The Great Debate

It may be constitutional, but it’s still a bad law

So the Supreme Court has upheld most of the Affordable Care Act as constitutional. As someone who supports universal healthcare, who has lived most of his life in the UK, which has an admirable national health service, and who believes affordable healthcare for all is the mark of a civilized nation, I say it’s too bad. It is a wretched piece of legislation: complex, expensive, incomprehensible – do you know anyone, even a health expert, who can tell you what it means in a single sentence – easy for the unscrupulous to manipulate, unpopular, and politically catastrophic for the president.

All credit to Barack Obama for at least getting universal healthcare on the statutes, something that has eluded presidents of both stripes for a century. It is a shaming fact that 50 million Americans have to either burden themselves with debt or throw themselves on the mercy of emergency rooms when they get sick. Some may be libertarians, others so rich they don’t have to worry about paying out a fortune when they fall ill. But they are in a minority.

Most are ordinary folks, those who don’t enjoy the canopy of care provided through employers, oblivious young people who imagine they’re immortal, or those without work or who simply can’t afford exorbitant premiums. These are the mothers with blubbing young children you meet in any emergency room at any time of day or night, throwing themselves and their offspring on the mercy of hospital staff. They are not making some principled stand about keeping government at bay. They are the sort of people – poor people, or people on modest incomes — you might imagine a Democratic president would strain to serve.

At first it seemed Obama would do the right thing. Long an advocate of a public option, he said in 2003: “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer health care program. I see no reason why … the wealthiest country in the history of the world … cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody … a single-payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I would like to see.”

In the primary debates in 2008 he dissed Hillary Clinton for proposing a mandate that would drive everyone into the arms of insurance companies. Back then he thought such a plan unconscionable. “The insurance companies don’t mind making sure that everybody has to purchase their product,” he scoffed. Yet that is what his Affordable Care Act entails, a mandate the Supreme Court has now approved.

Leave aside Obama’s broken promise that negotiations with healthcare companies would be televised and the careless way he assumed the Act was within the Constitution. Despite having both Houses in his grasp, Obama didn’t use the ample goodwill toward him and his vast political capital to deliver an equitable healthcare system. Instead he adopted a conservative plan concocted by the Heritage Foundation that became the blueprint for Mitt Romney in Massachusetts. The motive for the conservatives’ belated ingenuity was not a good-hearted desire to see every American well taken care of but a mean-spirited device to ensure there were no free riders. The result is a poll tax ensuring everyone, rich or poor, pays the same high price unless they plead for a federal handout.

Obama now has the opportunity to make healthcare a moral issue. Does Romney want 50 million Americans to suffer from ill health or enjoy the best medicine in the world?

The Supreme Court has given Obama a victory in upholding the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. But it's a hollow victory, because the law is convoluted and flawed. Join Discussion

Running al Qaeda

This piece originally appeared in Reuters Magazine.

We now have the first public release of goodies from Osama bin Laden’s redoubt at Abbottabad: 17 letters to and from bin Laden and his crew that spell out vision, plans and tactics for the global jihad. The letters span a decade and outline the dimensions of a would-be caliphate – a truly global theater of war conceived, plotted and executed by bin Laden. They also reveal bin Laden to be a highly accomplished orchestrator of a global network struggling with the challenges of collaboration. Three issues consume him, and they happen to be the classic political tasks in the management of collaboration.

First, and most important: keeping everyone on track. For bin Laden, the primary management task was clearly holding everyone to a solitary vision, staying true to values (Islamic law, as he read it), and aligning deeds with words. Across his network bin Laden had little command or control over who operates in the name of Allah or even al Qaeda. As a result, nothing bugged him more than dummies among al Qaeda’s formal franchisees, loose affiliates or allies getting distracted from killing Americans; or butchering innocent Muslims; or blowing chances for alliances he sorely wanted to create. Bin Laden’s advisers were astounded, for example, when al Qaeda in Iraq attacked Catholics in an attempt to pressure Coptic Christians into releasing prisoners. It’s as if, one wrote, someone took Sunnis hostage to pressure Shias – “Does this satisfy any sane person?” The sheer horror of the geopolitical and historical error left bin Laden’s deputies shaking their heads.

