Companies Use Immigration Crackdown to Turn a Profit

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/world/asia/getting-tough-on-immigrants-to-turn-a-profit.html?_r=1

Companies Use Immigration Crackdown to Turn a Profit

Rick Rycroft/Associated Press

The Woomera Detention Center, in Australia, was the scene of a detainee breakout in 2002.
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: September 28, 2011

The men showed up in a small town in Australia’s outback early last year, offering top dollar for all available lodgings. Within days, their company, Serco, was flying in recruits from as far away as London, and busing them from trailers to work 12-hour shifts as guards in a remote camp where immigrants seeking asylum are indefinitely detained.

1. DOCUMENT: Reports About Australia’s Privately Run Immigration Detention System

Related

1. In Father’s Memory, Fighting to Stay in Britain (August 21, 2011)
2. Deportation Program Sows Mistrust, U.S. Is Told (September 16, 2011)
3. Times Topic: Immigration Detention (U.S.)

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Andrew Quilty for The New York Times

Australia has relied on private security companies to run immigrant detention centers in places like Perth.

It was just a small part of a pattern on three continents where a handful of multinational security companies have been turning crackdowns on immigration into a growing global industry.
Especially in Britain, the United States and Australia, governments of different stripes have increasingly looked to such companies to expand detention and show voters they are enforcing tougher immigration laws.
Some of the companies are huge — one is among the largest private employers in the world — and they say they are meeting demand faster and less expensively than the public sector could.
But the ballooning of privatized detention has been accompanied by scathing inspection reports, lawsuits and the documentation of widespread abuse and neglect, sometimes lethal. Human rights groups say detention has neither worked as a deterrent nor speeded deportation, as governments contend, and some worry about the creation of a “detention-industrial complex” with a momentum of its own.
“They’re very good at the glossy brochure,” said Kaye Bernard, general secretary of the union of detention workers on the Australian territory of Christmas Island, where riots erupted this year between asylum seekers and guards. “On the ground, it’s almost laughable, the chaos and the inability to function.”
Private prisons in the United States have long stirred controversy. But while there have been conflicting studies about their costs and benefits, no systematic comparisons exist for immigration detention, say scholars like Matthew J. Gibney, a political scientist at the University of Oxford who tracks immigration systems.
Still, Mr. Gibney and others say the pitfalls of outsourcing immigration enforcement have become evident in the past 15 years. “When something goes wrong — a death, an escape — the government can blame it on a kind of market failure instead of an accountability failure,” he said.
In the United States — with almost 400,000 annual detentions in 2010, up from 280,000 in 2005 — private companies now control nearly half of all detention beds, compared with only 8 percent in state and federal prisons, according to government figures. In Britain, 7 of 11 detention centers and most short-term holding places for immigrants are run by for-profit contractors.
No country has more completely outsourced immigration enforcement, with more troubled results, than Australia. Under unusually severe mandatory detention laws, the system has been run by a succession of three publicly traded companies since 1998. All three are now major players in the international business of locking up and transporting unwanted foreigners.
The first, the Florida-based prison company GEO Group, lost its Australia contract in 2003 amid a commission’s findings that detained children were subjected to cruel treatment. An Australian government audit reported that the contract had not delivered “value-for-money.” In the United States, GEO controls 7,000 of 32,000 detention beds.
