JULY 22, 2012
OUR CHEMICAL ROMANCE
PLUS: ROMNEY’S MONEY MAN REBOOTING BATMAN THE END OF SNAIL MAIL
FROM TOP: ELLEN WEINSTEIN (CHEMISTRY ILLUSTRATION); JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES (MAILBOXES); JOSEF POLLEROSS / ANZENBERGER/REDUX (HAWASS); ANA NANCE (EGYPT)
07.22.12 #06 CONTENTS
Enter POINTERS: Jabs at Hillary, Picketing Stallone, Record Weather MOVING IMAGE DATA: Recession or Not, College Still Pays Q&A: Rashad Robinson
CHEMISTRY LESSONS BY LYNNE PEEPLES
Voices HOWARD FINEMAN: The Book of Ed BOBBY FONG: Don’t Miss the College Forest for the Career Trees BONNIE BRODNICK: I Come With Baggage
GOING POSTAL
BY DAVE JAMIESON
QUOTED
Exit BOOKS: The Dark Side of the Obama White House MOVIES: It’s Not Over... Until Batman Sings
GOLDEN MUMMIES
BY ANDREW BURMON
GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK: Ed Edmundson: Beyond The Bottom Line APPROVAL: A Meal Is A Terrible Thing To Waste TFU
OTHER DESERT CITIES BY ANA NANCE
FROM THE EDITOR: She Was Right ON THE COVER: Illustration for
Huffington by Brain Stauffer
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
She Was Right IFTY YEARS AGO, a marine biologist named Rachel Carson began publishing a series of articles in The New Yorker, sounding the alarm about the dangers of exposure to chemicals and the failure of the chemical industry and government regulators to protect people from those dangers. Later collected in the book Silent Spring, Carson’s prescient insights are the subject of an anniversary feature this week by HuffPost’s environmental reporter Lynne Peeples. She delivers not only a tribute to Carson but a reminder that her work is more relevant than ever. Despite Carson’s warnings, our leaders are still not doing nearly enough to regulate the potentially harmful chemicals we’re exposed
ART STREIBER
F
to every day. As Lynne notes, more than 80,000 chemicals currently used in our country have never been fully tested, so we don’t even know how damaging they might be to humans or to the environment. And as Harvard Medical School’s Eric Chivian explains, when it comes to determining if a chemical is dangerous, the U.S. does not put the burden of proof on those who introduce it; that burden is on the watchdogs to prove the danger, after the substance has already been introduced. Which is to say, we have it backward. We’d rather perform autopsies than biopsies. And it’s yet another instance in
Join the conversation on Twitter and Facebook
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
which we’re failing to keep up with the rest of the world. Our low level of concern and urgency is especially shocking when you consider the high level of potential to harm our most precious resource, our children. Decades after Carson wrote in Silent Spring that harm from chemical exposures begins in the womb, scientists learned she was right. We now know that early exposure to toxic chemicals can impact a child for his entire life, even if the effects take decades to manifest. Even though Carson’s key points have been widely affirmed by the scientific community, the pace of progress has been remarkably — unacceptably — slow, in large part because, as one expert tells Lynne, “things are far more complicated chemically than they were in Carson’s time.” And thus, harder to regulate. Meanwhile, we are playing a dangerous game of catch-up. Just this year, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stated that any level of lead in a child’s bloodstream is dangerous and can cause brain damage, no matter how small the amount. Today, “more American school
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
children die of cancer than from any other disease” — yet another quote from Carson that remains tragically true today. For some, the signature image that shows how real the threat is to our environment is the disappearing snowcap atop Mt. Lynne Kilimanjaro. For me, reminds us it’s the image of milthat when lions of kids suffering it comes to from asthma caused the explosion by the explosion of of chemicals toxins in our environin our world, ment, kids who are tomorrow afraid to go out and is today.” play without bringing along their inhalers. But instead of a hair-on-fire response, our approach has been more like wait-and-see. By highlighting Carson’s work, Lynne reminds us that when it comes to the explosion of chemicals in our world, tomorrow is today. And what we do today will deeply affect our tomorrows — and the tomorrows of our children.
ARIANNA
Enter
POINTERS
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
AP PHOTO/BRENDAN SMIALOWSK (CLINTON); SHUTTERSTOCK (TOMATO)
TAP TO READ MORE ON EGYPT AND ITS GOLDEN MUMMIES
1
EGYPT GREETS HILLARY WITH TOMATOES, MONICA JABS
Hillary Clinton got a messy welcome in Egypt when locals pelted her motorcade with tomatoes and shoes during her first visit to the country since the election of Islamist President Mohamed Mursi. Protestors chanted anti-Islamist slogans, accusing the U.S. of meddling in the election. They also threw in some “Monica, Monica” chants. “I want to be clear that the United States is not in the business, in Egypt, of choosing winners and losers, even if we could, which of course we cannot,” Clinton said at the U.S. consulate in Alexandria.
Enter
2
FROM TOP: AP PHOTO/DAVID MELVIN; AP PHOTO/JAE C. HONG; AP PHOTOS/ALEX BRANDON
3
4
POINTERS
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
WESTBORO BAPTIST CHURCH MARKS SAGE STALLONE’S DEATH
One hateful group is flouting Sylvester Stallone’s request for privacy following the sudden death of his 36-year-old son, Sage. The Westboro Baptist Church announced plans to picket the young actor’s funeral because of his “adulterous dad.” Sylvester fathered Sage while married to his first wife, Sasha Czack. Margie Phelps, daughter of Westboro leader Fred Phelps, tweeted, “Thricemarried rebel taught his son to mock God. #picketfuneral.”
DO AS I SAY, NOT AS I DO
House Democrats are mocking Republicans for voting to repeal the Affordable Care Act in a new video that shows Republicans such as GOP budget mastermind Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) saying that their votes had nothing to do with protecting their own health care benefits (the new law requires them to get on exchanges to get a health plan along with other average Americans). “House Republicans refuse to admit they voted to give themselves taxpayer funded lifetime guaranteed health care instead of having the same health care as their constituents,” said Jesse Ferguson, spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
OBAMA KISSES UP AFTER GETTING BOOED
President Obama played coy when the Kiss Cam settled on him and Michelle during the basketball game between the U.S. and Brazil men’s Olympic teams in Washington, D.C.— and voters weren’t happy. Boos filled the Verizon Center after the president “smiled,” but “didn’t kiss” his wife, according to White House pool reports. The Obamas got a second chance to smooch during the fourth quarter, and this time they made the popular decision, which was captured and tweeted by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “Four more years!” the crowd cheered.
Enter
5
POINTERS
SUMMER WEATHER SETS ANOTHER BAD RECORD
The growing drought in the U.S. covers more land than any drought in more than 50 years, according to a federal report released Monday. More than half of the continental U.S., from the Midwest to the West, is now in some stage of drought, thanks to the tenth-driest June on record. That’s not the worst of it: the past 12 months are the hottest on record, according to a report released last week.
BILLY RAY CYRUS TWEETS BLOODY PHOTO OF SON
6
FROM TOP: AP PHOTO/SETH PERLMAN; BILLY RAY CYRUS TWITTER
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
Braison Cyrus, Miley’s 18-year-old brother, got his tonsils out, and his proud dad was there to document the procedure. Billy Ray posted a photo on Twitter of a bloody Braison hooked up to machines and holding a bucket of his own blood. “Thanking God and all the fine doctors nurses and staff at Providence Saint Joseph hospital. Been a wild 24 hours but bringing my son home,” he wrote.
THAT’S VIRAL THE WORLD’S HEAVIEST WOMAN IS LOSING WEIGHT WITH MARATHON SEX
A selection of the week’s most talked-about stories. HEADLINES TO VIEW FULL STORIES
PHOTOGRAPHER SEEKS MYSTERY NEWLY-WED COUPLE
DAILY SHOW AND COLBERT REPORT HIT BY VIACOM AND DIRECTV DISPUTE
POLITICIANS WHO BEAR A STRIKING RESEMBLANCE TO DISNEY CHARACTERS
DANIEL TOSH APOLOGIZES FOR RAPE JOKE
Enter
MOVING IMAGE
Gone in the Gulf Off the coast of Louisiana, Island de Jean Charles — a main setting of Beasts of the Southern Wild— is disappearing into the Gulf of Mexico. Levees built in the 1960s along the Mississippi River disrupt the marshland and allow the Gulf’s salt water to eat away at its shores. The island is one-fourth the size it was when its oldest residents were children, and recent threats such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill continue to expedite erosion. PHOTOGRAPHS BY STACY KRANITZ
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
Enter
In 2008, Hurricane Ike severely damaged the home Lonnie Dardar built for his family. At his request, his family worked tirelessly to clean the house so he could return there to live out the rest of his days after the storm.
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
Enter
A fleet of abandoned shrimp boats wades lifelessly near one of the docks on Island de Jean Charles. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
Enter
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
The island, much like the local wetlands, is sinking into the surrounding marsh at an alarming rate. Despite its gradual submergence, many still call it home.
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
Enter
Nicole Dardar watches as her son plays with a neighbor in an inflatable pool outside their home. Dardar’s family left their home on the island in 2011. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
Enter
Xavier Chaisson hangs upside down in the home his family built during the 1970s. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
Enter
A man named “T-Scott” holds two birds he and his friends hunted to eat at a barbecue on the island. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
Enter
Thousands of dead fish line the shoulder of Island Road as the tide recedes. The road spans three miles and disappears underwater during tropical storms. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
Enter
Stephanie Chaisson holds her daughter, Madison, on their first Mother’s Day together in front of her childhood home on the island. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
Enter
Kiersten Guidry eats boiled crawfish in the backyard of her family’s home.
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
Enter
Travis Dardar and his wife, Nicole, abandoned their home on the island in 2011. “When I was a kid, they had trees all over ... if you look at the trees now, most of them are dead,” he says. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
Enter
T-Scott shows off a tattoo on his back that reads “Native Pride.” Approximately 20,000 Native Americans live along Louisiana’s coast.
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
DATA
Enter
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
Recession or Not, College Still Pays Current unemployment levels and anecdotal tales of jobless Ivy League graduates leave some wondering whether it’s worth taking on a pile of student debt to secure a college education. Some young Americans choose to skip college, but according
Percent College Grads
Percent Unemployed
to the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, those without at least four years of college still face higher unemployment rates and earn dramatically less than college graduates — as they also did a decade ago. — AJ Barbosa
Percent College Grads: Relative to National Average (1996)
Unemployment Rate: Relative to National Average
TAP FOR DETAILED VIEW
Source: 2006-2010 American Community Survey (ACS) 5-Year Estimates. This map is based on the most recently available county data and only captures the beginning portion of the current recession.
Enter
Q&A
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
Robinson, a former GLAAD leader who directs ColorOfChange.
Rashad Robinson Brings His Whole Self to the Room PHOTOGRAPH BY AXEL DUPEUX
Enter
M
Q&A
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
OST OF RASHAD ROBINSON’S life has been dedicated to politics and activism. As a toddler he joined his parents on picket lines. At 16 he had his own political talk show on public access television. By his mid-20s he was a leader at Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). Now, at 33, he’s the executive director of ColorOfChange, the spunky civil rights organization that has pressured major corporations, including Pepsi and Wal-Mart, to pull out of the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). In the wake of the Trayvon Martin killing, the group has taken on the ALEC-supported Stand Your Ground laws. Robinson is black and gay and doesn’t divide his loyalties. —Trymaine Lee
Well before the Trayvon Martin killing, ColorOfChange launched a campaign against ALEC. But his killing brought attention to Stand Your Ground laws, many of which ALEC had either engineered or supported, which give wide discretion in the use of deadly force. How did this affect the original strategy? Many of the folks that had a lot of passion around Trayvon Martin were able to see themselves as part of the ALEC campaign. It was able to give them something tangible to kind of move from after they had been to three or four rallies and they said, “What do we want to do to make a difference on the issues that impact our community?” You and your organization have become heroes to some liberals, who see you as a David taking on these Goliaths. Do you see it that way? There isn’t
Enter
Q&A
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
one evil empire but I do think that what we’re trying to push back against is the institutions that support the idea that you have to have money or power to have a voice in this democracy. And what we believe in is that by developing smart strategic campaigns we can raise the voices of everyday people. We can make their voices heard and just as loudly and in just as powerful ways as those that have millions or billions of dollars. You’ve talked about your family’s support for your activism, which has included your work with GLAAD. What was it like coming out to your parents? I took a while. I guess I say it’s a while because I worked at GLAAD and you hear kids coming out at 13 or 14 and you’re like “Whoa, like, that’s impressive.” I was not there. I came out when I was 22, 23, somewhere around that. I think that my parents had come to the realization at that point. I didn’t know what my support would look like. I also knew that it wasn’t going to be easy, and I’m black and now I’m going to be gay. Do you see yourself as a black man first or a gay man first? I wouldn’t even know how to answer the question. I don’t see myself more as my mother’s son first or my father’s
son first. I’m a whole person and I’m all of these things and I don’t think you can sort of take a piece out without affecting the whole. So that’s a silly question? I do think that there’s a way in which folks want to compartmentalize because it’s easier. It’s easier to say that this is this piece of me and this is this piece of me. Part of being a good leader is bringing your whole self to the room.