Second: managing franchise relations. Getting second-rung leadership right is important for any enterprise, and for al Qaeda that meant assuring the brand and building network capacity for terror. Bin Laden was careful about deciding who would be anointed with two powerful gifts – his blessing of leadership, and formal affiliation of groups to al Qaeda central (a term he heard used by the media and, amazingly, appropriated). Bin Laden was no pushover. In fact, the letters show that he was hands-on and prickly about all such organization matters, going so far as to require memoranda of understanding with affiliates. As for appointments, bin Laden was a stickler for a good résumé that detailed education, battlefield experience, and religious training.

“How excellent would it be,” bin Laden wrote, “if you ask brother Basir to send us the résumé, in detail and lengthy, of brother Anwar al-Awlaki.” And don’t forget the career goals and cover letter. “Also ask brother Anwar al-Awlaki to write his vision in detail in a separate message.” This, for the man nominated to run al Qaeda in Yemen.

Third: delivering on the promise of his brand and staying in the headlamps of his political support. Managing both the Arab street, upon which he counted for support, and his franchises, which were tasked to execute plots, required careful negotiation. The key was right-sizing terror. Too much wrist-chopping would serve only to alienate the street, whereas anemic targets would demoralize his men in the field. Violent, cataclysmic, high-value American kills like the Twin Towers, the USS Cole and the Nairobi embassy bombings worked for both, and for bin Laden.

We now have the first public release of goodies from Osama bin Laden’s redoubt at Abbottabad: 17 letters to and from bin Laden and his crew that spell out vision, plans and tactics for the global jihad. Join Discussion

The Made-in-China CEO

This piece originally appeared in Reuters Magazine.

Zhang Yue fondly caresses the blueprints as he slowly flips through them, occasionally pausing to stare at a drawing as he explains his new project. The plan seems impossibly ambitious: build a 220-story building, the tallest in the world, in just four months by using the rapid-construction techniques his company has developed. Zhang, a slight but wiry and intense man of 52, says “Sky City” – as he has dubbed it – can fix many of the world’s pollution, congestion, transportation and even disease problems by completely purifying the tower’s air. The 838-meter-tall building (10 meters taller than the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, currently the world’s tallest) will hold schools, a hospital, 17 helipads and some 30,000 people. It will, indeed, be a city in the sky.

His dreams don’t stop there. Pinned up on his office wall are plans for a project even more audacious – an almost preposterously massive building two kilometers high. When asked to estimate the odds of this 636-floor giganto-scraper ever being built, Zhang responds without hesitation, “One hundred percent! Some say that it’s sensationalism to construct such a tall building. That’s not so. Land shortages are already a grave problem. There’s also the very serious transportation issue. We must bring cities together and stretch for the sky in order to save cities and save the Earth. We must eliminate most traffic, traffic that has no value! And we must reduce our dependency on roads and transportation.”

Tenaciously pursuing a lofty vision is a hallmark of Zhang’s success at Broad Group, but also that of many entrepreneurial Chinese chief executives in these days of heady growth in the world’s second-largest economy. The recipe for success for all these CEOs includes: 1) the vision and guts to seize upon a bold, even outlandish idea; 2) a relentless drive to build a company; and 3) an outsized ego to drive the process and overwhelm the skeptics.

Chinese founder-CEOs such as Zong Qinghou of drinks-maker Wahaha (until last year China’s richest citizen), automaker Geely CEO Li Shufu, and Huawei chief Ren Zhengfei all have compelling, almost mythic personae that color most facets of their companies. “In these entrepreneurial firms, the products and services are the passions of the founder,” says Chris Marquis, a professor of organizational behavior at Harvard Business School who studies Chinese business executives. “They were employee No. 1, and now have hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in sales, and thousands of employees. These CEOs have been there every step of the way, and their vision has been what’s driven the company.”

These entrepreneurs are all known for thinking big… and then bigger. Zhang Yue’s Very Big Idea is to save the world by conserving energy, reducing congestion and pollution, and making homes and offices much more healthful places by purifying stale air he says is responsible for 68 percent of human illnesses. “Each era had an issue of its time; each era had a mission of its time,” Zhang says in an interview in his headquarters on the outskirts of Changsha, the capital of south China’s Hunan province. “Our era’s problem is not productivity and it’s not wealth. It’s not even politics or democracy. In society today – including China and all the countries of the world – we’re facing the increasingly grave problem of environmental pollution.”

