The Great Debate

Ending renewable energy’s villainy

The Republican and Democratic National Conventions mark the beginning of the end for the 2012 presidential campaign and – one hopes – the end of a regrettable chapter in American politics: a time when supporting real economic growth by encouraging American entrepreneurs became less important than throwing political punches.

For the better part of a year, politicians have paid lip service to aiding entrepreneurship, arguing that to pull our economy out of a recession we need to support small businesses and growing industries. Despite this, one sector filled with entrepreneurship and successful companies has been maligned, ignored, and in some instances vilified (Solyndra being the most prominent example). What’s so wrong with the U.S. solar, wind, biofuels and other clean, renewable energy industries?

It’s long past time to move beyond the accusatory politics of misrepresented facts and return to the bipartisan collaborative spirit that has driven clean energy’s success in this country. With less bad politics and more good policy, the sector can rapidly expand and make America a world leader in clean, renewable energy technology.

The fact is that the U.S. renewable energy industry is far stronger today than it was when the bipartisan Energy Policy Act passed in 2005; since then private investment has leveraged government support and both have played an important role in the industry’s success. Overall last year, U.S. solar installations doubled. Since 2007, 35 percent of all new electricity-generating capacity in the U.S. came from wind power. And last year, America produced 14 billion gallons of biofuels – double the amount of oil we import from Venezuela.

The U.S. now leads global clean energy investment, and clean technology is the leading venture capital category. Recent weeks have seen the announcement of hundreds of millions of dollars in new private investments in these technologies. For example, on July 25 investment bank Credit Suisse announced $300 million in new funding for rooftop solar installers SunRun and SolarCity. That is in addition to more than $120 billion in commitments to renewable energy by Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and other major financial institutions.

The U.S. military has also become a major supporter of energy efficiency and solar, wind, biofuels and other clean technologies for the tremendous value they provide in combat effectiveness, cost savings and energy security. There are plans to install 160,000 solar systems on military residence rooftops across 33 states. Military investments have led the nation and helped reduce the cost of advanced biofuels by more than 80 percent.

For the better part of a year, politicians have paid lip service to aiding entrepreneurship, arguing that to pull our economy out of a recession we need to support small businesses and growing industries. Despite this, one sector filled with entrepreneurship and successful companies has been maligned, ignored, and in some instances vilified. What’s so wrong with renewable energy? Join Discussion

What exactly do we mean by ‘inequality’?

What do we mean by “inequality,” and why exactly is it bad for American democracy? Are we discussing inequality of wages within a given firm or industry? Or inequality in household income — i.e., the difference between the poor and the middle class, or between the rich and everyone else? What about political inequality — is it a cause or an effect of economic inequality?

These are not idle questions, and to contemplate even incomplete answers appears, on the basis of these two books, to reveal a kind of knowledge inequality. Unless you’ve got a PhD in economics or political science and what Princeton University political scientist Martin Gilens calls “a virtual army of research assistants,” there’s not much chance that you’re going to reach airtight answers on your own.

Gilens and James K. Galbraith are among the few experts who’ve been working on the subject for more than a decade. Their conclusions reinforce the fears of those of us who’ve suspected that inequality is a blight on American society. Indeed, the damage to democratic values is not in some distant dystopian future: Gilens states plainly that the relationship between the policy desires of the wealthiest 10 percent of the population and actual federal public policy over recent decades “often corresponded more closely to a plutocracy than to a democracy.”

Yet both books offer some glimmer of hope, as well as findings that will surprise partisans on any side of the inequality debate.

If Galbraith is correct, the overwhelming majority of Americans have not experienced inequality directly. It’s not really the case that the poor or the middle class are getting poorer; rather, the rise in inequality comes from a very small number of rich people becoming ultrarich. Galbraith maintains that just five U.S. counties — three in northern California, one in Washington State where Microsoft is located, and New York County, aka Manhattan — are responsible for about half of the rise in inequality through the late 1990s, and just 15 counties — out of 3,143 counties nationwide — are responsible for all of it.

Galbraith believes that recent volatility in inequality levels stems almost entirely from the increased accumulation of wealth among those working at the top of the technology and finance sectors.

