The Great Debate

The urgent need to protect the global supply chain

Janet Napolitano

Jan 27, 2012 11:47 EST

Every day, staggering numbers of air, land and sea passengers, as well as millions of tons of cargo, move between nations. International trade and commerce has long driven the development of nations and provided unprecedented economic growth. Indeed, our future prosperity depends upon it.

At the same time, threats to trade and travel — whether from explosives hidden in a passenger’s clothing or inside a ship’s cargo, or from a natural disaster — remind us of the need for security and resilience within the global supply chain. A vulnerability or gap in any part of the world has the ability to affect the flow of goods and people thousands of miles away. For instance, just three days after the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear tragedies struck Japan last March, U.S. automakers began cutting shifts and idling some plants at home. In the days that followed, they did the same at their factories in more than 10 countries around the world.

Ten years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we also continue to see the determination of individuals and groups to disrupt economies by targeting our transit and cargo systems. Understanding the seriousness of these threats underscores the need for a continued focus on protecting the global supply chain.

Just as important, we must move away from the outdated dichotomy that we have to choose between trade and travel efficiency, and trade and travel security. Security and efficiency must no longer be seen as mutually exclusive. It is possible to enhance security without increasing wait times, creating more paperwork and driving costs higher – and we are doing so already.

As I announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, the United States released a National Strategy for Global Supply Chain Security, the product of more than two years of collaboration across the U.S. government, and with international and domestic public and private partners.

The National Strategy, created with the input of more than 60 subject matter experts and hundreds of supply chain stakeholders, takes a whole-of-nation approach to global supply chain systems, with two explicit goals: promoting the efficient and secure movement of goods; and fostering resiliency.

We will pursue this strategy in three main ways:

How religion is infiltrating public schools

Katherine Stewart

Jan 25, 2012 15:50 EST

On Sept. 1, 2011, the students of New Heights Middle School in Jefferson, South Carolina trooped into the gymnasium to hear the Christian rapper known as “B-SCHOC” tell them that Jesus alone could save them. They cheered as a pastor named Christian Chapman vied to win their souls for Christ. At the end of the show, they were asked to fill in a form indicating whether they had accepted Jesus as their savior. In a video posted on YouTube, B-SHOC exults that “324 kids at this school have made a decision for Jesus Christ.”

Wherever one chooses to draw the line between church and public school, there can’t be much doubt that the B-SHOC assembly at New Heights lay pretty far on the other side. Even the organizers of the assembly knew that. “Your principal went to me today, and I said, ‘How are you getting away with this?’” Pastor Chapman told a group of parents. “And he said, ‘I’m not … I want these kids to know that eternal life is real, and I don’t care what happens to me, they’re going to hear it today.”’

In fact, the school board voted to settle a suit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in which Jonathan Anderson, a parent whose son was harassed at the school for his non-belief, alleged that religion was all over the New Heights Middle School. School-sponsored prayers routinely opened and closed assemblies and performances. Religious messages made their way into lesson plans, and religious iconography decorated the walls. Students were punished for minor infractions by being told to write out sentences proclaiming their faith in God.

A number of these activities — such as the B-SHOC event — appear to be violations of the clause in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution intended to maintain separation between church and state. And the school board admits as much in its proposed settlement of the ACLU case. Yet an even greater number of religious activities in public schools have recently become legal as a result of novel interpretations of the Constitution handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court. Ironically, had the administration of New Heights been a little smarter, it could have achieved its apparent goal of using the school’s position of authority to spread the word of God among its captive students without running the risk of being sued. Thousands of other schools across the country do just that.

Four weeks after the B-SHOC assembly, for example, a large number of New Heights students gathered around the flagpole in front of the school one morning and prayed to Jesus for their classmates and their school. It was the annual “See You at the Pole” prayer event, and it happens at schools nationwide on the same day. On the understanding that the event is student-initiated and student-led, it is deemed to be constitutional. In recent years — at least when it comes to religion — the Supreme Court has made a firm distinction between school-sponsored speech, which is constrained by the Establishment Clause, and student speech, which is protected by the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.

