she was as obsessed as we were with the daily moisturizing routine. Then she announced that she had a solution: we must visit a Greek Orthodox priest and have the baby blessed. My mother-in-law, like both our families, is a nonpracticing Muslim, but this priest had distinguished himself by getting a friend's daughter married off by praying for her. I looked at my wife, unsure of what to say.

We live in Brooklyn. Neither of us is religious. I am a medical doctor. I have never met a priest in my life. Yet my mother-in-law was insistent, and my wife was curious.

So despite my skepticism, we found ourselves inside the Hagios Demetrios, an unremarkable old church on a hill overlooking the Bosporus. The gloomy little church smelled like incense and old people, of which there were many. They were lined up and hunched over in the foyer, patiently waiting for an audience with the priest. They all seemed to have rheumatism. We waited, too, the baby growing restless. I felt sad for these superstitious people and impatient to finish. Eventually a voice in accented Turkish announced that the priest would be seeing the babies first, and with that we pushed, as New Yorkers do, to the front of the line.

The priest, a tall robed figure surrounded by lesser robed figures, turned and looked at us as we entered. He had black hair and a black beard speckled with gray. He beckoned us over, my wife told him why we were there, and then I was acutely aware of everything in the room, all the people and the ornaments, the sunlight spilling in through stained glass. How it must have looked just like this hundreds of years ago. I was aware of the history of countless people, Christians, Muslims and Jews, who had stood where I was, hoping for a blessing. I remembered all my worry and frustration, my powerlessness to fix my own son despite everything I knew about medicine. The priest nodded and reached for my hand and took my wife's hand and he pulled us near. He put his palm on the baby's forehead.

He said, "Don't worry. Everything is going to be all right." A bit of my son's drool dripped onto my wrist. "You know, my daughter had terrible eczema, and I took her to several dermatologists until finally a doctor in Bakirkoy figured out that she was allergic to her stuffed toy. When we got rid of it her skin cleared up." He smiled at me. "Anyway, these skin conditions get better when they're like 2 years old." He put his hand on my shoulder and I smiled back.

We thanked him and turned to each other. We held the baby and felt lighter. The priest mumbled a benediction, made a sign and then politely motioned us to a door behind him. I had heard about this door. It led to a long and low tunnel dug into the hill, lit by occasional electric lights that illuminated the damp walls on which were inscribed centuries of prayers that people had left. Who knows how many of them had been answered.

We had to walk hunched over for what felt like hundreds of feet through this tunnel, and at the end was a brass spigot that I could not seem to operate. It was stuck tight. Nor could my wife turn it. It fell to the child's grandmother, who twisted it easily and collected the holy water in a bottle she had brought, and we washed the baby's skin.

Months later, back in Brooklyn, we still have that bottle of holy water. It sits, next to the infant Motrin and Tylenol, on a shelf near the baby's bed.

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Mert Erogul is an emergency doctor at Kings County Hospital and teaches medical students at SUNY Downstate School of Medicine.

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Editorial: A Step Toward Affordable Housing

Representative Melvin Watt, a Democrat of North Carolina, who was confirmed earlier this month as the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, will need to use all of his agency's powers to cope with a worsening affordable housing crisis that is placing poor and elderly Americans at risk of homelessness and forcing many of the nation's 43 million renters to skimp on food and medical care to meet the rent.

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One thing he can do right away is to require Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the federally backed mortgage companies that the agency oversees, to pay into the National Housing Trust Fund, which was created by Congress in 2008 but was never financed because the two companies were brought low by the mortgage crisis.

The crisis in affordable housing was underscored in an alarming study released this month by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard. The study found that, from 2000 to 2012, renters were caught in a relentless squeeze, with falling wages on one side and rising rents on the other. Median gross rents went up by 6 percent, while the median renter's income declined by 13 percent.

Nearly half of all renters earn less than $30,000 a year. According to the report, about half of them now pay more than a third of their incomes on rent — up 12 percentage points from a decade ago. A quarter of renters pay more than 50 percent of their incomes in rent, which places them at clear risk of homelessness.

Mr. Watt needs to encourage Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to stimulate affordable housing production by purchasing and guaranteeing more multifamily mortgages. He must find ways to make home loans more affordable to moderate-income borrowers. And he should direct Fannie and Freddie, which have recovered from the mortgage crisis, to begin paying into the trust fund.

The fund, modeled on successful state programs, could provide grants and loans to preserve, rehabilitate and build housing, primarily for extremely low-income families that earn 30 percent or less of median income in their areas. The fund could also be used to develop healthy, mixed-income communities; a developer who receives a subsidy would set aside a proportionate number of units for low-income families who would be charged affordable rents. Given the current crisis, programs like this are needed more than ever.