Zhang, who ranks No. 186 on the Hurun Report of wealthiest Chinese, built his estimated $1.19 billion fortune on industrial cooling systems and air conditioners. He started his company on the back of some patents for non-electrical air conditioning, and later expanded into industrial strength chillers and air purification systems that have been installed in Madrid’s airport, a U.S. military base, and throughout Europe and the Americas.

A bold new brand of CEO is pushing the Chinese economy into the stratosphere. Exhibit A is Zhang Yue, who has noble goals and grandiose ambitions. Join Discussion

The late conversion of a famous monetarist

The death of Anna Schwartz has been marked with reverential obituaries. Her contribution to economics was making sense of historical facts to offer a guide to what should be done today. Posterity will know her as the co-author, with Milton Friedman, of Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960, which revolutionized our understanding of the Great Depression. The pair concluded that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the slump was caused by the Federal Reserve not pumping enough money into the economy.

From this Friedman and Schwartz led a monetarist revolution that claimed that inflation, which had been thought to be caused by either insufficient supply or too much demand, was in all cases and solely caused by too large a supply of money. They led a counterrevolution against Keynesianism, which over three booming decades had driven economies into stagflation – a marriage of runaway inflation and stagnant growth that Keynesians were at a loss to explain or cure.

Although Friedman took much of the credit for the new orthodoxy, and won the Nobel Prize in 1976 for his efforts, Schwartz was more than the midwife of monetarism – she was an equal partner in its conception. When asked why she had not been awarded credit equal to the extrovert Friedman, she modestly responded: “I’m not a media person.” Like the winemaker Luigi Rossi, whose name appears second on Martini bottles, she was an important, if largely silent, partner. Just as no one ever asks for a dry Rossi, so few today remember Schwartz.

Her strength was in her strict empirical approach. A well-ordered social scientist who for more than 70 years was the mainstay of the National Bureau of Economic Research, she amassed facts, considered the evidence and made her deductions. In an age when faith-based economics has taken hold, hers was a clear voice in grasping what went on during the financial meltdown and freeze of 2008-09 and in the efforts by government to put things right.

Although Ben Bernanke was a great admirer of Schwartz, and famously said, at Friedman’s 90th birthday party: “Milton and Anna, regarding the Great Depression, you’re right. We [the Fed] did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again,” she did not return the compliment. In an interview given during the dark heart of the financial crisis, October 2008, Schwartz was unsympathetic to Bernanke, suggesting that just because he understood the Great Depression didn’t mean he knew what to do to avoid a repeat. She thought his loose money policy would foster hyperinflation.

“The Fed has gone about as if the problem is a shortage of liquidity. That is not the basic problem,” she said. She might have added, as John Maynard Keynes once said, that Bernanke’s cheap money solution was as hopeless as pushing on a string. She went on: “The basic problem for the markets is [uncertainty] that the balance sheets of financial firms are credible … Lending freezes up when lenders are uncertain that would-be borrowers have the resources to repay them.” The key was “all these exotic securities” that were “toxic because you cannot sell them, you don’t know what they’re worth, your balance sheet is not credible and the whole market freezes up. We don’t know whom to lend to because we don’t know who is sound.”

She thought buying troubled assets through TARP was “a step in the right direction,” but she was not in favor of bailing out banks. In that she echoed Joseph Schumpeter’s notion of “creative destruction.” “The [government] doesn’t have to save them, just as it didn’t save the stockholders and the employees of Bear Stearns. Why should they be worried about the creditors? Creditors are no more worthy of being rescued than ordinary people, who are really innocent of what’s been going on.”

When Anna Schwartz died last week, her obituaries made much of the work she famously did with Milton Friedman. They failed to note, however, that late in her life she became a convert to Keynesian economics. Join Discussion

Silent Spring’s 50th anniversary: What would Rachel Carson say now?

