Obama Should Meet With 'Rethink Afghanistan' Caucus - Nation

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posted by John Nichols on 10/06/2009

President Obama, who is under pressure from the Pentagon and defense contractors to surge 40,000 additional U.S. troops into occupied Afghanistan, met Tuesday with members of Congress to discuss the sorry state of the mission and its uncertain future.

That's the good news -- sort of.

At least the president is talking to the civilian leaders who, according to the U.S. Constitution, are supposed to be making decisions about whether to engage in and escalate wars.

The bad news is that the president -- who disptached Defense Secretary Robert Gates to say before the meeting: "We are not leaving Afghanistan" -- did not sit down with members of Congress who have studied the conflict and determined that it is time to develop a flexible exit strategy.

Here is the list of House and Senate members who got the White House invite:

SENATORS: Harry Reid, Majority Leader, D-NV * Dick Durbin, Majority Whip, D-IL * Mitch McConnell, Republican Leader, R-KY * Jon Kyl, Republican Whip, R-AZ * Carl Levin, Armed Services Chair, D-MI * John McCain, Armed Services Ranking Member, R-AZ * Daniel Inouye, Appropriations Chair and Defense Subcommittee Chair, D-HI * Thad Cochran, Appropriations Ranking Member and Defense Subcommittee Ranking, R-MS * John Kerry, Foreign Affairs Chair, D-MA * Richard Lugar, Foreign Affairs Ranking Member, R-IN * Patrick Leahy, Foreign Operations Appropriations Chair, D-VT * Judd Gregg, Foreign Operations Appropriations Ranking Member, R-NH * Dianne Feinstein, Intelligence Committee Chair, D-CA * Kit Bond, Intelligence Committee Ranking Member, R-MO

REPRESENTATIVES: Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA * Steny Hoyer, Majority Leader, D-MD * John Boehner, Republican Leader, R-OH * James Clyburn, Majority Whip, D-SC * Eric Cantor, Republican Whip, R-VA * Ike Skelton, Armed Services Chair, D-MO * Howard McKeon, Armed Services Ranking Member, R-CA * Howard Berman, Foreign Affairs Chair, D-CA * Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Foreign Affairs Ranking Member, R-FL * David Obey, Appropriations Chair, D-WI * Jerry Lewis, Appropriations Ranking Member, R-CA * Nita Lowey, Foreign Operations Appropriations Chair, D-NY * Kay Granger, Foreign Operations Appropriations Ranking Member, R-TX * John Murtha, Appropriations, Defense Subcommittee Chair, D-PA * Bill Young, Appropriations, Defense Subcommittee Ranking Member, R-FL * Silvestre Reyes, Intelligence Committee Chairman, D-TX * Peter Hoekstra, Intelligence Committee Ranking Member, R-MI

Readers will note that there are plenty of Republican hawks -- led by McCain -- on the list.

And, yes, there are some skeptics -- such as Durbin and Kerry.

But where are Senator Russ Feingold, D-Wisconsin, and Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, who have emerged as outspoken advocates for a rethink of the occupation and, in Feingold's case, a flexible exit strategy? Feingold, a member of the Intelligence Committee who has spent more time than most members in southern Asia, knows the territory well. And he would bring an alternative point of view to what is, after all, being billed as a frank and open discussions of strategy. (White House spokesman Robert Gibbs says: "The president has discussed wanting to hear from all of those that are involved in this, and certainly Congress plays a big role in this.")

Where is Massachusetts Congressman Jim McGovern's name on the list? McGovern has visited Afghanistan, met with troops and commanders, consulted with international security and development strategists, and come to share their conclusion that an escalation of U.S. forces would be a bad idea. The well-regarded vice chair of the Rules Committee is, as well, the sponsor of legislation demanding the development of an exit strategy. That legislation just attracted its 99th cosponsor in the House, meaning that with McGovern himself it now has 100 signed-on backers -- including a number of conservative Republicans.

McGovern and Congressman Walter Jones, R-North Carolina, recently circulated a letter opposing General Stanley McChrystal's bid to shift 40,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.

More than 50 House Democrats and Republicans signed the letter, which argues that "the last thing that our nation needs as it struggles with the pain of a severe economic crisis and a mountain of debt is another military quagmire. We believe that is why recent polls consistently show that a majority of Americans are opposed to a military escalation in Afghanistan."

The dissenting members are right about the polls. Opposition to the occupation is building.

They are right about the quagmire, a point brilliantly made by Robert Greenwald's just-released documentary "Rethink Afghanistan".

The president is right to consult Congress.

But he is wrong -- very wrong -- to consult only with supporters of the escalation and cautious critics. It reinforces a problem highlighted by Greenwald. "The echo chambers in Washington have long argued that Afghanistan is the war of necessity," the director explains. "This reasoning excluded any opposing viewpoints and has mired us in what is now perceived as the endless war."

The president should at least give a hearing to those members of the House and Senate who have had the wherewithal and the courage to challenge the convention wisdom that says the occupation of Afghanistan must continue -- and must continue to expand. He would quickly find that there are sound diplomacy-and-development strategies that offer alternatives not just to escalation but to maintaining the occupation.

Instead of limiting the discussion to the defenders of a failed status quo, and those who are satisfied to tinker rather than change direction, Obama should consult the "Rethink Afghanistan" caucus.

Pay Czar Targets Salary Cuts - WSJ.com

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Top Earners at Firms Getting Aid Would See Compensation Shift From Cash to Stock

By DEBORAH SOLOMON

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration's pay czar is planning to clamp down on compensation at firms receiving large sums of government aid by cutting annual cash salaries for many of the top employees under his authority, according to people familiar with the matter.

Instead of awarding large cash salaries, Kenneth Feinberg is planning to shift a chunk of an employee's annual salary into stock that cannot be accessed for several years, these people said. Such a move, the most intrusive yet into corporate compensation, would mark the government's first effort to curb the take-home pay of everyone from auto executives to financial traders.

Mr. Feinberg is expected to issue by mid-October his determination on compensation packages for 175 of the most-highly compensated executives and employees at the seven firms he oversees. The companies are: American International Group Inc., Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., General Motors Co., GMAC Financial Services Inc., Chrysler LLC and Chrysler Financial.

The move will further reshape pay at those firms and could complicate efforts by some of those seven companies to attract top executives and employees.

The issue could be particularly acute for Bank of America, which is searching for a successor to Kenneth Lewis, who announced plans to resign as chief executive of the company last week. A Bank of America spokesman said the bank declined to comment on compensation issues regarding the chief executive. "We have been in close communication with Feinberg and our compensation going forward is very much in line with his guidance," the spokesman said.