Robinson in New York City.
Voices
HOWARD FINEMAN
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES
The Book of Ed ED CONARD’S BOOK Unintended Consequences is on The New York Times best-seller list, but it was hard to find at my neighborhood Washington bookstore, Politics and Prose, deep in what you could call Obama Country. I stopped by the other day to look for it. A salesperson checked on her computer, and we eventually located a single copy on a bottom shelf towards the back of the store. “Our
best sellers don’t always match The Times’,” she said. In this case, that’s too bad. Mitt Romney is running his campaign so close to the vest as to be nearly invisible. The theory is to disappear, leaving President Obama to run against himself and his record on the economy. So if you want to know where Romney is coming from, as we said back in the day, you need to read not only the Book of Mormon and clips from The Boston Globe and his tax returns (OK, you can
Howard Fineman is editorial director of the Huffington Post Media Group
Voices read just one of those), you also need to read Conard’s technical but fervent paean to the folks whom the soon-to-be Republican presidential nominee reverently calls “the job creators.” That is: America’s wealthiest and yearning-to-be-wealthiest. The gist of the Book of Ed is that the lower-income tax era that began 32 years ago with Ronald Reagan, and that has continued through the Obama Years, is a great thing. It nurtures the richest (and those who want to be the richest), which is also a good thing because they take the risks that spur jobcreating innovation as they strive for the Big Score. Income inequality is not only inevitable, it is a blessing, he writes, in that we need these fat geese because their eggs are the most efficient way to hatch economic growth. The “unintended consequences” in the title, Conard explained to me, are the unemployment and stagnation created by government policies that ignore the fundamental physics of risk and striving. “The economy is what it is,” he says. The fact that this theory bestows social utility on the accumulation of wealth in general and the careers of investment bank-
HOWARD FINEMAN
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
ers and take-over artists doesn’t make it wrong, though it does make it convenient for the likes of Conard—and Romney—and the partners of, say, Bain Capital. Conard is not a weird guy with a soup-stained Adam Smith tie at a Grover Norquist rally. Conard is a presentable Manhattanite with an MBA from Harvard, which Mitt also attended. He and Romney are good friends—so much so that Conard gave a million dollars to Income an independent PAC inequality supporting the foris not only mer Massachusetts inevitable, it governor. Conard is a is a blessing, former managing dihe writes.” rector of Bain Capital. Romney hired him. Romney read a full draft of the book and made suggestions, including ways to cut it from 140,000 words to 80,000. “We’ve talked about a lot of the ideas in the book over the years,” Conard told me. “He told me I’m the new Ayn Rand.” Actually, Conard isn’t. Unlike Randian purists, he worries about federal deficits and thinks we need an across-the-board tax hike to ameliorate them. “We’ve got spending at 25 percent of GDP and tax revenues at 16 percent,” he
Voices said. “We are not going to get that first number down fast enough.” It’s a view diametrically opposed to the one his friend and former boss espouses, at least these days. We’ll see what happens if and when he becomes president. Conard is not a Ron Paul-style no-government man. He favors temporary limits on immigration to protect American jobs as we transition further into a “service economy.” He thinks that banks should be taxed for the privilege of being backstopped by the federal government, as they were in 2008. But he and Romney do share a profound faith in what they see as a hardheaded, realistic and—to them, inspiring—view of how the world works. By Conard’s calculations every dollar of successful risk-bearing investment produces at least five dollars in new wealth. “I used that number in the book because that is the generally accepted minimum,” he said, “but I the real number is closer to 20 dollars.” Our superior culture of risk, he says, is fostered by comparatively low personal taxes and light government regulation. And that, in turn, has yielded growth rates way above those of Europe and
HOWARD FINEMAN
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
Japan. “The Internet is the key and they have produced NOTHING—no Facebook, Google, Amazon, YouTube, Apple, Microsoft— NOTHING.” Bottom line: leave the market alone. Romney has given the book a cautious endorsement. “Ed has some interesting ideas,” he said. “I don’t agree with all of them, but give him a listen. He is a very capable thinker.” It is easy to deride Conard’s thoughts as In search nothing more than a of gold, we’ve redrawing of the Laffer bitterly divided curve from the dawn ourselves into of the Reagan Adminred and blue.” istration in 1981. In the intervening years we have had growth, but also are leaving our posterity with crushing debt. And we have shredded our sense of common purpose as a country. In search of gold, we’ve bitterly divided ourselves into red and blue. The 2012 campaign is and will highlight that chasm. But it would be a mistake for Democrats to underestimate the appeal of the Book of Ed, and of Romney’s preaching its core message at a time of economic stagnation. Greed may not be good, but sometimes it sells.
Voices
BOBBY FONG
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
Don’t Miss the College Forest for the Career Trees NOW THAT THE members of the college graduating class of 2016 are out of high school, what can we say to them as they anxiously await the next step in their educational journey? As I told a group of students at an orientation this past June: Although most of you want to master the skills that will enable you to get jobs, career preparation is only one piece of the college experience. A college may not always be
ILLUSTRATION BY MATTHEW HOLLISTER
able to anticipate what technical skills students will need ten years from now. Thirty percent of you will one day work in jobs that don’t yet exist. Studies show that nationally, 60 percent of students graduate in majors different from those in which they began. Your generation will change careers seven times over a lifetime. College, particularly a liberal arts college, seeks to cultivate
Bobby Fong is president of Ursinus College
Voices qualities of intellect and character that are essential not only for a satisfying career and useful life, but to make judgments and choices in the face of uncertainty and complexity. Learning judgment demands taking an active role in your education, and not being a passive receptacle for information transmission. College can’t serve you well without challenging you to integrate information and skills in ways you haven’t before, and to apply the results to problems that may not yield clear and simple answers. We do know that you will need to understand and assess competing ideas. You might need to revise long-held views and oppose conventional wisdom when given good reasons to do so. Consequently, you will need courage to re-examine cherished beliefs, a commitment to work with others with whom you disagree, persistence and discipline to work through difficult problems, and intellectual curiosity so that judgment is a satisfying pursuit. The goal of a classical liberal arts education was to prepare students to live in a community as a suitably prepared responsible citi-
BOBBY FONG
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
zen. In our time, you will need to be citizens not only of a local community, state, or nation, but also citizens of the world. You will need to negotiate the intricacies of community-building with classmates, roommates, faculty, and staff, in the classroom, on the athletic field, and in the residence hall, dining commons, labs, and clubs. You will likely find opportunities to practice cooperation, to engage in civil discourse, to disagree without being disagreeable, and to A college weigh the responsibil- may not ities of being a memalways be able ber of a community to anticipate against the dictates of what technical individual conscience. skills students Over the next four will need years you will probaten years bly change at a greatfrom now.� er rate than any comparable period in the rest of your lives, as you develop, not only your intellectual capacity, but also your character, your aesthetic sensibilities, your moral compasses, and your relations to the community of humankind. The experience you are about to embark on can be costly, as media continues to remind us. But regardless of price, you must
JAAFAR ASHTIYEH/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Voices
avoid the danger of wasting your education. I quote another college president, John B. Watson (1869-1942), the first president of Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical and Normal College, predecessor to the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, at a time when African Americans were often shunted to vocational studies rather than encouraged to pursue the liberal arts. President Watson said, “The first aim of a good college is not to teach books, but the meaning and purpose of life. Hard study
BOBBY FONG
and the learning of books are only a means to this end. We develop power and courage and determination and we go out to achieve Truth, Wisdom and Justice. If we do not come to this, the cost of schooling is wasted.” Please don’t waste the cost of your schooling. Developing mastery over a body of knowledge will enable you to make a living after graduation. But as important as knowledge is, if that is all you expect from college, you will have missed the larger ends of your education. Learn how to make a life of purpose, wherein your personal flourishing is intertwined with the welfare of others.
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
Some skills and habits will always have value.
BONNIE BRODNICK
Voices
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
I Come With Baggage
T
HE OTHER DAY I got into my car and threw my pocketbook onto the empty passenger seat. The “Fasten Your Seatbelt” alarm sounded and I was momentarily scared out of my wits. Was I living one of those YouTube clips that warn you to always look in the backseat before pulling away? I was either a daydreamer or someone with acute intuition (and paranoia) who sensed that there might be someone crouching in there. Thinking fast, I grabbed the plastic bag of quarters we keep in the door compartment and stuffed it under my seat. I was being cautious because ... well, you never know. ILLUSTRATION BY HANNA MELIN
Bonni Brodnick is the author of Pound Ridge Past: Remembrances of Our Townsfolk and is a columnist for the Bedford/ Pound Ridge Record-Review
Voices In full disclosure, here is the pathetic reality about the stillin-the-parking lot pandemonium taking place in my car: my pocketbook was so heavy that the seat registered it as a human being who needed to have their seatbelt fastened before I pulled away. The blaring questions are, Why do I carry such a huge pocketbook; and why does it weigh nearly as much as a third grader? I reflected back to grammar school when I carried a small white basket-shaped pocketbook that hinged close and was lined with blue gingham. There was a small bouquet of plastic minidaffodils stapled on top, hardly adding a fraction of an ounce. In this little treasure box was what every healthy seven-yearold would need at any given moment: a hankie, a roll of fruit Lifesavers and a plastic comb. Life was simple. Life was good. Where had I gone wrong? When I got to my destination, I poured it all out — figuratively and literally. Most assuredly, there was nothing in my pocketbook that I couldn’t live without. Except for three pairs of reading glasses in soft cases, a few (hundred) lip glosses in
BONNIE BRODNICK
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
shades that could carry me from summer through winter palettes, my iPhone, my wallet and a few scroungy reporter’s notebooks. There was no way I would throw away a pair of 3-D glasses. I might need them for the next eclipse or meteor shower. I snapped open a hard, black glass case. Wait, why is it empty? (And while we’re here, And has anyone seen my why do I sunglasses?) have a And why do I have Christmas a Christmas card card that that needs to be needs to mailed to France and be mailed it’s now July? Being to France that European postal services are often and it’s slower than ours, if now July?” I mail the card now, it will arrive by next Christmas (which will make me look like I’m completely organized with getting my holiday cards out on time). By putting all the junk in my pocketbook on the table, I could see that it would do me well to chuck the large container contact lens solution, the three hairbrushes (one is enough), hand
Voices creams from hotels, shampoo and conditioner both in the 32 fluid ounce size (Note to self: save space and look for a product that is a shampoo-slash-conditioner), a dried mascara and a half-eaten granola bar covered in a rare genus of bottom-of-thepocketbook mung. Two Moleskine journals, an old Vanity Fair, a full bottle of water, a copy of I am Charlotte Simmons (by Tom Wolfe), Me Talk Pretty One Day (by David Sedaris), dancing shoes for Zumba, water shoes for kayaking, one gym sneaker, a handful of highlighters in red, pink, green, orange and yellow ... the list goes on. Those are just the small things. I’m not even going to mention the other dispensable accoutrements that were part of my haz-mat clean up. Are suitcase-like pocketbooks an over-indulgence? I decided to ask my sister, a minimalist artist. “I never wanted to be a bigpocketbook person, but I think I’ve turned into one,” she said. Toujours chic, my sister was carrying a honking, high designer, soft leather pocketbook that was large enough for a two-week family vacation. It turns out, though, that the pocketbook’s
BONNIE BRODNICK
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
bark was louder than its bite. “This thing weighs a ton,” she confided, “and nothing is even in it. In fact, the actual bag weighs far more than all of its contents.” My sister turned her fancyshmancy pocketbook upside down and out poured one lip gloss, a checkbook, a wallet, reading and sun glasses, a travel-size hand cream, Altoids and one pen. I was ashamed that I was carrying so much junk and Are decided it was time suitcase-like for reformation. pocketbooks See me walkan overing down the street indulgence? today and you will I decided to notice that my pockask my sister, etbook is small and a minimalist stylish. I don’t schlep around half as artist.” much as I used to and I hope to never again set off a seatbelt alarm because my heavy pocketbook tripped the sensors. In fact, in seeking to pack more sparingly, I am now going to make the bold move of calling my pocketbook a “purse.” There. I lost one syllable... I feel so much lighter.
Voices
QUOTED
“ I sincerely believe that Stewart and Colbert are doing an active GOOD for humanity. They must be heard.”
—HuffPost commenter Francois Bergeron
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
“I’ve been told this is not for women and this will ruin my body and that we should just go shopping. Women can do more.”
—Alanood Abdulla Faraj
to the AP on her teammate Khadija Mohammed competing on the United Arab Emirates’ Olympic weightlifting team
I’ll confess that I quit Facebook because I began to dislike some of my family and friends. Don’t mean to be corny, but Facebook is definitely a look into someone’s soul and I didn’t like what I was seeing.
—HuffPost commenter wyattmatters
“ I’ve decided it’s time for me to let go of my mistress American Idol before she boils my rabbit.”
