Winning Progressive

(By addisnana)

Most people have heard of hydraulic fracturing or fracking which is the latest way to drill for oil and natural gas embedded in the layers of rock deep beneath the earth’s surface. Fracking requires a certain type of fine silica sand, a chemical cocktail and lots of water. Today we’ll get an overview of some of the issues surrounding the mining of frac sand and tomorrow we’ll look at the responses of communities and governments.

If you are thinking about a child’s sandbox or a walk along an ocean beach, Think again. Think something more like mountain top removal. The photo above from the Wisconsin DNR shows a sand mine near Grantsburg, WI near the St. Croix River.

Geology.com has a nice primer on frac sand with more photos.

Over one million pounds of frac sand can be used to stimulate a single well.

The new fractures in the rock, propped open by the durable sand grains, form a network of pore space that allows petroleum fluids to flow out of the rock and into the well. Frac sand is known as a “proppant” because it props the fractures open.

Reported average prices for frac sand in the U.S. Geological Survey Minerals Yearbook were between $45 per ton and $50 per ton in 2010. This is significantly higher than the average price of $35 per ton for specialty sand sold outside of the construction industry.

Frac sand is currently being mined in Texas, southeast Minnesota, southwest Wisconsin and proposed for northeast Iowa. The Midwest has what’s geologically called the St. Peter sandstone formation. Underneath the farm lands and river bluffs is silica sand that is perfect for fracking. Here’s a link to a map of frac sand mining in Minnesota. And here is Wisconsin.

Regulation:

When frac sand first was mined in the Midwest, the existing state mining regulations did not fit precisely. In some cases, it was up to local communities and/or county governments to decide whether and/or how to proceed. Minnesota and Wisconsin have taken very different approaches. Minnesota has a Democratic legislature and governor. Wisconsin has Republicans in charge. LaCrosse, WI and Winona, MN are situated across the Mississippi River from each other. As the LaCrosse Tribune points out, in the differences we see a tale of two cities:

Doug Losee can sum up the differences between Minnesota’s and Wisconsin’s frac sand mining regulations by describing how much room the two states’ environmental studies take up in his office.

“The Minnesota files really take up a bookcase. And for the most part, Wisconsin I can fit in a filing cabinet,” said Losee, who oversees environmental regulations for Mankato-based Unimin Corp.’s sand mines in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

The thick, three-ring binders that occupy Losee’s office bookcase are filled with scoping documents, data about groundwater and hundreds of pages of public comments, all part of the environmental impact statement (EIS) required for mines of a certain size in Minnesota.

The in-depth environmental study usually isn’t required in Wisconsin. That difference is one way mining experts say the two states have taken different regulatory approaches to the growing silica sand industry.

Obviously, air and groundwater don’t recognize being on opposite sides of a state boundary or a county line. Various units of government are seeking to cooperate, coordinate and even obstruct regulations that, depending on your point of view, are either urgently needed or getting in the way of mining companies and individual landowner’s rights.

Health Risks:

Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Science held a conference on the health impacts of fracking.

The path to lung cancers from silica dust is one of the oldest occupational health diseases on the books, and in this case completely preventable.

Eric Esswein, a Senior Industrial Hygienist for the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). Mr. Esswein presented the occupational health risks he found at 11 fracking operations in five states (CO, ND, PA, TX, and AR). The presentation was straightforward and frank. Fracking uses up to 4 million pounds of silica sand per well to prop open all the newly created fractures in the formation. The NIOSH recommended health limit is that no worker should breathe in more than 500 micrograms of that silica per day or else risk silicosis, an irreversible disease with a well-known, well-documented path to lung cancer. When Mr. Esswein placed monitors on 116 frack site workers to measure their breathing zone exposure, 79% of samples had more silica dust than recommended, 31% were 10 times higher than recommended, and the highest sample was 137 times higher than the NIOSH recommended limit.

Dr. Eula Bingham, a former Assistant Secretary of Labor from the Carter Administration, rose to comment and evoked the Gauley Bridge incident when hundreds of workers died within a few months following silica exposure.

Frac sand mining is creating the same silica dust and trucks carrying the sand are rolling through the countryside. The trucks are supposed to be covered. The sand dust from the mining sites becomes airborne and on a windy day can travel quite a ways. Although the NRDC was addressing fracking, the mining of the silica sand carries the same risks.