The biggest problem, he insists, is that in recent decades, we seem to have forgotten how to grow the economy except by increasing inequality. The result has been a series of bubbles, and bubbles always cause damage when they pop. Galbraith also trains his lens on Europe, and finds that the common assumption that Europe is “more equal” than the U.S. is untrue; precise measurements reveal that, aside from the handful of northern European social democracies, the opposite is true.

What do we mean by “inequality,” and why exactly is it bad for American democracy? When economists peer deeply into these questions, the answers are more complex than our common understanding of the issue. Join Discussion

This economy could be as good as it gets

A familiar refrain that was popular in the early 1990s is making a comeback during the great recession of 2008-2009, which has rocked the economy and labor market for more than five years: Is it possible that the children of this generation will not be as well-off as their parents? The labor market has been hobbled. The duration of unemployment has reached unprecedented levels, and it is now the case that unemployed workers in certain age groups face the prospect of never being employed again. If all of this sounds grim (and it is), consider the possibility that this may be as good as it gets.

It is true that the depth of the recession and the current sluggish recovery are much different than anything we have seen since the Great Depression. But rather than look at the current recession in comparison with previous U.S. recessions, consider its comparison with Europe. The events in Europe that sent crippling shockwaves through much of the world might be of such a magnitude that the current speed of the recovery is fast enough. The current downturn is unusual because it was triggered by a large common shock, rather than the idiosyncratic components that usually put individual countries into a recession. We don’t have a lot of experience with such shocks, so it may be useful to look across countries to see how others have fared.

The U.S. economy accounts for about 22 percent of world GDP; the European Union is about 25 percent. The figure below from Europeansnapshot.com compares the 2008 recession and recovery in the U.S. with those in the major economies of Europe. First note that the size of the contraction was much steeper in Germany, the UK and Italy, whose economies fell roughly 6 percent from their peak. In the U.S. it was more like 4 percent. But note as well that the recovery in the U.S. has been steady compared with these countries. All except Germany appear to be headed back into recession.

 

Many argue that the slow recovery in the U.S. is due to insufficient demand. As seen below, consumption – the biggest component of aggregate demand – never fell below its peak in Germany. In the U.S. it fell, but it has recovered and now looks very similar to where Germany is today.

The unemployment rate in the U.S. rose sharply in the first quarters of the recession, but it started from a level that was lower initially than most of the European comparison group. The U.S. is the only country other than Germany where unemployment has fallen from its peak.

The U.S. recovery is dismal when compared with other post World War Two U.S. recessions, and it is far from where it should be in terms of growth and employment. Labor force participation is the lowest it has been since 1979. But this may be the best that we can expect with the tools that the government has used. Join Discussion

Can the SEC ever improve?

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s case against Citigroup’s Brian Stoker, a director in the bank’s Global Markets group, seemed clear-cut. Stoker structured and marketed an investment portfolio consisting of credit default swaps. The agency accused him of misrepresenting deal terms and defrauding investors for not disclosing the bank’s bet against the portfolio while pitching the investment vehicle to customers. But when it came to trial earlier this summer, the government could not prove that Stoker knew or should have known that the pitches were misleading, and the jury didn’t convict.

It’s hardly surprising. The SEC’s failure to secure a guilty verdict is one more sign that the commission still has not climbed out of the morass in which it was mired for most of the Bush years. The agency tasked with overseeing some 5,000 broker-dealers, 10,000 investor-advisers, 10,000 hedge funds, and 12,000 public companies, as well as mutual funds, the exchanges and even the rating agencies, is ailing because of outdated rules, systems and structures.

What exactly ails the SEC? For starters, the legal framework in place to prosecute securities fraud is flawed. The commission was established to create rules that prohibit “any manipulative or deceptive device or contrivance.” But intent or recklessness is required to prove fraud or misrepresentation, and that can be difficult because the agency doesn’t have enough staff to comb through reams of documents for rare evidence that someone intended to cheat. In the Citigroup case, the agency instead relied on a rule that simply required a showing of negligence, but the prosecution could not prove even that.

The Stoker case underscores the legal framework’s penchant for punishing midlevel managers rather than those in charge. As the foreman told the American Lawyer, the jury could not find Stoker liable because “he did not act in some kind of vacuum where his behavior was not tolerated or encouraged by his bosses … To try to hang all this on Stoker didn’t work.” But the government rarely goes after higher-ups or CEOs like Dick Fuld and Jon Corzine because they are removed from day-to-day operations and often don’t leave evidence of intent or negligence. It faced this conundrum while building the case involving the Abacus deal that led to a $550 million settlement with Goldman Sachs and will have to overcome the same hurdle when former Goldman Sachs trader Fabrice Tourre is tried for his role in that deal.