The second company, G4S, an Anglo-Danish security conglomerate with more than 600,000 employees in 125 countries, was faulted for lethal neglect and abusive use of solitary confinement in Australia. By the middle of the past decade, after refugee children had sewed their lips together during hunger strikes in camps like Woomera and Curtin, and government commissions discovered that Australian citizens and legal residents were being wrongly detained and deported, protests pushed the Liberal Party government to dismantle some aspects of the system.
But after promising to return the work to the public sector, a Labor government awarded a five-year, $370 million contract to Serco in 2009. The value of the contract has since soared beyond $756 million as detention sites quadrupled, to 24, and the number of detainees ballooned to 6,700 from 1,000.
Dangerous Problems
Over the past year, riots, fires and suicidal protests left millions of dollars in damage at Serco-run centers from Christmas Island to Villawood, outside Sydney, and self-harm by detainees rose twelvefold, government documents show. In August, a government inspection report cited dangerous overcrowding, inadequate and ill-trained staff, no crisis planning and no requirement that Serco add employees when population exceeded capacity.
At the detention center Serco runs in Villawood, immigrants spoke of long, open-ended detentions making them crazy. Alwy Fadhel, 33, an Indonesian Christian who said he needed asylum from Islamic persecution, had long black hair coming out in clumps after being held for more than three years, in and out of solitary confinement.
“We talk to ourselves,” Mr. Fadhel said. “We talk to the mirror; we talk to the wall.”
Naomi Leong, a shy 9-year-old, was born in the detention camp. For more than three years, at a cost of about $380,000, she and her mother were held behind its barbed wire. Psychiatrists said Naomi was growing up mute, banging her head against the walls while her mother, Virginia Leong, a Malaysian citizen accused of trying to use a false passport, sank into depression.
Naomi and her mother became a cause célèbre in protests against the mandatory detention system, leading to their release in 2005 on rare humanitarian visas. They are now citizens.
“I come here to give little bit of hope to the people,” Ms. Leong said during a recent visit to Villawood, where posters display the governing principles of Serco, beginning with “We foster an entrepreneurial culture.”
Free-Market Solutions
Companies often say that losing a contract is the ultimate accountability.
“We are acutely aware of our responsibilities and are committed to the humane, fair and decent treatment of all those in our care,” a Serco spokesman said in an e-mail. “We will continue to work with our customers around the world and seek to improve the services we provide for them.”
But lost detention contracts are rare and easily replaced in this fast-growing business. Serco’s $10 billion portfolio includes many other businesses, from air traffic control and visa processing in the United States, to nuclear weapons maintenance, video surveillance and welfare-to-work programs in Britain, where it also operates several prisons and two “immigration removal centers.”
“If one area or territory slows down, we can move where the growth is,” Christopher Hyman, Serco’s chief executive, told investors last year, after reporting a 35 percent increase in profits. This spring, Serco reported a 13 percent profit rise.
Its rival G4S delivers cash to banks on most continents, runs airport security in 80 countries and has 1,500 employees in immigration enforcement in Britain, the Netherlands and the United States, where its services include escorting illegal border-crossers back to Mexico for the Department of Homeland Security.
Nick Buckles, the chief executive of G4S, would not discuss the company. But last year he told analysts how its “justice” business in the Netherlands blossomed in one week after the 2002 assassination of a politician with an anti-immigrant and law-and-order agenda.
“There’s nothing like a political crisis to stimulate a bit of change,” Mr. Buckles said.
In Britain last fall, the company came under criminal investigation in the asphyxiation of an Angolan man who died as three G4S escorts held him down on a British Airways flight. Soon afterward, British immigration authorities announced that the company had lost its bid to renew a $48 million deportation escort contract because it was underbid by a competitor.