When I was a graduate student at the University of Kansas, the pesticide DDT was very much on my mind. My assistantship in 1953 involved research on the evolution of DDT-resistance in fruit flies. It quickly became clear to all of us in this research group that the broadcast use of pesticides was a losing and dangerous game. When I attempted to raise butterflies in New Jersey in the 1940s, bringing food plants in from nature usually resulted in the caterpillars dying. In those days, widespread spraying of DDT to control mosquitoes coated much of the countryside with poison. In the lab it was easy to use selection to make flies impervious to DDT in some 10 generations, or, in contrast, so susceptible that they would drop dead at a whisper of that “miracle” chemical’s name. Evolution of resistance tended to make continuous use of any pesticide inefficient. The usual response of the chemical industry was to recommend increasing the dose or to substitute more toxic compounds, making pest control even more expensive and dangerous.

That was well understood by evolutionists early on, but it took a marine biologist and talented writer, Rachel Carson, to bring the pesticide problem to public attention and, incidentally, to launch the modern environmental movement. Silent Spring, published in September, 1962, was a brilliant book, but also one that appeared when the time clearly was ripe. The public seemingly had been primed by publicity about radioactive fallout, fears of pesticide residues on cranberries and the thalidomide scandal, the latter enhanced by pictures of infants born with distorted limbs. Carson suffered from the drawbacks of being a female scientist before science’s gender gap began to dissolve, and from lacking a PhD and a professorial position. Despite those “handicaps,” she had the science about as right as it could be at the time.

Carson was subject to a storm of vicious attacks by the combined public-relations machines of the chemical industry and agribusiness, and even from scientists in the industry and entomology departments of some universities. Typical was the much quoted statement of Professor Robert H. White-Stevens, a poultry scientist of Rutgers University: “If man were to follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.” The assault began even before Silent Spring was published. A public-relations campaign against Carson and trumpeting the safety of pesticides was bankrolled by the National Agricultural Chemical Association (NACA). Virtually all of the attacks were without merit. Carson withstood them all, even though she was struggling with metastatic cancer. I met her once only briefly, and then she was gone.

Rachel Carson’s legacy looms huge today. Many people have the impression that climate disruption is the worst environmental problem humanity faces, and indeed, its consequences may be catastrophic. But the spread of toxic chemicals from pole to pole may be the dark horse in the race. Carson may have started environmentalism by illuminating exactly the right issue. This is especially the case as recent research has shown that many synthetic chemicals, called endocrine-disrupting compounds, may do nasty things to you at high doses but can have different harmful effects at very low doses. These low-dose effects can increase the probabilities of altered sex determination, behavioral changes, developing cancers and more.

A mass of evidence should alert humanity to the risks of toxifying Earth from pole to pole with synthetic chemicals. For instance, Tyrone Hayes of the University of California, Berkeley, has suffered Carson-like abuse by flacks for the chemical industry for demonstrating nasty low-dose impacts of the near-ubiquitous herbicide atrazine in both the laboratory and in nature. Atrazine is manufactured by Syngenta, which has bankrolled a multimillion-dollar campaign hiring pundits to lie about atrazine and besmirch Hayes. The campaign resembles that of the well-funded fossil-fuel industry assault on climate disruption and also the tobacco industry’s perpetual storm of lies about the safety of smoking. Hayes has been, as was Rachel Carson, scientifically vindicated, and like Carson, is one of my heroes.

Infant mosquito fish exposed to small doses of 4-nonylphenol, a widely used industrial chemical, produced adults all with the female phenotype although the normal 50-50 male-female ratio persisted in the sex organs. In the wild, a high frequency of alligators in a Florida lake polluted with an endocrine-disrupting pesticide had developmental abnormalities leading to sterility. A recent, thorough review of the literature documented the pervasive evidence for low-dose effects in populations of human beings and of wildlife. One of its conclusions (conservative in my view) is that “regulatory action to minimize or eliminate human exposures to endocrine disruptors could significantly benefit human health.” Today humanity is faced with a series of epidemics in which toxics may be involved: asthma, autism, hormone-related cancers, ADHD, heart disease, autoimmune diseases, obesity, Type 2 diabetes and learning disabilities, just to name a few. Of course, toxics may be found innocent in many cases, but is it wise to keep releasing them ad lib into the environment on the assumption they are not involved?

Carson was properly concerned about the problems of unknown interactions among mixtures of novel chemicals in the environment. Today, with the potential for millions of possible synergisms among the tens of thousands of compounds already released, just identifying the culprits would be an enormous challenge. And if they were identified, removing them from the environment could be an even more monumental task, or most likely prove impossible.

Rachel Carson's legacy looms huge today. Many people have the impression that climate disruption is the worst environmental problem humanity faces, and indeed, its consequences may be catastrophic. But the spread of toxic chemicals from pole to pole may be the dark horse in the race. Join Discussion

An altruistic immigration policy

Monday morning, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down much of Arizona’s controversial immigration law. It’s now confirmed that it’s not a crime for immigrants in the United States, even undocumented ones, to apply for jobs here.

That ruling dovetails with President Barack Obama’s recent decision to effectively forbid the deportation of upstanding young people who are in the United States illegally.

Immigration advocates rejoiced at both decisions, but neither the Supreme Court ruling nor Obama’s move resolves the economic dynamics that drive illegal immigration. Instead, they create a gray area for undocumented immigrants to live and work more safely here in the United States. The next logical step, reforming our guest-worker system to allow more non-citizens to work here outside of legal purgatory, would offer more protections to these workers and boost the economy, too.

For years, some immigration advocates and contrarian economists have argued that a formal effort to give jobs to foreign workers – even without citizenship – can help everybody. A guest-worker program might just be the most powerful tool to fight global poverty, and a chance to help economic conditions here at home, too, if we can embrace the counterintuitive but true idea that more foreign workers can help even when domestic workers are caught in high unemployment.

David McKenzie, lead economist of the World Bank’s development group, has, along with his fellow researchers, been examining the way migration affects migrants – not just the people they leave behind or the new communities they end up living in. They’ve found that improved labor mobility is by far the greatest way to give a leg up to low-income people around the globe.

“High-skilled immigration is going to be useful for the high-skilled migrants, but allowing lower-skilled workers in is directly going to improve poverty in poor countries,” McKenzie says.

Immigration advocates rejoiced at the Supreme Court and Barack Obama's decisions to ease restrictions on illegal immigrants. But there's another option that would do good at home and abroad: a formal effort to give jobs to foreign workers. Join Discussion

Training a generation of citizen-journalists

Two years ago, frustrated by the powerlessness citizens expressed to me about the political process, moved by their transpartisan worries about the state of U.S. democracy, I began an experiment on Facebook: I sought to train “ordinary” people from all walks of life as reporters and opinion writers.

The community grew fast, to a reach of over 10 million and between 100,000 and 250,000 users a week. People joined from 23 countries. There was clearly an appetite for this kind of training and the material it produced.

More exciting to me as a journalist was that the quality of information these “ordinary” citizens were generating – once they had taken on board basics such as “what is double sourcing?”, the importance of “who, what where, why and how?” and the role of eyewitness accounts and original documents – rose very high.

My personal beat as a reporter is civil liberties in the U.S., and the death of local newspapers has meant there is little coverage of state-level stories of these issues. That new void of local reporting leaves the federal government and Congress less than accountable on the local level.

But Gerald Rozner, a tech specialist, gave us solid blow-by-blow accounts of the Emergency Managers fight in Michigan, with original documentation such as court rulings; Jennifer Slattery, an activist, got us sound and vivid documentation of the clashes between Occupy and Oakland police, and brought us detailed reports from similar fights around the country; other sources put together a trend by agribusiness interests to criminalize raw milk production and sales state by state. Citizen reports came in from many local sources confirming that Department of Homeland Security money and armaments were flowing into local police forces; they posted city council meeting minutes to back this up. Understandably – since news outlets have had to slash the staff that used to cover these beats – this story and its magnitude was almost overlooked by mainstream news outlets till months later. None of our contributors are paid: They work because they want to make sure that the information they find gets into the public arena.

Encouraged by these developments, a group of partners and I began to think about building a website that would support this kind of journalism and opinion writing, and help citizens strengthen democracy in other ways. DailyCloudt.com, launched three weeks ago, is the result.

This model of training citizens to be reporters and pundits is even more exciting when you take it global. We started on Facebook to get real-time Twitter reports, via Greg Monahan in Ireland, from friends of his on the Gaza-bound illegal flotillas: We knew – before most news outlets did – when activists on board were taken off the boat and transported to Israeli hospitals. Greg connected our feed with Twitter messages, too, from Internet friends and colleagues of his in the human rights world who were reporting live from Gaza during the Israeli bombardment: We watched and heard the bombs falling in real time, in human voices. Another memorable report came when we were discussing and posting news sources about the U.S. drone presence in Pakistan – and a Pakistani dad summarized what it was like for parents in his village to decide whether or not to send their kids to school that day based on local U.S. drone activity.