WSJ's Deborah Solomon details U.S. pay czar Kenneth Feinberg's plans for clamping down on pay, which would focus on cutting annual cash salaries for many of the 175 executives and other employees under his authority.

The Obama administration has tasked Mr. Feinberg with more closely tying compensation to long-term performance, something the White House believes will help prevent employees from taking unnecessary risks for short-term gains. A government official said shifting some salary away from cash and into stock will help achieve those goals.

The move is aimed squarely at salaries, not bonuses, which are restricted under rules passed by Congress earlier this year. Firms receiving bailout funds cannot pay cash bonuses to top executives and employees and must comply with a host of other restrictions, including capping bonus payments at one-third of total compensation

It's not clear what portion of an employee's salary will be diverted to stock but a person familiar with the matter said that in some cases it could be more than 50%. Indeed, Mr. Feinberg employed this strategy in his Oct. 2 ruling on pay for Robert Benmosche, the new chief executive of AIG. Mr. Benmosche's salary was broken into two pieces -- a $3 million annual cash salary and $4 million annually in AIG stock that cannot be accessed for five years.

The Federal Reserve, which is planning to propose risk-based guidelines later this month that would affect the way tens of thousands of bankers get paid, is not expected to adopt Mr. Feinberg's strategy in making its determinations. However, the Obama administration is hopeful that Mr. Feinberg's pay structure will be viewed as something of a "best practice" and that other firms may voluntarily seek to use similar methods in determining compensation.

Andrew Williams, a Treasury spokesman, wouldn't comment on Mr. Feinberg's plans but said the pay czar was appointed "to help ensure that companies strike the right balance around their need to retain talent, reward performance, and protect the taxpayers' investment. Obviously, we all have a shared interest in ensuring that those companies can return to profitability as soon as possible so that taxpayers can recoup their investment."

Mr. Feinberg, an attorney who is receiving no government compensation for his work, has been trying to convey some of his thinking in a series of recent public speeches and interviews. He doesn't plan to set any hard-dollar ceilings for executive pay and said he is sympathetic to the need for companies receiving government aid to pay enough to attract talented employees and remain competitive.

At a speech before the Chicago Bar Association last week, Mr. Feinberg said he will not have done his job if companies react to his decisions by saying "that's great, we're going to lose all our people and we're not going to be competitive."

But at the same time, the administration is under pressure to rein in what many view as excessive compensation at banks and other firms.

Mr. Feinberg has been working closely with the firms and many are aware of his plans regarding salary, people familiar with the matter said. Indeed, in the Chicago speech, Mr. Feinberg said the negotiations have been "a consensual process...I'm hoping I won't be required to simply make a determination over company objections."

—Dan Fitzpatrick contributed to this article.

Write to Deborah Solomon at deborah.solomon@wsj.com

Advertising - F.T.C. to Rule Blogs Must Disclose Gifts or Pay for Reviews - NYTimes.com

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By TIM ARANGO

FOR nearly three decades, the Federal Trade Commission’s rules regarding the relationships between advertisers and product reviewers and endorsers were deemed adequate. Then came the age of blogging and social media.

On Monday, the F.T.C. said it would revise rules about endorsements and testimonials in advertising that had been in place since 1980. The new regulations are aimed at the rapidly shifting new-media world and how advertisers are using bloggers and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to pitch their wares.

The F.T.C. said that beginning on Dec. 1, bloggers who review products must disclose any connection with advertisers, including, in most cases, the receipt of free products and whether or not they were paid in any way by advertisers, as occurs frequently. The new rules also take aim at celebrities, who will now need to disclose any ties to companies, should they promote products on a talk show or on Twitter. A second major change, which was not aimed specifically at bloggers or social media, was to eliminate the ability of advertisers to gush about results that differ from what is typical — for instance, from a weight loss supplement.

For bloggers who review products, this means that the days of an unimpeded flow of giveaways may be over. More broadly, the move suggests that the government is intent on bringing to bear on the Internet the same sorts of regulations that have governed other forms of media, like television or print.

“It crushes the idea that the Internet is separate from the kinds of concerns that have been attached to previous media,” said Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University.

Richard Cleland, assistant director of the division of advertising practices at the F.T.C., said: “We were looking and seeing the significance of social media marketing in the 21st century and we thought it was time to explain the principles of transparency and truth in advertising and apply them to social media marketing. Which isn’t to say that we saw a huge problem out there that was imperative to address.”

Still, sites like Twitter and Facebook, as well as blogs, have offered companies new opportunities to pitch products with endorsements that carry a veneer of authenticity because they seem to be straight from the mouth — or keyboard — of an individual consumer. In some cases, companies have set up product review blogs that appear to be independent. One such case involved Urban Nutrition, a seller of supplements, that ran Web sites like WeKnowDiets.com and GoogleDiets.com. The National Advertising Review Council, which governs the industry’s self-regulatory programs, said the sites were “formatted as independent product-review blogs.”

Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said, “the rules are looking ahead to a quite possible future when there is a market to buy ‘authentic’ public endorsements.”

Some marketing groups fought the changes. “If a product is provided to bloggers, the F.T.C. will consider that, in most cases, to be a material connection even if the advertiser has no control over the content of the blogs,” said Linda Goldstein, a partner at Manatt Phelps & Phillips, a law firm that represents three marketing groups, the Electronic Retailing Association, the Promotion Marketing Association and the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. “In terms of the real world blogging community, that’s a seismic shift.”

Ms. Goldstein added, “We would have preferred the F.T.C. to work closer with the industry to learn how viral marketing works.”

The new guidelines were not unexpected — the commission gave notice last November that it would take up the matter. They will affect scores of bloggers who began as hobbyists only to find that companies flocked to them in search of a new way to reach consumers.

About three-and-a-half years ago Christine Young, of Lincoln, Calif., began blogging about her adventures in home schooling. It led to her current blog, FromDatesToDiapers.com, about mothers and families. The free products soon started arriving, and now hardly a day goes by without a package from Federal Express or DHL arriving at her door, she said. Mostly they are children’s products, like Nintendo Wii games, but sometimes not. She said she recently received a free pair of women’s shoes from Timberland.

Ms. Young said she had always disclosed whether or not she received a free product when writing her reviews. But companies have nothing to lose when sending off goodies: if she doesn’t like a product, she simply won’t write about it.

“I think that bloggers definitely need to be held accountable,” said Ms. Young. “I think there is a certain level of trust that bloggers have with readers, and readers deserve to know the whole truth.”

A New Web Tool to Take Control of Your Health - NYTimes.com

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By STEVE LOHR

The national health care debate right now is all about giving more people affordable access to doctors and hospitals. Yet the vast majority of health care decisions — 80 percent or more, experts say — are really made by individuals, instead of medical professionals, whether choices are about diet and exercise or ways of managing chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease.