Even so, G4S has more than $1.1 billion in government contracts in Britain, a spokesman said, only about $126 million from the immigration authority. It quickly replaced the lost revenue with contracts to build, lease and run more police jails and prisons.
In 2007, Western Australia’s Human Rights Commission found that G4S drivers had ignored the cries of detainees locked in a scorching van, leaving them so dehydrated that one drank his own urine. The company was ordered to pay $500,000 for inhumane treatment, but three of the five victims already had been deported. Immigration officials, relying on company misinformation, had dismissed their complaints without investigation, the commission found.
There was a public outcry when an Aboriginal man died in another G4S van in similar circumstances the next year. A coroner ruled in 2009 that G4S, the drivers and the government shared the blame. The company was later awarded a $70 million, five-year prisoner transport contract in another state, Victoria, without competition.
G4S pleaded guilty to negligence in the van death this year, and was fined $285,000. Mr. Buckles, its chief executive, alluded to the case at a meeting with analysts in March, reassuring them.
“There is only two or three major players, typically sometimes only two people bidding,” Mr. Buckles said. “In time, we will become a winner in that market because there’s a lot of outsourcing opportunities and not many competitors.”
In August, when GEO, the Florida prison company, posted a 40 percent rise in second-quarter profits, its executives in Boca Raton spoke of new immigration business on both sides of the Atlantic.
John M. Hurley, a GEO executive for North American operations, cited “the continued growth in the criminal alien population,” larger facilities, and longer federal contracts, some up to 20 years.
At the company’s Reeves County Detention Center in Texas, immigrant inmates rioted in 2009 and 2010 after several detainees died in solitary confinement. GEO executives declined to comment. But speaking to shareholders, they credited much of the quarter’s $10 million increase in international revenue to the expansion of a detention center in Britain, where immigration was a hot issue in the 2010 election.
A Policy Backfires
“Britain is no longer a soft touch,” Damian Green, the immigration minister, said in August 2010 when he visited the center, near Heathrow Airport, reopening wings that had burned in 2006 during detainee riots under a different private operator.
The riots started the day the chief inspector of prisons released a blistering report about abuses there, including excessive waits for deportation. Months after Mr. Green’s appearance, an independent monitoring board complained that at the expanded center — now Europe’s largest, with 610 detainees — at least 35 men had been waiting more than a year to be deported, including one locked up for three years and seven months at a cost of at least $237,000.
The camp that Serco took over in the Australian outback, the Curtin Immigration Detention Center, had also been shut down amid riots and hunger strikes in 2002. But it was reopened last year to handle a surge of asylum seekers arriving by boat even as the government imposed a moratorium on processing their claims. Refurbished for 300 men, the camp sits on an old air force base and held more than 1,500 detainees in huts and tents behind an electrified fence. Serco guards likened the compound to a free-range chicken farm.
On March 28, a 19-year-old Afghan from a group persecuted by the Taliban hanged himself after 10 months’ detention — the system’s fifth suicide in seven months. A dozen guards, short of sleep and training, found themselves battling hundreds of grieving, angry detainees for the teenager’s body.
“We have lost control,” said Richard Harding, who served for a decade as Western Australia’s chief prison inspector. He is no enemy of privatization, and his praise for a Serco-run prison is posted on the company’s Web site. But he said Curtin today was emblematic of “a flawed arrangement that’s going to go wrong no matter who’s running it.”
“These big global companies, in relation to specific activities, are more powerful than the governments they’re dealing with,” he added.