Groundwater Pollution:

After it is mined, the sand needs to be processed. This involves using well water to wash the sand. The water is recycled and used again. Crispin Pierce of the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire has planned a five-year study:

Frac sand mines use a lot of water – millions of gallons a month – to process the sand and keep dust down. They typically install high-capacity wells similar to those used for farm irrigation.

The project will also model how mining’s re-shaping of the landscape will affect how precipitation recharges the groundwater.

From bottom right, a conveyor carries sand from the crushing area to a wash plant tower to be washed and sorted by grain size at the Preferred Sands plant in Blair, Wis., on June 20, 2012. Wash plants like this use thousands of gallons per minute, most of it recycled. Lukas Keapproth, Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism

If the processing water gets into the groundwater, the water needed for human consumption, animal consumption and agriculture will be contaminated. Each well applies for an individual permit. The cumulative effect of all the new wells on the groundwater is not known. The Wisconsin study will be rigorously scientific, but if its results are negative we will know only after five years of pollutants have been dumped in our groundwater.

Infrastructure:

The frac sand is moved by trucks to rail yards to be shipped to fracking sites elsewhere in the country. Wabasha, MN counts 600 to 900 loaded trucks per day arriving at their storage/shipping facility. Rural roads and bridges were not designed for this much traffic or these heavy loads. Who will pay for upgrading and maintaining the roads and bridges? Right now the answer is local property taxes in Minnesota. In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker is supporting sand mining:

Walker’s budget also includes $6.4 billion worth of investments in the state’s roads, bridges and freight routes. Part of that investment is aimed at improving freight rail in Monroe County, an area of heavy frac sand mining.

Improving freight rail service is key to making sand mining profitable. While the sand itself is easy to mine, moving it by truck is both expensive and hard on local roads.

Wisconsinwatch.org has some estimates of traffic:

If mine growth continues as predicted, the state Department of Transportation estimates frac sand mines could generate nearly 20,000 truck trips a day to and from processing facilities. Those trucks are projected to fill more than 2,000 rail cars daily headed for drill sites outside of Wisconsin.

Economic Impacts:

Proponents of frac sand mining say it will create good paying jobs and it has, says Charlie Walker, president of the Chippewa County Economic Development Corporation:

“The biggest impact we’ve seen is the job creation,” Walker said. “There were 150 unemployed truck drivers in Chippewa County coming out of the great recession. Now, we have a shortage.”

In January, EOG Resources opened its sand plant, the largest in the nation, in Chippewa Falls. EOG employs about 70 people at its processing plant and 30 at the mine sites. The company also contracts with about 100 truck drivers, bringing the direct job total to about 200, Walker said.

In addition to creating jobs, sand mining operations contribute to the local tax base. According to Walker, last year EOG paid $1.4 million in property taxes to the city of Chippewa Falls.

As of July 1, the (Wisconsin Economic Development) Center found 86 mining, processing and rail loading facilities operating or in development in the state, plus an additional 20 in the proposal stage. WEDC estimates 10 jobs per frac sand mine and 50 to 80 jobs for every processing facility or combined operation.
Using the lower end estimates, these 86 facilities could employ 2,780 people, about 2,500 more than in 2008.

In rural areas with higher unemployment, a $15-20/hour job is seen as a really good thing to have. On the other hand, many of these same areas rely on the tourism dollars of hiking, biking, fishing, hunting and other recreational activities. The tourism dollars and associated jobs are threatened by the presence of the sand mines and the sand truck traffic. If one farmer leases part of his land for sand mining and the money helps save his farm, does it matter that his next door neighbor gets asthma or worse?

Summary:

This represents a brief overview of the main issues associated with the mining of frac sand. Wisconsin is embracing the industry. Minnesota is attempting to balance jobs and economic development versus the environmental and health risks. Iowans are trying very hard to not have it at all.

Frac sand mining has all the classic trade-offs: business versus the environment, preserving the landscape versus exploiting its resources, jobs versus unemployment, socializing business costs versus taxpayers subsidizing profits, and the rights of an individual land owner versus the community’s wishes. Sadly many of the answers to the toughest questions will come through experience.  In my next post, I will discuss how grassroots organizations and some state and local governments are responding to the uncertainties posed by frac sand mining.

(Crossposted from Blogistan Polytechnic Institute (BPICampus.com))

(By The Political Pragmatic)

In a neuroscience study on racial empathy, Social Psychologist, Dr. Michael Inzlicht, found physical evidence that white people have difficulty empathizing with non-white people.  According to his findings, people are sensitive to others who fall within a closed circle defined by their social relations; and members of the social outgroups (Asians, Blacks, Latinos, Muslims) are excluded from this circle.