Two years ago, frustrated by the powerlessness citizens expressed to me about the political process, moved by their transpartisan worries about the state of U.S. democracy, I began an experiment on Facebook: I sought to train “ordinary” people from all walks of life as reporters and opinion writers. Join Discussion

Why the surge in obesity?

Editor’s note: This post is republished from the author’s blog.

The Weight of the Nation is a four-part series on obesity in America by HBO Films and the Institute of Medicine, with assistance from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It’s been showing on HBO and can be viewed online. Each of the four parts is well done and informative.

Obesity is defined as having a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or more. For a person 6 feet tall, that means a weight of more than 220 pounds. For someone 5’6″, the threshold is 185 pounds. People who are obese tend to earn less and are more likely to be depressed. They are at greater risk of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and some types of cancer, and they tend to die younger. The CDC estimates the direct and indirect medical care costs of obesity to be $150 billion a year, about 1% of our GDP.

The chart below, which appears several times in The Weight of the Nation, shows the trend in obesity among American adults since 1960, the first year for which we have good data. The data are from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). They are collected from actual measurements of people’s height and weight, rather than from phone interviews, so they’re quite reliable. After holding constant at about 15% in the 1960s and 1970s, the adult obesity rate shot up beginning in the 1980s, reaching 35% in the mid-2000s.

What caused the surge in obesity? The standard explanation is too much eating and too little physical activity, and The Weight of the Nation sticks with this story. But it shouldn’t, because the evidence suggests one of these two hypothesized culprits has been far more important than the other.

Here is the trend in eating, measured as average calories in the food supply (adjusted for loss and spoilage) according to data from the Department of Agriculture. This chart too is from The Weight of the Nation. The timing of change matches that for obesity; the level is flat through the 1970s and then rises sharply beginning in the 1980s. An alternative series, measuring energy consumption per capita, goes back to 1950 (see figure 6, chart F here); it too shows little or no change until 1980, and then a sharp jump. The rise in food consumption correlates closely with the rise in obesity.

What caused the surge in obesity? The standard explanation is too much eating and too little physical activity. But the evidence suggests one of these two hypothesized culprits has been far more important than the other. Join Discussion

Yes, there are things the Rio summit can accomplish

The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio was marked by optimism and hope, but much of the buzz about the upcoming Rio+20 meeting is skeptical and cynical. Critics say the Rio process has been unduly bureaucratic and hasn’t lived up to its goals. They are branding Rio+20 as a failure before it has even begun. President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron are sitting it out. Some even say that in the radically decentralized Internet Age, the days when government leaders or U.N. bodies can set global agendas by fiat are long gone.

True, the Rio process itself has sensibly evolved away from government decree and turned toward the private sector to build a green economy that can implement sustainability on a global scale. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t important things governments can do to make Rio’s goals a reality.

Many global businesses now recognize sustainability and equity as the only acceptable model of growth, and have adopted sustainable management of global supply chains as the “new normal.” In the years since the first Earth Summit, businesses and NGOs like ours have been working to scale up sustainable resource use and engage producers and communities worldwide. Unilever and hundreds of other global businesses are committed to sourcing 100 percent of the commodities they use from farms or forests independently certified by organizations like the Rainforest Alliance, the Forest Stewardship Council and commodity roundtables. Certified producers conserve resources and forests, protect habitats and biodiversity, and put livelihoods and communities on a sustainable, equitable footing.

Our efforts are quietly transforming global markets. Three percent of the world’s working forests, 10 percent of the world’s tea production and 15 percent of the world’s bananas are under sustainable management certified by the Rainforest Alliance. Ten percent of the entire global economy now operates under some form of sustainability standards. And these numbers are growing rapidly.

That’s some indication of how much the private sector and civil society can do to implement Rio’s goals by greening the global economy. But the world needs to speed the process up. Governments can create the conditions for that, including enforcing existing regulations, adopting sustainable procurement policies and providing incentives for sustainable production and consumption. Government policies enable the flow of investment in clean water, reforestation, soil management, better working conditions, schooling and worker training, and much else.

There are many examples of governments in both consumer and producer countries already using their power to do this. Wisconsin’s state government gives property tax breaks to landowners enrolled in certified sustainable forest management. Canada incentivized energy efficiency upgrades at pulp and paper plants. The Dutch government specifies certain types of sustainably produced products in their procurement guidelines. El Salvador provides export tax reductions on sustainably produced coffee. In Mexico, certified community-based forestry operations that meet international forest management standards are eligible for government grants to expand their business.

But there’s still a long way for governments to go. A recent study led by the Vance Center found that in the Americas, though many countries promulgated new sustainability incentives, very few got funded or promoted, and there was no consistency or focus on the most urgent problems.

The Rio process has sensibly evolved away from government decree and turned toward the private sector to build a green economy that can implement sustainability on a global scale. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t important things governments can do to make Rio’s goals a reality. Join Discussion

Will George W. Bush become a surprise Obama asset?

Whatever happened to George W. Bush? While 88-year-old George H.W. Bush still goes skydiving and chats about Justin Bieber with his granddaughter Jemma, the faux Texan who brought us two wars, waterboarding, an economic meltdown and record public borrowing is strangely missing. Just as well, you might think. What could he possibly say?

But George W. is a key witness in the trial of Barack Obama. Under attack from Mitt Romney for presiding over a stagnant economy, Obama blames his plight on the gaping hole in the country’s finances left by his predecessor. “Huge reckless bets were made with other people’s money,” Obama told an audience in Cleveland, this month. “And too many, from Wall Street to Washington, simply looked the other way.” Then, “in the fall of 2008 it all came tumbling down with a financial crisis that plunged the world into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.”

Obama has made light of his sour inheritance, joking: “Some have said I blame too many problems on my predecessor, but let’s not forget that’s a practice that was initiated by George W. Bush.” But in invoking the ghost of George W. he is deadly serious. To be left nursing the worst economy since Herbert Hoover is no laughing matter. The figures for the Bush years suggest Obama has a lot to complain about. Whether you judge it by stock market prices, or the number of Americans in poverty, or median household income, or growth in public debt, or GDP growth, or job growth, or number of Americans without health insurance, Bush passed on to Obama an economy heading South.

Americans seem to understand this. Bush, not Obama, is mostly blamed for the wretched state of the economy, according to a recent Gallup poll. Even Republicans are split, holding Bush and Obama equally responsible. This perhaps surprising evidence of fair play among voters goes a long way to explain why Obama continues to pound away at the narrative that he inherited a wrecked economy and deserves more time to fix it.

So what does W. think about the economy he left behind? In April, he spoke at Southern Methodist University in Dallas about the “decision that contradicted a principle I told the American people I stood on, which is that markets are the best way to allocate goods, resources, and services. That decision was to use taxpayers’ money to bail out Wall Street in order to make sure that we didn’t have an economic disaster.” The remark echoed what he wrote in his 2010 memoir Decision Points, that he believed the intervention “helped spare the American people from an economic disaster of historic proportions … the Second Great Depression that Ben Bernanke warned about did not happen.”

In a candid admission, he told his Dallas audience: “I can’t prove that we were going to have an economic disaster. I can just tell you we didn’t have one. I have thought often about this decision. I will just tell you this: had I had to make it again, I would make the same exact decision.” Tea Party supporters remember with horror Romney’s support for the Bush bailout. “We were on a precipice unlike anything we have known before in modern history with the potential of a complete collapse of our currency system and our financial system,” said Romney. “Had we not taken action, you could have seen a real devastation.”

Much to Romney’s relief, W. rarely steps away from his Texas fastness, and when he does, he keeps his utterances short. His endorsement of Romney was a mere five words – “I’m for Mitt Romney” – delivered just as the doors of an elevator abruptly closed upon his grinning visage. Bush has let it be known he will not be going on the stump for Romney, nor will you hear encomiums to the Bush years on Romney’s lips. Romney’s managers have decided that reminding the electorate of Bush’s existence is a sure vote loser.

The more the ex-president appears in public, the more chance the public has to recall the economic horror of his administration, confounding Mitt Romney's attempts to pin it on Obama. Next month the ghost of Bush will be spooking Romney again, with an intro to a collection of essays on promoting growth and at least one interview. Join Discussion