Of course, within the appropriate context that a school setting demands, students should always be free to talk about religion at school. Children can and should have the right to pray in school, discuss their faith and even proselytize their classmates. Yet, as in many other schools, the loud calls for “religious liberty” and the “free speech” of students is often just a convoluted way for adults to use the authority of the school to promote their own religious views and practices among students. The prayers at “See You at the Pole” may be student-led, yet the event is organized and promoted on national and local levels by adults. At events I attended, pastors from nearby churches played a central role in urging their kids to participate and supplied them with sophisticated sound systems and other props. At New Heights, Principal Larry Stinson led the prayers around the pole, and he was joined by a number of parents, teachers and other adults.

The idea that “it’s all right as long as the kids do it” is now so pervasive among those who view the public schools as missionary fields that it has a technical name: “peer evangelism.” A leader of the Life Book Movement — a project of The Gideons International, which provides high school students with “teenage” evangelical Christian tracts that they are expected to deliver to other kids in the school — calls it “a God-given loophole.” In the two and a half years since the inception of this peer evangelism initiative, they have distributed nearly 2 million “Life Books.”

Yemen needs an insurgent democracy

Stefan Wolff

Jan 24, 2012 14:58 EST

After months of uncertainty around whether Ali Abdullah Saleh has been sincere about stepping down from his post as Yemen’s president, Sunday brought confirmation that he has left the country to seek medical treatment in the United States. Under a deal brokered by the Gulf Cooperation Council with United Nations, United States and United Kingdom assistance, Saleh is barred from partaking in the Feb. 21 elections for an interim president. In exchange, he received immunity in an unamendable law — both nationally and internationally highly controversial — passed by Yemen’s parliament the day before his departure.

And yet Saleh made it immediately clear that he intended to return to Yemen before the elections to lead his General People’s Congress party, which holds a majority of seats in parliament. This is, of course, somewhat reminiscent of the last time Saleh left Yemen for medical treatment in June 2011. Following a bomb attack on the presidential palace which left several senior government officials dead and Saleh and others seriously injured, he sought treatment in Saudi Arabia amid hopes he would step down from office. He returned to Sana’a as president at the end of September. While Saleh will not be able to hold this office again, his intention of continuing to play a major role in the future of Yemen taints the otherwise good news of his departure.

But now what? We’ve seen leaders who had desperately tried to hold on forced from power in Arab countries before. Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali was run out of Tunisia. Hosni Mubarak, under withering domestic and international pressure, stepped down from Egypt’s presidency. And Muammar Gaddafi wouldn’t leave and was finally killed.

Yemen, though, is different. Its crisis goes much deeper than socioeconomic and political dissatisfaction. It has insurgencies to worry about.

There are two: the al-Houthi uprising in the north since 2004 and the increasingly secessionist rebellion in the south that, while tracing its origins back to the brief 1994 north-south civil war, has gained violent momentum from 2007 onwards. Both insurgencies are reactions to political marginalization and economic neglect by Sana’a.

But these insurgencies have telling differences. The situation in the north has been destabilized by past military operations against a Shi’ite rebellion that allegedly received support from Iran (doubtful as it may be in its significance). For years on-and-off fighting had seen little gain for either side until the government launched operation “Scorched Earth” in 2009. That push involved Saudi forces, but the insurgency, although reduced in strength, continued. To date, a number of ceasefire agreements have been signed, and broken, most recently in 2010.

In the south, meanwhile, a battle with secessionist forces is complicated by the significant and growing presence of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). This fight has garnered significant international attention, not least because of two failed international terrorist plots that originated in Yemen — the attempt to bring down airplanes with explosives hidden in printer toner cartridges in October 2010 and the Christmas Day bombing plot in 2009. The alliance between AQAP and the southern secessionists, however, is one of convenience above all else. The southern movement is deeply divided among different factions and has limited military capabilities. It thus relies to an extent on AQAP to challenge the regime without sharing the terrorist network’s religious fundamentalism or anti-Western agenda. For the regime, southern secession is unacceptable given that most of Yemen’s dwindling oil resources are located there. Internationally, too, there is broad support for Yemen’s unity and a fear that instability in the south will further enable and embolden AQAP.