Even so, accountability for wrongdoing can be fleeting because the agency still collects significantly less money from people as opposed to institutions. As a result, shareholders of corporate entities often get penalized financially for the deeds of midlevel managers and advisers. While this is changing, there still is a culture of punishing institutions, rather than wrongdoers. U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff has been a vocal critic of this approach. In November, he refused to approve an SEC settlement with Citigroup that allowed the bank to “neither admit nor deny” wrongdoing. While the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit likely will approve the settlement, in January the SEC stopped allowing wrongdoers who settle with the SEC and also are criminally convicted to “neither admit nor deny” charges.

Another glaring structural problem at the agency is that any changes in securities laws require congressional approval, but the SEC also relies on Congress for annual appropriations to continue running. Sensible reform would need a green light from Congress, which has no incentive to enact it. (Dodd-Frank merely made it easier to hold accountants, lawyers and other aiders and abettors liable.) After all, its members rely on institutions – banks, for example, for campaign contributions – that might be affected negatively by reform. Theoretically, there are other funding models. The U.S. Treasury Department collects $2.94 trillion in revenue, which runs its core operations. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation runs on taxes from banks that form its membership. If the SEC were funded independently, securities fraud would presumably be more easily and effectively regulated and prosecuted.

The SEC’s bureaucracy is a common complaint among bankers, traders and other financial services workers. Officials spend years launching, investigating and charging parties engaged in wrongdoing. In June, Peter Madoff was charged with fraud, four long years after his brother Bernie. It took a decade for the SEC to hold an Ohio fraudster accountable financially, except by then he was no longer living. In 2002, a tipster alerted the commission’s Midwest Regional Office that Cleveland-based investor adviser Robert Pinkas engaged in fraud. Seven years later, the SEC alleged that Pinkas overstated the value of equity and debt investments in two private companies. Pinkas died before the SEC’s scheduled hearing in March to determine whether he misappropriated more than $800,000 of client money to pay fines and penalties associated with the charges filed in 2009. It’s possible that Pinkas’s earlier activities didn’t merit an inquiry, but unlikely.

Reform of an elephantine agency is hardly a prospect anyone wants to contemplate. But if the SEC continues to lose high-profile enforcement cases, it’s possible that Americans will lose faith in the agency in the same way, as Chairman Schapiro said, they have lost faith in the markets regulated by it. Join Discussion

The ‘Yes We Can’ orphans: Obama’s missing constituency

By all accounts, the 2012 presidential election will be a squeaker – probably no more than a point or two in the popular vote will separate the candidates. Such close elections put a special premium on getting one’s base out to vote and targeting the small, yet important, group of “undecided voters”.

We already see both sides doing just this. On the one hand, the undecided voter – about 10 percent of the electorate – is most concerned about “jobs and the economy.” Both Romney and Obama have scrambled over the last month to try to establish credibility on this issue and, in turn, to undermine the credibility of their opponent.

Most analysts define undecideds as self-declared independents or those who have not expressed an opinion at the voting intention question (“unsure”, “refused” or “don’t know” responses). An often overlooked but much more precise way of thinking about this group is to understand them as alienated and disaffected voters – people who voted for one candidate in one election but do not plan to vote for that same candidate next time.

Obama won in 2008 by a healthy seven-point margin (53 to 46) in the popular vote, attracting a large and diverse coalition of voters. According to poll aggregators like Real Clear Politics and Pollster.com, Obama has maintained a small but consistent one-to-two-point lead over Romney for the last few months; 2012 is not shaping up like 2008. So what happened to Obama’s coalition? Or more precisely, where is the missing 6 percent?

To answer these questions, we analyzed 26,005 interviews from our Reuters-Ipsos presidential online tracking polling, conducted between June 3 and Aug. 29, 2012.

So what did we find?

Ultimately, we found two distinct groups: Disaffected Obama Voters, those who voted for Obama in 2008 but don’t plan to vote at all in 2012, and Alienated Obama Voters, those who voted for Obama in 2012 but plan on voting for Romney in 2012.

An often overlooked but much more precise way of thinking about undecided voters is to understand them as alienated and disaffected voters – people who voted for one candidate in one election but do not plan to vote for that same candidate next time. Join Discussion

Assange has reason to fear U.S. extradition

No one is emerging well from the Julian Assange extradition circus playing out in London. As the Wikileaker in chief sits tantalizingly beyond the reach of British police in the Ecuador embassy, he can congratulate himself on a rare trifecta.

By holing up in some corner of a foreign field that is forever Ecuador, he is embarrassing the British government, which prides itself on upholding the law. By resisting Sweden’s demands that he return to Stockholm to face rape charges, he continues to besmirch the justice system of a country otherwise famous as a beacon of liberality and progressivism. And by picking Ecuador, he is drawing attention to his reluctant host’s cruel, despotic regime, which thumbs its nose at democratic governments everywhere.

Add to that a fourth motive – and to Assange perhaps the most important – for his failure to turn himself in: his reproach of America. The reason he cites for not answering sexual assault accusations against him by two women is that Sweden may extradite him to America, where he fears he will be tortured and put to death.

His account of the law is both misleading and inaccurate. Britain could as easily extradite Assange to the U.S. as to Sweden, but it can’t. Like the rest of Europe, Britain may not deliver to America a criminal suspected of a capital crime – spying, in Assange’s case — because America has the death penalty. The same is true of Sweden. But his suggestion that if America could capture him he would be tortured and killed is plausible. And any who doubt his seemingly absurd claim should acquaint themselves with the wretched plight of United States Army Private First Class Bradley Manning.

Manning stands accused of providing Assange with a document dump of secret information in the biggest breach of security ever suffered by America. While the world’s press has reveled in America’s discomfort, the wholesale exposure of secret diplomatic reports has made it more difficult to work toward a peaceful settlement of the turmoil in Iraq and Afghanistan. If found guilty, Manning deserves to be punished.

The breach of security has, further, put in mortal danger the lives of individuals who have helped us achieve our aims. Some lives have been wrecked. Some may have been lost. The flip side of the notion that the world of spies and spying is glamorous is the betrayal of those who have been helping counter al Qaeda and the murderous regimes of Saddam Hussein, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Taliban.

But the disgusting treatment of Manning by U.S. Army authorities has played into the hands of Assange and his anarchist pals. By all accounts, Manning is a troubled individual whose confusion about gender led to his being relentlessly bullied throughout his Army career. The Army looked on and did nothing. After being arrested and charged with “aiding the enemy”, for which he faces the death penalty, he was subjected to conditions any civilized person would consider torture.

So long as Assange is on the run, the world will be reminded that America, once a benign republic proudly defending the world's freedoms, has slipped in the last 10 years into a state of shame where torture is excused and executions defended by even the most liberal of public figures. Join Discussion

Paul Ryan: a VP with a mandate

The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza rightly called Mitt Romney’s bold selection of Representative Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) as his running mate, “the most daring decision of his political career.”

Until this weekend, most observers expected Romney to proceed cautiously by selecting a vice-presidential nominee who would neither shake up the race nor introduce new risk into the campaign.

Mitt Romney, we hardly knew ye.

This is the most consequential presidential election in a generation. It deserves a campaign on big ideas and contrasting visions, not petty personal attacks, small ball and obfuscation.

To date, the Obama-Biden campaign has said embarrassingly little about what a second term would entail. Republicans expect that it would include an effort to legalize millions of undocumented workers, fully implement Obamacare, raise taxes, expand government and push climate change legislation. But President Obama hasn’t had the courage to say it. And so if, in a war of attrition, Obama ekes out a narrow victory in November, it will be hollow, as no mandate for these legislative goals will be granted.

Likewise, until now Romney’s argument that Obama deserves firing was not enough to provide a legislative mandate, even if he were to win.

if, in a war of attrition, Obama ekes out a narrow victory in November, it will be hollow, as no mandate for these legislative goals will be granted. Likewise, until now Romney’s argument that Obama deserves firing was not enough to provide a legislative mandate, even if he were to win. But now things are different. Join Discussion

Paul Ryan and the rich man’s burden

Mitt Romney’s decision to name Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin as his running mate says quite a lot about what Romney thinks about America and its workers, and none of it is good. In recent years, Ryan has earned a reputation as the intellectual of the conservative movement. He’s a gutsy guy who has been willing to transparently share his vision for America through a detailed budget proposal that leads inescapably to this conclusion: He believes that American workers are slackers and freeloaders.