—Steven Tyler
PREVIOUS PAGE: BRAD BARKET/GETTY IMAGES FOR COMEDY CENTRAL (COLBERT AND STEWART); AP PHOTO/KAMRAN JEBREILI (FARAJ); MICHAEL BECKER / FOX (TYLER) THIS PAGE: PICTURE CONTACT BV / ALAMY (SOLDIERS); AP PHOTO/CLIFF OWEN (OBAMA); AP PHOTO/MARK HUMPHREY (PHELPS)
Voices
QUOTED
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
“ Always interesting that breastfeeding moms catch hell at every turn, but no one seems to care when practically naked people visit WalMart, the grocery store, theme parks, waterparks, and the like.”
—HuffPost commenter Angela Lemmons
“ We need to withdraw from all foreign countries that hate us and tend to our own needs. ” —HuffPost commenter JoeBlough
As I come to closure on my career, am I going to look back in 20 years and say, ‘What if?’ That’s something I don’t want.
—Michael Phelps
in an interview with Details
“ I think there is no doubt that I underestimated the degree to which in this town politics trumps problem-solving.”
—President Obama in an interview with CBS News
OLIVER MUNDAY
07.22.12 #06
FEATURES CHEMISTRY LESSONS GOING POSTAL GOLDEN MUMMIES OTHER DESERT CITIES
Cl
Chemistry Lessons
A
Living With Rachel Carson’s Legacy By Lynne Peeples
Illustrations by Ellen Weinstein
As you read this, a menagerie of chemical pollutants is coursing through your body. What you do and how you live doesn’t matter. You have inhaled them, you’ve eaten them, you’ve absorbed them through your skin. You’re doing it right now.
If you are an average American, your personal chemical inventory — embedded in your blood, your breath and your bones — will include an alphabet soup of phthalates, mercury, perfluorinated compounds, bisphenol A, and assorted chemical flame retardants. If you are a new mother, you are passing these chemicals to your child through your breast milk. If you are pregnant, you are delivering them through your umbilical cord. These inescapable realities of modern life — realities that have vexed environmental advocates
and worried scientists for years — are not new. They were all foreseen, with sometimes chilling accuracy, 50 years ago this summer, when an unassuming marine biologist from Springdale, Pa., named Rachel Carson began publishing a series of articles in The New Yorker. Carson’s essays, which accused the chemical industry of calculated deception and American regulators of wanton disregard for the proliferation of pesticides and other chemical pollutants released into the environment, would ultimately be published as the book Silent Spring — considered by many to be the clarion call of the modern environmental movement.
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
CHEMISTRY LESSONS
“Maybe we didn’t heed a warning. Can we really afford to wait another 50 years?” —Erin Brockovich
Today, one study after another repeats the same cautions Carson raised decades ago, including how the tiniest chemical exposures can lead to long-term harm, especially to children. “We’ve discovered many things that Carson intuitively anticipated, and also some things that she would’ve never imagined,” says John Peterson Myers, CEO and chief scientist at Environmental Health Sciences. Optimists, Myers included, suggest that, by combining Carson’s prescient insights with modern advancements in biology and chemistry, we can preserve the health of future generations. In 2010, chronic diseases such as heart disease and cancer surpassed infectious diseases as the leading causes of death across the world, notes Bruce Lanphear, an environmental health expert
at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. “That can be seen as both troubling and an opportunity,” he says, suggesting that we have the potential to eliminate some of the exposures now implicated in chronic diseases. “The problem is that it is really the mega-corporations that are designing, or keeping us from developing, regulatory policies to protect people.” More than 80,000 chemicals currently used in the U.S. have never been fully tested for their potential to harm humans or the environment, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Maybe we didn’t heed a warning,” says environmental activist and lawyer Erin Brockovich. “Can we really afford to wait another 50 years?” To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Silent Spring, Huffington decided to review five of Rachel Carson’s warnings made decades ago to see how they measure up today.
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
CHEMISTRY LESSONS
01
“ Every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.”
A FEW YEARS before she was pregnant with her first child, Elsie, Hannah Pingree got tested for toxic chemicals as part of a demonstration study by public health groups. Although she has lived most of her life on an island 12 miles off the coast of Maine, her blood, hair and urine showed high levels of flame retardants, mercury and phthalates. “I was living nowhere near anything industrial,” says Pingree, former Speaker of the Maine House and now a consultant for “Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families,” a national
coalition working to reform toxic chemical regulation. “This was simply from interacting with the environment and in my home.” Pingree is now pregnant with her second child. As she knows, and as Carson suggested but had no way of proving at the time, exposures to toxic chemicals begin in the womb. Whatever exposures a mother encounters, so too does her future child. As Carson wrote in The New Yorker on June 30, 1962: toxic chemicals have “entered the environment of almost everyone — even of children as yet unborn.” Within the body of the story, was
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
CHEMISTRY LESSONS
an ad from the chemical giant Dupont Co. promoting its motto: “Better Things For Better Living … Through Chemistry.” “Back in mid-century, a lot of people thought that the placenta was a barrier to environmental chemicals,” says Tracey Woodruff, a reproductive health expert at the University of California, San Francisco. It was some 40 years after Silent Spring’s publication when scientists finally confirmed Carson’s hunch — finding nearly 300 different industrial chemicals in samples of umbilical cord blood. Pingree also knows, as did Carson, that a rapidly developing fetus or child is particularly vulnerable to the effects of those chemical exposures. Childhood cancer may be one tragic consequence. Carson pointed out that “more American school children die of cancer than from any other disease.” A statistic that holds true today. In many cases, however, the effects of early life exposures don’t appear for decades, and once they do, they’re almost impossible to trace back to their origins, Carson noted. “A child is not going to necessarily wake up with some
rash, but they may later have cancer at age 50,” says Pingree. She is less worried about her now 16-month-old’s “daily survival,” and more about the long-term effects of “things like pesticides and the plastic she’s chewing on.” Still, Myers, the chief scientist at Environmental Health Sciences, points to a “remarkable ray of hope.” “We’re learning that we actually may be able to prevent chronic diseases of adulthood by reducing exposures in the womb,” he says.
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
CHEMISTRY LESSONS
02
“ Once they were kept in containers marked with skull and crossbones.”
PINGREE DOES EVERYTHING she can to limit both her and Elsie’s chemical exposures. Like other parents, however, she finds the task frustrating. “It’s impossible for a parent to live their life trying to make the right decisions about chemicals. There are so many things we don’t know,” says Pingree. “We have this system that allows all of us to have these levels of consumer and industrial chemicals without any idea how they got in there.” Potentially toxic chemicals are pervasive yet generally invisible — from pajamas treated with
flame retardants to bisphenol-A leaching out of plastic bottles to pesticides lingering on fruits. Parents faced much the same predicament 50 years ago. “Lulled by the soft sell and the hidden persuader,” wrote Carson, “the average citizen is seldom aware of the deadly materials with which he is surrounding himself.” Manufacturers are rarely required to disclose ingredients in their products, notes Woodruff. And when they do, there are often loopholes such as the requirement that a pesticide label need only include the names of “active” ingredients. “You can’t know it if you don’t see it,” she says.
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
CHEMISTRY LESSONS
Further, disclosures are irrelevant if no tests have been done to identify harmful effects. This is the case for tens of thousands of chemicals common in consumer products. Aside from substances designed to be ingested as food or drug, newly developed commercial chemicals are virtually unregulated in the U.S. — until and unless they are proven harmful. “The burden of proof in this country is on proving a chemical is dangerous rather than on the side of those who introduce the chemical to prove that it is safe,” says Eric Chivian, director of Harvard Medical School’s Center for Health and the Global Environment. Europe, he notes, has it the other way around. Carson expressed her own frustration with the U.S. government’s lack of chemical regulation.” If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials,” wrote Carson, “it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could
conceive of no such problem.” Of course, there are also those unintentional ingredients that find their way into products today without anyone’s knowledge. A study published in May suggested that peanut butter can be a source of trace amounts of flame retardants. “There are always little surprises that we’re finding,” says Woodruff.
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
CHEMISTRY LESSONS
03
“ The chemical war is never won, and all life is caught in its violent crossfire.”
THOUGH WOMEN’S NYLONS were the subject of the 1962 DuPont ad that adorned Carson’s New Yorker article, the company also had a big hand in the pesticide business. In fact, DuPont was a major manufacturer of the prime antagonist in Silent Spring: DDT. Worry over the widespread aerial spraying of the pesticide inspired Carson to pursue her book. “Not only forests and cultivated fields are sprayed, but towns and cities as well,” she wrote. “The legend that the herbicides are toxic only to plants and so pose no threat to animal life has been widely disseminated, but unfortu-
nately it is not true.” While DDT was banned in the U.S. a decade after the publication of her book, and subsequently banned for agricultural use worldwide, Carson’s concerns persist. DDT remains in limited use for the control of mosquito-borne diseases and replacement pesticides now pose their own risks. Environmental advocates fear widespread poisoning, as well as a continuing arms race with nature that they say humans are destined to lose. “Evidence of aerial spraying this year in California points to the pesticide treadmill that Carson had acknowledged 50 years ago,” says Paul Towers of the non-
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
CHEMISTRY LESSONS
profit Pesticide Action Network. Mosquito districts in the state are enlisting more toxic chemicals than they had in years past for the control of West Nile Virus due to concerns over pesticide resistance in mosquitoes. Insects that can withstand a spray are more likely to spawn the next generation of pests. And over time, this survival of the fittest can render useless whatever chemical concoction is employed. Meanwhile, industrial agriculture may soon transition to a genetically-modified corn resistant to two common pesticides, Roundup and 2,4-D, in response to growing resistance among weeds. The result, advocates fear, is the use of stronger doses of the herbicides. Roundup has been shown to disrupt human hormones; 2,4-D was a component of Agent Orange. Matt Liebman, of Iowa State University, foresees weeds evolving resistance to the new variety of corn within a few years. “Then we’ll be on same treadmill that we’ve been on,” he says. “Carson was not arguing for banning all pesticides,” notes
John Wargo of Yale University, who spent six months going through 117 boxes of Carson’s personal files. “She was simply arguing against the broad-scale prophylactic application that would lead to widespread contamination and exposure. Her arguments follow a train of logic and a narrative that would be extremely useful today.”
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
CHEMISTRY LESSONS
04
“ The contamination of our world is not alone a matter of mass spraying. Indeed, for most of us this is of less importance than the innumerable small-scale exposures to which we are subjected day by day, year after year.”
EARLIER THIS YEAR, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared that there is no safe level of lead in the bloodstreams of children. Even in tiny amounts, exposures to the heavy metal via dust and flakes of lead paint can damage a child’s developing brain. Scientists today are also heard stating similarly grim warnings about a growing number of environmental toxins, found in a lengthening list of places.
“People took Carson somewhat seriously in the case of DDT, but she was also talking in very broad terms about chemicals,” says Pingree. Whether from eating a piece of salmon or breathing in secondhand smoke or chemicals sprayed on a lawn, each of our everyday exposures may be tiny, though not necessarily insignificant. “One part in a million sounds like a very small amount — and so it is,” wrote Carson, referencing a likely amount of pesticide residue on food. “But such substances are so potent that a min-
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
CHEMISTRY LESSONS
ute quantity can bring about vast changes in the body.” Lanphear of Simon Frasier University notes that we are now worrying about even smaller exposures than Carson was suggesting. “Parts per billion,” he says. Recent research has also questioned the popular notion that “the dose makes the poison.” Minuscule concentrations of chemicals that disrupt hormones — common in industrial pollution, pesticides and plastics — may have potent effects, sometimes even when large doses of the same chemical appear harmless. Some chemicals also can accumulate in the environment and the human body, where they can combine and interact with other chemicals. “This is why there is no ‘safe’ dose of a carcinogen,” Carson wrote. Carson pointed out one combination of chemicals that had already raised red flags among scientists: malathion mixed with other organophosphate pesticides. Administered together, she wrote, “a massive poisoning results — up to 50 times as severe as would be predicted on the basis of adding together the toxicities of the two.”
Organophosphates, including malathion, are still in use today. “Things are far more complicated chemically than they were in Carson’s time,” says Wargo. “There are so many uses of many more active ingredients, inert ingredients and differently formulated products that it’s become difficult for governments to identify the risks.” “We are now living in a world probably beyond what Carson could have ever imagined, in terms of the number of chemicals kids interact with every day,” says Pingree. “And we’re having all the impacts that she worried about.”
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
CHEMISTRY LESSONS
05
“ These injuries to the genetic material are of a kind that may lead to disease in the individual exposed or they may make their effects felt in future generations.”