What is American exceptionalism?

James Ledbetter

Jan 23, 2012 15:30 EST

Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, although they spend a lot of time these days at one another’s throat, appeared on the night of the South Carolina primary to agree on at least one thing: Each believes in “American exceptionalism,” and, they say, Barack Obama does not. Gingrich has already devoted an entire book to the topic, and in an interview with my colleague David Rohde, a top foreign policy adviser to Romney made it clear that American exceptionalism is a theme that Romney intends to stress throughout the campaign.

It’s easy to see that these candidates view their own ideas about American exceptionalism as a strong opportunity to contrast themselves with the incumbent. It’s harder, though, after sifting through the various ways the term is used, to establish what it actually means. Far from being a simple concept that one can easily endorse or reject, American exceptionalism is a loose skein that uneasily unites many different strands of thought, faith and ideology.

Like so much in the discussion of American history, the phrase is often traced to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. But that doesn’t explain much, because when de Tocqueville wrote that “the position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional,” he was referring primarily to the development of a practical — as opposed to literary or artistic — worldview, stemming from the American landscape and the lack of an aristocracy. More to the point, Gingrich seeks to ground the term in the American Revolution: “The ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence, and the unique American identity that arose from an American civilization that honored them, form what we call today ‘American Exceptionalism’,” he wrote in A Nation Like No Other, published last year. But that explanation, too, is inadequate; after all, the authors of the Declaration of Independence went out of their way to universalize the values underpinning the American experience (“when, in the course of human events…”), not to cleave that experience off from the rest of the world.

Rather, the faith in the uniqueness of the American experience is best found in its Puritan heritage, the belief that God made a covenant with the founders of America and intended to use American civilization as an example for the rest of the world. In a much-cited speech, Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop referred in 1630 to his colony as “a city on a hill” that could serve as a beacon to the world. But grounding American exceptionalism in religion creates multiple conceptual minefields. For one, the early colonies were not really bastions of liberty; in addition to their slaveholdings, they were, as Gingrich acknowledges, governed like “a theocratic dictatorship.” For another, an appeal to the supernatural puts the idea of American exceptionalism on a similar plane with, say, the Jewish concept of being the Chosen People or the ancient Chinese idea that their country is at the center of the universe — which is to say, there is nothing exceptional about thinking that your civilization is exceptional. Nonetheless, the idea that the United States occupies a privileged and arguably unique place in history is critical to understanding the phrase “American exceptionalism,” from the Manifest Destiny period to the present day.

In the 20th century, American exceptionalism took on a particular meaning in political theory. Typically, it was used to explain why the United States — unlike nearly all developed nations — had never developed a significant working-class political movement. Curiously, although Gingrich and Romney are principally using it in the context of American foreign policy, that usage is of fairly recent vintage. It is also where the meaning of the term is probably the muddiest and does not make as neat a litmus test as Gingrich and Romney seem to want. One can believe that the foundation of America in ideas of liberty and self-governance — rather than in ethnicity or royal domain — makes the United States “exceptional” and yet still be deeply skeptical about America’s use of force abroad. Instead, what Gingrich and Romney appear to be advocating under the name of exceptionalism is either American unilateralism — the idea that the United States has a right and/or obligation to act in the international sphere even if all other countries and multinational institutions don’t join in — or American infallibility — the idea that nothing the United States does in the international arena is ever morally unjustified.

On such subtopics there is robust debate, particularly since 9/11. The Canadian scholar and politician Michael Ignatieff has identified three problematic areas of American exceptionalism in the international realm. These include American exemptionalism, the idea that prevailing international standards don’t apply to the U.S., particularly in the ratification of human rights conventions; double standards, the idea that rules will be ignored or enforced depending on the U.S. perception of its interests; and legal isolationism, the notion that legal findings outside the U.S. should have no bearing on how American judges rule and think.

Here is where Gingrich and Romney probably see a place they can sink their teeth into. It is nearly certain that current or former members of the Obama administration have publicly taken positions against “American exceptionalism” if it’s defined as unilateralism, infallibility, exemptionalism, etc. The political hope is that such parts can be made to stand for the whole and thus used as one more way to call out Obama’s supposed patriotism vacuum.

The retail price of America’s income inequality

Caitlin Kelly

Jan 20, 2012 16:16 EST

Retail is considered one of the bright spots in the American economy, one of only six job categories projected to grow nationally through 2018. But a survey released this week makes clear that many of these are jobs in name only, offering poverty-level wages, highly restricted access to benefits, part-time work when full-time is desired, and a workforce so cowed that it routinely accepts working conditions that make work-life balance, or the chance to upgrade skills and move into better-paid work elsewhere, all but impossible.

The survey, conducted by Retail Action Project, a New York City-based workers’ advocacy group, offers frank data from 436 workers in 230 stores across the city’s five boroughs, from the luxury purveyors of Fifth Avenue to discount outlets in the Bronx. With 242,000 retail workers in Manhattan alone, the data – the first ever gathered directly from these workers – offers a telling and sobering look at this important industry.

The report’s highlights:

• The median wage in New York is $9.50 an hour, 52 percent lower than the citywide average for all industries. If associates in one of the nation’s costliest cities can’t even earn a living wage, who can?
• Black and Latino workers surveyed are more likely to be hired part-time and given worse schedules than their coworkers. Based on average wages and hours worked per week, white workers’ income is 12 percent higher than that of their black colleagues.
• Just over half of workers surveyed earn less than $10 an hour. But more than three-quarters of female Latino workers – 77 percent – fall beneath that threshold.
• While 54 percent of white workers received a raise or promotion after six months on the job, only 39 percent of black workers and 28 percent of Latino workers did.

The irony of retail work for many of these employees is that they can’t afford to buy much of what they’re selling. When I worked as an associate for 27 months at The North Face, a $30 hat, even with an employee discount, cost more than an hour of my labor.

The income of the median American family, adjusted for inflation, is lower now than in 1998. Gas, food and other costs have risen significantly, yet many workers’ wages are falling behind. The American economy still relies on consumer spending – 70 percent – yet fewer and fewer hardworking Americans can keep up.

But if you don’t earn it, you can’t spend it.

More taxis mean more traffic

Charles Komanoff

Jan 20, 2012 14:21 EST

“There’s something for everyone,” exulted New York City taxi czar David Yassky over the December agreement between Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Michael Bloomberg to expand taxi service. The disabled get 2,000 new wheelchair-accessible yellow cabs, up from around 250 at present. Outer-borough residents get the right to hail non-yellow “livery” cabs instead of having to phone for them. And the city gets a billion-dollar “one shot” from auctioning medallions for the new yellow cabs.

Oh, and all New Yorkers get something they need like a hole in the head: a permanent jolt of new gridlock from the extra taxi traffic.

No one mentioned traffic when the taxi deal was rolled out last month at City Hall and in Albany. After all, with 800,000 motor vehicles already entering the Manhattan Central Business District (CBD) each weekday, what difference could a mere 2,000 additional yellow cabs possibly make?

Plenty, it turns out. Yellow cabs spend three-fourths of each shift, around seven hours, plying CBD streets and avenues. (And of course some are active for two shifts a day.) Most private cars driven in Manhattan don’t do so for long. Even at the CBD’s notoriously labored traffic pace ― now averaging 9.5 mph, up from 8 mph before the recession ― the two to three miles per day logged by the average car below 60th Street occupy 15 to 20 minutes.

Adding one new medallion is thus equivalent to adding 40 private cars. Adding 2,000 of them ― as the city now intends to do during the next three years ― would be the traffic equivalent of adding 80,000 cars, a 10 percent increase in volume.

That 10 percent would be a big deal. The Manhattan CBD already runs so close to maximum capacity that a relatively small increase in the number of vehicles operating there makes a very considerable difference in the outcome. There’s a mathematical way to state this, but there’s also a proverb referring to straws and camels’ backs.