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Editorial: Mistaken Ruling on Contraception

The contraception mandate in the new health care reform law accommodates religious beliefs. It exempts houses of worship from having to provide contraceptive coverage without a co-pay. Church-affiliated organizations like schools and hospitals need only send a short form to their insurance administrator, which takes care of the coverage.

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There is no breach of religious freedom, nor any undue burden involved. But that was not enough for a judge of the Federal District Court in Brooklyn, Brian Cogan, who decided that even filing a form is too much to ask. He ruled in favor of two high schools and two health care systems affiliated with the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Under the law, the federal government may not "substantially burden a person's exercise of religion" unless the government demonstrates that the burden is the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling interest. The judge said the government had not proved a compelling interest and that there are better, less restrictive ways to achieve the government's goal. But Judge Cogan should never have reached those issues since requiring religious-affiliated entities to inform insurance administrators that they wish to exclude contraceptive coverage — which some already do — does not rise to a "substantial burden" on religious exercise by any reasonable standard.

This case is among dozens challenging the birth control mandate. The Supreme Court agreed to hear two cases involving secular for-profit companies. What Judge Cogan missed, and the justices need to recognize, is the threat to religious liberty comes from employers trying to impose their religious views on workers.

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Editorial | The Rural Life: Farewell

The first Rural Life appeared on the editorial page nearly 16 years ago. This is the last. This seems a good season to leave, with a long winter ahead, the wood stove burning, and plenty of hopes and plans for the coming year. When The Rural Life began, I didn't imagine that it would last so long or chart so many changes in my life. Nor did I imagine that it would find so many good readers. But it has, and I'm grateful for that.

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As for the farm, it will go on much as it has. The horses will stand broadside in the sun or paw the snow looking for last year's grass. The roosters — two of them now — will breast the bright morning air as always while the hens go about their business. The dogs — two of them now, again — will chase each other through the snow. I'll be fixing fence and hauling wood and feeding out hay and chopping ice in the horse tank when the power goes out. And I'll be doing what I've always done: watching the way one thought becomes another as I go about the chores.

But what about your farm, the one you've pictured while reading The Rural Life all these years? I know, from talking to readers, that it's far bigger and more orderly than mine. It has fewer rocks and richer soil and fences that somehow magically stay taut. It reflects who you are as surely as my place reflects who I am. And it seems to be just about anywhere, wherever there's open land and some woods and enough time to walk the fence line. I've always wished that I could visit the farm that readers imagine I live on. It sounds like a very nice place.

I am more human for all the animals I've lived with since I moved to this farm. Here, I've learned almost everything I know about the kinship of all life. The only crops on this farm have been thoughts and feelings and perceptions, which I know you're raising on your farm, too. Some are annual, some perennial and some are invasive — no question about it.

But perhaps the most important thing I learned here, on these rocky, tree-bound acres, was to look up from my work in the sure knowledge that there was always something worth noticing and that there were nearly always words to suit it. 

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Editorial: The Global Cancer Burden

Cancer is on the rise around the world and poses a particular threat in many low- and middle-income countries. Death tolls globally far exceed those from such devastating infectious diseases like AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. According to recent reports from international health agencies, global mortality from those three diseases has, in fact, been cut substantially — by nearly half in the case of malaria — over the past decade.

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The International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organization at the United Nations, reported this month that an estimated 14.1 million new cancer cases and 8.2 million cancer-related deaths occurred worldwide in 2012, up from 12.7 million and 7.6 million respectively in 2008. The most commonly diagnosed cancers were lung, breast and colorectal cancers.

Less-developed regions of the world accounted for more than half of all new cancer cases and almost two-thirds of all cancer deaths. The rising toll was largely connected to unhealthy eating habits adopted from industrialized nations and on the lack of access to screening and clinical services that can save lives. The findings underscore the importance of strengthening the health care systems of low-income countries that are battling a host of disease problems.

The American Cancer Society issued a report last month that focused on Africa as a likely future epicenter of a tobacco epidemic. Although smoking rates are quite low in most African countries, the report projected that they will rise substantially as the population lives longer, economic growth produces more income to buy tobacco products and smoking among African boys and girls, which is rising, extends into their adult years.

If nothing is done to reduce smoking, the report estimates that adult smokers in Africa will soar to 572 million by 2100, up from 77 million today. That makes it imperative that international trade agreements uphold the ability of individual countries to regulate the sale and marketing of tobacco products within their borders. The industry argues that this would restrict free trade. It is a frivolous argument, little more than an effort by tobacco companies to bully their way into emerging markets. From a health perspective, it is also dangerously irresponsible.

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Editorial: France’s Operation Butterfly

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In fact, France has multiple reasons for intervening in the Central African Republic. The specter of the Rwandan genocide, in which France's role was severely criticized, is surely a factor, as are the goals of making the region safe for investment and assuring access to resources, including oil and uranium.

Named for an African butterfly, the operation was to be an in-and-out affair that would last no more than six months. But the situation has grown worse since the French intervened, with Muslims accusing France of taking sides in the conflict. France risks a longer and more costly engagement than it anticipated, and it is going to need more help from allies and the United Nations.

More than 1,000 people have died in sectarian violence between Seleka Muslim rebel groups and Christian militias since the French operation began in early December. According to the United Nations refugee agency, 200,000 people have been driven from their homes in the capital, Bangui, and more than a half-million others elsewhere in the country have been, too. At this point, the country is hostage to a brawl between warring sectarian factions, with spillover from and into neighboring Chad, Sudan, Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The financial and logistical assistance pledged by the United Nations, the United States and the European Union, and the contribution of a planned 6,000 troops by the African Union will not be enough to stop the fighting and allow the distribution of humanitarian aid, let alone bring political stability.

European leaders rebuffed President Hollande's request for military support at the European Council meeting in Brussels last week; they should act quickly to provide additional financial help and enforce the ban on sending arms and mercenaries to the Central African Republic that the European Union agreed to on Monday.

The United Nations, having authorized the French intervention on Dec. 5, should now move to authorize a United Nations peacekeeping mission. Without additional international assistance, more people will be killed and displaced, and prospects for any kind of political stability across the region will fade.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Op-Ed Columnist: When I’m Sixty-Four

LONDON — It does not seem that long ago that the Beatles could plausibly portray geriatric redundancy as beginning at an age sometimes referred to as young these days. "Will you still need me," they asked, "Will you still feed me, when I'm sixty-four?"

Damon Winter/The New York Times

Roger Cohen

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That was, in fact, a while back — in 1967. But such is the mist cast by advancing years that it is hard to believe we stand close to a half-century from the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album. Since then life spans have grown dramatically in an acceleration of the process that has seen longevity double in developed countries over the past 150 years. In 1850, half of England's population was dead by 45. Today, according to Sarah Harper, a British gerontologist, half the English population is alive at 85.

But these advances brought on by antibiotics, vaccination programs, improved sanitation and better medicine (not to mention dietary supplements and the treadmill) are peanuts compared to what may lie in store. The brave new world of regenerative medicine is upon us. This is the term of art for the various techniques and technologies (including cell therapy, gene therapy and tissue engineering) that will, its advocates say, allow the body to slow, halt or even reverse aging by enabling the regeneration and repair of damaged organs, cells and tissues. Talk of routinely living to 120 or even 200 no longer lies in the realm of cranks and fantasists.

Indeed, the buzz around radical life extension is such that the dot-com gurus who brought us the likes of Google and PayPal now find themselves laser-focused on an Age of Longevity, as if transforming our lives was not enough whereas doubling them through moonshot thinking would be an incontrovertible contribution to human progress. Connectivity was O.K., but conjuring super-centenarians will be better. Larry Page, the chief executive of Google, and Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire, early investor in Facebook and co-founder of PayPal, are among those who, in separate ventures, have aging in their cross hairs.

"If people think they are going to die, it is demotivating," Thiel told me. "The idea of immortality is motivational." He described his ideas as "180 degrees the opposite" of Steve Jobs's, who once said: "Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

It is probably wise to take Thiel's idea of an end to aging (or at least its radical postponement) seriously. Any extrapolation from technological progress over the past quarter-century makes the notion plausible. At least seriously enough to ask the question: Do we want this Shangri-La? Do we want a world of boomerang generations where, like Prince Charles still awaiting his big job, we'll be lucky to come into an inheritance at 80?

More seriously, given limited natural resources, already aging populations, spreading megacities, a dearth of jobs in the developed world, severe strains on health services, disappearing pensions and growing inequality, the idea of radically extending life (initially for the rich, one assumes) seems ominous — even if human adaptability and ingenuity are always underestimated.

Then there are the deeper moral issues. Nature can, of course, be improved upon or we would still be dying of polio. But it would be rash to imagine that tampering to this degree with our human lot and altering so radically the delicate equilibrium of humankind and nature will not produce plenty of Donald Rumsfeld's "unknown unknowns," deathless monsters of our own creation. Radical life extension smacks of an intemperate claim to have unlocked the fundamental mystery of life. That is dangerous territory.

This year, the Pew Research Center found that in the United States, where current life expectancy is 78.7 years, 56 percent of American adults said they would not choose to undergo medical treatments to live to 120 or more. Their median ideal life span was 90. A small majority said radical life extension would be bad for society. Americans, it seems, are ready to wear their trousers rolled rather than be seduced by eternal youth.

This resistance to the super-centenarian dream demonstrates good sense. Immortality — how tempting, how appalling! What a suffocating trick on the young! Death is feared, but it is death that makes time a living thing. Without it life becomes a featureless expanse. I fear death, up to a point, but would fear life without end far more: All those people to see over and over again, worse than Twitter with limitless characters. As Martin Amis has observed, "I find that in your 60s everything begins to look sort of slightly magical again. And it's imbued with a kind of leave-taking resonance."

Memento Mori is perhaps life's greatest spur. And, as Christmas Day reminds us, you can do a lot by the age of 33.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Editorial: This Day of Good Cheer

This is not the shortest or the darkest or the quietest or even the holiest day of the year. But it is the most joyous and the most richly seasonal. Around Christmas Day orbit the lesser holidays that help account for the texture of this season: days of shopping and decorating, the days of Advent and Christmas Eve, the liturgical 12 days that end in Twelfth Night, better known to most of us as Jan. 5.

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Christmas can seem, somehow, outside the sequence of the ordinary year, yet it can also feel like the revolving center, a pivot in feeling as well as time and festivity.

The culture of Christmas — the songbook, the films, the stories, chapter and verse of the nativity — is so intent upon making us feel what we ought to feel (charity, rejoicing, something of the shepherds' awe, the glee of children) that sometimes it can come as a shock when we actually feel those things, even though most of us never reach the ecstatic heights of George Bailey on Christmas Eve or Scrooge on Christmas morning.

Christmas is, for many of us, our only glimpse of what tradition really means. Our lives are, by and large, not the least bit traditional. If it feels sometimes as though Christmas is another country, that's because it is.

This is a day of good cheer, an archaic phrase that comes to life on just this one holiday. There is no need to draw a lesson from Christmas. Life offers us lessons aplenty. It is enough to be here today, and to be of good cheer.

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Editorial: More Hunger for the Poorest Americans

This is a harsh season for Americans struggling to afford food. Last month, the long lines at food pantries across the country grew longer with the expiration of the boost to food stamp benefit levels included in the 2009 economic stimulus plan. Those lines are apt to grow even longer thanks to the refusal of House Republicans to renew extended unemployment benefits as part of the recent budget deal.

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And if that isn't sufficient pain for the neediest, Congress is getting ready to make another big cut to nutrition aid when it returns in early January.

Senator Debbie Stabenow, a Democrat of Michigan and the chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, and Representative Frank Lucas, a Republican of Oklahoma who leads the House Agriculture Committee, are close to a deal on a farm bill that is said to include an increase in crop insurance subsidies for farmers and a more than $8 billion cut in food stamp benefits for the poor over the next 10 years.

That cut, about double the one contained in the Senate version of the farm bill, is more modest than the devastating $40 billion reduction in the farm bill passed by House Republicans that would have denied benefits to about 3.8 million people in 2014, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The House bill would also impose drug-testing, work requirements and other conditions, which are not expected to be included in the compromise bill. Still, the compromise deal, driven by the Republican obsession with cutting the food stamps program, will leave many Americans worse off than before.

The deal being finalized would not kick people off the rolls, but it would end a practice used in some 16 states to boost food stamp benefits. That change would reduce benefits for 850,000 of the nation's poorest households, according the Congressional Budget Office, with the cut falling particularly hard on seniors, disabled people and working-poor families with children.

The households affected currently receive higher food stamp benefits (on average around $90 a month) under a practice known as "heat-and-eat," which is intended to prevent poor families from having to choose between heating fuel and food. States employing this practice trigger the increased food assistance by providing selected households a nominal amount of fuel aid (as little as $1 per year), regardless of whether they actually pay utility bills.

This gaming of the system has had the positive effect of giving some hard-pressed families in high-cost areas like New York City help with their overall household budget, but it has also provided a talking point for critics bent on gutting the food stamps program.

The proposed Senate-House deal would require states to pay $20 a year to trigger the higher benefits. Some states will likely decline to increase their subsidies to that amount, so to achieve the bill's projected savings benefits would have to be taken away from many poor families.

The right fix would be to take any savings and devote it along with other new financing to make sure basic food needs of the poorest families are met. Some Democratic lawmakers and antihunger advocates say the $8 billion cut being contemplated in the compromise deal is necessary to get the food stamps program reauthorized by both the Senate and House and that keeping the cuts to that level would be a political defeat for right-wing Republicans, who sought to do much more damage. That may be true, but it's not much consolation for people lining up at food pantries because their inadequate monthly food stamps allotment has run out.

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