IN OTHER WORDS, if you happen to be obese or infertile, facing cancer or diabetes or any number of other diseases, it might well have something to do with your father’s exposure to a plastic toy in 1955, or even his father’s exposure to his comrades’ chemicallaced second-hand smoke after he successfully stormed the beach at Normandy. Your own children and grandchildren may even pay the price of the ancestral exposures. Carson hinted at this possible new spin on nature versus nurture
50 years ago, and scientists are only now confirming her suspicions. “That was a very insightful comment for the time,” says Michael Skinner, a leading expert in an emerging field called epigenetics at Washington State University. “It came long before we had any data, before anything was appreciated about this.” Studies published over the last couple of months have bolstered the notion that toxic chemicals in our ancestors’ environment could help explain cases of a variety of diseases and cognitive problems that we and our children suffer
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
CHEMISTRY LESSONS
today — even without exposure to the contaminants ourselves. “Many behavioral diseases like autism run in families but do not follow normal genetic patterns,” says Skinner. “Our findings really fit the bill.” Environmental insults don’t necessarily have to alter our genetic code to cause lasting trouble, Skinner and other scientists have discovered. They also can disrupt the body’s ability to interpret these inherited instructions, and in certain cases, this so-called epigenetic defect is handed down and becomes more pronounced in subsequent generations. A young soldier exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam, for example, or a kid caught in a drift of DDT insect repellant on his 1950s cul-de-sac, might well pass on health consequences to their children, and then to their children’s children, and so on down the family line. Myers says that he used to “draw solace” from the belief that environmental contaminants such as plasticizers and flame retardants, now likely linked to condi-
tions such as diabetes and asthma, were not affecting any inheritable information. In other words, if you were to remove the exposure, most people thought that the next generation would be spared. “This casts a significant shadow of a doubt,” he said, “on that assumption.”
What Would a World Without Mail Look Like?
GOINGPOSTAL PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
BY DAVE JAMIESON
ILLUSTRATION BY OLIVER MUNDAY
THE POST OFFICE
in Syria, Va., is pretty easy to miss, but then so is the village of Syria itself. Lying in the eastern foothills of the Shenandoah mountains, about 90 miles from Washington, DC, Syria has just a few hundred residents, mostly natives and recent retirees. The village has no stop lights and one general store, the Syria Mercantile Company, which serves as a grocer, a hunting-and-fishing outfitter and a meeting ground for town gossip. ¶ Inside, near the cash register up front, a single employee of the U.S.Postal Service helms a tiny, wood-paneled office about the size of a generous walk-in closet.
Except for when it was briefly displaced after a pair of long-ago fires, the post office has occupied this same spot inside the general store since 1898, according to Jim Graves, the general store’s owner. In a village where many residents still don’t have internet access, the Syria post office — like so many post offices around the country — remains not only one of the few fixtures in town, but also a primary link to the outside world. So it came as a great shock when the postal service told residents of Syria last year that the small outpost would soon be clos-
ing, the victim of budget cuts emanating from Washington. “The rural area has no say-so,” says Graves, whose family has for generations run Syria Mercantile as well as Graves Mountain Lodge, a resort that’s the largest business in town. “When you get up there to D.C., those people up there have no concept of what’s in a rural area... They have no idea.” At all levels of government, budget cuts are hacking at core services that we’ve long took for granted, from fire departments to public transportation, and the postal service is no different. The agency has been struggling to get its budget in order and climb out of the red. It is currently facing a crisis, having
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES
GOINGPOSTAL
lost $3.2 billion in the last quarter and $3.3 billion in the quarter before that. At this pace, the agency could run out of money soon. Americans may soon witness the fraying of an institution that, despite the rise of the internet, they still badly need. Even for those of us who pay our bills online, the postal service is intertwined in our daily lives, delivering the products we buy, the magazines we read and, in many cases, the medications we rely on. And for those on the less fortunate side of the digital divide, a society without decent mail service is hard to contemplate. Mail
remains the bind between millions of Americans. For many of them, the letter carrier is the only civil servant they see all day. Even the founders recognized the role a postal service plays in a democracy, empowering Congress through the Constitution to create one. But now, having exhausted its borrowing abilities, the postal service could face bankruptcy. That’s how Syria found itself on a list of 3,700 post offices around the country targeted for closure, many of them in rural areas where the next post office could be many miles away. In Syria’s case, their new local post office would be about 10 miles south to Madison, the county seat — not so far as the crow flies, but
U.S. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe speaks to the media about budget troubles.
GOINGPOSTAL
a long way on back-country roads and switchbacks, especially with gas over $3 a gallon. “You get back in the hollows down here, some people would have to go 15 or 20 miles,” says Gene Pells, 75, a retiree in Syria. That means some residents might have to drive more than a half hour to mail a package, pick up some stamps or buy or redeem a money order. According to Pells, some locals who can’t read also come to the post office to get help paying their bills. “A lot of people here are pretty well in the dark,” says Pells. “We have no access to cell [service] where we are, and no access to high-speed internet until fairly recently.” The controversy exposed a few nerves in town. Plenty of residents didn’t take kindly to Washington putting an axe to their century-old office, where for decades families have been making a daily pilgrimage to retrieve their mail at the window, chatting at the informal parlor often assembled at the front of the store. More than 170 people signed a petition, organized by Pells and a few allies, protesting the closure. Under heavy opposition, the
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
$3.2 BILLION THE AMOUNT OF MONEY THAT THE USPS LOST IN Q2 2012
postal service ultimately scrapped its plan to shutter the Syria post office back late last year. But then earlier this year it announced it would be cutting the branch’s hours — from normal business hours to just two per day, right around lunchtime — as it would for thousands of others around the country. The lone full-time employee at the Syria office would probably be looking for new work after an unexpected early retirement. To save the postal service, lawmakers and the agency’s own leadership want to dramatically scale back its workforce and operations. Postal workers and some public advocates warn that such moves will send the agency off a cliff, destroying a service as old as the republic itself, not to mention hundreds of thousands of jobs. If that happens, the ramifications will be felt not just in small
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
GOINGPOSTAL
towns like Syria, but everywhere. And Americans who use the post office — which is to say all Americans — may have to adjust their expectations of government and what it does for them. “I have a 93-year-old father in rural, south Alabama,” says Ben Cooper, president of a business association called the Coalition for a 21st Century Postal Service. “He knows what time the letter carrier comes. If he doesn’t come at the right time, my father blames the government. Most people out there have a hard time getting their hands around trillions of dollars of debt and the [European Union] and all of this. But they see the government in simple things like the postal service. If it fails and it doesn’t do what’s expected of it, people see the fabric crumbling.”
MAIL IS LIKE OXYGEN
Patrick Donahoe, the U.S. postmaster general since 2010, has put himself in an unusual position for a civil servant. He’s essentially pleading with Congress to allow him to put his own agency through significant cuts. To right the agency, he says it’s necessary to pare back the work-
force by another 150,000, eliminate Saturday delivery and close postal facilities that are a drag on the agency’s bottom line. “Americans are smart people. They know we can’t have the same levels of service and the same size of an organization as we did in the past,” Donahoe says. “We don’t want to be a burden. We take no tax money. We want to run this like any other business.” Though overseen by the federal government, the postal service is an independent agency whose budget comes from postage fees, not taxpayer dollars. It’s a business that isn’t really a business — a corporation that must answer to Congress whenever its managers want to make structural changes. Because of this quasi-corporate, quasi-governmental standing, the postal service suffers from an inherent conflict, says Ron Bloom, the turnaround expert who helped lead the bailout of the auto industry. “You must make money, and you must carry out all these social functions at the same time,” Bloom says. Unlike other businesses, the postal service has a “universal service” obligation, meaning it must serve every American home and business — including the most far-flung. It must also charge the same price for a letter wheth-
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
AP PHOTO/J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE
GOINGPOSTAL
er it’s going from New York City to Greenwich, Conn., or from New York City to Anchorage, Ak. Those letters generate the bulk of the postal service’s budget. Highdensity areas subsidize low-density areas, and the short deliveries subsidize the long ones. The letter you mail across the city for 45 cents helps underwrite the letter you mail across the country for 45 cents. The internet has disrupted this system, however. Though the volume of package deliveries has shot up with the rise of e-commerce, it’s not enough to replace the huge losses from the decline in firstclass mail. Online billpay, in particular, has sucked business away from the agency, as has the worst
recession in decades. “It’s been unrelenting,” Donahoe says of the fall in first-class mail. “We’re off almost 30 percent over the last five years, from where it was at the end of 2006.” The postal service has another unique — and some would say more pressing — problem. In 2006, before the housing crash and the Great Recession, Congress passed a law requiring the agency to pay for the health care benefits of its retirees decades in advance, putting the agency on the hook for $5.5 billion a year in payments — a requirement hard to find elsewhere in either the private or public sector. The mandate may have seemed like prudent long-term planning during rosier economic times, but most observers agree that it’s handicapped the agency. Of the
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) and activists from the Postal Workers Union rally on Capitol Hill in June.
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
GOINGPOSTAL
$3.2 billion in losses last quarter, for instance, about $3.05 billion came from the pre-funding burden, not from operational failings. Ohio Democrat Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a staunch supporter of postal workers, has gone so far as to argue that small-government advocates in Congress created the mandate in order to deliberately cripple the agency and create an excuse to push for cuts. “That was a move that was designed to deal a death blow to the U.S. Postal Service,” Kucinich said at a press conference last month. Regardless of the mandate, the decline in mail volume is undeniable and will only get worse. Some supporters worry that the attempts to save the agency will end up killing it instead. “We need to do some major, thoughtful restructuring of the postal service so it can survive in the long run,” says Bloom, who, along with the investment bank Lazard, has been hired by the National Association of Letter Carriers union to devise a turnaround strategy for the agency. “But we don’t need to rush to judgment and slash and burn the very asset the post office has, which is its network. Then it will never recover.”
“ MAIL IS LIKE OXYGEN. IT’S THERE AND YOU COUNT ON IT, AND YOU DON’T GET WORRIED ABOUT IT UNTIL IT DISAPPEARS.” Donahoe’s critics say his proposed reforms will start the agency on a “death spiral”: If you cut the post office’s core services, customers begin looking at other options, leading inevitably to more financial hardship and further cuts down the line. A majority of Americans may be willing to forgo Saturday delivery and drive farther to buy stamps, but as the value and convenience diminish, so does the agency’s long-term viability, the thinking goes. “The post office is being pushed to the cliff, into the abyss,” Ralph Nader, the longtime consumer advocate and an acolyte of the death-spiral theory, told The Huffington Post last year. “The ultimate goal is shrinkage — continual shrinkage and private businesses pick up the cream.” Consider one likely service cut:
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
ANDREW HARRER/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
GOINGPOSTAL
the dropping of Saturday delivery. Seven in 10 Americans support the idea if the savings will help the agency survive, according to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll. But it will certainly make the postal service less convenient. The postal service has already proposed changing its standards for first class. Whereas a first-class letter is expected to arrive within one to three days, that benchmark would be changed to two to three days, eliminating overnight service. Cutting Saturday delivery would make it even slower. That could be inconvenient for many and even problematic for others, including those who receive prescription medications by mail. Tonda Rush, president of the National Newspaper Association, says her members worry that a diminished postal service won’t get community papers to subscribers before they’re yesterday’s news. Diminished service aside, a slimmed-down postal service could have a dramatic effect on the wider economy. As an American employer, the U.S. Postal Service ranks behind only the federal government and Walmart, with roughly 550,000 career employers on its payroll. (Postal service
employees often aren’t counted among the federal workforce since they aren’t paid by tax dollars.) That’s to say nothing of the wider mailing industry, which would include catalog printers, envelope manufacturers and direct-mail advertisers to name just a few — an estimated 8 million workers and more than $1 trillion in business annually. If the mail slowed, so could a good chunk of the economy. “We’re seeing an unraveling of the basis of the system,” says Rush. “Mail is like oxygen. It’s there and you count on it, and you don’t get worried about it until it disappears. There is going to be concern by a lot of people if this goes away. The national concern is going to be enormous.”
WAKE-UP CALL
Congress is expected to soon pass legislation that will overhaul the
Tonda Rush, president of the National Newspaper Association, speaks during a Senate hearing in 2011.