I’ve spent the last few years developing a computer model to analyze congestion pricing. If you put these extra cabs into the mix, the results aren’t pretty, even allowing for the replacement of some car traffic by the increased taxi traffic, as well as the divergence between peak usage periods for taxis (evenings) and cars and trucks (daytime). The model predicts that raising yellow-cab traffic volumes by 15% (the proportional increase in the number of medallions) will cause travel speeds to fall by 12%, averaged across all of Manhattan south of 60th Street from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. weekdays. (Details of my analysis can be found here.)

Mr. 1 Percent versus Mr. 1 Percent

David Callahan

Jan 20, 2012 12:21 EST

Listening to a newly populist President Obama or to Mitt Romney, who touts his CEO past at every turn, it is tempting to imagine a 2012 election that unfolds as textbooks imagine, with Republicans speaking for business and Democrats standing up for the little guy. Don’t be fooled. A more accurate reading of the contest features two elite candidates who represent different wings of the 1 Percent – a group increasingly divided over economics and the role of government.

Look closely at Obama’s rhetoric and you see that he’s not channeling Occupy Wall Street as much as a pragmatic tax-and-invest liberalism. Obama speaks for highly educated, affluent Americans who want government to do more, not less, on a number of fronts – like education, infrastructure, scientific research and clean energy. These folks don’t envy Europe; they envy China, which is deploying a muscular statism to compete economically and dominate the future.

Yes, Obama has made some strong statements lately about inequality and raising taxes on rich people. But most of this goes over just fine in Malibu or Manhattan. Many of the rich are ready to pay higher taxes – with polls showing, for instance, that a majority of millionaires support the Buffett Tax. And many agree that inequality has gone too far, seeing the growing wealth divide as a threat to America’s economic dynamism and social cohesion. The things that liberal rich people don’t like – unions, protectionism, and regulation, etc. – Obama doesn’t like much either.

Romney, meanwhile, speaks for a more familiar kind of 1 Percenter who thinks that business has all the answers and government should claim as little private wealth as possible. These elites embrace what New York Times columnist Ross Douthat last week called the “competitiveness revolution” – a drive for greater efficiencies and higher profits in which private equity firms like Bain Capital are heroes, not villains. Most of these people aren’t concerned about inequality, believing that all boats will rise faster in a laissez-faire economy and the fantastic heights of the yachts will only serve to inspire people. The best thing government can do for the little guy, the logic here goes, is get out of the way of private enterprise.

This clash of elites is hardly new. It has been taking shape for years now as the economy has diversified, with vast new wealth created by highly educated knowledge workers who live and work in blue states and, by and large, believe in government and elite experts. Barack Obama, so obviously smart and logical, with two Ivy League degrees, is a near-perfect fit for this crowd.

Romney is a less ideal candidate for his pro-business constituency, at least according to his mixed record on taxes and government as Massachusetts governor. But he’s close enough, with his CEO credentials and a set of policy positions that blogger Ezra Klein noted recently put him well to the right of George W. Bush.

While the media often imply that Obama has been abandoned by his affluent supporters and is now banking on populist appeals, campaign finance data supports the notion of a divided 1 Percent. Obama has been raking in big bucks from wealthy supporters – nearly as much as all the Republican candidates combined – and Democrats overall have raised more money in the current election cycle than Republicans (not including outside groups) – despite the attention-grabbing GOP primaries under way.  As in the previous few elections, Democrats are doing great with lawyers, tech leaders, entertainment professionals and other educated elites.

Keystone XL’s organizing principle

David Roberts

Jan 19, 2012 16:47 EST

In October 2011, National Journal surveyed energy experts about whether Obama was likely to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry Canadian tar-sands oil through the U.S. to the Gulf of Mexico. Ninety-one percent of the “energy and environment insiders” believed he would.

On Wednesday, Obama proved them wrong.

