Spring 2009

We Urge President Obama to Take the Following Actions

By Jeri Zeder     |     Illustration by Zina Saunders

Barack Obama promised to bring change to America. Change, of course, demands creative thinking and fresh perspectives. So, what better place to turn than Northeastern University School of Law? Here, four experts from the law school community tell President Obama why the US needs a national obesity policy, how to check global warming, how the US can be a leader in international human rights and why the poor are key to a strong economy.

Richard Daynard
Downsize the Obesity Epidemic

Two wars, terrorism, economic havoc, environmental decay — these only scratch the surface of the staggering list of problems facing the Obama administration. Why should the American waistline be a presidential priority?

Professor Richard Daynard ticks off the reasons without skipping a beat. Over one-third of children born in 2000 are projected to develop diabetes, putting them at risk for shortened life spans and disability. Should trends continue, by 2030, obesity will make up $860 billion — 16 percent — of US health care expenditures. The obesity epidemic has serious implications for our nation’s health care budget and economic productivity. And yet, Daynard says, the US has no policy to address obesity.

“We know at the top of Obama’s list is health care reform, and to do health care reform, we must get control over the mushrooming health care budget,” says Daynard. “The obesity epidemic is likely to be a driver in continued increases in the health care budget. If he doesn’t get that under control, it’s hard to see how he can come up with a viable health care reform plan.”

Daynard is president of the School of Law’s Public Health Advocacy Institute (PHAI), a legal research center for public health law. Last September, PHAI co-sponsored a weekend-long working conference that brought together experts in obesity, public health policy and law. The conference resulted in a report containing more than 40 policy recommendations for the federal government in seven key areas to tackle the obesity epidemic, which PHAI submitted to the Obama transition team. The report received online notice in The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and The Boston Globe published an op-ed coauthored by Daynard.

If implemented, the PHAI recommendations would have wide-ranging impact not only on obesity, but also on worker productivity, food security, energy independence, transportation and poverty issues.

The recommendations would cause shifts in agricultural production toward healthier foods; increase the availability of, and access to, public transportation; make healthy food readily available to children and the poor; and make cities safer by creating parks and other opportunities for urban recreation. Tools cited for achieving these results include an executive order requiring federal agencies to consider the impact of federal legislation on the obesity epidemic; federal taxes on unhealthy foods and beverages, with revenues earmarked for obesity programs; additional funds to the Child Nutrition Bill to increase the amount and quality of fruits and vegetables provided in schools; and improvements to federal food labeling laws. (The full report is online at www.phaionline.org.)

Daynard also urges President Obama to use his legendary oratory to fight obesity. “Obama is a charismatic guy and can lead through very stirring rhetoric,” he says. “And stirring rhetoric matters. Obviously, that needs to be followed by action.”

Seth Kaplan '93:
Raise the Heat on Global Warming

Asked to name the three top environmental issues facing the new president, Seth Kaplan ’93 says, “Global warming, global warming, global warming.” If pressed, he’ll add air, water and ocean pollution to the roster. But Kaplan, vice president for climate advocacy at the Conservation Law Foundation and director of its Clean Energy and Climate Change Program, believes that global warming is the biggest problem, requiring the broadest action.

“It’s hard to overstress global warming as being the over-arching issue,” Kaplan says. “That is not to say it’s the only challenge, but it’s the one where we need to create a whole new set of legal and administrative structures to address it.”

Global warming is caused by industrialization and a world population explosion that has increased emissions of carbon dioxide and other gasses. These gasses get trapped in the atmosphere and produce a greenhouse effect that raises global temperatures. If current trends continue, over the next century global warming will result in drowned coastal communities as ocean levels rise, political and economic devastation as destructive storms intensify in strength and frequency, the spread of disease as climate zones shift, and widespread starvation as arable land shrinks.

"We need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050," Kaplan says. "The need for immediate, aggressive action is tremendous. We're out of time."

What's critical, Kaplan says, is federal action in three major areas: energy efficiency, transportation and renewable, clean energy. New economic stimulus bills should include provisions to ramp up investment in energy efficiency so our buildings, factories, homes, schools and offices will waste less energy and electricity, and use more emission-free technologies. We should reshape our transportation system not only because that will improve public transportation, but also because it will reduce our use of fuels that emit greenhouse gasses.

"Seventy-five to 80 percent of transportation spending is on roads and highways," Kaplan says. "We have built a system that facilitates car travel. If we want a different future— walking to school, walking to a train—we need to pay for that system."

We can invent creative solutions for clean, renewable energy by investing in research and development. Kaplan cites "cow power" as one example. The manure produced on farms emits methane, a greenhouse gas 27 times more potent than carbon dioxide. A program in Vermont uses methane digesters, a new technology, to convert manure into clean, renewable, electricity-producing biogases. Cow pies become sources of non-polluting electricity.

Kaplan also urges Obama to fight global warming through economic incentives. Carbon taxes could generate revenues for investing in energy efficiency and renewable energy. Market-based solutions, such as a cap-and-trade system, could lower emissions. In Washington, DC, there's broad support, in principle, for this approach, where a limit is set on overall greenhouse gas emissions, and businesses trade emissions allowances within that limit.

Kaplan predicts that Obama will have to fight powerful interests to turn ours into an economy that promotes green living. "The thing to remember," he says, "is we have a responsibility to serve the future."

Hope Lewis
Nationalize International Human Rights

Only two countries have not ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child: the US — and Somalia. The US is the only major industrialized country that has not ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Every industrialized country has ratified the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, except the United States — which puts it in the same company as North Korea and Iran. And after terrorism hit the homeland in 2001, the US abandoned its long-standing compliance with the Geneva Conventions.

Professor Hope Lewis, co-founder of the law school’s Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy, has this advice for President Obama: It’s time for the US to take international human rights law seriously.

Lewis applauds Obama’s week-one orders to reverse course on torture, arbitrary detention and Guantanamo. “So much damage has been done to our global reputation, and, internally, [the Bush administration’s policies] have undermined our sense of who we are,” Lewis says. Obama’s actions will help restore our civil rights and civil liberties traditions, she hopes. She also approves of Obama’s retraction of the so-called Mexico City policy, first issued under President Reagan, that required nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that receive federal funding to refrain from performing or promoting abortion services as a method of family planning in other countries.

Lewis says the US should establish a formal legal framework for human rights. Obama should seek ratification of the major UN human rights treaties and establish a national human rights commission. "That human rights standards have to be lived up to, that every arm of government should consider human rights as part of what they do, whether it is the labor department or housing or homeland security, that signal has to come from the top," says Lewis.

The US attitude toward economic and social rights, ambivalent at best, must change. "All human rights are interdependent and indivisible," she argues. As long as their rights to housing, food, work and health care are unrecognized and unenforced, underprivileged Americans will be de facto excluded from the foundational political and individual rights that give citizens power.

Social and economic human rights are especially important for people with disabilities. Their unemployment rate is much higher than the general population—attributable to poor access to training and adaptive technologies as well as attitudes in the workplace. Forty-five nations have ratified the new United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities; the US should join them, Lewis believes.

"This is another treaty through which the US could send positive signals and follow through on policy," Lewis says. "When you exclude groups in society, the society as a whole loses out." Finally, Lewis wants human rights issues integrated into our national conversation. Children are not taught about human rights in school. December 10, 2008, the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, went essentially unnoticed by the mainstream media. The danger of not educating our populace about human rights, Lewis says, is that we're less equipped as a society to speak out and mobilize when those rights are threatened.

"We don't have an ethos that says human rights should be part of our culture," Lewis says. "That's how I think those who are trying to distort American values get away with it. There's a vacuum, which they can fill with this rhetoric. Obama has to get rid of that vacuum."

Rashmi Dyal-Chand '94
To Right the Economy, Start with the Poor

The current economic crisis is being blamed on a perfect storm of many factors. Just to name a few: cheap credit, inflated home prices, distorted tax incentives, questionable subprime mortgage instruments, Wall Street's dealing in mortgage-backed securities made up of poor, risky loans, and lack of government oversight. With a bail-out here and a stimulus package there, the government both before and after President Obama's swearing in has been trying to stanch the financial hemorrhaging and stave off a full-blown depression. There's lots of talk about how to fix Wall Street so as to save Main Street, aka the middle class. But what about the poor?

If we want to come up with effective solutions and avoid the same mistakes in the future, we need to understand how government policies and banking practices affected the poor and contributed to the current economic fiasco. That's the main message of Professor Rashmi Dyal-Chand '94, whose teaching and scholarship focus on property law, poverty and economic development. She is also an editor of the law school's online publication Human Rights and the Global Economy.

"A focus on poverty and on regulation might have given us warning signals we didn't see," says Dyal-Chand. She would advise Obama to reassess the causes of poverty, and include those in a broad economic research agenda that would help identify policies that promote economic development and address the deregulation of the banking system.

Calling residential mortgages the "epicenter" of the economic crisis, Dyal-Chand wants Obama to consider banning some exotic mortgage instruments and rethink the extent to which we use credit as a substitute for welfare. "Some very significant regulatory changes have been made in the last several decades that uniquely affect poor people and warrant serious, if not rollback, then at least amendment," she says, explaining the foreclosure crisis resulted from our credit policies.

"What we've seen is the proliferation of exotic lending and the development of a secondary market that has quite uniquely impacted people of lower incomes," she says. The combination of predatory lending and deregulation of banking set the real estate market up to fail. Obama needs to address that, she says.

Obama also should find ways to repair the wage, income and wealth disparities that have become entrenched in our society. "We've seen such a lack of interest in increasing wages to meaningful levels. I'd want to look for ways to increase wages," Dyal-Chand says. The federal government should also partner financially and otherwise with state and city governments to promote economic development in what she calls a "researchrich" way. People who are less skilled often don't have access to networks where they might be employed in better jobs. By way of illustration, Dyal-Chand brings up Boston. "One area that leaps to mind is the medical industry," she says. "I've always been interested in ways to incorporate people of lower income in that area."

Economic policies that focus on the poor are in the interest of all of us, Dyal-Chand insists. "Poor people are part of our society," she says, "not only on a social level, but at a very concrete financial level," connected to us all. Obama, she emphasizes, can't help the middle class without helping the poor, too.

Jeri Zeder is a contributing writer. Her last story for the magazine focused on progressive lawyers.