I thought back to this study when I read a statement by Harvard Law Professor, Lawrence Lessig:

“One difference between our age and the civil rights age is that when Martin Luther King engaged in an act of civil disobedience, he was exposing himself to maybe 30 days in jail…Snowden is facing much greater penalties for what he has done.”

I couldn’t help but wonder if the good Professor had somehow missed the part where Dr. King was assassinated.  Of course he knew…it simply wasn’t important.  The prioritization of the lives of white people over the lives of people of color is  the natural order of things.  So it came as no surprise when Chris Hayes of MSNBC’s All In equated espionage suspect Snowden, who broke an oath to his country and stole classified information with Dr. Martin Luther King, who’s life struggle was for equality and civil rights.

The unconscious, inconsideration; the way whites diminish my history gnaws at something deep within my core and I’m losing the capacity to give so much consideration, compassion and respect, when so little is given to me.  I can’t pinpoint a time, a place or an event that made a difference.  I just know I’m not as empathetic as I once was.  I still volunteer.  I donate my time and money to the causes I believe in, but the circle of my concerns is shrinking.

My mother died on the morning of 9/11, so it was easy to remain distant from the catastrophic event in New York.  Perhaps a part of me even resented the idea that it was supposed to be more important to me than the loss of my own mother and I admit to still feeling a nagging annoyance that they continue a ceremony to honor the dead year after year by reading off their names.  Still, I assigned  my lack of emotion to my own sense of personal loss.

It wasn’t long ago, I mentioned to my good friend and neighbor the tremendous disparity between the settlements awarded to people who lost loved ones during 9/11 and those who suffered loss during Katrina.  9/11 victims received millions, Katrina victims were limited to $30,000.  Stan, the most liberal white person I know said, “well, you know that was because those places in the lower 9th Ward were pretty rundown.”  I protested, reminding him people didn’t live in the Twin Towers..they were compensated for loss of income and lives, conversely, during Katrina people had not only lost loved ones, they’d lost their homes and everything they owned.  My liberal friend was totally detached and saw no sense of unfairness until I asked, “did you know 40% of the people who died during Katrina were white?”  Suddenly, he agreed with me.

It wasn’t so long ago, an event like the Sandy Hook school shootings would have shattered my heart.  Not now.  I still care and I mourn for the parents,  but I also think about the children who are killed every single day, one by one in this country; the media barely notices, they don’t interview their parents, hold rallies or debate new laws.  In fact, when Trayvon Martin’s parents sought justice for their child, the media challenged their veracity, demonized the victim and fanned the flames of racism.  It’s what they do, in the media, our history books, our educational system…so I understand the inability of so many whites to emotionally connect to the humanity of people of color.  I understand, but that doesn’t make it okay.

If you think it infringes on your rights to be “stopped and frisked” before you board an airplane…it’s an infringement to stop and frisk people for merely walking or driving down the street.  You don’t have to fly, but you do have to walk down the street.  It is 21st century Jim Crow, reminiscent of when slaves had to have papers to move about. But then again, they’ve been calling for the papers of the President ever since he declared his candidacy for office.  What would happen if they began stopping and frisking white people?  If you believe it’s unconstitutional to register ownership of a gun, you should believe it’s unconstitutional to require law-abiding citizens to register to vote.  But you have more regard for the bullet than you have for the ballot.  If you believe vigilante justice and lynching were wrong, you should have a problem with “stand your ground”.  I could go on and on.  These are the inconsistencies and exceptions that have worn down my sense of compassion, so when the sacrifices of my heroes, Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks,  are diminished, it does something to me.

I recently read an article by Mia McKenzie, who said it perfectly:

“I feel as if something important, something essential to my humanity, is being drained away every time you ignore the suffering and death of people who look like me and my family and my friends and my community, while devoting endless hours of attention to the suffering of people who look like you. Each time, I feel little… less…well, I feel a little less.

And I’m not happy about it. I don’t feel good about it. I don’t want to be someone who can’t empathize with people who don’t look like me.

The only way to stop this is for you to stop ignoring the lives and our deaths and our stories…. It is not enough for you to say, when confronted, that you care. You need to act like it…”

For this weekend’s progressive reading list we have articles on the progressive Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina, how judicial elections are corrupting state courts, the role of tax policy in rising income inequality, a debate regarding colleges promoting massive open online courses, and FBI abuses in working to defeat radical students movements in the 1960s.