How could the experts have gotten it so wrong? The answer is twofold: Grassroots environmentalists were stronger, and congressional Republicans dumber, than anyone predicted.

Back in August of 2011, when author and activist Bill McKibben staged the first anti-Keystone rallies around the White House, political observers scoffed. These were, after all, the same environmentalists who had been rendered irrelevant by their cap-and-trade defeat and the stress of economic recession. No way they could stop a fossil fuel infrastructure project with big money behind it.

But McKibben kept at it. The movement he seeded grew, forging strategic partnerships with Nebraska farmers, social-justice groups and unions. Activists staged more rallies, hounded the president everywhere he went and uncovered serious questions about the relationship between the tar-sands industry and the State Department. As the crowds grew, big-money Democratic donors started weighing in on the issue. In November, under intense pressure, Obama announced that the final determination would be delayed until after the election. It was an unexpected display of muscle from the green grass roots.

Still, most observers assumed that Obama was just buying time (and the support of his environmental base) and would approve the pipeline in the spring. That’s where the dumb Republicans came in.

The strange, rocky beginnings of DHL

James Scurlock

Jan 19, 2012 15:44 EST

This is an excerpt from King Larry: The Life and Ruins of a Billionaire Genius, published this month by Scribner.

With over a quarter million employees and a network of more countries than the U.N., DHL remains the largest express shipper in the world. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it was also the first, beating FedEx by several years. By some measures, the little-known (in the U.S., at least) DHL remains the fastest growing corporation in history and was certainly the most visionary. DHL instigated the destruction of the centuries-old tradition of the postal monopoly and invented its own word processor in the mid-1970s. Anticipating e-mail, it employed the grandfather of the Internet as its president in the early 1980s.

And yet if DHL’s official corporate history is to believed — and we really have no choice here, since only two men were there and both are long gone — the company was conceived during a chance encounter in a grocery store parking lot between Larry Hillblom and a salesman from a small courier firm where both men worked, a silver-haired, gray-suited 58-year-old bon vivant named Adrian Dalsey. Dalsey was the opposite of Hillblom — an impeccably groomed smooth-talker who lived in a suburb of San Francisco with his loyal wife of thirty years; by his mid-fifties, the silver fox had spent enough money on other women that none remained for his and Marge’s golden years. Hillblom’s conservative politics and his work ethic would have endeared him to a man of Dalsey’s generation, but he lacked the older man’s finesse, meaning that their encounter was probably more intense than respectful. Customers who happened to push their shopping carts by that fateful meeting might have mistaken them for a wealthy father tolerating an obnoxious child.

But they eventually agreed that their boss had left a lot of low-hanging fruit unpicked. Insurers were not the only ones with time-sensitive documents. There was tremendous value to be captured if, for example, a shipping company could forward its bills of lading to customs in advance of a ship’s arrival, saving days or even weeks in port. Ditto for banks, which could only begin collecting interest on deposits once the original, cancelled check, was received by the Federal Reserve, or a law firm that needed a physical signature in order to effect a contract. Sending these documents via the postal service might take two weeks, if they reached their destination at all. At a time of double-digit interest rates and looming postal strikes, both men knew that the market for a fast, reliable courier service was huge — and growing. They understood that their skills complemented one another almost perfectly. And they disliked each other immensely.

“Larry and Dalsey had a visible acrimony,” an old friend of Hillblom’s told me. “Dalsey liked to snipe and he had this, he was a bit unctuous, he had this — it wasn’t a lisp, but an impediment — speech pattern that was distinctive and a little bit patrician. He was a distinguished-looking guy, a ladies’ man, and thought himself so. He used to snipe at Larry in a scornful, patronizing way, and it annoyed you. So here you have these two people with totally different worldviews and different functions within the company at loggerheads, creating the nascent IBM — unknowingly.” The friend paused for a moment and smiled. “Or maybe not.”