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
GOINGPOSTAL
postal service, likely leaving a much leaner agency in its place. While Donahoe has requested permission to cut 150,000 jobs, the Democratic-controlled Senate passed a bill in April that would free up money to phase out around 100,000 positions. It would also lighten the pre-funding burden, limit overnight delivery in some areas and allow the agency to start shipping wine and beer like private shipping companies already do. The plan that Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is pushing in the House is more severe. It would allow for the phasing out of more than 150,000 jobs, facilitate a quicker move to five-day delivery and bar no-layoff clauses in labor contracts. It would also establish a commission tasked with cutting costs if the agency wasn’t hitting its benchmarks. “What we have in the Senate is not perfect, but it’s a very good start,” says Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), one of the most vocal lawmakers on the issue. Carper, who logged three tours with the Navy in Vietnam during the war, says he partly sees the postal service through the lens of someone serving abroad. “The folks in Afghanistan, when I go visit them,
“ SOME PEOPLE MIGHT SAY IT’S A DEATH SPIRAL. WHAT I THINK IT IS IS A WAKE-UP CALL.” they get mail and they look for packages, but they don’t need the mail like we did. It’s just a reality. Some people might say it’s a death spiral. What I think it is is a wake-up call.” Whatever the final deal, the postal service will probably be much smaller than it used to be. In justifying the workforce cuts, Donahoe draws parallels with the auto and steel industries. “I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, and my parents worked for General Motors. I’ve seen two examples of not planning ahead and having companies and people suffering,” he says. “My view is this: A healthy postal service that employs 350,000 to 400,000 and that pays middle-class wages is a heck of a lot better than an unhealthy one that employs 500,000 or 600,000 and runs up debt and scares people out of business.” Even if the shrinkage is neces-
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
AP PHOTO/SUSAN WALSH
GOINGPOSTAL
sary, however, some question the timing. Public-sector job losses due to budget cuts have been a huge drag on the economic recovery, wiping out many of the gains made in the private sector. As the economist Dean Baker has pointed out,150,000 jobs cut from the postal service would equal several weeks’ worth of recent job growth in this economy. “Even if we say that’s a good thing to do, it would be much better if we could put that off,” Baker says. “I understand from an accounting standpoint they want [the workers] off the books as
soon as possible, but from an economic standpoint, it’s less money going into the economy.” Another issue is the level of pay earned by postal workers. The job has traditionally been seen as a gateway to the middle class, with wages that reflect that — a situation that causes resentment among some, in today’s low-pay economy. As with a lot of public-sector jobs, workers in the private sector tend to view postal employees as overpaid. Paradoxically, the postal service generally receives high marks from the public, with about three quarters of first-class mail customers offering a favorable review of the agency, comparable to FedEx and UPS, according to sur-
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) checks his watch while speaking to reporters in June.
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
GOINGPOSTAL
veys by the American Consumer Satisfaction Index. In other words, a lot of people who approve of postal workers’ performance resent the wages and benefits that underwrite and help ensure that performance. Tonya Detrick, a letter carrier from Hagerstown, Md., hears the gripes often, even from relatives. “The public perception is that we’re overpaid and the taxpayers are paying us,” says Detrick. “People in my family, who I’ve known my whole adult life, still think taxpayers [pay our salaries]. No, you don’t pay my check. The stamp you put on this letter pays my check. But the taxes you pay the federal government do not.” “I think that our wages are commensurate with where middle-class wages should be,” Detrick adds. “We need a middle class in this country.” The postal service was certainly the gateway to the middle class for Detrick, a 24-year veteran. She came to the agency looking for a job as soon as she got out of high school. She and her two siblings were being raised by her mother, who worked long hours for low pay as a retail clerk. They were poor, living together in public housing.
“ THERE’S A SANCTITY OF THE MAIL THAT’S IMPORTANT TO A LOT OF PEOPLE IN THIS COUNTRY. ” Detrick started out at a salary more than double the minimum wage at the time, she recalled. She had good health insurance and a retirement fund she could count on. She also loved the job. “I liked meeting people, being outside, feeling like I do a service for the public,” Detrick says. “I’m a people person and it’s a lovable job when you’re a people person... I’m very satisfied with the life that it’s given me.” Detrick now earns a salary in the mid-five figures after two decades with the postal service. She’s managed to raise three kids mostly on her own, with one son in college and another headed in the fall. Her well-paying job at the postal service, she says, has made it all possible. To further complicate the labor issue, postal jobs aren’t just middle-class jobs — they’re middle-class jobs that have gone disproportionately to veterans and
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
GOINGPOSTAL
AP PHOTO/MORRY GASH
African-Americans. The agency remains one of the largest employers of veterans in the nation, with about one in four carriers having served in the armed forces, according to the National Association of Letter Carriers. About one in five of the agency’s employees are African-American. Those two communities will bear the brunt of looming job cuts, says Phil Rubio, a former letter carrier who wrote a book, “There’s Always Work at the Post Office,” about African-Americans and the postal service. “It’s shrinking,” says Rubio. “The post office was one place where African-Americans could find jobs in the 60s and 70s and after that. I’m not African-American, but like them the post office was an avenue to the middle-class for me. We purchased our own home, we put our kids through college. Removing that I think is bad for the country in general. Historically, it has been such a rich institution.”
A PERSONAL AFFRONT
Postal unions have been pushing back against the most austere proposals. Unfortunately for them, today’s political atmosphere lends
itself to the kind of job cuts and concessions that could fundamentally alter the agency. GOP governors across the country have blamed public-sector unions for their budget woes. In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker (R) survived a recall election after championing legislation that stripped most of the state’s publicsector workers of their collective bargaining rights. Gov. John Kasich (R) shepherded similar legislation into law in Ohio, although it was eventually overturned by voters. Many House Republicans in Washington have shown sympathy for rolling back the bargaining rights of public-sector workers. “To destroy public unions, they would just as soon destroy the government agencies as well,”
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker celebrates at a party following his win in the state’s recall election.
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
GOINGPOSTAL
says Cliff Guffey, president of the American Postal Workers Union, which represents many of the workers who aren’t carriers. “There’s a sanctity of the mail that’s important to a lot of people in this country. But there are people who want to dismantle it.” When it comes to postal reform, Tad DeHaven, a budget analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, argues that lawmakers cater too much to the postal unions, as well as to their own constituents. Even self-avowed small-government types have a way of losing their convictions when it’s their own post offices on the chopping block. “It’s supposed to run like a business, but ultimately it answers to 535 people in Congress,” DeHaven says. “They make decisions on the basis of parochial concerns.” The unions seem to fear Rep. Darrell Issa the most. As chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Issa holds the key to postal reform on the House side. Unions say his attempt to bar no-layoff clauses in labor contracts as part of the postal reform bill would effectively gut their bargaining power. Issa has warned against a government bailout for the agen-
“ IT’S SUPPOSED TO RUN LIKE A BUSINESS, BUT ULTIMATELY IT ANSWERS TO 535 PEOPLE IN CONGRESS.” cy, arguing that taxpayers would be on the hook for billions due to labor contracts. “If USPS is prevented from cutting costs, 400,000 USPS jobs will be put in jeopardy and Americans could face an across the board postal rate hike of 25% — this could affect rates charged by companies like FedEx and UPS as well,” Issa said in a statement to The Huffington Post. “Eighty percent of USPS operating expenses are labor related. Continuing no-layoff protections that do not exist for the rest of the federal workforce will prevent USPS from returning to solvency and meeting its obligations to employees, retirees, and the American people.” Postal unions had hoped they’d find an ally in Issa. The California lawmaker had actually been one of the biggest beneficiaries of cam-
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES
GOINGPOSTAL
paign money from postal unions, receiving $41,000 during the 2010 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. But Issa cast postal employees and their unions as a primary obstacle to financial stability in an op-ed he wrote for the Washington Times in 2010. “[T]housands have less than a full day’s work, and some are even paid to sit in empty rooms,” he wrote of workers. That rhetoric has angered and baffled employees like Robert Williams, 62, of Washington, D.C. Williams is a 39-year postal veteran who serves as president of his union local, the National Association of Letter Carriers 142. The local has about 1,800 mem-
bers and covers around 90 percent of D.C.-area carriers, Williams says. Like Williams himself, the majority of the local’s members are African-American. On a recent morning, Williams gave a reporter a tour of the neighborhood he grew up in, Anacostia, a mostly African-American area of Washington with a high poverty rate. Perhaps aware of a lack of sympathy among the general public for postal employees, Williams instead spoke about how cuts to the postal service would impact poorer residents of neglected neighborhoods in cities like Washington. But when it comes to the antilabor sentiment, Williams can’t hide his frustration. He draws a line between the predicament facing postal unions and the rollback
Dozens of old mailboxes fill the parking lot outside the U.S. Post Office sorting center in San Francisco, Calif.
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
GOINGPOSTAL
of collective bargaining in Wisconsin. He seems genuinely hurt by it. “We negotiated a contract with the postal service,” he says. “That’s what our bargain is. And now someone wants to come and take away our bargain. “I take it as a personal affront,” he added. “I’m not going after people in the private sector. Make as much money as you want to make...I don’t think they understand what unions have done. I really don’t think they do. All the things they have now — five-day weeks, eight-hour workdays, overtime, child labor laws. That’s something organized labor fought for.” Yet even Williams recognizes the problem posed by the decline in first-class mail, which isn’t an abstraction when you handle letters for a living. “You can see it,” he says of the falling volume.
THE LAST MILE
If the postal service cuts back or disappears altogether, there are two big competitors seemingly waiting in the wings. As Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), who pushed a plan to privatize Amtrak service, said at a hearing last year: “The postal service is becoming a dinosaur and will soon be extinct...I usually
“ I THINK WE ARE REALLY IN DANGER OF LOSING WHAT I WOULD CALL IMPORTANT CITIZENSHIP VALUES.” use FedEx or UPS.” Those shipping giants may have a combined U.S. workforce comparable to that of the U.S. Postal Service, but they probably wouldn’t fill the void left by the agency. It’s doubtful that UPS and FedEx would be interested in delivering letters, postcards and bills. With web-centric people winnowing down their mail piles, the profits to be made on firstclass mail are dwindling. Besides, they don’t have the universal network that the postal service has in place, and it wouldn’t make sense for them to try to start going door to door making nickel-and-dime deliveries. Unlike the postal service, the private shipping companies have built networks designed for more specialized, high-dollar shipping, not first-class mail.
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
JB REED/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
GOINGPOSTAL
In fact, FedEx and UPS are actually dependent on the postal service, just like the rest of us. The agency does what’s called “lastmile delivery,” often carrying FedEx and UPS packages on the last leg of their trip. It simply isn’t profitable for the private companies to deliver all the way to remote homes, so they take advantage of the government’s universal service guarantee for many of their home deliveries. Package delivery is one promising area for the postal service, thanks to the rise of e-commerce, and private industry would probably be happy to pick up the business should the postal service disappear. But the private carriers would also suffer, at least initially, if the postal service starts to contract. Asked where UPS stands on postal reform, Kara Ross, a company spokeswoman, says, “We think it’s important to have a strong postal service. They contract to us, and we contract to them.” Maury Donahue, a spokeswoman for FedEx, echoes that sentiment, saying in an email that the company “support[s] efforts to ensure that the Postal Service is able to successfully manage its business. We believe that a healthy Postal Service, the largest
postal operator in the world, is important to America.” Private corporations, of course, have no social obligations to the public the way the postal service does. Lose the postal service and you lose a considerable public asset, and maybe something more, says Ellen Dannin, a professor at Penn State’s Dickinson School of Law who follows privatization trends. “If you are going to have one country, then you have to take actions that help keep you knitted together as a country,” says Dannin. “I think that we are really in danger of losing what I would call important citizenship values...We have a responsibility to one another to make [the postal service] function effectively.”
Neil Chin, right, and Cecil Farrell work at the FedEx Harlem River Yards facility in New York City.
GOLDEN MUMMIES
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE INDIANA JONES OF EGYPT? BY ANDREW BURMON
GOLDEN MUMMIES
PREVIOUS PAGE: MIKHAIL GALUSTOV/REDUX
ahi Hawass’ ego hasn’t suffered since protesters forced him out of his influential post as Egypt’s antiquities steward 18 months ago, shortly after Hosni Mubarak was toppled from the country’s presidency. “I am Egyptian antiquities,” he says. That confidence served him well when he controlled the pharaohs’ treasures on Mubarak’s behalf, steering Egypt’s economically critical Supreme Council of Antiquities and the billions it helped reap annually, primarily from tourism and international exhibitions. The man who calls himself Egypt’s Indiana Jones has fewer
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
friends these days, now that revolution and a corruption scandal have forced him from office. Protesters who picketed Hawass and his Indy-esque fedora in Tahrir Square shouted that he should “take it with him and go.” Though he was briefly restored to power last year, Hawass, 64, has yet to find much support among the Freedom and Justice Party of President-Elect Mohamed Morsi. He may yet be vindicated, however, if Morsi’s new government finds it can’t replace his golden touch. The stability of the fledgling democracy may even depend on it. Before Mubarak’s fall in February, 2011, Hawass had spent more than two decades helping Egypt promote its antiquities to a foreign audience. He is credited as the man behind the traveling King Tut exhibit, the discovery of the Valley of the Golden Mummies and a wide range of other projects during his nine years as Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities. He provided an agreeable face for the Western world. Hawass’ aggressive promotion often came on the heels of tragedy, in what appeared to be a deft strumming of public sentiment toward his homeland. In 1998, following the murder of 63 tourists in Luxor, he reopened the Sphinx to the public after its 10-year closure. From then on, he organized a near-constant parade of blockbuster
JOSEF POLLEROSS / ANZENBERGER/REDUX
Dr. Zahi Hawass watches an excavation team work at the Tombs of the Craftsmen in Cairo, Egypt. Hawass spent more than two decades promoting Egypt’s antiquities to Western culture.