The long-term answer to improving the health of the nation’s population and curbing costs, experts agree, is to help people make smarter decisions day in and day out about their own health. And the most powerful potential tool in the march toward intelligent consumerism in health care may be the Web.

That is why on Tuesday, a start-up company led by Adam Bosworth, former head of the Google Health team, plans to become the newest entrant to the online consumer health business.

Already, surveys show that a majority of adults in America routinely scour the Internet for health information. Doctors joke that the standard second opinion of diagnosis and treatment has become a patient’s Google search, with the results printed out and brought to the doctor’s office.

But the Web is still mainly a vast trove of generalized health information. The ideal, health experts say, would be to combine personal data with health information to deliver tailored health plans for individuals. That is what Mr. Bosworth and his San Francisco-based company, Keas (pronounced KEE-ahs) Inc., mean to do.

Using the Keas system, for example, a person with Type 2 diabetes might receive reminders, advice on diet and exercise, questions and prompts presented on the Web site or delivered by e-mail or text messages — all personalized for the person’s age, gender, weight and other health conditions.

Although success is far from certain, Keas has some big partners, including Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault.

Health technology experts say Keas is at the forefront of the effort to combine advanced Web and database technologies so it can personalize health education. The promise, they say, is a big step forward for online health tools, and could help accelerate their adoption — much as the spreadsheet program helped kick-start the personal computer industry back in the early 1980s.

“This is the next generation of applications for online health care,” said Dr. David C. Kibbe, a health technology expert and senior adviser to the American Academy of Family Physicians, who is also a member of the Keas advisory board.

The Obama administration has drafted its guidelines for producing electronic health records — patient records held by doctors and hospitals — with applications like Keas in mind. To qualify for government subsidies, the electronic records must be able to generate patient education materials that help guide care, and eventually share information with personally controlled health records of the sort offered by Google Health and Microsoft Health Vault.

“The goal is not just health care information, but knowledge about what that means and what action to take,” said Dr. John D. Halamka, chief information officer at the Harvard Medical School, and a member of a federal advisory group on electronic health records. “And that is what Keas, and others in different ways, are really starting to think through.”

Other initial partners of Keas are impressed with its technology. Healthwise, a nonprofit supplier of online health information, has created 15 care plans for Keas so far, including ones on high blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes, weight management and stress management.

Healthwise provides health content to major managed care companies, insurers and Web portals, including Kaiser Permanente, Aetna, WebMD, Revolution Health, Yahoo, MSN and AOL.

But Keas, said Jim Giuffre, president of Healthwise, has a feature that is distinct from other health services online. “They have developed the technology to make decisions from personalized data,” Mr. Giuffre said. “We think it’s going to help consumers make better health care choices.”

Dr. Alan R. Greene, a clinical professor of pediatrics at the Stanford University School of Medicine, has two children’s care plans on Keas, for ear infections and asthma, and is working on others. Dr. Greene has done projects with WebMD and Yahoo in the past. “But this little start-up has an extremely powerful tool, both personalized and interactive,” he said.

For medical experts, Keas is currently helping them with technical assistance. But the company intends to keep simplifying the tools so that individual physicians or health experts can build their own care plans.

The technical game plan at Keas bears the imprint of Mr. Bosworth’s career. As a senior engineer at Microsoft in the 1990s, he led the design team that created Access, a personal computer database program, introduced in 1992, which enabled nonprogrammers to build databases. Later, Mr. Bosworth focused on Internet software, working on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser and then XML, an open technology for tagging text documents on the Web and data sharing between programs.

Database expertise, easy-to-use tools for nonexperts and automated data sharing among Web documents are all essential ingredients in the personalized care plans.

At Google, which he joined in 2004, Mr. Bosworth worked on Gmail, Blogger, online spreadsheets and other products. But the company’s leaders knew he was interested in using Internet technology to improve health care. Having studied history at Harvard, Mr. Bosworth is a voracious and eclectic reader and a globe-trotting traveler. (The name “kea” refers to a species of alpine parrot, which he spotted on the South Island of New Zealand).

“I spent 25 years of my life building Lego blocks for computing,” said Mr. Bosworth, 54, adding that the time had come to pursue wider horizons.

His years at Google, Mr. Bosworth said, were good ones, and the work the health team was doing with personal health records was important. Moving people’s data online, where individuals can control it, he said, would be vital to using Internet technology to improve health care — and only big companies like Google and Microsoft can do that.

“But I decided my focus should be on the other side of the equation — what to do with the data,” he said.

So Mr. Bosworth left Google, founded Keas and started hiring people in March 2008. The company has 24 employees, and last December it received venture capital backing from Atlas Ventures and Ignition Partners.

The Keas site requires a user to sign in and fill out a questionnaire. Personal health records from Google Health and Microsoft Health Vault can be automatically fed into the Keas care plans.

Another early partner is Quest Diagnostics, the nation’s largest clinical laboratory company, and, with permission, an individual’s lab data can influence the Keas plans. Users can put in as much or as little personal information as they want. Because Keas works with care providers, like doctors, it is required by law to adhere to all federal rules under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, for encrypting and handling information to safeguard the privacy of personal information, Mr. Bosworth said.

The care plans present personalized status reports, as individualized dashboards, showing a person to be in the red, yellow or green bands. Green is good, and care plans make recommendations on how to get there.

Initially, the care plans will be free, but eventually Keas will include subscriptions for plans, probably at a few dollars a month. Keas will take a slice, and pass the rest on to the plan creator — the model used by the Apple’s iPhone applications store.

“We’re still learning, so we’re in no rush to charge,” Mr. Bosworth said. “But the idea is that people will get paid for doing things that are really engaging and useful.”

In the long term, Mr. Bosworth hopes Keas will evolve into a marketplace, where health experts are the sellers, and consumers who want the best personalized advice are the buyers. “I think that’s a pretty big idea,” he said. “If it works, it helps drive consumerism into health care.”

Napolitano Outlines Ideas for Revamping Immigration Detention - NYTimes.com

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By NINA BERNSTEIN

The Obama administration is looking to convert hotels and nursing homes into immigration detention centers and to build two model detention centers from scratch as it tries to transform the way the government holds people it is seeking to deport.

These and other initiatives, described in an interview on Monday by Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, are part of the administration’s effort to revamp the much-criticized detention system, even as it expands the enforcement programs that send most people accused of immigration violations to jails and private prisons. The cost, she said, would be covered by greater efficiencies in the detention and removal system, which costs $2.4 billion annually to operate and holds about 380,000 people a year.

“The paradigm was wrong,” Ms. Napolitano said of the nation’s patchwork of rented jail space, which has more than tripled in size since 1995, largely through Immigration and Customs Enforcement contracts for cells more restrictive, and expensive, than required for a population that is largely not dangerous. Among those in detention on Sept. 1, 51 percent were considered felons, and of those, 11 percent had committed violent crimes.

“Serious felons deserve to be in the prison model,” Ms. Napolitano said, “but there are others. There are women. There are children.”

These and other nonviolent people should be sorted and detained or supervised in ways appropriate to their level of danger or flight risk, she said. Her goal, she said, is “to make immigration detention more cohesive, accountable and relevant to the entire spectrum of detainees we are dealing with.”

Several of the initiatives Ms. Napolitano described, to be formally announced on Tuesday afternoon, are steps on a road outlined in August, when John Morton, the assistant secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, announced an ambitious plan to transform the penal network into a “truly civil detention system.”

But the corrections expert he had put in charge of the overhaul, Dora B. Schriro, quit last month to become the corrections commissioner in New York City, after delivering a report on her eight-month top-to-bottom review of the system. The report had remained under wraps until now.

Dr. Schriro’s departure, and the delay in making her report public, dismayed many of the dozens of immigrant advocacy groups she consulted. Her 35-page report, provided to The New York Times after the interview on the condition that it not be posted on its Web site until Tuesday afternoon, calls for prompt attention to individual complaints about a lack of medical care, and “a credible grievance process, sustained in an environment free from intimidation and retaliation.”

In her interview, Ms. Napolitano said little about medical care but promised that within six months the Department of Homeland Security would “devise and implement” a classification system to better place people with medical or mental health needs in the right detention centers.

That vow puzzled some immigrant advocacy groups that deal with seriously ill detainees, including some who have died in federal custody after not getting proper treatment. The groups said they were concerned about the gap between announced plans to improve medical care and the actions of immigration officials.

Cheryl Little, the director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, pointed to the case of a woman she called Rosemarie, who, while being detained at the Glades County Detention Center, has suffered severe daily bleeding as a result of a fibroid tumor in her uterus.

“This has gone on for more than the five months she has been in ICE custody,” Ms. Little said. “Since June, we have tried everything to get her proper treatment. We started the requests at the local level and escalated up to D.H.S. headquarters. Ultimately we’ve had to file a lawsuit, and Rosemarie still hasn’t had the surgery she needs.”

Ms. Napolitano noted repeatedly that some of the initiatives she was announcing were “easier said than done.” Plans to speed the implementation of an online system for families and lawyers to locate detainees, for example, have been complicated by privacy issues and by the fact that many detainees share names and some stay in the system for only a couple of days, she said.

Likewise, though alternatives to detention are much cheaper than the jails under contract — $14 a day at most per person, compared with more than $100 a day — the overall cost is more complicated to calculate, she said.

About 19,000 noncitizens are supervised daily using alternatives like electronic bracelets, but their immigration cases are moved to the back of the line for adjudication. Homeland Security is working with the Justice Department, which oversees immigration courts, to modify that practice, she said, and this fall will submit a proposal to Congress to expand detention alternatives.

A request for proposals to build two model detention centers, one in California, will be issued within a year, said Mr. Morton, the ICE official. On Oct. 30, he said, he will solicit proposals and market research about converted hotels, nursing homes and other residential facilities that could serve as less expensive and less restrictive detention centers.

Mr. Morton said that on Sept. 18 the agency began housing nonviolent detainees, including new asylum seekers, at the Broward Transitional Center in Pompano Beach, Fla., near free legal help. But Charu al-Sahli, the statewide director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, said the Broward center, run for profit by GEO, a large prison company formerly known as Wackenhut, had been housing asylum seekers since 2003.

A former work-release center now surrounded by barbed wire, it is being expanded to house 700, up from 530.

“Even though it’s a nicer environment than a jail,” Ms. al-Sahli said, “these are still the people we would hold up for release, not just nicer detention.”

Karzai’s Running Mate Poised for Political Return - NYTimes.com

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By CARLOTTA GALL

KABUL, Afghanistan — Once the most powerful man in Afghanistan, Marshal Muhammad Qasim Fahim sat on the political sidelines for the past five years after being accused of corruption and maintaining an armed militia when he was defense minister.

Now, after President Hamid Karzai drafted him as a running mate, he is poised to take up power again and is re-emerging as an important power broker for Mr. Karzai, despite lingering reservations about him among American officials and others in the West.

In a rare interview last week in his sumptuous home in Kabul, the capital, Marshal Fahim vehemently denied any allegations of wrongdoing, and called for a peaceful resolution of the disputed count from the Aug. 20 election. A partial recount began Monday, with results expected to be announced within days.

Though he acknowledged a substantial element of fraud in the vote, he said he felt confident that it was not enough to reverse Mr. Karzai’s lead.

“I think Karzai can win in the first round,” he said.

If Mr. Karzai is confirmed the winner, Marshal Fahim will become first vice president, and Karim Khalili, another former leader of the resistance against the Soviet invasion, will become second vice president.

Before the election, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the head of the United Nations mission in Afghanistan, Kai Eide, tried to warn Mr. Karzai away from Marshal Fahim, saying he would damage the president’s standing with the United States and other countries.

But the embattled Mr. Karzai sought Marshal Fahim’s support anyway, not only for the votes he could attract, but also for the muscle he could provide as Afghanistan’s most powerful former militia commander.

Marshal Fahim’s political rebirth now presents a quandary for Afghanistan’s allies, though he may yet prove critical to Mr. Karzai, both in heading off protests by opponents over the tainted election and in battling a tenacious Taliban insurgency, which he has taken on before.

Marshal Fahim commanded the anti-Taliban forces of the United Front, which fought alongside American forces and toppled the Taliban in 2001.

Although his forces have been disbanded or absorbed into the police and the army, he still commands solid support among the former resistance fighters, the mujahedeen, and so exerts considerable influence over the streets of Kabul and much of northern Afghanistan.

He said he had sided with Mr. Karzai in the election, rather than with his former comrade-in-arms and Mr. Karzai’s main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, because he believed that Afghanistan needed a strong national government that would unite its two largest ethnic groups, the Tajiks and the Pashtuns.

Mr. Karzai, who is from the Pashtun south, tried to go it alone during the past five years and pushed aside many former allies, especially among former resistance fighters in the north, Marshal Fahim said. But he said the president had learned that he could not manage without them.

“Now he realized that he needs us, and we need him, and to rescue Afghanistan from 30 years of war, we will listen to each other and work together,” he said.

But he acknowledged that Mr. Karzai had to introduce changes if re-elected, in particular in his handling of corruption and improving government practices.

“We need a central government working with a lot of effort, where people see themselves as participants,” he said. “And we should have better coordination with the foreigners on security.”

Marshal Fahim has himself been accused in the past of corruption, particularly related to his distribution of prime real estate to cabinet members and some of his generals while serving as vice president in Mr. Karzai’s absence.

Allegations have emerged recently of his involvement in drug smuggling when he was defense minister, which Marshal Fahim vehemently denied.

“I challenge you: if someone can find one shred of evidence, I will hang myself,” he said in the interview. “It is baseless and a complete insult.”

The accusation was particularly shaming, he said, because when the mujahedeen fought against the Soviet occupation, and later against the Taliban, their leader, the legendary commander of the Northern Alliance, Ahmed Shah Massoud, banned drugs and even cigarettes. “Not even a puff or a sniff was allowed,” Marshal Fahim said.

He denied a report in The New York Times in August that said he had use of a Soviet-made cargo plane to transport heroin to Russia and return with cash. Afghanistan had no working planes when he was defense minister, he said.

He visited Russia twice during his time as defense minister, both times as a guest on a Russian government plane, and smuggling drugs on such occasions was out of the question, he said.

He said, as Mr. Karzai has, that the information was propaganda and part of a conspiracy against them before the election.

American officials have indicated that they would like Marshal Fahim sidelined as vice president, but it is not clear how the United States military would regard his return to power and his interest in coordinating what he calls the “fight against terrorism.”

A longtime opponent of the Taliban, Marshal Fahim advocates a tough approach to the insurgency. He said that while it was appropriate for the president to continue to offer peace talks to the Taliban, he did not believe that the Taliban were interested in reconciliation.

“My belief is the time for peace is when we are strong and the Taliban are weak,” he said. “Now would not be a good time for Afghanistan to make peace.”

He said the government and coalition forces should focus on hitting Taliban bases both in Pakistan and in southern Afghanistan, and he endorsed the search for a new strategy in fighting the insurgency.

“The method of fighting should be studied very carefully; there should be a new strategy,” he said. He is not opposed to the presence of foreign troops, describing them as “a reality,” and he would not comment on the proposals of the United States commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, for sending more troops, saying that it was up to the coalition commander to decide what he needed.

He proposed promoting brave and experienced former resistance fighters into critical police and military positions to improve security in areas in the north where the insurgency was spreading.

“They are in the structure already, but you have to appoint them,” he said. “Then you have to clear those areas and make posts and give them to good mujahedeen who have a good reputation in those areas and let them keep the security.”

That may prove controversial, however. Under changes put into place by the Interior Ministry, the emphasis has been on the literacy and training of police recruits, and many former resistance fighters have been sidelined to prevent a return of militias loyal to particular strongmen.

Contention Over Rankings of African Nations - NYTimes.com

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By CELIA W. DUGGER

JOHANNESBURG — Two independent ratings of Africa’s best- and worst-governed nations — one released Monday, the other last week — both put Mauritius at the top of the heap and Somalia at the bottom and reached often similar, though far from identical, conclusions about the 51 countries in between.

But behind these efforts to assess the voluminous evidence on African governance — a catchall phrase that includes measures like corruption, vaccine coverage, crime rates and armed conflict — lies a dispute between a Harvard political scientist, Robert Rotberg, and a wealthy Sudanese-born philanthropist, Mo Ibrahim, who used to finance his research.

For the past two years, Professor Rotberg, the head of a program on conflict resolution at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and Mr. Ibrahim, who leads his own foundation, collaborated to produce the Ibrahim Index of African Governance. But they parted ways over who should have final say.

Last week, Professor Rotberg and his colleague, Rachel M. Gisselquist, released their Index of African Governance. Their work is now supported by the Boston-based World Peace Foundation, which Professor Rotberg leads.

In an interview after the indexes were released, Mr. Ibrahim said decisions about the Ibrahim index were always meant to shift to the African researchers and institutions that his foundation’s board had increasingly brought into the process — a shift he said Professor Rotberg had resisted.

“Why should an American gentleman sitting in Boston have editorial control?” Mr. Ibrahim asked. “That is unacceptable.”

Professor Rotberg saw the dispute differently. He said he and Ms. Gisselquist had invented the index and wanted to retain authority over it. “The issue is academic freedom versus foundation control,” he said in a telephone interview on Monday.

The two rival ratings count 9 out of 10 of the same countries among the best and worst governed, though not in the same order. Among the best governed, both name Mauritius, Seychelles, Cape Verde, Botswana, Tunisia, Ghana, Namibia, South Africa and São Tomé and Príncipe. The Rotberg index also includes Algeria in the top 10, while the Ibrahim index counts Lesotho.

Among the worst performers, both count Guinea, Zimbabwe, Eritrea, Central African Republic, Ivory Coast, Congo, Chad, Sudan and Somalia. For the Rotberg index, Angola made the bottom 10, while the Ibrahim index included Equatorial Guinea.

They had more substantive differences over rankings for nations in the middle. For example, the Rotberg index ranked Malawi, a small, impoverished southern African nation, 14th, while the Ibrahim index put it 25th.

Daniel Kaufmann, a Brookings Institution expert on corruption who is advising the Ibrahim Foundation, said the effort to make the index an African assessment of African governance could add to its influence on a continent where there is still suspicion of Western research.

“It will be harder to reject because of the Africanization,” said Mr. Kaufmann, who was formerly at the World Bank Institute, where he shaped its global governance ratings.

The Ibrahim Foundation has placed full-page advertisements in newspapers in 45 African countries describing its findings in local languages, an attempt to inform a broader public and to encourage civic groups to take advantage of the trove of information on its Web site.

Advisers on the Ibrahim index say it relies on more recent data — from 2008, as well as 2007 — and tracks a broader array of information, including assessments by experts, than does the Rotberg index.

Professor Rotberg said empirical data comparable across countries — the main basis for his and Ms. Gisselquist’s rankings — were generally not available for the previous year. That is why they used 2007 data for the 2009 index.

Both indexes offer elaborate and detailed breakdowns of dozens of indicators. Some who have researched similar issues but are not involved in either of the new indexes, like Hennie van Vuuren, in the Cape Town office of the Institute for Security Studies, said the split that led to two indexes was unfortunate.

“It would make much more sense to pool resources and have a methodologically strong index — an instrument that African governments and civil society groups can trust to be a mirror of the state of governance on the African continent,” he said.

Honduran Security Forces Accused of Abuse - NYTimes.com

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By ELISABETH MALKIN

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras — Rosamaria Valeriano Flores was returning home from a visit to a public health clinic and found herself in a crowd of people dispersing from a demonstration in support of the ousted president, Manuel Zelaya. As she crossed the central square of the Honduran capital, a group of soldiers and police officers pushed her to the ground and beat her with their truncheons.

She said the men kicked out most of her top teeth, broke her ribs and split open her head. “A policeman spit in my face and said, ‘You will die,’ ” she said, adding that the attack stopped when a police officer shouted at the men that they would kill her.

Ms. Valeriano, 39, was sitting in the office of a Tegucigalpa human rights group last week, speaking about the assault, which took place on Aug. 12. As she told her story, mumbling to hide her missing teeth, she pointed to a scar on her scalp and to her still-sore left ribs.

Since Mr. Zelaya was removed in a June 28 coup, security forces have tried to halt opposition with beatings and mass arrests, human rights groups say. Eleven people have been killed since the coup, according to the Committee for Families of the Disappeared and Detainees in Honduras, or Cofadeh.

The number of violations and their intensity has increased since Mr. Zelaya secretly returned to Honduras two weeks ago, taking refuge at the Brazilian Embassy, human rights groups say.

The groups describe an atmosphere of growing impunity, one in which security forces act unhindered by legal constraints. Their free hand had been strengthened by an emergency decree allowing the police to detain anyone suspected of posing a threat.

“In the 1980s, there were political assassinations, torture and disappearances,” said Bertha Oliva, Cofadeh’s general coordinator, in an interview last week, recalling the political repression of the country’s so-called dirty war. “They were selective and hidden. But now there is massive repression and defiance of the whole world. They do it in broad daylight, without any scruples, with nothing to stop them.”

Amid the crackdown, a delegation of foreign ministers from the Organization of American States is scheduled to arrive in the capital, Tegucigalpa, on Wednesday in an attempt to restart negotiations between representatives for Mr. Zelaya and Roberto Micheletti, the de facto president.

In advance of the meeting, Mr. Micheletti lifted the decree Monday.

The abuses could have a chilling effect on presidential elections scheduled for Nov. 29. The de facto government and its supporters argue that the elections will close the chapter on the coup and its aftermath, but the United Nations, the United States and other governments have said that they will not recognize the vote if it is conducted under the current conditions.

“Elections are a risk because people won’t vote,” said Javier Acevedo, a lawyer with the Center for Research and the Promotion of Human Rights in Tegucigalpa. “The soldiers and police at the polls will be the same ones as those who have been carrying out the repression.”

Investigators from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights visited in August, and found a pattern of disproportionate force, arbitrary detentions and control of information.

The group asked the de facto government to provide protective measures for dozens of politicians, union leaders, teachers, human rights workers and journalists who say they have been followed and threatened.

The de facto government responded that strong measures were needed against Mr. Zelaya’s supporters, whom they described as vandals, a point backed up by government television advertisements showing burning buses and street barricades. Some of the demonstrations have turned violent as some of Mr. Zelaya’s supporters have smashed storefronts and burned tires at street barricades. The government says that three people have been killed since the coup.

Mr. Micheletti has said the investigators from the Inter-American Commission were biased, noting that its president, Luz Patricia Mejía, is Venezuelan. Much of Honduras’s political and economic elite feared that Mr. Zelaya was trying to copy Venezuela’s brand of socialism as he moved toward an alliance with that nation’s president, Hugo Chávez.

The Honduran government’s human rights institutions have failed to respond to the violations with any vigor, advocates say.

The human rights prosecutor, Sandra Ponce, is on vacation, according to news reports. Ramón Custodio, the government human rights commissioner who fought repression in the 1980s, has generally supported the coup, although he has criticized some actions of the de facto government.

Groups that were vulnerable to human rights abuses before the coup face even more risk now. Since the coup, for example, there have been six murders of gay men or transvestites, according to gay rights groups. Until 2008, the average number of such killings each year was three to six.

The day after Mr. Zelaya returned, the police broke up a demonstration by his supporters outside the Brazilian Embassy with tear gas. As people were fleeing, security forces tear-gassed the Cofadeh office, just blocks away. The action, Ms. Oliva believes, was aimed at preventing Cofadeh lawyers from intervening by taking testimony or seeking the release of people who were detained.

Since Mr. Zelaya’s return, security forces also have been rumbling through poor neighborhoods that are the base of his support. “They are going into neighborhoods in a way to intimidate people,” said Mr. Acevedo, the lawyer. In that time, the center has documented an increasing level of violence. Investigators have seen more than two dozen people with bullet wounds in hospitals, and some detainees have had their hands broken and have been burned with cigarettes, he said.

While the police and soldiers are looking for the activists who have been organizing resistance, the sweep seems to pick up anyone who gets in their way.

Yulian Lobo said her husband was arrested in the neighborhood of Villa Olímpica and accused of having a grenade. “It came out of nowhere,” she said, adding that her husband, a driver, had not been to pro-Zelaya marches.

Lesbia Marisol Flores, 38, is a resistance activist, but when the police beat her up, she was waiting at a bus stop after attending the wake of a 24-year-old woman who died after she was tear-gassed outside the Brazilian Embassy on Sept. 22.

“There were eight policemen and their faces were all covered,” she said, adding that they had selected her at random from the group at the bus stop. “There was no motive. It is their hobby now.”

Elisabeth Malkin reported from Tegucigalpa last week and added updated information from Mexico City.

Condé Nast Closes Gourmet and 3 Other Magazines - NYTimes.com

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By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

It’s Rachael Ray’s world now — we’re all just cooking in it.

Gourmet magazine, which has celebrated cooking and travel in its lavish pages since 1941, will cease publication with the November issue, its owner, Condé Nast, announced on Monday.

Gourmet was to food what Vogue is to fashion, a magazine with a rich history and a perch high in the publishing firmament. Under the stewardship of Ruth Reichl, one of the star editors at Condé Nast, Gourmet poured money into sumptuous photography, test kitchens and exotic travel pieces, resulting in a beautifully produced magazine that lived, and sold, the high life.

Ms. Reichl, formerly a restaurant critic at The New York Times, will most likely leave Condé Nast, though it is not entirely clear, a Condé Nast spokeswoman, Maurie Perl, said. The company will continue with the more recipe-focused food magazine Bon Appétit.

Condé Nast also announced it would shut three other magazines: the parenting magazine Cookie and the wedding publications Elegant Bride and Modern Bride. About 180 people will lose their jobs as a result of the four closings. For Gourmet’s legion of fans, the loss particularly stings — it is the end to a long relationship between readers and the magazine’s depiction of food as exploration.

In choosing Bon Appétit over Gourmet, Condé Nast reflected a bigger shift both inside and outside the company: influence, and spending power, now lies with the middle class.