Matt Siegel contributed reporting from Sydney, Australia.

A version of this article appeared in print on September 29, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Getting Tough On Immigrants To Turn a Profit.

Global Warming: Why Americans Are In Denial

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/24/global-warming-why-americans-deny_n_979177.html

Global Warming: Why Americans Are In Denial
CHARLES J. HANLEY   09/24/11 02:45 PM ET  
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  Climate Change Denial ,   Climate Change Skeptics ,   Climate-Change , Global Warming Denial , Climate Change Americans , Climate Skeptics , Global Warming Americans , Green News


NEW YORK — Tucked between treatises on algae and prehistoric turquoise beads, the study on page 460 of a long-ago issue of the U.S. journal Science drew little attention.
“I don’t think there were any newspaper articles about it or anything like that,” the author recalls.
But the headline on the 1975 report was bold: “Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” And this article that coined the term may have marked the last time a mention of “global warming” didn’t set off an instant outcry of angry denial.
___
EDITOR’S NOTE: Climate change has already provoked debate in a U.S. presidential campaign barely begun. An Associated Press journalist draws on decades of climate reporting to offer a retrospective and analysis on global warming and the undying urge to deny.
___
In the paper, Columbia University geoscientist Wally Broecker calculated how much carbon dioxide would accumulate in the atmosphere in the coming 35 years, and how temperatures consequently would rise. His numbers have proven almost dead-on correct. Meanwhile, other powerful evidence poured in over those decades, showing the “greenhouse effect” is real and is happening. And yet resistance to the idea among many in the U.S. appears to have hardened.
What’s going on?
“The desire to disbelieve deepens as the scale of the threat grows,” concludes economist-ethicist Clive Hamilton.
He and others who track what they call “denialism” find that its nature is changing in America, last redoubt of climate naysayers. It has taken on a more partisan, ideological tone. Polls find a widening Republican-Democratic gap on climate. Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry even accuses climate scientists of lying for money. Global warming looms as a debatable question in yet another U.S. election campaign.
From his big-windowed office overlooking the wooded campus of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., Broecker has observed this deepening of the desire to disbelieve.
“The opposition by the Republicans has gotten stronger and stronger,” the 79-year-old “grandfather of climate science” said in an interview. “But, of course, the push by the Democrats has become stronger and stronger, and as it has become a more important issue, it has become more polarized.”
The solution: “Eventually it’ll become damned clear that the Earth is warming and the warming is beyond anything we have experienced in millions of years, and people will have to admit…” He stopped and laughed.
“Well, I suppose they could say God is burning us up.”
The basic physics of anthropogenic – manmade – global warming has been clear for more than a century, since researchers proved that carbon dioxide traps heat. Others later showed CO2 was building up in the atmosphere from the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels. Weather stations then filled in the rest: Temperatures were rising.
“As a physicist, putting CO2 into the air is good enough for me. It’s the physics that convinces me,” said veteran Cambridge University researcher Liz Morris. But she said work must go on to refine climate data and computer climate models, “to convince the deeply reluctant organizers of this world.”
The reluctance to rein in carbon emissions revealed itself early on.
In the 1980s, as scientists studied Greenland’s buried ice for clues to past climate, upgraded their computer models peering into the future, and improved global temperature analyses, the fossil-fuel industries were mobilizing for a campaign to question the science.
By 1988, NASA climatologist James Hansen could appear before a U.S. Senate committee and warn that global warming had begun, a dramatic announcement later confirmed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a new, U.N.-sponsored network of hundreds of international scientists.
But when Hansen was called back to testify in 1989, the White House of President George H.W. Bush edited this government scientist’s remarks to water down his conclusions, and Hansen declined to appear.
That was the year U.S. oil and coal interests formed the Global Climate Coalition to combat efforts to shift economies away from their products. Britain’s Royal Society and other researchers later determined that oil giant Exxon disbursed millions of dollars annually to think tanks and a handful of supposed experts to sow doubt about the facts.
In 1997, two years after the IPCC declared the “balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate,” the world’s nations gathered in Kyoto, Japan, to try to do something about it. The naysayers were there as well.
“The statement that we’ll have continued warming with an increase in CO2 is opinion, not fact,” oil executive William F. O’Keefe of the Global Climate Coalition insisted to reporters in Kyoto.
The late Bert Bolin, then IPCC chief, despaired.
“I’m not really surprised at the political reaction,” the Swedish climatologist told The Associated Press. “I am surprised at the way some of the scientific findings have been rejected in an unscientific manner.”
In fact, a document emerged years later showing that the industry coalition’s own scientific team had quietly advised it that the basic science of global warming was indisputable.
Kyoto’s final agreement called for limited rollbacks in greenhouse emissions. The United States didn’t even join in that. And by 2000, the CO2 built up in the atmosphere to 369 parts per million – just 4 ppm less than Broecker predicted – compared with 280 ppm before the industrial revolution.
Global temperatures rose as well, by 0.6 degrees C (1.1 degrees F) in the 20th century. And the mercury just kept rising. The decade 2000-2009 was the warmest on record, and 2010 and 2005 were the warmest years on record.
Satellite and other monitoring, meanwhile, found nights were warming faster than days, and winters more than summers, and the upper atmosphere was cooling while the lower atmosphere warmed – all clear signals greenhouse warming was at work, not some other factor.
The impact has been widespread.
An authoritative study this August reported that hundreds of species are retreating toward the poles, egrets showing up in southern England, American robins in Eskimo villages. Some, such as polar bears, have nowhere to go. Eventual large-scale extinctions are feared.
The heat is cutting into wheat yields, nurturing beetles that are destroying northern forests, attracting malarial mosquitoes to higher altitudes.
From the Rockies to the Himalayas, glaciers are shrinking, sending ever more water into the world’s seas. Because of accelerated melt in Greenland and elsewhere, the eight-nation Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program projects ocean levels will rise 90 to 160 centimeters (35 to 63 inches) by 2100, threatening coastlines everywhere.
“We are scared, really and truly,” diplomat Laurence Edwards, from the Pacific’s Marshall Islands, told the AP before the 1997 Kyoto meeting.
Today in his low-lying home islands, rising seas have washed away shoreline graveyards, saltwater has invaded wells, and islanders desperately seek aid to build a seawall to shield their capital.
The oceans are turning more acidic, too, from absorbing excess carbon dioxide. Acidifying seas will harm plankton, shellfish and other marine life up the food chain. Biologists fear the world’s coral reefs, home to much ocean life and already damaged from warmer waters, will largely disappear in this century.
The greatest fears may focus on “feedbacks” in the Arctic, warming twice as fast as the rest of the world.
The Arctic Ocean’s summer ice cap has shrunk by half and is expected to essentially vanish by 2030 or 2040, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center reported Sept. 15. Ashore, meanwhile, the Arctic tundra’s permafrost is thawing and releasing methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
These changes will feed on themselves: Released methane leads to warmer skies, which will release more methane. Ice-free Arctic waters absorb more of the sun’s heat than do reflective ice and snow, and so melt will beget melt. The frozen Arctic is a controller of Northern Hemisphere climate; an unfrozen one could upend age-old weather patterns across continents.
In the face of years of scientific findings and growing impacts, the doubters persist. They ignore long-term trends and seize on insignificant year-to-year blips in data to claim all is well. They focus on minor mistakes in thousands of pages of peer-reviewed studies to claim all is wrong. And they carom from one explanation to another for today’s warming Earth: jet contrails, sunspots, cosmic rays, natural cycles.
“Ninety-eight percent of the world’s climate scientists say it’s for real, and yet you still have deniers,” observed former U.S. Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, a New York Republican who chaired the House’s science committee.
Christiana Figueres, Costa Rican head of the U.N.’s post-Kyoto climate negotiations, finds it “very, very perplexing, this apparent allergy that there is in the United States. Why?”
The Australian scholar Hamilton sought to explain why in his 2010 book, “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change.”
In an interview, he said he found a “transformation” from the 1990s and its industry-financed campaign, to an America where climate denial “has now become a marker of cultural identity in the `angry’ parts of the United States.”
“Climate denial has been incorporated in the broader movement of right-wing populism,” he said, a movement that has “a visceral loathing of environmentalism.”
An in-depth study of a decade of Gallup polling finds statistical backing for that analysis.
On the question of whether they believed the effects of global warming were already happening, the percentage of self-identified Republicans or conservatives answering “yes” plummeted from almost 50 percent in 2007-2008 to 30 percent or less in 2010, while liberals and Democrats remained at 70 percent or more, according to the study in this spring’s Sociological Quarterly.
A Pew Research Center poll last October found a similar left-right gap.
The drop-off coincided with the election of Democrat Barack Obama as president and the Democratic effort in Congress, ultimately futile, to impose government caps on industrial greenhouse emissions.
Boehlert, the veteran Republican congressman, noted that “high-profile people with an `R’ after their name, like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, are saying it’s all fiction. Pooh-poohing the science of climate change feeds into their basic narrative that all government is bad.”
The quarterly study’s authors, Aaron M. McCright of Michigan State University and Riley E. Dunlap of Oklahoma State, suggested climate had joined abortion and other explosive, intractable issues as a mainstay of America’s hardening left-right gap.
“The culture wars have thus taken on a new dimension,” they wrote.
Al Gore, for one, remains upbeat. The former vice president and Nobel Prize-winning climate campaigner says “ferocity” in defense of false beliefs often increases “as the evidence proving them false builds.”
In an AP interview, he pointed to tipping points in recent history – the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the dismantling of U.S. racial segregation – when the potential for change built slowly in the background, until a critical mass was reached.
“This is building toward a point where the falsehoods of climate denial will be unacceptable as a basis for policy much longer,” Gore said. “As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, `How long? Not long.’”
Even Wally Broecker’s jest – that deniers could blame God – may not be an option for long.
Last May the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences, arm of an institution that once persecuted Galileo for his scientific findings, pronounced on manmade global warming: It’s happening.
Said the pope’s scientific advisers, “We must protect the habitat that sustains us.”

2010 The Rebirth of Environmentalism: Grassroots Activism from the Spotted Owl to the Polar Bear

http://www.hcn.org/issues/42.7/building-a-more-effective-environmental-movement?utm_source=wcn1&utm_medium=email
Building a more effective environmental movement
REVIEW - From the April 26, 2010 issue of High Country News
By Felice Pace

The Rebirth of Environmentalism: Grassroots Activism from the Spotted Owl to the Polar Bear
Douglas Bevington
285 pages, softcover: $35. 
Island Press, 2009.

In The Rebirth of Environmentalism, activist Douglas Bevington explores the relationship between large national organizations like the Sierra Club and small “grassroots biodiversity groups” like Northwest California’s Environmental Protection Information Center. Bevington describes the different strategies these groups employ and analyzes their effectiveness in protecting land and wildlife.
Bevington’s own position is clear: “Grassroots biodiversity groups have been the unsung heroes of American environmentalism during the past twenty years.” He describes these groups as “small, radical environmental organizations that protect imperiled wildlife and forests, particularly through the aggressive use of litigation.”
Bevington focuses on three late-20th century environmental campaigns -- the Headwaters Forest campaign, the zero-cut national forest campaign and the endangered species litigation campaign -- to reveal the often turbulent internal politics of the environmental movement.
In his view, the nationals play an “insider” game where compromise rules and access to the seats of power determines the groups’ positions. Grassroots groups, however, use “outsider” strategies free from such considerations. Although he acknowledges that the insider strategy produces results, he concludes that it fails to achieve the level of protection needed. But this perspective is overly simplistic and disregards the accomplishments of national-grassroots alliances.
The Rebirth of Environmentalism invites comparison to The Death of Environmentalism by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus and to their follow-up book, Break Through. All three authors want the environmental movement to act more boldly, but that is about all they agree on. Shellenberger and Nordhaus want established national organizations to become more political in outlook and more strategic in action; they ignore the grassroots groups that Bevington sees as key.
An environmental movement with the power to address today’s most pressing problems can emerge, says Bevington, but only if resources are reallocated from established national organizations: “We will need environmental groups that are bold and unconstrained, that do not fear controversy or conflict, and that advocate for what is ecologically necessary rather than what is narrowly seen as politically realistic.”
Death or rebirth, the nationals versus the grassroots: At a time of unprecedented environmental challenges, these questions merit serious consideration by all who want to build a more effective conservation movement.

Green Breast

E) Residential areas and suburbia
mainstream America

The fourth area is the residential area of the American born middle class. It is possibly the most representative example of what mainstream America is. It is usually a place where you find individual family homes, houses made of wood, usually two floored buildings, with a huge garage for two cars, a lawn, and a wide sidewalk in front, shadowed by big trees. The people who live in the fourth area are American born, usually white.
The well off in suburbia

The fifth area includes all the suburbs around the large central city. It is the place were the well-off live. Private homes can look like small mansions or even small palaces. Usually in the woods or in pleasant semi-rural surroundings, the homes you find there are surrounded by beautiful lawns dotted with swimming-pools.
Urban sprawl

At some point between the city limits and plain countryside it is difficult to tell where a city actually ends. This is typical of urban sprawl, a situation which can be defined as building houses in the country but not too far from cities. Environmentally speaking, this type of development is highly objectionalble.


Sprawl is a pattern of growth involving low-density development in the suburbs, beyond the edges of existing towns and cities. Residential areas in sprawl-type development are typically low-density, geographically separated from retail stores and offices, and heavily automobile-dependent. Because of this reliance on the automobile, the sprawl landscape is dominated by a vast network of roads and parking lots. (source: Google

Can Perry Beat Obama in US 2012 Presidential Election?

September 16, 2011
Can Perry Beat Obama in US 2012 Presidential Election?
Greg Flakus | Houston

1. http://www.voanews.com/english/news/usa/Can-Perry-Beat-Obama-in-US-2012-Presidential-Election-129942518.html

Photo: Reuters
U.S. Republican presidential candidate Texas Governor Rick Perry leaves a campaign stop at Harvey’s Bakery and Coffee Shop in Dover, New Hampshire August 18, 2011.

Texas Governor Rick Perry recently entered the race for the Republican Party presidential nomination and immediately soared to the top of public opinion polls.  Perry is popular with many conservatives, but he may not fare as well with moderates and independent voters if he wins the nomination and faces President Barack Obama in the 2012 election.  

Main appeal

Perry’s main appeal to voters is that the state he has run for the past decade has created more jobs than any other.  In debates with Republican rivals, he promises to follow his Texas model to boost national economic growth.

“You give people the opportunity to risk their capital by lowering the tax burden on them, by lowering the regulatory climate, and you will see an American economy that takes off like a rocket ship,” Perry said.

Criticism


Reuters

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney makes a point as Texas Governor Rick Perry ® listens during the Reagan Centennial GOP presidential primary debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California September 7, 2011

But his rivals, especially former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, question Perry’s criticism of the federal Social Security program for senior citizens.

“But the question is, do you still believe that Social Security should be ended as a federal program as you did six months ago when your book came out [calling for the end of federal-controlled Social Security]  and returned [the Social Security problems] to the states, or do you want to retreat from that?” asked Romney during a debate.

“I think we ought to have a conversation, “ responded Perry.

“We’re having that right now, governor. We’re running for president,” Romney quipped.

Critics say Perry’s criticism of Social Security and his stand on a number of other social issues may help him win the conservative votes he needs to secure the Republican nomination, but could undermine his appeal to the moderate voters he will need to win the presidency.

Mark Jones, chairman of Rice University’s Political Science Department, has been keeping a close eye on Perry’s presidential quest.

“If the focus of the campaign is not so much on jobs and the economy, but more is on these other issues such as social values, religion, things like Social Security, then I think the Perry candidacy would be doomed,” Jones said.

Successes 

Jones says Perry will do better by focusing on the jobs created in Texas during his time in office.  According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Texas added more than 700,000 private sector jobs in the past ten years, while large states like California and Michigan each lost more than 600,000 jobs.  Perry’s rivals question how much credit he should get, noting that the Lonestar state has advantages that were in place long before he assumed office. But Mark Jones says that won’t matter to voters.

“Texas has done well on jobs, that is tough to dispute and, from a political perspective that is difficult to dispute. Perry can say ‘I created the jobs, “ noted Jones.

Weaknesses

He says Perry is generally popular with the conservatives who form the base of the Republican party today, but he does have a few weak spots, like immigration.

Perry campaigned for governor calling for tough measures against crime along the nearly 2,000-kilometer border Texas shares with Mexico.

“If Washington won’t protect our border, Texas will,” promised Perry in a campaign ad.

But Perry angered some conservatives by endorsing a comprehensive immigration reform plan that they regard as giving amnesty to those who violated US law.

“We need to craft and pass an immigration bill that allows those individuals who are basically economic immigrants to move back and forth across that border,” he said.

Hispanic vote 

Mark Jones says this could be a problem for Perry among conservatives, but it could help him win Hispanic votes if he becomes the Republican candidate.

“He has sort-of tried to have his cake and eat it too [ have it both ways] on the immigration issue,” noted Jones. “He does not want to alienate the right, so he talks a semi-tough line, but he doesn’t do anything that might over alienate Hispanics who might otherwise want to vote for him.”

Jones thinks Perry’s biggest problem may be that some Republicans fear his more extreme positions could undermine him in a race against Mr. Obama. He says the more moderate Mitt Romney may take advantage of that. 

“What Mitt Romney is going to do over the next six months is convince those same voters as well as moderate voters that Rick Perry is unelectable in the general election,” Jones said.

Rick Perry has never lost an election, but his whole career has been in Texas. His big national test will begin early next year with the Iowa caucuses and the nation’s first primary in New Hampshire.

Stung by the President on Air Quality, Environmentalists Weigh Their Options

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/science/earth/04air.html?scp=1&sq=environmentalists&st=Search

Stung by the President on Air Quality, Environmentalists Weigh Their OptionsBy LESLIE KAUFMAN
Published: September 3, 2011

For environmental groups, it was the final hard slap that brought a long-troubled relationship to the brink.

Evan Vucci/Associated Press

President Obama in the Rose Garden on Wednesday. On Friday, he went against the advice of environmental officials.Related

1. Obama Administration Abandons Stricter Air-Quality Rules (September 3, 2011)
2. Times Topics: Air Pollution | Environmental Protection Agency

Related in Opinion

1. Editorial: A Bad Call on Ozone (September 3, 2011)
2. Room For Debate: What if Republicans Closed the E.P.A.?

A blog about energy and the environment.Go to Blog »
In late August, the State Department gave a crucial go-ahead on a controversial pipeline to bring tar sands oil from Canada to the Gulf Coast. Then on Friday, leading into the holiday weekend, the Obama administration announced without warning that it was walking away from stricter ozone pollution standards that it had been promising for three years and instead sticking with Bush-era standards.
John D. Walke, clean air director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group based in New York, likened the ozone decision to a “bomb being dropped.”
Mr. Walke and representatives of other environmental groups saw the president’s actions as brazen political sellouts to business interests and the Republican Party, which regards environmental regulations as job killers and a brick wall to economic recovery.
The question for environmentalists became, what to do next?
“There is shock and chaos here,” Mr. Walke said, “so I do not know. I can’t answer that question.” But he added that his group would resume a smog lawsuit against the government that it had dropped because it had been lulled into believing that this administration would enact tougher regulations without being forced to do so by the courts.
Political analysts watching the Obama administration’s pullback from the environmental agenda this past month say that in the current climate there is little chance that environmentalists or their allies will ever side with the Republicans. After all, the Republican-led House of Representatives has been aggressively moving to curtail protections for endangered species and regulations for clean air and water, and most of the Republican presidential candidates have been intensely critical of any government effort to address climate change.
Still, they say, the president could face political repercussions in subtler but nevertheless corrosive ways: from losing volunteer enthusiasm to tying up his allies in fights with him instead of with his enemies.
“Energy from part of the base will now be directed at communicating with the White House and not with the public about the administration’s record,” said Daniel J. Weiss, director of climate strategy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research group with close ties to the White House.
And Justin Ruben, executive director of MoveOn.org, a five-million-member online progressive political organization that played a significant role in President Obama’s election in 2008, said he was sure that his members would be deflated.
“How are our members in Ohio and Florida who pounded the pavement in 2008 going to make the case for why this election matters?” Mr. Ruben said. “Stuff like this is devastating to the hope and passion that fuels the volunteers that made the president’s 2008 campaign so unique and successful.”
Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, who does extensive work on public perception and the environment, said the real threat to the president’s reputation stemming from the ozone decision went far beyond environmentalists.
“It could play into an emerging narrative in his own party that he is caving too quickly to Republican pressure,” Dr. Leiserowitz said. “It is a dangerous narrative in your own base because it cuts down on enthusiasm and it is a narrative that his opponents will pick up on.”
In fact, it is a lesson that some environmental groups have already learned, and they are preparing to act accordingly.
“I think that two-plus years into Obama’s presidency is more than enough time for him to have established a clear weak record,” said Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, which has been battling the president on endangered species.
“The environmental movement needs to keep piling the pressure on and realizing playing nicey-nice won’t work,” Mr. Suckling said, adding that more public actions and lawsuits are the way to get Mr. Obama’s attention.His is not the only group going this way, but so far it is unclear that protests are being heard.
All last week across the street from the White House, Bill McKibben, a founder of 350.org, a grass-roots organization that advocates limiting carbon emissions, staged demonstrations to protest the Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring the tar sands oil from Canada.
As of Friday, Mr. McKibben said, more than a thousand people had been arrested in the previous days of protest, including Obama campaign staff members from 2008. Yet, he said of the White House, “we heard not one word from them.”
One of those former campaign workers who was arrested was Courtney Hight, who was the youth vote director in Florida in 2008. She offered an explicit warning: “If the president decides not to permit the pipeline, he will reignite the enthusiasm many of my friends and I felt in 2008. But if he approves it, it is just human nature that the disappointment will sap the enthusiasm that drove us to work so hard last time.”

A version of this article appeared in print on September 4, 2011, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Stung by the President on Air Quality, Environmentalists Weigh Their Options.