museum shows around the world designed to advertise Egypt as both an idea and destination. In his absence, it remains unclear whether Egypt can make such economically crucial overtures to foreign tourists and whether the billions — and the goodwill — Hawass once brought in can ever come back without him. “He created by his publicity campaigns a new image of Egypt that mobilized millions of visitors,” says Dieter Arnold, head of the Metropolitan Museum’s Egypt Department in New York. “He cleaned up the sites, built tourist facilities and museums, orga-
nized exhibitions abroad and brought Egyptian antiquities into the center of worldwide attention.” For years, tourism had been the country’s largest economic sector. While the price of cotton fluctuated wildly and the number of ships passing through the Suez Canal plummeted after the global financial crisis, tourism proved resilient. In 2009, revenue dipped a slight 2% before thundering back in 2010 with more than 15% growth. Still, by the first month of last year, as protests consumed Cairo, it had become clear that tourism alone would not be enough to keep the economy
GOLDEN MUMMIES
healthy. As the protests spread, the economy sank. The Tourism Ministry announced that revenue dropped by a third to $8.8 billion in 2011, but industry observers say the damage has been much worse. In addition to months of violence and instability, Tourism Ministry officials believe a rise in antiwestern political posturing and extremist Islamic attitudes has contributed to leeriness among would-be visitors. Hawass’s ubiquity, and his gift for gab, bred resentment among his fellow Egyptians, but the money he delivered quieted critics. Some 14.5 million visitors arrived in Egypt in 2010, many to tour the country’s historical sites. The billions they spent were vital to shoring up the country’s foreign reserves, which helped provide for such basic needs as wheat imports. In essence, Hawass was putting bread on the table. Of course, that also involved painting a picture of Egypt that was tourist-friendly and glossed over some of the country’s brutal realities. Hawass’ Egypt was the pyramids and the pharoahs, not social, political and economic inequities on the streets of Cairo. Recruiting Western enthusiasts like assistants on his great dig, Hawass steered some of those same Westerners away from a deeper understanding of the tectonic shifts in Egyptian society that ultimately surfaced in Tahrir. He also was never focused only on branding Egypt — he was busy brand-
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
ing himself as well. He mandated that the King Tut exhibition sell copies of his fedora and planned to launch an eponymous clothing line marketing shirts that his catalogue claimed, “Recall the rugged experience of excavating the ancient tombs in Egypt.” Mubarak’s wife strongly supported Hawass, and he took the opportunity
“ HE WAS BUSY BRANDING HIMSELF AS WELL.” for financial gain. Hawass received $200,000 a year for serving as an Explorer-In-Residence for The National Geographic Society, which also helped arrange speaking engagements that earned him $15,000 apiece. In addition, he made an undisclosed sum from the sale of his books (each copy of “Secret Voyage: Love, Magic and Mysteries in the Realm of the Pharoah’s” sold for $4,400), as well as a reality TV show that he starred in, and his government salary. Though speculation about Hawass’s personal wealth became something of a sport among Egyptians frustrated by the Mubarak government’s lack of transparency, even those who saw him as the ultimate opportunist may be forced to accept him back into the fold if he can again funnel billions of
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
GOLDEN MUMMIES
THE WHITE HOUSE
(Left to right) Hawass, President Barack Obama, Senior Advisor David Axelrod and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel tour the Pyramids and Sphinx in 2009.
dollars into the public purse. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Hawass was reinstated as Minister,” says Nora Shalaby, an Egyptologist and political activist. If Hawass makes a comeback, it will be a tribute to his charismatic tenacity and to the willingness of the new government to compromise democratic ideals in order to secure the country’s economy. Hawass’s weakness may be that he is a remnant of the old regime, but, in some ways, this is also his strength. He is an accomplished autocrat with little interest in public opinion and a demonstrated passion for showmanship. While his return would
be politically unpopular, it might prove to be economically expedient. “I’ll never stop caring about or working with Egypt’s history,” Hawass says.
SUDDEN POPULISM
Three days into the Cairo riots, as fire tore through the National Museum, thieves broke into the newly opened gift shop, stole tchotchkes and knocked over displays. Outside, smoke was billowing out of Mubarak’s party headquarters and across the city onto CNN. Rumors were spreading on Twitter: Protesters were looting the museum. Protesters were policing the museum.
FROM TOP: MOISES SAMAN/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX; ROGER LEMOYNE/REDUX
Above: A protestor raises his fist in front of a burning vehicle in Tahrir Square during clashes with riot police in 2011. Below: Hundreds of anti-Mubarak demonstrators gathered to express their anger in Tahrir Square in 2011.
GOLDEN MUMMIES
Police were looting the museum. “Where is Zahi Hawass?” came close to becoming a Twitter meme before he resurfaced from his home in Giza the next afternoon. Hawass was so synonymous with the museum and so possessive of its image that his absence from the spotlight — if not the building itself — during a harrowing moment in the institution’s history marked a complete deviation from the blusterous norm. Hawass claimed curfews had confined him to his home and thanked protesters for protecting the museum, Hawass, speaking in perfunctory verbal jabs, downplayed the damage — “They destroyed two mummies and opened one case,” he told Al Jazeera — even as TV cameras revealed the mess inside the museum. In fact, a second team of burglars had rappelled into one of the Museum’s main halls through a skylight and broken numerous displays and artifacts. In an update to his personal blog the next day, Hawass continued to praise the Egyptian people for their vigilant defense of their heritage. “The Egyptian people are calling for freedom, not destruction,” wrote Hawass “When I left the museum on Saturday [January, 29], I was met outside by many Egyptians, who asked if the museum was safe and what they could do to help. The people were happy to see an Egyptian official leave his home and come
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
to Tahrir Square without fear; they loved that I came to the museum.” According to Shalaby, this sudden populism struck a false note. “Hawass had never hidden his dislike for Egyptians and found them unworthy of their own heritage,” says Shalaby. Though some Egyptologists believe Hawass was, as International As-
“ HAWASS HAD NEVER HIDDEN HIS DISLIKE FOR EGYPTIANS.” sociation of Egyptologists President James Allen puts it, “responsible for the Egyptian public’s renewed interest in and respect for their Pharaonic legacy,” many Egyptians resented him for what they describe as his shabby treatment of local people and domestic archeologists. Shalaby points out that the “countless concrete walls he built around towns and villages to separate the inhabitants from the antiquity sites” infuriated civilians even as his policy of announcing every major find soured the attitude of professional diggers. Whalid Saad, a museum guide, says that the protesters crowded around the museum knew, contrary to what Hawass was telling the media, that
FROM TOP: REUTERS/AMR ABDALLAH; STEVE CRISP / REUTERS
GOLDEN MUMMIES
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
antiquities had been broken. “We found pieces in the street and had to carry them back inside,” says Saad. “Some Egyptians helped us collect them.” According to Saad, museum guides had immediately concluded that several treasures were irreparably damaged. Later inquiries found that 78 pieces had been stolen. Some were never recovered. In the weeks after the break in, Hawass told reporters that he was working overtime to make sure Egypt’s relics would be safe as the revolution rolled on. He also endlessly lauded — often exaggerating — the heroism of the protesters who had protected their country’s priceless artifacts from harm. If Hawass was aware that Above: Egyptian Army special forces personnel stand there were two groups of guard beside a gold funerary mask of King Tankhamun at the Egyptian Museum in 2011. Below: Hawass thieves, he continued to feign stands with a artifact that was damaged during the raid. ignorance after touring the wreckage. Instead he mocked the foolishness of thieves who would petrators had been security guards focus on the gift shop he “was very and police officers. proud of,” the one operated by busiThe incident seemed to highlight nesses closely tied to his interests, one of Hawass’s weaknesses — the mentioning only in passing the brofuzzy distinction between his perken vitrines and statues inside. sonal and professional business relaUnfortunately for Hawass, a far tionships, giving his enemies within more complicated story was emergthe museum, government and on the ing. There was talk, later substanstreets ammunition to mount the astiated by the Egyptian Cultural sault that would eventually result in Heritage Organization, that the perhis removal from government.
GOLDEN MUMMIES
“All the devils came for me,” says Hawass. “The accusations brought against me were just the talk of people who had hated me for years.”
ALL THE SUNS MAN CAN REMEMBER
The entrance to the laser show consists of a gate in the wall separating the work sites at the foot of the Great Pyramids from Giza’s dirty, charmless downtown and the Pizza Hut across the street. The chairs inside sit arrayed just out of the reach of the Sphinx’s heavy stone paws: the rows and rows of foldable white chairs would be at home at a high school commencement. When the show begins at 7:30 pm, laser effects swirl around monuments buttressed by archeologists’ scaffolds as the Sphinx tells the story of ancient Egypt. “For five thousand years, I’ve seen all the suns man can remember in the sky,” says the Sphinx itself, voiced by Omar Sherif. “I saw the history of Egypt in its first glow as tomorrow I shall see the east burning with a new flame.” After ten years working on the Giza plateau, Hawass was appointed to the board of trustees of a governmentowned company behind this nightly spectacle. His connection to the company, Sound and Light, came to the fore in 2009, when he canceled the results of an auction for a contract to operate a gift shop in the National Museum. Even as Farid Atiya, the
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
businessman who won the auction, complained, Hawass planned a second round of bids. He also lobbied the government to simply give Sound and Light the contract - which the government eventually did. When the new gift shop opened the State Council, a the judicial body closed it. The council sided with Atiya, but Hawass wrote to the Prime Minister to tell him Sound and Light and AUC had already invested too much in the project for the store to be shuttered. That was in early January 2011. A month later, as Mubarak handed over control to a military council, Hawass remained as prominent as
“ ALL THE DEVILS CAME FOR ME.” ever, but the gift shop, empty since the break in, would soon prove troublesome again. By late February, a group of about 150 young Egyptian archeologists were opposing Hawass, publicly demanding opportunities in a field they claimed the toppled regime had ceded to foreigners. Hawass resigned on March 5, saying he was no longer capable of creating jobs and protecting sites from looters and attackers.
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
GOLDEN MUMMIES
ANA NANCE
A fort in the desert near Intercontinental Hotels’ Palace Port Ghalib Resort in Marsa Alam, Egypt.
“We need the money brought in by tourists who visit our sites and museums to fund these things and, at the moment, there are no tourists,” Hawass wrote in an email to several media outlets confirming his departure. Hawass’ resignation didn’t last long. The interim government persuaded him to take up the newly created post of Antiquities Minister. This is when, as Hawass describes it, “The thieves I stopped before the revolution targeted me.” Not long after he assumed his new post, Atiya filed suit against him again, this time citing a law under which civil servants who failed to implement court rul-
ings must be fired and jailed. Though a court decree allowed him to maintain his position and avoid imprisonment, Hawass lost the case and, with it, his bid to dissociate himself from Mubarak’s cabal of profiteers. He had been found guilty of corruption. If his relationship with the Egyptian people had been tenuous before, it was now downright hostile. In early July, the Egyptian government pushed out Hawass along with 11 other Ministers unpopular with protesters. Hawass had just returned from an international tour promoting post-revolutionary tourism and resigned his position as a National Geo-
ANA NANCE (3)
GOLDEN MUMMIES
graphic Explorer-In-Residence. “All the talk over the last six months was just by people who hate me,” says Hawass. “Not a single accusation was correct. People are jealous of success.” The gift shop was removed, becoming nothing more than a glass-walled exit. Hawass was not only replaced as Minister of Antiquities, but forced out of his unofficial post as Egypt’s pitchman. The timing was less than ideal. In the immediate aftermath of the Cairo riots, hundreds of thousands of tourists had rushed out of Egypt. They hadn’t come back. The New York Times reported in late February that the occupancy rates in Luxor dropped as low as 4 percent, down from an average of 61 percent, even as popular beach resort Sharm el Sheik’s rate dropped to eight from 70 percent. It didn’t help that, even as the government ran ads on TV stations around the world, politicians publicly mulled bans on alcohol, bikinis and non-halal food. Before it was disbanded, Parliament was a hotbed for such proposals, though they never made much progress. “The media reported on these negative declarations, but when these statements were rejected the media has not reported that,” Tourism Minister Mounir Fakhry Abder el Nour complained at a recent press conference. Democracy brought Islamic organizations previously known for the
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
Charred ruins remain at the building that once housed now-deposed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and the National Democratic Party in Cairo.
GOLDEN MUMMIES
violence that led to a tourist exodus in the late 1990s back into everyday life. The Building and Development Party, which won 13 seats in the 2011 lower parliament election as part of a coalition of conservative Salafist groups, is the political wing of the El Gama’a El Islamiyya movement. In 1997, it claimed responsibility for a terrorist attack on foreigners visiting Hatshepsut’s temple in Luxor that claimed the lives of 48 tourists.