Advertising support for luxurious magazines like Gourmet has dwindled, while grocery store advertisers have continued to buy pages at more accessible, celebrity-driven magazines like Every Day With Rachael Ray, which specializes in 30-minute meals, and Food Network Magazine.

It was an unexpected decision from Condé Nast, which said it closed the magazine because it was losing too much money.

“In the economics of the ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s, this would be a business decision balanced by the cultural reticence to part with iconic brands,” Charles H. Townsend, Condé Nast’s chief executive, said in an interview. “This economy is a completely different bag.”

With the decline in luxury advertising, the company lost about 8,000 ad pages through the October issues, compared with the same period in 2008, according to Media Industry Newsletter.

With a 43 percent drop, Gourmet was among the hardest hit. This summer, Condé Nast brought in the corporate consulting firm McKinsey & Company to “help in looking at every one of these businesses clinically, not emotionally,” Mr. Townsend said.

Gourmet was smaller than Bon Appétit, with a circulation of about 980,000 versus Bon Appétit’s 1.35 million. Bon Appétit had higher newsstand sales in the first six months of this year, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

Though its sales dropped, Gourmet’s dropped much more sharply in that period, compared with the first six months of 2008. Their editorial approaches differed, too: a recent Bon Appétit cover line promised “America’s Best Hot Dogs,” while Gourmet ran an article on how restaurant critics would spend $1,000 in their hometowns.

“You have to look at the advertisers that support food magazines — they tend to be mass manufacturers, and those are the companies that have the money,” said Dorothy Kalins, founding editor of the food magazine Saveur.

Barry Lowenthal, president at the Media Kitchen in New York, part of the advertising holding company MDC Partners, said that Gourmet’s reliance on travel and luxury advertisers had hurt it. “If you have to make a bet who will support you,” he said, “it’s going to be the Bon Appétit advertiser.”

Gourmet did not lack for impassioned readers. Alice Waters, the California restaurateur, said she nearly started crying when she heard of the closing. Gail Zweigenthal, a former editor in chief of Gourmet, said she was saddened. “I think it was the first magazine that taught people how to navigate the intricacies of foreign travel, where to stay, what to eat,” she said. “It was such a special magazine. It had such history.”

And Dana Cowin, the editor in chief of Food and Wine, praised Ms. Reichl’s “sociopolitical and cultural commentary,” as well as the magazine’s literary sensibility.

The death of Gourmet doesn’t mean people are cooking less or do not want food magazines, said Suzanne M. Grimes, who oversees Every Day With Rachael Ray, among other brands, for the Reader’s Digest Association.

“Cooking is getting more democratic,” she said. “Food has become an emotional currency, not an aspiration.”

It has also become democratized via the chatty ubiquity of Ms. Ray and the Food Network stars. Ms. Reichl is a celebrity in the food world, but of an elite type. She “is one of those icons in chief,” said George Janson, managing partner at GroupM Print, part of the advertising company WPP. But what harried cooks want now, it seems, is less a distant idol and more a pal.

Of Condé Nast’s decision, Abe Peck, professor emeritus at Northwestern’s journalism school, said “they didn’t make the glamour bet here.”

With the news about Gourmet and the other publications, which employees received on Monday morning, another era ended within Condé Nast itself.

The company has developed a reputation for luxury. Part of that means keeping cars and drivers idling outside restaurants for its top executives, but it has also spent years holding on to money-losing publications, including, at points, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair.

But Mr. Townsend said that the current advertising picture was too dismal. “The tide’s not coming back in,” he said. “It could take us five years to get back to 2007 levels if we’re lucky enough to.”

So, he said, the company could no longer afford magazines that lost money. “We won’t have businesses that don’t make a contribution,” he said. “This economy has pinched us and sobered us up.”

The consultants from McKinsey issued specific budget recommendations for publications, and executives at some magazines, who asked not to be named as they were not authorized to discuss the cuts, said they were told last month that their budgets needed to shrink by 25 percent.

Mr. Townsend said each magazine was given a profit-margin goal, and it was up to the editor and publisher of each to figure out how to reach those goals. After that, he said, there will be no further cuts for a while. “Done. Done,” he said.

Mr. Townsend said that much of his effort going forward would be focused online, where he wants to move away from dependence on display advertising. He will also expand the wedding magazine Brides, increasing its frequency to 12 times a year, and invest in its Web site.

Mr. Townsend said the closed magazines could have some future on the Web or in other media.

Cookie, for instance, “may very well be an electronic brand of substance,” while Gourmet could have strong books, broadcast and Web businesses.

It is unclear what plans for those businesses are; the company has contracts to fulfill in some of the side businesses. Ms. Reichl, after packing up her office, was expected to return to her book tour for “Gourmet Today,” a new cookbook.

“Sorry not to be posting now, but I’m packing. We’re all stunned, sad,” she posted on Twitter on Monday afternoon.

Stuart Elliott and Kim Severson contributed reporting.

Obama Aides Act to Fix Safety Net - NYTimes.com

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By JACKIE CALMES

WASHINGTON — With unemployment expected to rise well into next year even as the economy slowly recovers, the Obama administration and Democratic leaders in Congress are discussing extending several safety net programs as well as proposing new tax incentives for businesses to renew hiring.

President Obama’s economic team discussed a wide range of ideas at a meeting on Monday, following his Saturday radio address in which he said it would “explore additional options to promote job creation.” But officials emphasized that a decision was still far off and that in any event the effort would not add up to a second economic stimulus package, only an extension of the first.

“We’re thinking through all additional potential strategies for accelerating job creation,” said Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod.

The latest deliberations, and Mr. Obama’s added phrase in Saturday’s radio address, occurred against a backdrop of worsening joblessness. While some economists and policy makers say the recession is easing, a report on Friday showed unemployment in September inched up to 9.8 percent, a 26-year high.

Among the options for additional steps is some variation on Mr. Obama’s proposal during the stimulus debate to give employers a $3,000 tax credit for each new hire, which Congress rejected last winter partly out of concern that businesses would manipulate their payrolls to claim the credit. Another option would allow more businesses to deduct their net operating losses going back five years instead of the usual two; Congress limited the break to small businesses as part of the economic stimulus law.

The search for further remedies is part of a two-track effort in the White House and Congress. Democrats are also considering plans to continue through 2010 the extra unemployment assistance and health benefits available to people who are out of work for long periods. Also likely to be retained, some officials say, is a popular $8,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers that was included in the $787 billion stimulus law and has helped rouse a housing market that nonetheless remains shaky.

The unemployment and health benefits are otherwise due to expire at the end of this year, and the homebuyer’s credit at the end of November. Extending the unemployment and health benefits alone through next year could cost up to $100 billion. Additional measures would raise the price at a time when the White House and Congress are confronting growing pressure to avoid adding to already high deficits.

Yet Democrats are more anxious about stemming the loss of jobs and creating new ones.

With economists forecasting that unemployment could hit 10 percent before job growth returns, perhaps in mid-2010, Democrats face month after month of bad news on the jobs front in a midterm election year, when a president’s party typically loses Congressional seats. Charlie Cook, a longtime nonpartisan election analyst, said last week that he was raising the odds of Democrats losing their House majority to about 50-50.

Even a modest stimulus package that mostly maintains current programs would ignite a debate about the effectiveness of the original $787 billion plan, stoking Republicans’ arguments that the package of spending and tax cuts was a waste of taxpayers’ money. While most economists agree with Democrats that job losses would have been worse without the stimulus, Mr. Obama remains on the defensive for his initial promise that it would save or create 3.5 million jobs.

Despite the bad jobs figures, Democrats in Congress generally agree with the White House that a second full-blown stimulus package is not needed, barring an economic relapse.

The $787 billion recovery plan was intended to stretch over two years, partly in anticipation that the downturn would be prolonged. About 60 percent of the total is yet to be released, and much of that will go toward projects like road-building, other construction and research that save or create jobs.

Mark Zandi, an economist who occasionally advises Congressional Democratic leaders, and before that advised Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, in his two presidential campaigns, has projected an additional 750,000 job losses through next March, which would bring total losses to almost 9 million since December 2007. Mr. Zandi predicted that the unemployment rate would peak at 10.5 percent next June.

It is “very important,” he said, for the government to “continue to provide significant support to the economy through next year.” At the least, he said, that should include extending the homebuyer’s credit, various business tax breaks and mortgage relief programs.

But the demands on the federal government are likely to expand beyond that in the coming year.

Continued job losses only add to the plight of the states, which already are reeling from reduced tax revenues and increased demand for social services. Most states were able to balance their budgets this year, as they are required to do, only with billions of dollars in infusions from Washington. And the fiscal outlook for the states is now worse than a year ago, according to agencies that monitor them.

As the White House and Congress proceed with discussions of what to do next, Congress is working to stretch unemployment compensation for people who have been out of work for up to 79 weeks, or a year and a half. The House passed a bill for 13 additional weeks of aid for jobless workers in the 27 states with unemployment rates of 8.5 percent or higher, but some senators want an extra 12 weeks of benefits available in all states.

With the safety net programs due to expire after Dec. 31, the White House and Congress have contemplated for some time that they would probably have to renew them.

Besides the extended unemployment and food stamp benefits, they would keep alive a subsidy for people who lose their jobs and opt for the Cobra program, which lets them buy continued health care coverage under their former employers’ insurance plans. The subsidy covers up to 65 percent of the insurance premiums for most workers.

As Democrats have found, aiding those who have lost their jobs is simpler than preventing more layoffs and creating new jobs.

“There may not be anything we can do,” said a Democratic Congressional leadership aide who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter. “Under any circumstances, it’s going to take a while for jobs to recover.”

John Harwood contributed reporting.

Federal Diary: Government Lags in Hiring of Latinos

By Ed O'Keefe
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Latino Americans may be the nation's fastest-growing minority group, but they're also the most underrepresented among civilian federal employees. As of last September, Hispanics accounted for about 8 percent of the total civilian federal workforce, according to the Office of Personnel Management. That's well below the 13.2 percent of Hispanics in the national civilian labor force, according to Labor Department statistics.

Of the 25 largest government agencies, 17 saw modest increases in Hispanic hires in fiscal 2008 over fiscal 2007, with most being made at the lower- and mid-level General Schedule levels. At higher levels of government, Hispanics accounted for 3.6 percent of the Senior Executive Service during fiscal 2008, according to OPM figures.

The overall Latino hiring disparity is equivalent to more than 100,000 jobs or roughly $5.5 billion in salaries, according to Gilbert Sandate, chairman of the Coalition for Fairness for Hispanics in Government. His group has met with White House and OPM officials to discuss the issue.

Put another way, practically every new hire in the federal government would have to be Hispanic to make up the difference between the population size and the numbers represented in the government civilian workforce, said Jorge E. Ponce, co-chairman of the Council of Federal EEO and Civil Rights Executives.

Nobody is advocating such a move, and regardless, most Hispanic leaders that track the issue are pleased with what the Obama administration has done so far to address their concerns.

"We are encouraged by the enthusiasm and some of the things that they want to do, that they hope to do in terms of addressing this issue," Sandate said.

Hispanic activists applauded Obama's decision to appoint Hilda L. Solis as labor secretary and Ken Salazar to lead the Interior Department. The White House counts at least 43 Senate-confirmed government officials of Hispanic origin (including ambassadors and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor), a number higher than at the same point in the Clinton and Bush administrations. More than 30 other Latinos work on the White House staff, three of whom participate in the daily senior staff meetings, according to White House officials.

Those senior Latino officials should help recruitment efforts at lower levels of government, said Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.

"One of the things we do know, and it's not surprising, is that when we have Latinos as Cabinet secretaries, we have increases in Hispanic hires," he said.

"It really comes down to a commitment from the senior-most individuals at these agencies, in this case Cabinet secretaries and directors, that they make a commitment to diversifying the workforce. It has to come from the top," Vargas said.

The OPM is working to develop a new strategy to address hiring diversity, said Elizabeth A. Montoya, the agency's chief of staff. But observers said the OPM can only do so much because it lacks the ability to enforce its hiring suggestions or hold agencies accountable.

"The federal agencies are left to self-police themselves," Sandate said. "While it's true that OPM asks the individual agencies to submit annual reports, there are no consequences whatsoever if they've done good or bad. As a result, Hispanics continue to be the only underrepresented group in the federal workforce."

Janet Murguía, president of the National Council of La Raza, has also called for more accountability.

"The nation's demographics are changing fast, and the government needs to react to that," she said.

Montoya said accountability measures will be considered as part of OPM's new recommendations.

"It's under discussion how we implement that accountability," she said.

In the meantime, several agencies are seeking new ways to recruit and hire Latinos for entry- and mid-level positions, according to the OPM. "Across the board, a lot of departments are struggling with the hiring in general, and that is something that everyone is willing to admit," said Vince Casillas, the former Hispanic media director for the Obama campaign who is now a partner with Balsera Communications. He has met with several government agencies to discuss launching campaigns aimed at potential Latino recruits.

"There's definitely right now a deliberate and conscious effort to start reaching out to Latinos and recruiting them," he said.