Regardless of the natural tension between two very different people from two very different generations, Hillblom and Dalsey ultimately understood that they needed one other in order to make a go of it. Hillblom was overflowing with ideas and energy; he was willing to work twenty-four hours a day and could do a lot of the legal legwork. Plus, he had saved up six-thousand dollars, which would become the company’s seed capital. Dalsey had the client connections. They incorporated in September, using the initials of their last names and adding that of Robert Lynn, a real-estate investor friend of Dalsey’s who had promised to help them raise capital. Lynn, however, dropped out of DHL immediately, sniffing that the company would never succeed.

Dalsey quickly signed DHL’s first client — the shipping giant Seatrain, which needed to courier bills of lading between Los Angeles and Honolulu — then hit a wall. Hillblom and Dalsey had hoped that Lynn’s financing would carry them through the lean months but now they were forced to rely on a trickle of cash to survive. Marge, Dalsey’s wife, became the corporate secretary and kept the books on her dining room table. Hillblom was forced to not only travel with DHL’s bags but also to pick them up at Seatrain before boarding the plane and drop them off after he arrived. During the few hours he was not working, he slept or studied for the bar exam. And he waited for his super-salesman to sign one of their dream clients. But Dalsey, scouring the Bay Area in an old Plymouth Duster whose unmatched doors were salvaged from a junkyard, had stumbled on the first in a long line of catch-22s: DHL needed banking clients in order to become profitable but they could not afford the expensive insurance that banking clients demanded. While the value of the checks that the banks were sending was, on its face, negligible — nothing more than paper and ink — if even a single, large check became lost or delayed for more than a few days, the interest lost could be substantial. Nearly a year would pass before an insurance agent offered up a solution. In the meantime, Hillblom nearly starved to death in paradise.

The GOP’s hunt for Latino voters

Stephen Nuno

Jan 18, 2012 16:47 EST

Jon Huntsman suspended more than just his campaign this week. He also put an end to any hope the GOP had of making strides in the Latino community.

And despite the stereotypes, because of the Obama administration’s policies, there really was hope. The administration has increased the number of deportations to nearly 400,000 people a year since taking office, according to ABC News. Likewise, in Secretary Janet Napolitano’s annual report to Congress, she describes the Department of Homeland Security’s efforts to be at “record highs.” President Obama’s first term has featured twice the number of deportations as George W. Bush’s by instituting a systematic approach to immigration enforcement not seen since the infamous days of “Operation Wetback,” a program in which President Dwight Eisenhower deported over a million Mexican nationals, among them American citizens.

One might think this would be an opportunity for the GOP to make inroads with the Latino community, but the Republicans seem confident they can sit idly by as Latinos simply run into their arms. The GOP claims economics are Latinos’ most important issue, but with over half of Hispanics within a generation of the immigrant experience, migration is also a profound issue (and one with profound economic consequences). And on that issue, most of the GOP candidates have done little to distinguish themselves.

But Huntsman was different. He was perhaps the only candidate who managed not to offend Latinos throughout the primary. Huntsman rightfully saw the wall on our southern border as repugnant to American values. By arguing for tough border control, yet also supporting in-state tuition for the children of unauthorized residents, Huntsman was able to conceptually distinguish the dangers of an unmanaged border from the benefits of those who came in search of a better life.

Huntsman also comes from the same Utah Mormon milieu that produced the Utah Compact, a set of principles endorsed by civic and business leaders, and the LDS Church, that asks politicians to “adopt reasonable policies addressing immigrants in Utah.” The Utah Compact also opposes a policy that unnecessarily separates families, a significant acknowledgement of the harm our immigration laws do to Hispanic families.

Perhaps most important, Huntsman differentiated himself from other Republicans as the only cosmopolitan who was comfortable with diversity. A former ambassador to China, he has direct experience with diversity in languages and customs. As a person fluent in Chinese, he saw diversity as an advantage rather than a threat. Latinos are familiar with the benefits of bilingualism, and as we continue to engage and compete in a global environment, it will become increasingly important to the success of our economy.

But now the remaining candidates only inflame the underlying hostility against minorities in the GOP’s base. To make strides with Latinos, they’ll have to counteract that and support a more humane approach to immigration. And this is not just about making friends — it’s about winning elections.