A MESSY HOME
The tourist drought is just as evident outside Egypt’s urban core. Tribesmen and Bedouins have taken to squatting in the half-built resort complexes off the Halaieb We Shalafein highway, which runs down the Red Sea coast. Inside the all-inclusives that have remained open, Russian women in string bikinis and British couples have their pick of poolside lounge chairs. A creeping stillness is the only sign of revolution. Further north, in the Sinai, hotels have been less affected by the turmoil. Though occupancy rates remain low in Sharm el Sheik, the Russians and Chinese have helped refill the nightclubs and spas. The Sinai, after all, has been a hot spot for decades. “A tourist doesn’t care to participate in regime change,” says Minister Abder el Nour. “This is a society in crisis.” It is not uncommon for Englishspeaking students and unemployed
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
tourism workers to apologize, unsolicited, to foreigners about Cairo’s now impenetrable traffic, slowed by the roadblocks surrounding Tahrir, and for the shouting on the streets. Hospitality is not merely an industry for Egyptians and though they are proud of their revolution, they feel embarrassed inviting strangers into a messy home. “It is not always like this,” a friendly student named Alexander told Huffington, near a burka store in Cairo’s Islamic quarter. “We are not an angry people.” Though a student can’t personally deliver that message to the Western world, Zahi Hawass can. “I used to tell them that if they need money, our heritage was a way
“ PEOPLE ARE JEALOUS OF SUCCESS.” to get it,” says Hawass. “If Good Morning America needs five minutes about pyramids, it can make a billion dollars for this country.” There’s a genius to Hawass’s costuming. By never stepping out of character, he has avoided stepping into the muck of regional politics. Despite being unceremoniously fired, Hawass has emerged from the revolution with
ANA NANCE
GOLDEN MUMMIES
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
less baggage than those who have seized power. Morsi and the Supreme Council Of The Armed Forces, which ran Egypt’s interim government, dissolved parliament and recently abridged the list of executive powers, are both heavily scarred from battle. Neither receives positive coverage in the foreign press, Morsi because of the Muslim Brotherhood’s links to extremists and the SCAF because it is hardly outward-looking (it recently released an ad advising Egyptians not to talk to foreigners because they might be spies). Two snorklers step out into the waters near Intercontinental Hotels’ Palace Port Ghalib Resort in Marsa Alam. Ironies persist. The Los Angeles Times recently wrote that Morsi “symbolizes the Egypt in this new era, post revolution, long, bloody and still unresolved and we understand the past regime struggle between political Islam and focused on the concept of the one man a secular old guard” only days after show to keep the control of the coungiving “Cleopatra: The Exhibition,” a try within a few people,” says Karim touring exhibit featuring a film about Elemam, a spokesperson for the FJP’s Hawass’s work a glowing review. tourism committee and former tour It remains unclear, however, how operator. “But there are many talMorsi plans to mobilize Egypt’s byzented people with great capabilities in antine bureaucracy to stimulate tour- tourism and Egyptology. We have over ism. The Muslim Brotherhood’s of80 million Egyptians and our job is to ficial news site has already published bring the best talent onboard as well promises from Morsi indicating he as a succession plan to ensure thrustwants to invest $20 billion in the ing new talent and leaders to create a tourism industry. sustainable thriving Egypt.” “We are looking to institutionalize Elemam says the FJP envisions an
GOLDEN MUMMIES
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
AMEL PAIN/EPA/CORBIS
Hawass stands outside the tomb of priest Rudj-Ka shortly after it was discovered near the Giza Pyramids. Excavators discovered the tomb months before the uprising forced Hawass from his position as Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.
Egypt where small businesses as well as large hotels — many of which are foreign owned — will be able to compete for the tourist dollars and where visitors will engage with the culture instead of simply stopping off at major landmarks and resorts. Yet the new government may not be able to afford them if it doesn’t demonstrate an ability to pay back the billions in loans Egypt owes. Though many Egyptologists are reluctant to go on the record — access being necessary to their continued work — many complain privately that the sites around Egypt are now being mismanaged.
Whether or not its new democratic rulers call Hawass out of the bullpen will tell the world a great deal about the new Egypt. The regime will have to decide whether economic expediency warrants compromising the egalitarian ideals of Tahrir or if the ideals of the revolution trumps all. Zahi Hawass — excavator, salesman, Mubarak acolyte, disgrace — is unswayed and still confident of his place in this new order. “The magic of antiquities in Egypt will never fade,” he says. “Because I am clean and honest, I will return.”
OTHER DESERT CITIES
LIFE IN EGYPT’S EASTERN DESERT PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANA NANCE
OTHER DESERT CITIES
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
If you drive several hours south from the Egyptian resort-town of Marsa Alam, you’ll come to the lunar-like sands of Wadi el Gamal National Park. There you will find the Ababda, an ancient nomadic tribe. Among them is Abdel Hamid, whose family lives in a series of semi-permanent structures near an unmarked iron mine. Hamid, who tends to camels with his wife and six children, allowed Ana Nance to chronicle a day in his life.
Egypt’s Eastern Desert doesn’t have any roads, but years of commuting by its natives have created sporadic trails that give travelers a sense of direction.
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
OTHER DESERT CITIES
In Ababda tribes, the wife of a “praying man,” or head of the family, is typically not allowed to meet any men who visit the tribe.
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
OTHER DESERT CITIES
A family’s tent stands on their land in a quiet valley of the Eastern Desert. Two other tents are located nearby — each housing different members of the family.
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
OTHER DESERT CITIES
An Ababda tribeswoman and her daughter sit outside their tent. The spoon-type ring in the mother’s nose signifies her status as an elderly tribeswoman.
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
OTHER DESERT CITIES
An Ababda boy takes a break from herding his family’s camels on their land in the Eastern Desert.
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
OTHER DESERT CITIES
Two young Ababda girls stand proudly next to one of their camels. There are four young girls who handle the majority of their family’s chores.
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
OTHER DESERT CITIES
A young Ababda boy shows off his pet goat. The boy is the youngest member of his family.
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
OTHER DESERT CITIES
A group of Ababda children work as a team to make bread for dinner.
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
OTHER DESERT CITIES
The head of his family, an Ababda father makes coffee — a customary beverage to serve when greeting guests.
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
OTHER DESERT CITIES
The eldest sister of the family cooks flatbread on a sheet of metal.
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
PHOTO ESSAY TK
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
Above: After being prepared by a group of Ababda children, a piece of flatbread roasts on a sheet of metal. Below: Coffee brews in a traditional Ababda clay pot atop an open fire.
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
OTHER DESERT CITIES
An Ababda man gives camel rides and shows tourists traditional life in the desert at a nearby hotel.
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
OTHER DESERT CITIES
A young woman from another desert family holds her pet goat. Goats are common companions to Ababda children until the goat grows older and is exchanged for a younger one.
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
OTHER DESERT CITIES
A camel approaches a tree as the sun sets on the desert near Wadi Gimal, Egypt.
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
OTHER DESERT CITIES
An Ababda man stands outside of a desert fort that’s open to tourists. Travelers can spend an evening in the fort where they are treated to customary Ababda fare and hospitality.
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
OTHER DESERT CITIES
A group of Ababda tribesmen brews coffee for tourists near a resort in Marsa Alam, Egypt. Many tribesmen work in the tourism industry but still maintain a traditional life.
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
Exit
The Dark Side Of The Obama White House BY DAN FROOMKIN
BOOKS
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
Exit HE MOST conspicuous reaction in Washington to a series of astonishing national security revelations, many of which emerged in two new books, has come from prominent members of Congress demanding investigations into who leaked them. One member, California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, even complained of learning more from one of the books than she did in her top oversight post over the intelligence community. But anybody upset about finding things out this way should be angry at the people who didn’t tell them what they needed to know — not the ones who did. In Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, New York Times reporter David E. Sanger describes in quite extraordinary detail the Obama administration’s hitherto secret cyberwar campaign against Iran, its targeted drone strikes against Al Qaeda and affiliates, and any number of other covert ops, including of course the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. As he indicates in his subtitle, Sanger concludes that the biggest surprise of the Obama presidency
BOOKS
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
PREVIOUS PAGE: RON SACHS/POOL VIA BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
T
is just how aggressive he has been in his application of military power. But a case can be made that what’s even more surprising is Obama’s abuse of secrecy. Publicly an advocate of government transparency and oversight, Obama has nevertheless hidden the most controversial and unilateral aspects of his presidency — including new ways of waging acknowledged and unacknowledged wars — more thoroughly and effectively than anyone might have imagined. Sanger’s book, and longtime Newsweek reporter Daniel Klaidman’s new book, Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency, shine a bit of light into the darkness, which is good, in that they at least open up the possibility of a national conver-
Confront and Conceal by David E. Sanger, left, and Kill or Capture by Daniel Klaidman.
Exit sation around these issues. There’s a lot to talk about. What should the rules be for cyberwarfare? When is targeted killing OK? Can U.S. citizens be snuffed out by the state without any judicial due process? Does indefinite detention ever end? And another question: What ever happened to Obama the liberal civil libertarian? While the authors themselves don’t come off as particularly concerned, a close reading of the two books, especially taken together, paints a very disturbing picture of expanded and unrestrained power in an environment where politics trumps principle. Sanger, for instance, chronicles Obama’s shift on indefinite detention — from calling it a “loaded weapon” he’d never want in the hands of a Mitt Romney to signing an executive order establishing it as a power of the presidency. He also notes that “the expansion of drone and cyber technology” plus use of special forces “dramatically expanded the president’s ability to wage nonstop, low-level conflict, something just short of war, every day of the year.” Klaidman’s book, while less thorough than Sanger’s, describes the extraordinary, unilateral pro-
BOOKS
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
cess Obama follows before deciding to have someone killed, which he does frequently, while apparently remaining in denial about the ensuing civilian casualties. Klaidman also focuses on issues from which Sanger averts his eyes, such as the lack of a plausible “capture” policy to go along with the “kill” one, and the “perverse incentives” that created. The problem has been that the obvious thing to
A close reading of the two books, especially taken together, paints a very disturbing picture of expanded and unrestrained power in an environment where politics trumps principle.” do — bring a captured terror suspect to the U.S. to face criminal trial — is a nonstarter with Obama’s easily cowed political team. Indeed, Klaidman’s book vividly depicts a national security decision-making process that almost always culminates in Obama siding with the Republican-appeasing and often-wrong political “pragmatists” on his team. The few remaining aides willing to stand up for the
Exit
AP PHOTO/CHARLES DHARAPAK
restoration of the rule of law that Obama promised during the campaign are left in the dust. Sanger’s book, which occasionally reads like a notebook dump, ultimately offers a sympathetic portrait of Obama. “When confronted with a direct threat to American security, Obama has shown he is willing to act unilaterally — in a targeted, get-in-and-get-out fashion, that avoids, at all costs, the kind of messy ground wars and lengthy occupations that have drained America’s treasury and spirit for the past decades,” he writes. Sanger gives short shrift to the downsides of Obama’s fateful choices — because that’s not what his book is about. It’s more an authorized biography of the Obama White House, along the lines of Bob Woodward’s ultimately discredited Bush at War. Sanger does end up raising some profound questions here and there. For instance, Sanger asks: “What is the difference — legally and morally — between a sticky bomb the Israelis place on the side of an Iranian scientist’s car and a Hellfire missile the United States launches at a car in Yemen from thirty thousand feet
BOOKS
in the air? How is one an ‘assassination’ — condemned by the United States — and the other an ‘insurgent strike’? What is the difference between attacking a country’s weapon-making machinery through a laptop computer or through bunker-busters? What happens when other states catch up with American technology — some already have — and turn these weapons on targets inside the United States or American troops abroad, arguing that it was Washington that set the precedent for their use? These are all questions the Obama team discusses chiefly in classified briefings, not public debates.” Sadly, Sanger doesn’t really attempt to pursue answers to these and other tough questions. That
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
Former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel had a “quasiobsession” with drones, Klaidman writes.