North Carolina’s Tug-of-War – the story of the growing battle between an increasingly progressive populace in North Carolina, and the conservative legislators and multimillionaires who are trying to cement in a reactionary agenda at the state level. For a profile of Art Pope, the leading conservative multimillionaire behind the conservative movement in North Carolina, see this article.  And if you live in North Carolina, please get involved in the Moral Monday movement that is fighting back against the conservative onslaught.

Justice At Risk – a report documenting how state judicial elections, and the obscene amounts of money being raised in them, are corrupting state judicial systems.

Rising Income Inequality and the Role of Shifting Market-Income Distribution, Tax Burdens, and Tax Rates – a report documenting how the rise in income inequality over the past 30 years has been accelerated by an increasingly less progressive tax system.

Are MOOCs Good for Students? – a series of articles debating massive open online courses (“MOOCs”), which supporters claim will increase access to educational opportunities and which critics contend will undermine public university systems and the most important value of education, which is learning the ability to think.

Berkeley: What We Didn’t Know - a review of the book Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Power, which documents how the FBI abused its authority in targeting radical student groups the 1960s as a way to gain political power.

(By Joanne Boyer, cross-posted at Wisdom Voices)

Robert Koehler is a self-described “peace journalist” and nationally syndicated by Tribune Media Services, which is part of the Chicago Tribune. Many of his soul-searching articles appear on Common Dreams, OpEdNews and other progressive sites. If you’ve not found him there, here’s the link to his own site Common Wonders. His writing reminds us, as a people, of the two words often missing from today’s conversations: conscience and soul. Two major defining characteristics of human beings.

He embraces life with a courage and conviction that serves as a reminder of the human condition in all its joy and sorrow. In researching another topic, I found a reference in a student newspaper from 1901 that said: “We live with the vital truths, which we have become familiar as we live in our material environment – heedless, unobservant, indifferent; and our real self is starved because it lacks the nourishment of divine thought and yearnings.” Robert Koehler’s writings offer nourishment of divine thought.

We are honored to have had the opportunity to capture a few of his views for our June Progressive Profile. His insights serve as a daily reflection for how to live our lives.

Q. What in your DNA has provided you the insights and “progressive” thought that fills your writing?

I wonder about this all the time. I wasn’t raised as a progressive. My parents were apolitical Ike-Republicans when I was a kid. I grew up as a conventional Lutheran, having been taught that all non-Christians went to Hell. There were no blacks or Jews anywhere in sight when I was growing up, in the nonchalant, endemically racist world of 1950s white America. But I would say my parents were good, loving people who never taught me to hate or fear others, but to act with Christian charity to all.

That remains my basic moral template. As I grew up, I simply applied this to the real world as I encountered it. I challenged lots of society’s far more superficial values. I came on my own to question the logic of violence and incubated antiwar sentiments throughout my childhood and adolescence, but externally I was apolitical. Even as the civil rights movement started rolling, I remained apolitical – abstractly supportive, but never motivated to be an activist. I rejected my religion at age 16, influenced by two books, Exodus, by Leon Uris, and The Age of Reason, by Thomas Paine. I was 18 when the Berkeley Free Speech Movement hit the news and that really resonated with me.

By then I knew I wanted to be a writer and recoiled at the pseudo social horror surrounding taboo words. In college, at Western Michigan University, my rebellious tendencies finally pushed me toward progressive politics, and I became active in the civil rights and eventually antiwar struggles then going on. Western was a fairly conservative school but had a progressive contingent that I embraced – and in the process found myself as a person more fully than I ever had in my life. The two main elements of my progressive identity, I would say, are the bedrock “love your enemy, we are all one” moral message of basic Christianity, and my love of writing, which became my primary vehicle for taking a moral stand.

Q. I see you spent some time in Kalamazoo. With the Alberta tar sands spill that has polluted the Kalamazoo River, what are your thoughts about what we are doing to the planet and our environment? Do you see hope in what is going on today to try and safe the environment and the planet?

I was horrified when I learned about the oil spill in the Kalamazoo River, which I knew well. I went to college in Kalamazoo and lived in that part of Michigan for ten years. I was in my early 20s when the environmental movement came into being and became a back-to-the-lander for a number of years, living on a communal farm and learning many basic farming and gardening skills. Even though I eventually moved to Chicago to find a career in journalism, the cause of environmentalism is very close to my heart; I am active in urban gardening. I feel a great deal of frustration and despair about the out-of-control economic forces that exploit, consume and trash the environment, and have less optimism about this than most other problems we face. My hope is with the many passionate young people in Chicago and around the world who have begun devoting their lives to social change and eco-sanity.

Q. Peace. The word rings through most of what you write. Did you think at this point in your life, that the concept of peace would be something that you would need to defend or have to explain and/or try to defend?

Yes and no. 9/11, Bush, the war on terror – these things have shattered the national soul. This is the new normal – an Orwellian permanent war, now hardly more than background noise. This sort of thing I never, of course, foresaw in my younger days. Now the quest for peace has intensified in urgency tenfold or a hundredfold. Human civilization is unraveling environmentally, politically, culturally, spiritually. A warped economic system depends on war: the military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex. We have a system that requires enemies, that weeds people out. To hear the stories of those who are on the wrong side of the divide, whether at home or abroad is so heartbreaking, but what it has done is open up the urgency of peace like never before — the urgency of learning how to build a new sort of society, based on connectedness, the Golden Rule.

“Peace” is an endless experiment; it’s always tentative. We have to start by finding a few basic principles: the new social bedrock. We’re in the process of doing this, and involvement in this process is what gives meaning to my life.

Q. What keeps you motivated today to keep writing on topics such as peace and non-violence?

I do have a fragile optimism. My passion these days is for restorative justice, restorative practices, peace circles. People finding new ways to connect and communicate and resolve conflict. There are people who have moved beyond the win-lose paradigm and domination culture. As Einstein said, “We can’t solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” I believe many of us are living, or learning to live, at a new level of thinking. I call it power with one another, as opposed to the current political-economic-religious paradigm of power over one another. While I despair at the pending consequences of our current short-sightedness, I remain passionate that millions of people across the globe are working quietly to build the world that must evolve.

Q. What has dealing with death as directly as you have taught you about living life fully each and every day?

Perhaps the most important thing I learned when I lost my wife to cancer 15 years ago is that death is not the enemy. I was at her side as she died. She became radiant, the pain furrows loosened. She became beautiful and whole as she let go. It was, except for being present at the birth of my daughter, the most amazing experience of my life. Death is not what we need to fear; we’re embraced in a loving universe. The sticking point is human behavior, human fear. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said, “We’re not human beings having a divine experience. We’re divine beings having a human experience.” Re-remembering this, as I must do every day, pulls me out of whatever anger and anguish may be gripping me at the moment.

Q. Are there “heroes” you admire? Who from the past or today inspires you?

This could be a long list but I’ll talk about three. The first is my late wife, Barbara, who was a public interest attorney with an extraordinary passion for social justice. Her courage in the face of a fatal illness remains my life’s beacon. She was also an unreconstructed hippie who reawakened my social conscience after I had become a journalist and had begun drifting into cynicism. She reconnected me to my soul, to my love of justice and fairness. She turned me, or inspired me to turn myself, into a peace journalist.

As hero #2, I choose the late Ken Macrorie, a writing teacher and mentor I had as an undergraduate at Western Michigan University. He developed a teaching technique called free writing and taught me how to find my own voice as a writer. Every day I feel indebted to him for his encouragement and support so many years ago.

Finally, I will mention a writer named Rupert Ross, who wrote an extraordinary book called Returning to the Teachings, which is about restorative justice and the peace circle process as we Westerners learned it from aboriginal cultures in Northern Canada. A Canadian crown attorney, Ross wrote about his own experience with tribal men and women who insisted on reclaiming the culture the Europeans had destroyed in the previous century. His book taught me, among much, much else, that civilization is not a linear path of progress, from a primitive to an advanced state, but that “advanced” Western culture is spiritually impoverished and knows very little about the forces that tie us to one another and our planet. Thank God for the native peoples everywhere who can help us relearn what we’ve been forgetting for the last five or six millennia.

Q. As a journalist who probably cut his teeth during the Watergate days, what are your comments/insights into the state of journalism today? Where do you see (if you do) signs of hope for the 4th Estate?

My journalism career began in the early ‘70s, just before Watergate. It may be that the Watergate revelations were the culmination of “liberal journalism,” a several-decade run that began with the civil rights movement in the ‘50s. While the alleged liberal media initially kept its mouth shut about Vietnam, eventually it embraced an antiwar stance and was instrumental in ending – and forgetting about – that horrific war. Post-Watergate, at least as it has always seemed to me, the mainstream media underwent convulsions of remorse for speaking truth to power and promised never to do it again. Political scandals came and went but the media never again, even during Iran-Contra, dug down to bedrock moral principles in its reporting. It more or less reverted to a sophisticated form of yellow journalism, titillating the public with violence and celebrity gossip. Where do I see signs of hope? Well, I have admiration for every journalist who is able to claim a sense of independence in his or her work. The big problem, in mainstream, well-compensated journalism is at the top. It’s big business. The newsroom isn’t independent of the interests of the owners. In such a context, most reporters control their curiosity and practice self-censorship, only digging for the truth in acceptable directions.

The hideous unanimity with which the mainstream media supported the post-9/11 Bush agenda is a crime against humanity, and any official media remorse for supporting this ghastly mistake has been tepid and superficial, and certainly doesn’t translate into skepticism toward the next war. My main sense of hope is in the flourishing progressive sites on the Internet, such as Common Dreams and Democracy Now, in the concept of peace journalism as developed by Johan Galtung at transcend.org, in the many fabulous documentaries being made. The collapsing media empires no longer have a corner on legitimacy.

Q. Do you think life runs in cycles? Or do you sense that what we are experiencing is really different from other cycles of history?

I think both are true. Life is cyclical and also it is evolving – thus every cycle thrusts us a little further into our becoming. Our economic system is consuming the planet, as well as our spiritual life; at some point in the not too distant future, as so many people are saying, this can’t keep going on. The system will collapse and something new will have to emerge. It’s frightening to contemplate, unless I let myself relax and trust the great unknown. I think humanity is moving toward something beyond itself. I also believe love is a tremendous force in the universe and it embraces us whether we know it or not. Just as molecules became so complex that cellular life emerged on the planet out of inanimate matter, so this complexity of connection continues, and it involves us.

Q. Tell us a bit about your book.

My book is called Courage Grows Strong at the Wound. You can get information about it at commonwonders. There’s a lot in it that’s personal. It moves from the inward journey to the outward journey – from dealing with my wife’s death to groping for an end to war. It’s also about the comedy of errors of being a single dad raising an adolescent girl. It’s also about everyone’s inner genius. The book is deeply reverent and irreverent as hell. We’re divine beings having a human experience. This book takes a close look at that human experience.

Q. What “advice” would you give to keep people engaged in trying to make positive change in the world?

Keep on keeping on! Understand that there is an inevitability to what you are doing, and that your work is connected to that of millions of others. Understand that you are an inspiration to all the rest of us.

(By NCrissie B)

Recently a federal judge ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to suspend a Bush-era rule and place a 10-year-old girl on the adult lung transplant list. Or as conservatives headlined it: Court Orders Sebelius to Suspend Death Panel.

The case involves Sarah Murnaghan, a 10-year-old girl with cystic fibrosis:

Sarah has cystic fibrosis and only weeks to live, according to her parents. She has been on the waiting list for children’s lungs for 18 months and in Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia since February.

The order does not mean that Sarah will be next in line for adult lungs; rather, she will be offered lungs before wait-listed adults whose need is less dire.

“For us, this means that for the next 10 days, Sarah’s placement in the queue for adult lungs will be based on the severity of her illness, and she will not be penalized for her age,” her parents said in a statement. “We are experiencing many emotions: relief, happiness, gratitude and, for the first time in months: hope.”

A Bush-era rule

Although conservatives have tried to tie this case to Obamacare, the rule barring children under 12 from being placed on the adult transplant list was promulgated in 2005 under the Bush administration:

In May 2005, the lung allocation system changed in the United States. Previously, lung organs were allocated based primarily on the length of time waiting for a transplant. Under this first come first served algorithm, all potential candidates had the same urgency status on the waiting list and there was no mechanism to account for an individual candidate’s clinical deterioration.

The new rule required the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network and United Network for Organ Sharing to prioritize transplant patients based on “the highest medical urgency while maximizing utility by avoiding futile transplantation,” and the rule has worked very well:

Since it was implemented, the new lung allocation system has had a significant impact on lung transplantation. First, waiting time has decreased substantially. The median waiting time for patients listed in 2000 was over 1500 days, but this was 130 days for those listed in 2006. It should be noted however that the median waiting time consistently decreased between 2000 and 2004 before the new allocation system was implemented; indeed, the median waiting time in 2004 was approximately 800 days. Nevertheless, there was a considerable decrease in waiting time between 2004 and 2006. In addition, deaths on the waiting list decreased further from approximately 130 deaths per 1000 patient-years in 2004 to 97 deaths per 1000 patient-years in 2006. Furthermore, the annual number of transplants in 2006 was at record of 1401. While the Organ Donation Breakthrough Collaborative contributed to this, it is likely that the greater efficiency of the new allocation system also played an important role.

“Not just the instinct to save a child”

The under-12 exclusion from the adult list lay in the best medical estimates of doctors a decade ago:

The policy that the Murnaghans and their advocates are questioning is one that puts children under 12 at the bottom of the waiting list for lungs from adult donors. Young children would be first in line for lungs donated by kids their age. But far fewer of those are available.

In recent years, younger kids have been given greater priority for kidney and liver transplants, [NYU bioethicist Art] Caplan said, and that is in-keeping with the desire of donors that their organs provide as much life as they can. A transplant into an older patient might not provide the same number of “life years,” he said, an important consideration. But whether that’s in order for lungs as well depends on the actual science of transplanting adult lungs into children, not just the instinct to save a child.

While children can receive adult lungs, doctors normally transplant only a portion of the lung and, historically, that created additional risks. Similar risks were deemed minimal for kidney and liver transplants, and rule changes allowed children onto the adult waiting lists for those organs. Whether such risks are minimal for lung transplants is a matter of medical science, not political convenience.

“Suspend her death panel”

And for Republicans, this case is all about political convenience and a chance to revive 2009′s Lie of the Year. As Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft put it:

A federal judge ordered HHS Director Kathleen Sebelius to suspend her death panel and place 10 year-old Sarah Murnaghan on the lung donor list.

Hoft doesn’t mention the inconvenient fact that this is a decade-old rule passed by the Bush administration, and makes no attempt to deal with the medical science. Instead he hangs his case on an out-of-context quote from Secretary Sebelius: “Some people will live. Some people will die.”

Secretary Sebelius was stating that unavoidably harsh fact of transplant lists as the reason she should not intervene and make personal choices. And she was correct, as even the National Review’s Yuval Levin admits:

In fact, the logic of this situation works roughly the other way. The members pressing this case are asking a politically appointed official to take directly upon herself the role of making life-or-death decisions in individual cases. In an unavoidably zero-sum system like organ transplantation – where one person’s receiving an organ means another does not – there is basically no avoiding some utilitarian calculus, and such a calculus would best be based on an assessment of need together with an assessment of the likelihood of a successful transplantation with beneficial effects.

Instead this decision creates a different metric: whether a sick child’s family can afford a lawyer, or can drum up the political support to sway a government official. That will, as Levin writes, favor wealthy and well-connected families over others with equally- or more-needy children.

Sarah Murnaghan’s case is tragic, and I hope doctors find a donor and her surgery is successful. But her receiving those lungs would mean that some adult – who might have had a better probability of success with a complete lung transplant – will have died.

That is the harsh reality of organ transplants and we need to discuss it openly and rationally … rather than using a desperately ill 10-year-old child as a prop in a political campaign to smear Obamacare.

(Crossposted from Blogistan Polytechnic Institute (BPICampus.com))

Last week’s revelations about the National Security Agency carrying out a massive data-mining operation in which it collects data about virtually every telephone call made in the US has, of course, set off a firestorm. Many of the claims being made by critics on both the left and the right regarding these programs appear to be extreme hyperbole. That being said, there are important concerns and questions that need to be answered regarding the NSA spying programs and their costs, impacts on civil liberties, and effectiveness. As such, we progressives should be calling for and welcoming an open and transparent public evaluation and debate regarding these programs to make sure our national security efforts are both making us safer and minimizing impacts to our civil liberties. Following are some specific thoughts on these issues.

The NSA Spying Programs Raise Important Civil Liberties Concerns

Perhaps the most hotly contested question regarding the NSA spying programs is whether they infringe on civil liberties. Answering that question is made difficult by the fact that we simply do not know the extent of the NSA programs. In addition, while some supporters claim that there have been no abuses of the program, that claim is hard to verify given the levels of secrecy around these NSA programs. At a minimum, full disclosure of the extent and details of US government surveillance of Americans is necessary so that we can assess exactly what civil liberties impacts may be at stake here.

That being said, we already know enough that we should be concerned about the civil liberties implications of the NSA spying programs. For one thing, the data mining and other spying techniques being carried out has led to the creation of a sprawling surveillance infrastructure, which will almost certainly seek to perpetuate and expand its reach. In addition, the collection and retention of information regarding every phone call you have made, who you called, how long your spoke with that person on the phone, etc., certainly appears to infringe on people’s right to privacy. Many will respond that privacy concerns are overstated here given that most Americans already reveal far more personal information online or to corporations. But there is an important distinction when it comes to government surveillance, and that is that, unlike corporations, government is able to bring the full weight of the law against a person based on the information that is being secretly collected.

President Obama is Neither Solely to Blame Nor Blameless

While many in the media portray the NSA spying programs as Obama spying on Americans, the reality is that officials in all three branches of government, from both political parties, have authorized the growing levels of government surveillance that our country has seen over the past 40 years, as is well-documented in this timeline by ProPublica. Republicans and Democrats worked together to draft the PATRIOT Act that authorized much of the NSA spying program, and Congress has not seen fit to amend the PATRIOT Act or rein in the NSA’s data-mining operation. As such, it is pure sophistry to suggest that President Obama is primarily responsible for the increasing levels of surveillance that have been occurring, or that such programs represent a “scandal” for this Administration. Instead, the Obama administration is simply aggressively using the tools that Congress and the previous administration provided.

That being said, it is the Obama Administration that is today, among other things, tracking the telephone calls made by virtually every resident of the US. Unfortunately, many Democrats have reacted to this fact by approving of the types of NSA spying programs under President Obama that they found illegitimate under President George W. Bush. But we should not allow our partisan interests override the need to call out a program that raises serious civil liberties concerns. In short, if the NSA’s collection of data on basically every phone call made in the US was wrong when the Bush Administration started it in 2002, and was wrong when Congress blessed it in 2006, then it remains wrong now that the Obama administration is doing it today.

There is Little Evidence that Data-Mining Works for Counter-terrorism

A significant objection to the NSA data-mining programs is that there is little evidence that such programs are effective in rooting out terrorists. Instead, given the extreme rareness of both terrorism incidences and terrorists, the predictive ability of data-mining on counter-terrorism issues is questionable at best. In addition, analysts sifting through the massive amounts of data that are collected will end up with large numbers of false positives (i.e.: people incorrectly flagged as potential terrorists), and will spend valuable time and resources tracking down an inordinate number of false leads created by the data-mining. In order for data-mining to really work when it comes to something as rare as terrorism, you need information that enables you to target and narrow the assessment, which is exactly the type of information that is gathered through traditional police and intelligence work, rather than massive data-mining projects.

We Are Spending Vast Resources on the National Security State

The fact that the NSA is collecting phone records on every call made in the U.S. is just the latest example of how we have built a massive national security state over the past decade. As the Washington Post summarized in a 2010 investigative report on the extent of the national security state:

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

Among other things, the Washington Post found that there were 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies working on counter-terrorism and homeland security programs, that 854,000 people had top-secret security clearances, and that 33 building complexes totaling more than 17 million square feet have been built since September 2001.

While it is difficult to find reliable data on exactly how much all of this national security infrastructure costs, one can get a sense of the amounts at issue when you consider that Booz Allen Hamilton, the private contractor where Edward Snowden worked, just received a five-year, $5.6 billion contract from the government for this work.

Questions That Need to Be Answered

The civil liberties implications of the NSA spying programs are critical and should be fully investigated and publicly aired. But there are other important questions regarding the effectiveness of the approaches being taken, and the resources being expended on these programs that should also be evaluated. Specific questions we would like to see answered include:

- Is the data mining approach effective? Is so much data being collected that it is difficult if not impossible to sift through it in a timely and meaningful fashion?

- How much is being spent on these spying efforts? Is such level of spending necessary to achieve our national security goals, or could we achieve those goals with less?

- Why are so many private contractors, as opposed to government employees, being used, and how are they selected and compensated? Do these contractors turn around and lobby Congress for even further spending on the national security programs that the contractors profit off of?

- Most importantly, would more limited and targeted efforts be more effective, cost less, and infringe less on our civil liberties?

While the details of the NSA spying programs remain to be determined, the basics are very concerning. We’ve created a giant national security apparatus, involving large private contracting firms, collecting massive amounts of information, with essentially no public oversight and little evidence that such an approach will preserve our safety or our civil liberties. In order to protect both our national security and our civil liberties, we need an open and transparent evaluation and debate about the national security state that we have built up so far, and an assessment of whether more effective and less costly methods for protecting national security while also protecting our civil liberties could be pursued.