Ryan hasn’t written a book, but his defining work is “A Roadmap For America’s Future,” where he was admirably honest about his plans for dealing with the long aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

But his diagnosis of the problem should make taxpayers who go to work every day wonder what the potential vice-president of the United States really thinks about them. Summing up the problem, he writes:

Americans have been lured into viewing government – more than themselves, their families, their communities, their faith – as their main source of support; they have been drawn toward depending on the public sector for growing shares of their material and personal well-being.  The trend drains individual initiative and personal responsibility. It creates an aversion to risk, sapping the entrepreneurial spirit necessary for growth, innovation, and prosperity. In turn, it subtly and gradually suffocates the creative potential for prosperity.

To support the notion that most Americans have come to view the government as a provider, Ryan cites analysis done by the Tax Foundation, a non-partisan research group that had concluded, when Ryan first published his “Roadmap” in 2008, that 60 percent of American taxpayers receive more in government services than they pay in taxes. Of course, these taxpayers make up the bottom 60 percent of wage earners. This is the source of the “rich man’s burden” argument – that our society is built on a system of patronage where a minority pays for the needs of all the rest and the richer you are, the more you pay and the less you get back.

In a system of progressive taxation this is not all that surprising. The more you have, the more you can pay without needing anything. The Tax Foundation attempted to be expansive in its analysis so that the benefits received by taxpayers include not just direct payments, like unemployment insurance and Medicare, but also our broader societal initiatives such as air-traffic control, space exploration and national defense. Fair enough. We all share in those programs, but we don’t all share in them equally.

What the analysis lacked was a look at relative benefits. We all, for example, have better lives because the U.S. has a functioning and safe air transportation system. But that good clearly means more to the people who use air travel for business and recreation, and a little less to those who use Greyhound buses. To broaden the example, U.S. military spending and foreign policy clearly mean more, in a practical way, to multinational businesses than they do to smaller local businesses, even though both benefit to some measurable extent.

Mitt Romney’s decision to name Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin as his running mate says quite a lot about what Romney thinks about America and its workers, and none of it is good. Join Discussion

Fifty shades of pop porn

Passing through the maze of lounge chairs at the beach or pool this summer, one best seller and its sequels appear like spots under beach umbrellas; black-sheened paperbacks in the hands of plenty of reclining, rapt women.

Anything that resembles narrative or character in the Fifty Shades series, which starts with the title novel Fifty Shades of Grey, is forgone to get to the meaty stuff; that is, the sex. Our heroine, who is at times compared to the naïve beauty from Tess of the D’Urbervilles (a solitary well-employed allusion in the series), chooses the chiseled, sexy, young Christian Grey for her first, but definitely not her last, sexual experience. Skip to the revelation about Grey’s preferences in the bedroom, and within a hundred pages she is tied up, roped down, spanked, lashed and beaten in the pursuit of Grey’s satisfaction.

 

It is little surprise, then, that in the craze to read Fifty Shades, women have opted for the e-book version almost as often as they have for the paperback. In the U.S., the book has sold about 10 million copies in each category, passing the 20 million sales mark in July. But are people – women, especially – actually enjoying the book, or is the title simply enjoying a short-lived period of wild popularity? Within these questions another, older, question is buried: What makes a woman want to read a novel?

It is difficult to gauge who among the readers of the Fifty Shades novels are actually fans. The bad writing, the transgressive sex, and even the length of the books are points of many casual reviews on the Internet. Others see qualities to like in the novels. Roxane Gay, who wrote about them for The Rumpus, calls the series “a modern fairy tale with a dark, erotic twist.” So much has been said (a cursory search of the Huffington Post for “Fifty Shades of Gray” turns up thousands of pages of content) that it is difficult for anyone not to have a vague notion of the book’s content by now.

This may be part of the anomaly of the book’s success. Sales of the series accounted for 20 percent of adult fiction sold in the spring, according to Nielsen BookScan. One woman I talked to had put the first book down for good after reading a particular line that cannot be reproduced here about what Grey wanted to do to the protagonist’s mouth. For others, the bad writing was a turnoff. “I don’t believe anyone ever said ‘holy cow’ at the moment of her first orgasm,” said author Erica Jong in a recent panel in New York about the book’s effects on sexual culture.

The series’ unique popularity presents an opportunity to view the thousands of (mostly women) readers in the way that women have historically been regarded as readers of novels, and ask a question that academics have been trying to answer for decades, which is not only why do women read novels, but how?

It's hard to gauge who among the readers of the Fifty Shades novels are actually fans. The bad writing, the transgressive sex and even the length of the books are points of many casual reviews on the Internet. But the their wild popularity prompts an older, deeper question: What makes a woman want to read a novel? Join Discussion

Meatless Mondays can be patriotic, too

Recently, the Texas commissioner of agriculture reacted with outrage to the fact that employees of the United States Department of Agriculture would dare suggest, in an internal newsletter on “greening” the Washington headquarters, that co-workers might consider practicing “Meatless Mondays” to reduce the environmental impact of their diet. “Last I checked,” blogged Commissioner Todd Staples, “USDA had a very specific duty to promote and champion American agriculture. Imagine Ford or Chevy discouraging the purchase of their pickup trucks. Anyone else see the absurdity? How about the betrayal?”

Staples went on to call the suggestion to forgo meat once in a while ”treasonous.” L’état, c’est boeuf. But there’s a bigger question: Is the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s purpose, indeed, simply to promote the consumption of American commodities in the same way Ford tries to sell F-150s? Or is it instead to help agriculture work for the American public at large?

Staples’s response to Meatless Mondays captures a pervasive way of thinking in the world of modern American agriculture. Some of the soft spots in Staples’s argument are immediately obvious. For one thing, agriculture includes fruits, vegetables, grains and dairy, too. “We’re not saying ‘don’t eat,’” counters Bob Martin, a food policy expert at Johns Hopkins and an adviser to the Meatless Mondays campaign. “So we’re not anti-agriculture.”

As a branch of the United States government, the USDA was created in the mid-1800s to collect and distribute the best farming knowledge. Farmers were, as President Abraham Lincoln phrased it, “the most numerous class” in a young, largely agrarian nation. But the 16th president saw that it was a class that would bring the country better benefit if equipped with the best scientific and technological knowledge. In 1862, Congress passed a bill establishing a Department of Agriculture. Its mission was “to acquire and to diffuse among the people of the United States useful information on subjects connected with agriculture in the most general and comprehensive sense of that word.” That knowledge-centric founding vision is reflected in the USDA’s stated mission today: “We provide leadership on food, agriculture, natural resources, and related issues based on sound public policy, the best available science, and efficient management.”

In the interim, though, there’s inarguably been a shift toward production for the sake of production. “After World War Two was when it really started to change,” says Johns Hopkins’s Martin, “and it became a chest-thumping, ‘best agricultural system in the world,’ ‘let’s produce more and export it – don’t worry about it’ sort of thing.” One important era: the reign of Earl Butz, who served as agriculture secretary under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford until he was drummed out of the latter’s cabinet in 1976 over an especially crude racist joke. High food prices had become a political issue for Nixon, and in part to help drive them down Butz encouraged American farmers to plant “from fencerow to fencerow.” In the years that followed, laws were passed creating industrywide promotional programs on agricultural commodities overseen by USDA and funded by producer fees, such as the Beef Board, which was paid for by dollar-per-head fees and brought us “Beef. It’s What’s For Dinner.” (Similarly, there’s “Pork. The Other White Meat” and “The Incredible, Edible Egg.”) “Get big or get out,” Butz told farmers. And today, big industrial livestock producers, scaled-up corporate farms and powerful industry groups have become the image of the American agricultural system.

In our early years, we were a hungry nation. It made sense to ramp up both production and consumption. But now we’re, well, overfed. “There was a time when the nation producing more food wasn’t contrary to its nutritional needs,” says Dr. Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University. “Undernutrition was a problem. Obesity wasn’t. But the situation has changed.”

Is the United States Department of Agriculture's purpose simply to promote the consumption of American commodities in the same way Ford tries to sell F-150s? Or is it, instead, to help agriculture work for the American public at large? Join Discussion