Exit may be in part because his style of access journalism doesn’t allow for pushing your sources too hard, let alone calling bullshit on them. For instance, Sanger writes that White House counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan said in June 2011 that over the previous year there had not been a single collateral death from drone strikes (he later. (Brennan later amended that to say there was no “credible evidence” of such deaths.) Yet there is ample evidence of, as one example, a March 2011 CIA drone attack in Pakistan killing some 50 people, including tribal elders, who were gathered for a tribal conclave. In fact, the U.K.-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism has exhaustively documented the deaths of 479 to 821 Pakistani civilians, including 174 children, in CIA drone strikes since 2004. All Sanger can bring himself to say is: “It is hard to believe that no civilians have been killed, and Brennan’s argument may not be of much solace to anyone living upstairs or downstairs from the room where a terror suspect was standing when the Hellfire missile arrived.” No it wouldn’t be, because they’re all dead. And while the only rationale for
BOOKS
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
granting sources anonymity is so they will tell you the truth, Sanger, for instance, quotes an unnamed “senior intelligence officer” as saying: “Every time I’ve looked into a report of numerous civilian deaths, it tracked back to a Pakistani F-16 strike, or something similar.” Sanger also quotes Obama, who went off script in a Google hangout in early 2012 and said: “I want to make sure that people understand,
Klaidman’s book vividly depicts a national security decision-making process that almost always culminates in Obama siding with the Republican-appeasing and often-wrong political “pragmatists” on his team.” actually, drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties.” Klaidman, meanwhile, takes us inside the White House to witness the battle that former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel described as Tammany Hall vs. the Aspen Institute, i.e. political operatives vs. idealists. Klaidman writes that while Obama “struggled with national security dilemmas, sometimes to the
AP PHOTO/BILL HABER (HOLDER); AP PHOTO/CHARLES DHARAPAK (CRAIG)
Exit point of Hamlet-like indecision,” time and again Tammany Hall ultimately won the day — in a process that remains opaque and, frankly, quite disillusioning. Attorney General Eric Holder and former White House counsel Greg Craig are the de facto protagonists of Klaidman’s book — which would have been a far better read without the author’s studied neutrality — but they keep getting beaten down, marginalized and humiliated by Emanuel and Obama. On drone strikes, Klaidman lays out a slew of reasons why Obama should have been more ambivalent about their use, starting with the fact that the very first drone strike of his presidency claimed not a terrorist, but a prominent pro-government tribal elder and four members of his family (including two children). Why this didn’t dissuade Obama is left unclear. One possible reason is Emanuel’s enthusiasm. “For all the handwringing among the lawyers and civil libertarians, Obama’s chief of staff understood the political upside to a program that took out high-level terrorists,” Klaidman writes. In fact, Emanuel had a “quasi obsession” with the drone strikes and how they were going to
BOOKS
“help my guy” that left “even some CIA veterans uncomfortable.” Klaidman also outlines how a Emanuel total miscalculation that Sen. Lindsey Graham would get the GOP on board with closing Guantanamo so long as Obama sacrificed pretty much all of his campaign promises led to the administration’s abject collapse on the issue. Still, it’s too easy to blame Emanuel. It was Obama who chose him and took his advice so many times. Much like Ron Suskind wrote in 2011 in Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President, about Obama’s woeful economic team, the administration’s lack of boldness isn’t any one advisor’s doing, but rather a reflection of how Obama wields power — at least domestically. Abroad, he is making up his own rules as he goes along.
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
Attorney General Eric Holder, left, and former White House counsel Greg Craig.
Exit
MOVIES
It’s Not Over... Until Batman Sings THE DARK KNIGHT RISES is the final chapter in director Christopher Nolan’s Batman series, but if Hollywood history is any indication, it won’t be the last we see of the Caped Crusader. “Old franchises never die, and they do not fade away,” Peter Guber, who produced the first Batman movie in 1989, told Huffington. “They always find a new partner, a new telling, a new story, a new ingredient, a new lead member.” In that spirit, we asked Huffington readers: how would you reboot Batman for the post-Nolan era? Here are some of their answers. ILLUSTRATIONS BY STANLEY CHOW
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
BATMAN BY THE BEACH We can all agree, The Dark Knight is just way too dark. Move him from Gotham City to Miami. Give him some new villains like The Paparazzo and LeBron James. —PAUL SCHEER
Exit
MOVIES
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
BATMAN GOES VINTAGE
Jon Hamm as Batman against a sexy and power duo of Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn played by Christina Hendricks and Amanda Seyfried, respectively. The setting: a lush fantastic art deco, ‘30s or ‘40s like the animated series, all sleek elegance even with the darker, grittier parts. —ROBYN FOREHAND
SPREAD THE WONDER-WEALTH
How about Nightwing, Robin, Batgirl, or Oracle! Better yet a Justice League movie, with other characters having their own movies! How is it that the green lantern has it’s own movie but Wonder Woman doesn’t?! Riddle me that. —APRIL AGUILAR GOLDEN YEARS IN GOTHAM I’d create a Batman movie taking place in the future, where Batman is old and “actually” retired... but has a teenage child who is a trouble-making, spoiled badass who eventually stumbles upon his fathers past and decides that being a Vigilant would be fun. —JORDAN SOMMERFELD
SUPERMAN SURPRISE The next Batman should have maybe a Superman cameo or something, slowly setting the stage for a Justice League movie. Similar to what Marvel did, except better. —ADAM T. GROOM
I don’t want to be 65-70 years old... and look back and say that I didn’t do anything worthwhile in my life.”
Exit
GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK
Ed Edmundson
Beyond The Bottom Line
KATIE GRIFFITH
MAKING THE ROUNDS during the Internet start-up craze in the 1990s, Potomac, Maryland resident Ed Edmundson worked to help develop the product marketing and business development strategies of convergence communication companies such as Eatel and Geocities. Now, Edmundson is one businessman in a growing trend of enPHOTOGRAPH BY SGO PHOTOWORKS
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
Edmundson, a former dot-com exec, now runs a free trade business that helps support women in Nepal.
Exit
trepreneurs working to better the world through the business of fair trade. But Edmundson takes that trend one step further – he hasn’t pocketed a dime in eight years. After the dot-com bubble burst in the mid- 1990s, Edmundson wanted to start a business on his own terms. Ten years after his selfimposed exile from the corporate world, Edmundson spends his days designing handbags while sipping coffee and overseeing stock orders from his phone, before picking up his daughter from school. “I was just burned out,” Edmundson said. “I was exhausted — I wanted to do my own thing
GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK
and I wanted to stay in the Internet space, and I needed something that was portable.” His answer was Earth Divas, a fair trade business that imports handmade, natural fiber accessories “made by women for women” mostly from Nepal. Fair trade businesses foster better working conditions and promote job sustainability for workers in developing countries. The movement aims to pay workers real wages for the back-breaking labor they often do. Fair trade products will often be more expensive, but customers can feel good about spending the extra
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
Earth Divas imports handmade, natural fiber accessories made by women in Nepal.
Exit money, which goes back to feed families in developing countries rather than into the pockets of a corporate giant. Edmundson purchased the business, originally named Hemp Sisters, in 2004 and grew it from a family hobby business to a website dedicated to wholesale fair trade. Earth Divas was certified by the Fair Trade Federation in December 2011. Edmundson works directly with his artisans to collaborate on his product and pays them as much as possible on an hourly wage. On top of paying out typical wages, Edmundson doesn’t take a salary and returns 100 percent of the business’s profits to the workers, taking what he does beyond the realm of typical fair trade practices. “Once I started doing this, it was like this is not going to be anything that’s ever going to make me rich, and I can’t take money, I don’t want the money,” he said. “I don’t want to be 65-70 years old and be ready to call it a day and look back and say that I didn’t do anything worthwhile in my life.” Earth Divas products are carried everywhere from local mom-andpop health food stores to college bookstores and national chains, such as Whole Foods Market. You might see the brightly colored, handmade bags on the shoulder of a college student or on the arm of a
GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK
soccer mom on a grocery run. Edmundson’s passion for his business makes the effort a success, even though he’s been losing money for at least five years. In order to generate interest among customers, Edmunsdon decided to price products well below what they cost to produce. “I’ve had to kind of buy my way
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
Fair trade products are often more expensive, because they incorporate real wages for laborers.
Exit
GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
This is not going to be anything that’s ever going to make me rich.
in,” Edmundson said. “They just weren’t ready for this product. They weren’t used to it.” His slow build to profitability started to pay off in 2008 when the company made a profit for the first time. He then sent all of that money back to Nepal as a holiday gift to his workers. According to Edmundson, about $7,000 was paid back to his artisans as a holiday bonus and as regular bonuses throughout the year. He also hosted a holiday party that year for the workers to celebrate their success. But then everything went south. Fuel charges went up, the dollar went down and material costs for hemp, cotton and wool
doubled. Backed partially by Edmundson’s wife, who works to support the family, Earth Divas has only made a profit one year since it launched in 2004. “I’ve said that if it doesn’t happen this year, I’m done. And I’ve been saying that every year for the past five years. For some reason I keep doing it,” Edmundson said. “I know that when this business reaches $1 million a year it will be self-sustaining and that’s my goal in life — to get it to the point where I don’t have to put money into it, that it will be able to function on its own without me doing everything,” he added. “And we’re getting there.”
Edmundson strives to pay his artisans as much as possible, returning 100 percent of the profits to the workers.
Exit
APPROVAL
BIANCA BOSKER
iTUNES TOP PAID FOOD & DRINK APPS
A Meal Is A Terrible Thing To Waste I HAVE IVY League-educated friends who spend more time researching where to eat than they dedicated to their entire academic careers. There’s interviewing, cross-referencing and fact-checking — and that doesn’t even include figuring out what to order. Here are some apps that take the trouble — but not the taste — out of hunting down a great meal.
FOURSQUARE
DINING GRADES (FREE)
(FREE)
Forget check-ins: this is a tip factory, even if you have few “friends.” Scan top picks from average Joes and pros alike to find foodie Meccas (as well as what to order) in any city.
Peckish and paranoid? Check to see if the food at that swanky hotspot is both “in” and edible with this app’s crowdsourced cleanliness reviews.
eHarmony for eaters. Tell Ness what you like by reviewing places you’ve been, and it’ll serve up recommendations based on where you are and what you love.
CHART SOURCE: APPLE; DATA AS OF 7/18/20
(FREE)
NESS
MOBILECIOUS
CHEFS FEED (FREE)
($9.99)
Get all the happiness of eating from a food truck without the hassle of hunting it down. The best bites these days come from these roving restaurants, so eat up.
Get dining tips straight from Mario Batali, Thomas Keller and more celeb chefs (though no guarantees they haven’t saved their favorite hot spots for themselves).
Crowdsourced, schmowdsourced! Get the classic, quality reviews Zagat is known for with this app that taps into its trusted encyclopedia of ratings.
(FREE)
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
1
LOCALEATS MAGELLAN PRESS INC. $0.99
Yelp minus the chains. Find one-of-a-kind indie restaurants, for serious food snobs only.
2
FOOD NETWORK IN THE KITCHEN TELEVISION FOOD NETWORK G.P. $1.99
3
FASTPALEO FAST PALEO LLC $0.99
4
DINNER SPINNER PRO ALL RECIPES, INC. $2.99
5
MIXOLOGIST™ DRINK RECIPES DIGITAL OUTCROP $0.99
6
DINERS, DRIVE-INS AND DIVES LOCATOR MAPMUSE $2.99
7
GRILL-IT! SLUICE, LLC $0.99
8
COR.KZ WINE INFO APPLIED AMBIGUITIES $2.99
9
SHINE UNLIMITED MASTERCHEF ACADEMY $0.99
10
ZAGAT HANDMARK, INC. $9.99
ZAGAT
01
TFU
AP PHOTO/ROBERT F. BUKATY (LEPAGE); SHUTTERSTOCK (FEET, HAND); DANIEL ACKER/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES (MEAT); COURTESY OF RICHIE MAGIC (MAGIC)
Exit
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
Maine Gov. Calls IRS “The New Gestapo”
2
GEORGIA MAN POSES AS TV HOST AT WALMART, SUCKS WOMAN’S TOE
05
Magician Eats 61 Crickets In One Minute
3
NO PICTURES: Media Banned From Photographing Mitt Romney & Dick Cheney Together
4
OREGON FOOD SERVICE WORKERS NO LONGER REQUIRED TO WEAR GLOVES
FINN ROBERTS / ALAMY (SNAKE); SHUTTERSTOCK (WOMAN STEALING, SANDWICH); MICHAEL DODGE/NEWSPIX/REX (OLYMPIC COUPLE); AP PHOTO/JOE BURBANK (CARROLL)
Exit
06
HUFFINGTON 07.22.12
TFU
Swiss Sleaze: Zurich Pizzeria Offers Pie With Spider, Scorpion and Snake Venom
7
FEMALE HOUSE GOP STAFFERS MAKE $10K LESS THAN MALE COUNTERPARTS
10
8
Australian Olympic Officials Ban Married Couples From Rooming Together In London
Needles Found In Turkey Sandwiches On 4 Delta Flights
9
FL LT. GOV.: “BLACK WOMEN THAT LOOK LIKE ME” DON’T GO LESBIAN
Editor-in-Chief:
Arianna Huffington Executive Editor: Timothy L. O’Brien Executive Features Editor: John Montorio Managing Editor: Katy Hall Senior Culture Editor: Danny Shea Senior Politics Editor: Sasha Belenky Senior Voices Editor: Stuart Whatley Quoted Editor: MacGregor Thomson Viral Editor: Dean Praetorius Social Editor: Mia Aquino Editorial Assistant: Jenny Macksamie Editorial Intern: AJ Barbosa Creative Director: Josh Klenert Art Director: Andrea Nasca Photography Director: Anna Dickson Associate Photo Editor: Wendy George Designers: Eve Binder, Troy Dunham, Greg Grabowy, Susana Soares Production Director: Peter K. Niceberg AOL Mobile SVP Mail & Mobile: David Temkin Mobile UX and Design Director: David Robinson Creative Director: Jeremy LaCroix Product Managers: Mimmie Huang, Luan Tran Developers: Scott Tury, Mike Levine, Carl Haines, Terence Worley, Sudheer Agrawal, Jacob Knobel, Eisuke Arai Tech Leadership: Umesh Rao QA: Scott Basham, Eileen Miller Sales: Mandar Shinde, Jami Lawrence AOL, Inc. Chairman & CEO:
Tim Armstrong
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK