Trip or Treat

I wish all solutions were as simple. As parents, we’d like to preserve a simple childhood tradition of greeting neighbors and enjoying treats. But as citizens, we must weigh the dark side of those sweets. Concerns about child labor, slavery and exploitative conditions in the African cocoa trade make trick-or-treat bittersweet. How can we avoid tripping into moral perils while enjoying holiday traditions?

More chocolate is sold at Halloween than at any other time of year. Chocolate sales were $14.4 billion in 2004, as Americans consume nearly 12 pounds of chocolate per person per year. Chocolate consumption in rich countries should be good news for the world’s poor. The cocoa beans that make chocolate can be grown only in a narrow band near the equator, a slice of the planet home to many of the world’s poor. Yet chocolate profits go predominantly to manufacturing and marketing companies in the first world, rather than cocoa farmers in the developing world. Instead of benefiting from the cocoa trade, many cocoa growers suffer exploitation.

Africa leads the world in cocoa production, growing over 76 percent of the planet’s total output. Four of the five top cocoa-growing countries are in Africa: Ivory Coast, Ghana, Cameroon and Nigeria. Ivory Coast alone is responsible for 43 percent of world cocoa production, yet the country is extremely poor and becoming poorer. More than 44 percent of Ivorians have incomes below the poverty line, and the country ranks near the bottom in the U.N. human development index: 164th out of 177. Certainly poverty there has many causes: a civil war ravaged the economy and the rising H.I.V./AIDS epidemic takes its toll. But low prices paid to cocoa growers have not helped.

Media exposés six years ago focused attention on the dire conditions of cocoa workers in West Africa. Congress responded, and the House passed legislation that would have required that cocoa products be labeled and certified that they were not made with child or forced labor. The chocolate manufacturers intervened and derailed the legislation. They raised the standard chorus of multinational corporations looking to shirk social responsibilities in the global economy: that they do not own the producers, are not responsible for conditions there and are unable to control their own supply chains. In September 2001 Representative Elliot Engel (Democrat of New York) and Senator Tom Harkin (Democrat of Iowa) negotiated the Cocoa Protocol, a voluntary agreement among chocolate companies, cocoa traders, governments and plantation owners to take measures to improve conditions among cocoa farmers, reduce child labor and establish a certification procedure by July 2005. The companies failed to meet the deadline, blaming the civil war in Ivory Coast. But a recent industry report released by Tulane University lauds the progress on other fronts.

In a meeting of the African Cocoa Summit last month, Ghana’s President John Agyekum Kufuor told a different story. Although countries have now ratified the International Labor Organization’s Convention 182 pledging to do away with the worst forms of child labor, they do not adhere to it. He called for imposition of “a regime of verification and stoppage of the phenomenon in every form.” This is important so that the Cocoa Protocol results in real gains, not excuses.

There is another way to get at the problem: buy only fair trade chocolate and cocoa, especially through Catholic Relief Services’ partnership with Divine Chocolate. Fair trade chocolates return more of the purchase price to the farmers who grow the cocoa, helping them and their families to make a living and rise from poverty. Eating fair trade chocolate is a way to put your money literally where your mouth is, and use your food dollars to “treat” both yourself and the person who grew your food.

The Catholic Relief Services’ fair trade chocolates program goes one step further. The farmers of the Kuapa Kokoo cooperative in Ghana are not only guaranteed better fair trade prices for their cocoa beans; they also own almost 50 percent of the Day Chocolate Co., which produces their Divine Chocolate bars and products, so they earn a share of the profits directly from all Divine Chocolate sales. C.R.S. also encourages schools, parishes, teams and other groups to use fair trade products in their fundraisers. Through their Raise Money Right program, groups can raise money for their organization and raise awareness about fair trade as a way to fight global poverty. Winners of the C.R.S. Raise Money Right contests earn prizes, including trips to Ghana to visit the cocoa cooperative themselves.

As we prepare for the onslaught of the “trip or treaters,” we can use the holiday to stand in solidarity with children in poverty around the world and make chocolate a sweeter experience for people on both ends of the global supply chain.

Race and the War on Drugs

Recent studies based on government data point to racially skewed sentences like those for possession or sale of crack cocaine and powder cocaine. For example, the Sentencing Project’s recent report, A 25-Year Quagmire: The War on Drugs and Its Impact on American Society, notes that while both crack cocaine and powder cocaine have the same chemical composition, sentences for crack offenses are far heavier. A person convicted of selling five grams of crack, equivalent to the weight of two pennies, receives the same mandatory minimum sentence as someone who sells 500 grams of powder cocaine. Crack sentences fall most heavily on African-Americans, who are more likely to use this form of cocaine than whites. And because it is frequently sold in inner-city areas on street corners, police can more easily engage in “buy and bust” procedures. Powder cocaine, on the other hand, is usually more accessible in higher-income areas, where detection and arrest are less likely. The issue is thus also one of class.

The drug war has led to the incarceration of hundreds of thousands of young black men and women. Women are more likely than men to be found guilty of drug offenses, and in some ways they are more deeply affected. Two-thirds of the women in state and federal prisons are mothers of children under 18 years of age. Imprisonment means the removal of their offspring to foster care or the homes of relatives, who may already be overburdened with children of their own. After release, both men and women convicted of drug felonies are hampered in efforts to make a successful re-entry into society. Federal legislation in 1996 placed a lifetime ban on receiving food stamps and allows public housing authorities to bar those with drug convictions.

Lack of adequate drug treatment while incarcerated also compounds re-entry problems. Instead of rising, the rate of in-prison drug therapy has actually fallen since 1991, despite the fact that almost one in five people in state prisons on drug charges cite the need to pay for their drug habit as the reason for their offense. The U.S. bishops pointed out in their 2000 statement Responsibility, Rehabilitation and Restoration that “locking up addicts without proper treatment and then returning them to the streets perpetuates a cycle of behavior that benefits neither the offender, nor society.” Similarly, a RAND study argues that drug treatment, within as well as outside incarcerational settings, is more effective in controlling drug abuse and crime than expansion of the prison system.

Initiatives to reform drug laws are emerging. This year both Delaware and Rhode Island considered the repeal of mandatory minimum sentencing laws for drug crimes. Rhode Island’s House and Senate passed legislation of this kind; and although the governor vetoed the measure, the fact that the state’s legislature backed it shows movement toward more sensible drug laws. At the federal level, too, the U.S. Sentencing Commission has recommended that sentencing guidelines be lowered for crack offenses because of implicit racial inequities. Its recommendations take effect Nov. 1 unless disapproved by Congress. This change, however, will not affect federal mandatory minimum sentencing policies, which only Congress can alter and which cry out for change because they bind the hands of magistrates seeking to administer justice fairly. But Congress can and should pass the pending bipartisan legislation aimed at removing the disparity between penalties for crack and powder cocaine. In the meantime, the Supreme Court is also addressing the disparity, though indirectly, by considering whether a federal judge has the right to impose a sentence for a crack offense that is less than what the guidelines call for.

With 80 percent of crack sentences imposed on African-Americans, racial disparities have reached glaring levels and point to the need for a changed policy. On the wider societal level, as the bishops note in their 2000 statement, it is the deep, underlying problems that need attention: lack of employment, poor housing, inadequate education and family disintegration in poor communities. Instead of unfairly harsh sentences for drug offenses, supportive initiatives for low-income communities and greater use of alternatives to incarceration should be the basis of an enlightened approach to criminal justice.

The Power of Japan

There were, of course, survivors, the hibakusha (literally “explosion-affected people”) and among them the tainai hibakusha, those nestled “in their mother’s womb” when the atomic bombs exploded. It is not inconsequential that the current Archbishop of Nagasaki, the Most Reverend Joseph M. Takami, is himself one of the tainai hibakusha. Speaking at Georgetown University in March 2007, Archbishop Takami noted that he had grown up personally affected by the suffering. A week after the blast, he said, “four members of my immediate family, including my grandmother and two aunts, died.” He acknowledged that Japan was not merely a victim of the war, but a willing aggressor against its Asian neighbors. Yet, speaking for many Japanese people, the archbishop said that direct experience of the atomic bomb “taught us a precious lesson of nonviolence as a way of life, a conviction, a belief and a non-negotiable commitment.”

Nonviolence as a way of life needs to be recast or revitalized for the current generation of Japanese, however, for Japan’s “non-negotiable commitment” to peace is being tested by developments within Asia itself, on the larger world scene and by the United States government. Since the year 2000, the U.S.-Japan relationship has been changing radically in ways that have alarmed some Japanese voters, Japan’s Catholic bishops and some of the country’s political leaders, like the mayor of Nagasaki. As Archbishop Takami put it in his Georgetown address, “Japan is a willing partner in the U.S. global war on terror,” increasingly allowing the U.S. military to use its land, air and naval facilities as Japan itself takes on an ever larger military role. Such a role stands in direct contradiction to Japan’s postwar Constitution, self-understanding and foreign policy.

Post-World War II Developments

Nonviolence as a way of life, as Archbishop Takami expressed it, is relatively new in Japan’s long militant history. It took root in postwar Japan, defeated and occupied for six years by the Allies, mainly the United States. As a nation, Japan was (and still is) unique in the world in having experienced the horror of a nuclear attack. Yet the Japanese transition to nonviolence developed gradually. As a war-torn world began to realize the extent of the Holocaust and the immense number of Stalin’s victims, the Japanese started to acknowledge their aggression toward other Asians in the Pacific and their own war crimes. This intense period was also one of enormous flux as leaders set up a new government and rewrote the 1890 Meiji Constitution. That constitution had been promulgated under Emperor Hirohito’s grandfather, who was considered a deity (as was his son and grandson until after World War II, when the emperor’s religious role was recast). In 1947 the Japanese Diet (parliament) debated a draft constitution for 114 days, made revisions and accepted the final version, which included Article 9, a controversial prohibition against Japan’s maintaining an offensive military or using force internationally for any reason. In its entirety Article 9 reads:

1. Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.

2. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.

Scholars have advanced several reasons to explain why Japan, acting in contrast to its highly militarized past, so readily agreed to limit its military. It is said that Japan envisioned itself becoming a neutral nation like Sweden or Switzerland and that by not having to rebuild its military, while under the protection of the United States, Japan could focus on rebuilding its economy. Meanwhile, as the Japanese public embraced a new Constitution, a new government and a new understanding of their emperor, it also began to internalize the pacifist ethic that still characterizes a majority today, particularly regarding nuclear arms and proliferation.

During those same years the U.S.S.R. united its postwar land gains and pursued Communist world domination, emerging as the new threat to world peace. Japan’s proximity to both Communist Russia and China was particularly advantageous to America’s anti-Communist strategy. As early as the Eisenhower administration, the U.S. government had second thoughts about having urged institutionalized pacifism on Japan, which weakened it as an ally. On the other hand, some scholars argue that Japanese leaders saw Article 9 as a potential defense, shielding Japan from being caught between the two cold war superpowers.

In signing the 1951 Mutual Security Treaty and the 1954 Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement, the United States promised to protect Japan, and Japan allowed the United States to use its territory for permanent military bases. The latter agreement also permitted Japan to maintain a limited Self-Defense Force to protect its mainland.

Since the end of the cold war, three unlikely streams continued to run alongside one another in Japan. First, nonaggression and nuclear pacifism have become a part of Japanese culture and identity. The signs are various. Not only did Japan sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and refrain from building or trading in nuclear arms; but according to polls conducted over the last few decades, more than 70 percent of Japanese have consistently opposed nuclear weapons. As a nation Japan did not intervene during the Vietnam War, after a citizen campaign of protest, and rejected U.S. pressure to send members of the Japanese Self-Defense Force to support the United States during the first Persian Gulf war.

Second, Japan’s S.D.F. has grown substantially in size and strength. Its navy, air force and army together employ 240,000 people (according to 2006 data). And Japan’s $50 billion annual defense budget is the world’s third largest after those of the United States and Russia, though China’s (which is not publicly known) might be larger.

Third, the U.S. troops and weapons on Japanese soil have increased in number, size and power. Some 50,000 U.S. troops currently reside on more than 130 military installations, mostly on Okinawa—all at Japanese expense, the troop salaries excepted.

In addition to these three streams, Japan has breached its own self-defense policy on a number of occasions, beginning in Cambodia in 1992, when Japan sent some 2,000 “peacekeepers,” including members of its military, to Cambodia under the auspices of the U.N. to monitor a ceasefire, train civilian police and engineer the repair of roads and bridges. Japan’s role in world peacekeeping has grown since then.

By the time the Soviet Union split up in the early 1990s, Japan and the United States had become strong allies with social, cultural, political and economic ties. Japan’s economy boomed, and Japan became one of the world’s richest nations. The cold war era ended and another era began.

Changing Role on the World Stage

Enter China. Asia’s sleeping giant has awakened. As the behemoth labors to develop its economy and shape its new international role, Japan is being forced to adjust its self-image, regional strategy and position in the world. North Korea’s nuclear testing and posturing and Pakistan’s interest in nuclear arms, heightened by its role in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, have scarcely gone unnoticed in Japan. Add to the picture a newly aggressive Russia, flush with oil profits, looming to the northwest over Japan’s shoulder and it becomes apparent that Japan cannot remain unaffected or indifferent. A nuclear Asia is at hand. What does that prospect mean for Japan? This is a matter for significant public thought and conversation, which should be reflected in the kind of leaders Japan chooses to govern it.

But that is not all. Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the United States has become engulfed in a “war on terror” and is mired in the Middle East, its troops stretched thin. How secure is Japan now with the United States as its protector? Does Japan’s protectorate position promote regional peace or work against it? The Bush administration has urged Japanese leaders to remove its constitutional restraint and take on more responsibility for regional defense. Given such increasing pressures, it is not surprising that two Japanese prime ministers, Junichiro Koizumi and after him Shinzo Abe, have pushed for a referendum to amend the Constitution, particularly the clause on international collective defense in Article 9. This seems to be in abeyance under the new prime minister, Yasuo Fukuda, who is thought to be more cautious in military matters. But the issues will not simply fade away.

The choice facing the Japanese is not a new one, since Japan has already leaned away from its Constitution. It has broken precedent (Archbishop Takami says it has violated its Constitution) by using military force beyond its borders. In 2001 the S.D.F. sank a North Korean spy ship; recently Japan has sent troops to Afghanistan and Iraq as part of the “coalition of the willing.” Technically Japanese troops do not engage in combat there but provide logistical support. Japan is also aware that its Self-Defense Force is ill-equipped for offensive actions: its navy has no nuclear submarines or aircraft carriers and its three military branches lack both coordination and efficient communication. In 2006, the Diet introduced a bill to consolidate oversight of these operations and change the name of the ministry.

At Georgetown Archbishop Takami cited bilateral agreements of 2005 (the U.S.-Japan Alliance) and 2006 (the Roadmap for Realignment Implementation), by which, he said, “Japan has been made a major hub for American military operations all over the world, transforming the Japanese military forces into part of the globally deployed U.S. military forces.” The archbishop questioned the legality of the process, intimating that it may require formal treaty revisions “through democratic procedures.” He also said that Japan has committed itself “to full participation in ballistic missile defense, counterterrorism, search and destroy operations, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance operations, through response to attacks by weapons of mass destruction and joint use of bases and facilities in Japan with the Self-Defense Force to the U.S. use of seaport and airport facilities, roads, water spaces, airspaces, and frequency bands.” The complete list is cumulatively more troubling. These agreements violate Japan’s Constitution, yet they have been agreed to by the two governments, even as constitutional change is being discussed without strong support for change among Japanese voters.

Political leaders have also sidestepped Japan’s popular no-nuclear policy. According to Archbishop Takami, 546 Tomahawk missiles are already in place on U.S. warships at Yokosuka, and the nuclear submarine George Washington will be deployed there next year. A citizens’ movement against its deployment collected 500,000 signatures, and the city council passed a resolution opposing it in 2005; but “the mayor now defends the Yokosuka base as the forefront of the ballistic missile defense,” the archbishop reported. He added that “Okinawa has the biggest arsenal in Asia that can store more than 50,000 tons of ammunition in 500 installations.”

The Japanese people’s post-World War II commitment to nonviolence and against nuclear weapons must be updated in light of such recent developments. And Japan’s relationship to the United States needs to be publicly aired and assessed. The questions facing Japan are serious. Can Japan remain dependent upon the United States and willfully unable to protect itself, even as more large or unstable nations nearby acquire nuclear weapons? Is that prudent? Does Japan—apart from the promptings of the United States—wish to address the worldwide war on terror? If so, how? How can Japan strengthen and balance its relationships to China, North Korea, India and Pakistan, among others? If Japan amended its “peace constitution,” shed its military dependency and became a major military power in the region, would that increase Japan’s security and stability and the peace of Asia?

Japan could make a firm recommitment to peace and renegotiate its military agreements with the United States. Or Japan could amend its Constitution and existing treaties so that these reflect its current policy. Or Japan could take a whole new direction in terms of national goals and policies, take over its own military affairs and require the U.S. troops to leave.

The direction Japanese voters will prefer is difficult to predict. While there seems to be no current groundswell of support for a full militarization of Japan, support is growing on the margins. In an upper-house election in July, the people voted in a landslide election for members of the Democratic Party, the party in opposition to that of the prime minister (the Liberal Democratic Party). Commentators interpreted the vote as displeasure with Abe’s domestic scandals and policy blunders, which later brought about his downfall.

Unwittingly, the voters have bought some time for those who oppose efforts to revise the pacifist Constitution. Opponents may well redouble their efforts to make a persuasive case for peace. Opponents include the Japanese Catholic Bishops Conference, which prefers to keep Article 9 as it is and to fortify the nation’s commitment to nonviolence as a world witness to peace, and the current mayor of Nagasaki, Tomihisa Taue. In his remarks at Nagasaki’s Peace Park, Mayor Taue warned against the perils of nuclear proliferation and proposed that Japan’s three non-nuclear principles, which ban the possession, production and importation of nuclear armaments, be enacted into law. “The use of nuclear weapons can never be permitted or considered acceptable for any reason whatsoever,” Taue said. What the Japanese people as a whole must decide is whether they, as victims of atomic weapons, will become potential perpetrators.

How the Media Shape Elections

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards and Rudolph Giuliani, John McCain, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson in their respective parties made it to that level by emerging in early polls, even though many commentators say these polls are meaningless. In terms of visibility, however, they mean everything. In primary politics name recognition equals money, money equals coverage, coverage equals name recognition, and name recognition equals—you guessed it—more money.

Ask political reporters or editors how they decide who to cover and why they ignore candidates like Senators Joe Biden, Sam Brownback and Chris Dodd, and they will say, occasionally sheepishly: “Look, there are 18 candidates, and we only have so much money and staff, and we can hardly afford to cover the big six or eight. Sure, Biden is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has 30 years experience and is an engaging guy, but he is going nowhere.”

Lack of coverage helps to ensure that such a candidate goes nowhere.

Today candidates have an alternative: they can turn to the Internet. The outspoken Elizabeth Edwards explained her husband’s increasingly strident Internet campaign by saying: “We can’t make John black; we can’t make him a woman…. Those things get you a certain amount of fundraising dollars.” She neglected to mention that they also garner attention from the mainstream media. So Edwards went around the mainstream media to the Internet, where he speaks out loudly and clearly.

How the media approach a campaign also serves to shape it. In the early part of 2007, for example, the media spent a lot of time asking: Can a woman, a black person or a Mormon be elected president? The typical answer was a definite maybe. But the question itself increased the recognition of the female, black and Mormon candidates. For the first time ever, the white Catholic and mainline Protestant men had to go nuclear to compete.

Was It Always Like This?

Eric Engberg, the former CBS News correspondent, is fond of saying that journalism is the only profession that gets rewarded for making mistakes: “First you miss a story and get it all wrong, then the real story unfolds; it is an upset and what happens? You get an even bigger story!” The media love upsets, surprises and Cinderella victories. Of course, the Cinderellas often toiled in obscurity before being “discovered.”

George McGovern, a former senator from South Dakota and the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate, tells a story about his run in 1971, when no media were taking him seriously. One day as he landed at the airport in Cleveland, where he was to give a substantive speech on economics at the Cleveland City Club, an aide looked out and saw a phalanx of television cameras. McGovern quickly woke up from a nap, straightened his tie and walked off the plane, only to see the cameramen dash away and swarm around Chubby Checker.

In 1975, when the media were sure that the Democratic candidates to watch were Lloyd Bentsen, Birch Bayh and Henry Jackson (known as Scoop), Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, rode around Iowa in a rental car going from one local radio station to another. They became known one city at a time. Jack Germond, the veteran political journalist, said that while everyone in Washington was swooning over Howard Baker, Iowans were learning about an obscure peanut farmer from Plains, Ga., who said he would never lie to them.

In 1983, with the experiences of McGovern and Carter under my belt, I was working with Gary Hart’s presidential campaign. Once again big media decided that the race was between the two front-runners, Walter Mondale and John Glenn. Hart was frustrated but not daunted. His staff was poor (they received no paychecks for months), cold (the heat was kept off in the national headquarters) and unduplicated (the Xerox machine was removed by bill collectors). Yet using several alternative strategies, Hart saw some media successes. First, work your way into other people’s stories. When the president says something, for example, be the first person to respond (White House reporters are happy for a quick quote). Second, if political reporters are not paying attention, look for ways to get into the business section, style section, even the sports section of the newspapers. Those reporters tend to play it straight, and their stories are read by audiences who do not automatically have their “I hate politics” guard up. Third, say yes to all offers of publicity.

In late 1983, when a network TV correspondent was assigned to a new technology story, she tried to enlist all the front-runners. They said they were far too busy to cooperate with a soft feature. We in the Hart campaign, by contrast, said: “Sure, we will play.” “Are you doing focus groups?” she asked. “We have one scheduled with young people for next week,” we said. (That was a stretch, but it seemed like a good idea.) We set up a group, the crew came, and we “tested” a slogan we knew was a winner with young people. “How do you feel about a candidate who represents a ‘new generation of leadership?’” we asked them. “Wow, I would vote for him in a heartbeat” and “He speaks to me” were the answers. This focus group touting our candidate and theme made it to the evening news virtually unedited. Later, the reporter remembered who helped her get on the air.

Can Such Things Happen This Year?

Dark-horse candidates slog on, convinced or at least hoping that lightning will strike in the same place a fourth or fifth time. But given the combination of an early primary and caucus calendar, the short time between the first primaries and “Tsunami Tuesday” on Feb. 5, the huge financial advantage of the front-runners and the media’s decision to ignore all but the top tier, it seems that Cinderella may never even get to the ball.

Voters in the early states are being bombarded with messages from national media telling them which candidates are viable. Ron Brownstein, a columnist for The Los Angeles Times, put it this way: “The new system isn’t bringing back the bosses’ smoke-filled room, but it is increasing the clout of the air-conditioned television studio and the elegant drawing room in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. And it is presenting dark-horse candidates with something like a closed circle. Even in the initial states with the power to confer national viability, voters appear increasingly inclined to reward only the candidates who have already demonstrated it, in part because those are the only candidates they hear much about in the national media.”

An unprecedented amount of coverage was given this year to what used to be called “the invisible primary” phase of the campaign. The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has counted 5,051 newspaper and television stories about the top-tier candidates in the first half of 2007. Figures prepared by the Tyndall Group on the amount of time network news devotes to campaigns show that the time given in just the first half of 2007 outpaced the total number of minutes spent in the pre-presidential election years for the last four campaign cycles (Table 1).

The fall phase of the 2008 presidential campaigns has been marked by the arrival of “embeds,” formerly known as “kids on the bus.” These are young producers who are sent out by the networks to cover the campaigns 24/7. It is hardly surprising that the television networks have embedded full-time producers with the top two candidates on both sides and have assigned their highest-profile political reporters to cover them. NBC, for example, put Andrea Mitchell with Hillary Clinton; CBS assigned Jim Axelrod, their White House correspondent. The other candidates mainly get a day with one of these big reporters and an occasional look from the producers assigned to Iowa or New Hampshire. Only the top tier receives full network coverage.

Occasionally one of the lower-tier candidates gets a moment in the spotlight. Walter Shapiro, the author of One Car Caravan, a delightful look at the early phase of the 2004 campaign, when reporters could get up close and personal with candidates, says that this year it is almost impossible to do that. The top tier had entourages with palace guards, canned speeches and television and online ads from the beginning of the campaign.

News organizations have been fighting to get small snippets of exclusive information from the big eight. But Shapiro, who is now Washington bureau chief for Salon, decided to spend some of his scarce resources on Michael Sherer, a reporter for Salon, who developed an early fascination with Mike Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor and a Republican. Huckabee seemed to have a shot at breaking out of the pack, so Sherer wrote a long early profile on him. Shapiro’s hunch was pretty good, since Huckabee managed to have a minor Cinderella moment by coming in second in another allegedly meaningless event: the Iowa Republican Straw Poll. For a few quiet weeks at the end of the summer, Huckabee drew some coveted attention from the mainstream media as well, which may have helped to fill his paltry campaign coffers.

August was a huge bonanza month for Mike Huckabee. According to National Journal’s Hotline, he not only made it onto the Sunday talk-show circuit but topped the list of candidate exposure on cable television, with 1 hour and 19 minutes. He was seen on mainstream media and also on “The Colbert Report” (Comedy Central) and HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher,” which moved him into the top 10 candidates in terms of airtime. Second in August was the first-place winner of the Iowa straw poll, Mitt Romney. Third was Joe Biden at 1 hour and 6 minutes.

The Unpredictables of Media Coverage

Other breaking news can wreak havoc with even the best media strategy. Mitt Romney, who spent most of his airtime capital on traditional media, was scheduled to appear on the business channel shows to promote his new tax plan. That day the Senator Larry Craig story broke (Craig was arrested in a men’s room in Minneapolis). As a result, Romney used his air time explaining why he fired Craig from a post in his campaign.

The publication of Joe Biden’s autobiography was a hook to help him get some visibility, which worked quite well. But a trip to Iraq in September, which his campaign hoped would gain him some airtime, was overshadowed by a surprise visit from President Bush, who has bigger marquee value than the senator from Delaware; then a sandstorm kept Biden from making a much-heralded interview on CNN.

In the quarterly review of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, the authors found that articles and television stories about the front-runners were so overwhelming in number that they did not even bother counting stories about the other candidates. It seems ironic, therefore, that while the media are preoccupied with the front-runners, the front-runners tend to avoid interviews, especially the Sunday talk shows and one-on-one interviews that they cannot control. A second Hotline list documents the coverage (Table 2).

In terms of the total time they have spent on the air giving interviews and answering questions, the top three—McCain, Biden and Gingrich—are hardly the front-runners in national polls. Those front-runners—Clinton and Giuliani—by contrast, are interview-averse, ranking 15th and 16th on the Hotline list. And Fred Thom-pson, who had many stories written and aired about him, clocked only 2 hours and 3 minutes of face time. Perhaps it just makes sense that the candidates least sought out by the media would avail themselves of the “free” talk shows.

One setting in which the second- and third-tier candidates had hoped to level the playing field was the debates. But the actual number of viewers for most of these forums has been low, and the news reports on them focus almost exclusively on the skirmishes among the leading candidates. A classic New York Times article following the April South Carolina Democratic debate had this insightful reporting on Senator Chris Dodd, who was mentioned for the first time in the 23rd paragraph: “Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut also took part in the debate.”

Voters who want to go beyond horse-race journalism and make their own reasoned decisions about who can best lead the country can do it, although it will take a bit of hard work. All the candidates have Web sites, position papers and long biographies. Spending some time with C-Span, one of the few places on television that covers all the candidates talking to voters at length, is a way to assess these politicians unfiltered by the media lens. And watching the town meetings and neighborhood coffees, we are reminded how seriously the citizens in the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire take their role as surrogates for the rest of us.

A Catholic Call To the Common Good

Rick Santorum, for example, a former Republican senator from Pennsylvania and a Catholic, has written a book titled It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good. His one-time opponent, Robert Casey Jr., a Catholic and currently a Democratic senator from Pennsylvania, made the common good a defining theme in his campaign. Several 2008 presidential candidates, including Senators Hillary Clinton and Sam Brownback, have peppered their stump speeches, talking points and position papers with language about the common good.

Appeals to the common good resonate particularly at a time when war, corporate scandals, the government’s bungled response to Hurricane Katrina and anxiety about globalization have left many feeling adrift in a rapidly changing world. “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” W. B. Yeats wrote in his 1920 poem “The Second Coming.” This could describe our own fractured and alienated era.

Despite the flurry of references to the common good in public discourse, however, the term often twists in the rhetorical wind and comes across as a vague idea, so unthreatening that it is about as controversial as clean drinking water. The common good has been invoked in sound bites and catchphrases to support both liberal and conservative arguments. But an authentic understanding of the common good—one enriched by its particular connection to Catholic social thought—has practical implications for public policy and defies conventional ideological and political categories. Indeed, Catholicism’s long history of defining the common good as rooted in the dignity of the human person and the specific demands of justice, makes Catholics especially well-suited to challenge societal leaders to embrace a more energetic public agenda rooted in the common good.

Theory and Practice

For centuries, the Catholic tradition has emphasized a call to the common good as the centerpiece of Catholic social teaching. Building on concepts articulated first by Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas spoke about the good sought by all as intertwined with the reality of God. In the 16th century, the earliest followers of St. Ignatius Loyola were among the first Westerners to travel beyond Europe, inspired in part by a global vision of the common good. Pope Leo XIII, in his encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), was the first to make formal use of the concept of the common good as the starting point for the church’s social analysis.

According to the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, “The principle of the common good, to which every aspect of social life must be related if it is to attain its fullest meaning, stems from the dignity, unity and equality of all people.” Yet there is a stunning failure to connect the clarity of these ideals and the realities of a world in which poverty, war and racism tear apart the human family. As globalization dissolves borders and shrinks our world, for example, the burdens and benefits of global capitalism undermine the common good by widening the chasm between rich and poor, hope and despair.

The chasm was evident in a recent New York Times story, “The Richest of the Rich, Proud of a New Gilded Age” (7/15), in which billionaire tycoons boasted about their personal accomplishments, bemoaned taxes on their fortunes and had little to say about why more than 37 million Americans live in poverty in the world’s richest country. A few months earlier, the Nasdaq launched a private stock market for elite investors with assets of more than $100 million. Meanwhile, in many towns and cities, the blue-collar jobs that once supported the middle class have disappeared as corporations pursue cheap labor, minimal regulation and higher profits outside the United States. Traditional community bonds are fraying. A commitment to the “commons,” public spaces that benefit all, has given way to private, gated communities where strangers of different classes or complexions can live apart, at a comfortable distance.

Our political culture both mirrors and shapes these trends. While government has often been an instrument of social good during epochal changes in American history, several decades of ideological assaults have branded “big government” as antithetical to freedom and individual responsibility. The marketplace, privatization and the primacy of choice have become a secular trinity. While Catholic social teaching values the importance of personal achievement, it also insists that government take on responsibilities that the market or individuals alone cannot or will not meet. The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes the common good as “the reason the political authority exists.” Furthermore, the church’s social doctrine insists that “ownership of goods be equally accessible to all” and that the “universal destination of goods” requires a moral economic system in which workers earn living wages and resources are distributed equitably. Pope Benedict XVI, in his encyclical Deus Caritas Est, writes that love of God and love of neighbor are inseparable and that “justice is both the aim and intrinsic criterion of all politics.”

These are powerful words with practical implications for our most divisive contemporary debates about abortion, war, immigration, health care and climate change. These words challenge us to think deeply about what it means to be faithful citizens and to reflect on how our conscience and faith inform how we vote and live as both citizens and disciples.

The 2008 Election

As a presidential election year approaches, campaigners will again rank Catholics among the most coveted voters. Since Catholic social teaching is broad and deep, Catholics should insist that our national debate on values reflect the fullness of this rich tradition. Building a culture of life requires economic and social policies that help women choose life. It requires ending an unjust war, ensuring that poor children have health care and taking seriously the threats of global climate change. A renewed common good narrative in our public square has the potential to inspire a civic and moral awakening, one that Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned when he spoke of the “beloved community,” a society where all of us, not just a few, have the opportunity to share in the abundance of creation.

No political party has a monopoly on moral values. Both Republicans and Democrats have an equal opportunity to succeed or fail in living up to the obligations of the common good. As Catholics, our faith inspires us to help reshape our culture and politics not simply as another interest group, but as members of a global church that seeks justice for the most vulnerable because it recognizes our common humanity as children of God. We should take up this struggle with hope, insisting that our public officials treat the common good not as another catch phrase in a campaign playbook, but as the foundation of moral leadership. In this way, we speak from the heart of our tradition with a message as old as the Beatitudes and as powerfully relevant for this election as it will still be a century from now.

It Starts in Mexico

Their turnabout reflects a change that has taken place in Mexican attitudes ever since a more genuine democracy emerged there seven years ago. In the minds of many, building the fence—and, theoretically, allowing far fewer migrants to cross illegally into the United States—would finally force Mexico’s leaders to confront the inexcusable inequality that pushes almost a million Mexicans over the border each year. For decades, the jobs in America’s vegetable fields, restaurant kitchens and hotel laundries have been an all too convenient social safety valve, taking the pressure off the Mexican elite. That overprivileged class has produced the world’s richest man, telecom billionaire Carlos Slim Helú; but it seems oblivious to the fact that almost half of Mexico’s 106 million people live in poverty—a quarter of them in extreme poverty, surviving on about $1 a day.

My Mexican colleagues were simply acknowledging what most Americans still fail to grasp: immigration reform is not domestic policy; it’s foreign policy. Approaching it as the former has led us to one failed immigration scheme after another. I started my career in the 1980s covering the Reagan administration’s sweeping amnesty for undocumented immigrants and its crackdown on employers who hired them. That was followed in the 1990s by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, intended to “seal” the frontier with fences and thousands of new border patrol agents. Result: by 2000, the number of migrants entering the U.S. illegally had actually risen to a record of almost two million a year.

By then the message should have been clear: instead of trying to curb illegal immigration at the border, we should try reducing it at its source inside Mexico and Latin America, the region with the world’s widest income disparities. As long as so many millions south of our porous border live in grinding poverty (and as long as the world north of the border remains addicted to cheap fruit-picking, dish-washing and room-cleaning), illegal immigrants will keep coming. But if we could work with countries like Mexico to steer more of their wealth and ours to the impoverished by means of better jobs, education and entrepreneurial opportunities—if we were to steer billions to those efforts instead of fences—we might not need the fences.

Increasing Capital and Credit in Mexico

Mexico is a conservative nation. But last year a leftist, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, came within less than one percentage point of defeating Calderón in the presidential election (and would have won had he not been such a strident and messianic campaigner). The main reason for his appeal is that his platform included commonsense economic reforms that Lou Dobbs and other immigration grouches should have applauded. Among them was a big increase in the amount of capital and credit for small farmers and small-business owners, who are the forgotten sector of Mexico’s economy even though they employ almost two-thirds of Mexico’s workers. “For once,” López told me during his campaign, “we’re going to confront the great sin of the Mexican economic system—that it doesn’t create jobs.”

Or at least jobs decent enough to “keep our young people,” as López often shouted on the stump, “from having to abandon their towns and families for the other side of the border!” Calderón, a conservative who was favored by Mexico’s notorious business monopolies, found himself having to co-opt much of López’s rhetoric in order to win, insisting, for example, that “one kilometer of new road in Oaxaca,” one of Mexico’s poorest states, “is worth more than 100 miles of fence on the border.” Now it is up to Calderón, and us—whether we like it or not—to prove that notion right.

There is increasing consensus among Mexico’s poor, as well as its policymakers, that one of the best means of doing that is microcredit. The idea of bringing small business loans to a nation’s most remote and economically depressed regions got a boost last year when the Bangladeshi micro-credit guru, Muhammad Yunus, won the Nobel Peace Prize. Few countries need microcredit more than Mexico, where for tens of millions of citizens access to the wealth-generating benefits of a banking system is as rare as potable water.

In the developed world, for example, there are usually fewer than 2,000 people per bank branch. In Mexican states like Oaxaca the number is 38,000, according to the Mexico City-based Association of Mexican Social Sector Credit Unions (Amuccs). What’s more, Mexico’s banks all but shut out small enterprises with exorbitant interest rates and maddening red tape. “That’s one of Mexico’s ugly paradoxes,” says Isabel Cruz, director of Amuccs. “It actually has one of the hemisphere’s largest financial systems, but it loans very little to its own economy.” Only three banks, in fact, handle 70 percent of Mexico’s financial activity, and little if any of it is conducted in the rural areas that produce the lion’s share of illegal immigrants.

Creating Jobs and Improving Schools

Many of those immigrants have now decided to do what Mexico’s banks won’t. Mexicans in the United States send home as much as $25 billion in remittances each year; and while much of it used to be wasted on flashy pickup trucks, wide-screen televisions and (apologies to my fellow Catholics) ostentatious churches, more is now being used to start local microcredit banks. The hope, of course, is that fostering new, job-creating businesses at home will eventually keep Mexican workers at home.

That ideal is being borne out in a small but growing number of rural Mexican towns, especially in the country’s backward south (where López, not surprisingly, won almost every state last year). Earlier this year I visited one of them, Santa Cruz Mixtepec, an indigenous Mixtec community in the rugged mountains of southern Oaxaca. Two-thirds of Santa Cruz’s 3,000 residents live undocumented al otro lado, “on the other side” in the United States; and each year they send back almost $1 million. A few years ago the wives in Santa Cruz took a chunk of that money and founded a microcredit bank, Xu Nuu Ndavi (Mixtec for “Poor People’s Money”). With starter loans of $5,000 and up, Xu Nuu Ndavi has helped build businesses as diverse as furniture-making and tomato greenhouses—a sorely needed shot in the arm for a town that still farms with oxen and wooden plows.

Slowly but surely, Xu Nuu Ndavi is yielding the most important result: Santa Cruz’s workers are starting to return to este lado, or “this side,” and some who considered leaving have decided to stay. One is 30-year-old Alberto Bautista, who recently came home from Arizona to work at his uncle’s new carpentry shop and start a family. Another is Roberto Hernández, who was poised to jump the border until he got a loan to start a metal window-frames business that he says should soon employ 10 people. “Opportunities like this are like infecting a child with a cold virus,” Hernández told me with a laugh while adjusting his blowtorch. “It spreads.”

Modesto Ramos, who has returned from Virginia, where he did construction work, caught the bug in a big way. Near his home now stands a complex of tomato greenhouses, each covering some 1,500 square feet, which from a distance look like large crystal bubbles amid Santa Cruz’s small cinder-block homes. Stroking his Fu Manchu-like moustache, Ramos proudly strolled up and down the rows of plants, whose saladette tomatoes are in huge demand in this part of Mexico, and inspected the new indoor irrigation equipment he recently installed. “I listened to President Calderón talk about development on the radio a couple nights ago,” he said. “But you can’t talk about development until you start investing money in communities like this, with decent interest rates and more flexible terms,” like those that Xu Nuu Ndavi offers.

Olivia Mendoza, one of the microbank’s founders, said 95 percent of the loans so far have been paid on time—a sign, she added, that locals want to make this program work “in order to bring our families back together.” She also knows that microcredit is not a cure-all for the migration plague. Rural schooling in Mexico, for example, has yet to enter the 20th century, let alone the 21st. “We need much more investment in education out here,” Mendoza noted, “if we’re going to make our kids employable in jobs with living wages.” Another useful effort would be what’s known as “legalizing” the poor: giving marginalized citizens like the Mixtecs formal legal title to their homes, businesses and other assets (which in Mexico’s informal economy are estimated to be worth some $315 billion) so they can parlay them into collateral for bank credit and investment capital.

Revising Trade Agreements

The bigger point is that all these illegal-immigration remedies are what the United States can, and should, make a foreign-policy priority if we want to break our chronic cycle of immigration-reform debacles. Since the end of the cold war, America has too often tried to substitute free trade for foreign policy, especially in Latin America, a region Washington usually dismisses as geopolitical trailer trash. Free trade per se is hardly a bad thing. Since the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect in 1994, Mexican exports to the United States have leapt from $40 billion to about $200 billion. But at the same time, the share of national income for Mexico’s richest 10 percent has grown significantly, while that of the poorest 10 percent has declined. And that of the rural poor has plummeted: fewer than 3 percent of Mexican farmers today can compete with cheaper, and heavily subsidized, agricultural imports from the United States.

Nafta has obviously failed as a solution to illegal immigration, partly because the wealth it has created simply does not flow through Mexico’s economic bloodstream, and partly because it has put Mexico’s campesinos, or farmers, at an insurmountable disadvantage. One way we can help correct that is to revise Nafta to reduce agricultural tariffs at a less severe pace, while at the same time reconsidering our lavish subsidies to U.S. farmers.

Another is to get into the microcredit act. A $7 billion border fence might make America’s xenophobes feel better in the short run. In the long run, however, they would be doing themselves a bigger favor by lobbying their congressmen to channel that money as foreign aid to microbanks like Xu Nuu Ndavi—and to pressure the Mexican government to pony up, too. The World Bank last year announced a $1 billion fund for small-business loans in Latin America, and the United States should follow suit (with much more cash than the paltry figures the Bush administration has discussed thus far). Promoting more business enterprises means more Mexicans participating in Nafta and, logic dictates, fewer Mexicans crossing the Rio Grande.

This brings us to the most urgent reform Washington needs to push in Mexico: dismantling the power of its ravenous monopolies and oligopolies, which control every industry from television to cement to sliced bread. They are the main reason that credit and capital get choked off from Mexican society, but Mexico can get away with it by simply exporting its desperate workers to the United States.

Rogelio Ramírez de la O, one of Mexico’s most respected business consultants, joined the López campaign because he is convinced his country cannot continue this way. He is no fan of the Lou Dobbs lobby, but he grins when he hears the U.S. Congress threaten to tax the lucrative migrant remittances that Mexico relies on to prop up its lopsided economy. “The Calderón cabinet,” he says, “is very nervous about that one.” Taxing that money, unfortunately, would almost certainly put undue hardship on Mexico’s poor. But like the fence, it is a tempting idea if it could jolt Mexico into meaningful reform. And you do not need a few tequilas to feel that way.

'Jaw, Jaw,' Not 'War, War'

The invitation extended to Mr. Ahmadinejad to address the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, despite public protests, was in the best tradition of university life, where the opportunity to hear unpopular viewpoints and challenge them is protected by academic freedom. Unfortunately, the president of Columbia, Lee C. Bollinger, apparently stung by public criticism of the university’s invitation, chose to open the proceedings by calling the Iranian president “a petty and cruel dictator,” who would not “have the intellectual courage” to answer searching questions about his interpretation of the history of the Holocaust and Iran’s right to develop nuclear power. The reaction to Mr. Bollinger’s remarks was mixed, but even some of those who had protested the university’s invitation to Mr. Ahmadinejad expressed disappointment at the Columbia president’s violation of norms of hospitality and academic courtesy.

Some of the Iranian president’s comments at Columbia, like his denial that there are homosexuals in Iran, lived up (or down) to expectations. Nonetheless, he pointed out the moral ambiguity of the U.S. position on nuclear arms, which threatens Iran with military action if it pursues a policy of nuclear development, while violating nonproliferation agreements by favoring India’s efforts to enhance its nuclear arsenal. The United States has also failed to observe its commitment to reduce substantially its own nuclear stockpile, a ruined pillar of the nonproliferation regime. To other nations such a double standard in taking and granting privileged exceptions from nonproliferation mandates seems an exercise in arrogance. Selective enforcement of treaties naturally arouses resentment among disfavored nations, and it undercuts U.S. moral standing in the world. It will take decades for the United States to win back the good opinion lost by the overbearing style of this administration and the injury it has done to international law and institutions.

In arguing that the Holocaust should not be used to justify the oppression of the Palestinian people, Mr. Ahmadinejad likewise touched on an unresolved and neuralgic issue that haunts U.S. policy in the Middle East. Once again, he was able to parry accusations of denying history and meddling where he does not belong, because the U.S. administration, while giving lip service to the ideal of a two-state solution, has repeatedly employed a double standard. It has favored only those concessions to the Palestinians that have Israel’s prior approval and appears to be shaping multiparty talks scheduled for November to fit Israel’s negotiating strategy.

The meeting of the Iranian president later in the week with an interfaith panel of Christian leaders, arranged by the Mennonite Central Committee, was free of the personal rancor that soured his appearance at Columbia. The meeting, held in the Church Center for the United Nations, aspired, in the words of one participant, to explore the “common moral heritage” shared by Christians and Muslims. The Iranian president was asked whether it would it be possible to identify and admit the shortcomings “of your society and of ours.” While Mr. Ahmadinejad’s answer was no more satisfying than his answers at Columbia, the attempt to engage in honest dialogue was more promising than the walkout executed by the U.S. delegation when the Iranian president rose to speak to the General Assembly.

After Mr. Ahmadinejad departed, The New Yorker published a report by Seymour Hersh (“Shifting Targets,” 10/8) of continued planning within the Bush administration for military strikes against Iran. The story made apprehensive readers nostalgic for Winston Churchill, who once said, “To jaw, jaw is always better than to war, war.” The wider international community shares U.S. concerns about Iran, but the United States, as if out of a pathological need for an enemy, persists in shunning, isolating and demonizing Iran. If multiparty talks can succeed with North Korea, another nuclearizing member of the “axis of evil,” might not constructive engagement and negotiation succeed with Iran as well?

Iraq’s Abandoned Refugees

The war in Iraq has led to the first jump in global refugee numbers in five years. An estimated two million refugees have sought safety in Jordan, Syria and other neighboring countries. Comparable numbers, unable to flee, eke out a precarious existence within Iraq’s borders as internally displaced persons. Increasingly, moreover, Middle Eastern countries are closing their doors to Iraqis. Whole planeloads of fleeing Iraqis have been turned back from Jordan, even when they had proper documentation. Jordan now hosts the highest number of refugees per capita of any country in the world. Syria too, which previously had what amounted to an open door policy for Iraqi refugees, is now imposing visa requirements—a major stumbling block for those fleeing from the violence. Saudi Arabia has gone so far as to create a $7 billion, technically sophisticated physical barrier to keep Iraqis out.

In the early years of the conflict, Jordan generously allowed Iraqis to enter and remain. But after the bombing of three hotels in Amman in 2005 by Iraqi terrorists, which caused 60 deaths, the mood in Jordan changed. One result was that Iraqi males between the ages of 17 and 35 are completely banned. Three-fourths of Iraqi refugees in Jordan are consequently women and children. Those who entered with savings were initially able to find lodging and, with Arabic as a common language, could to some extent blend in with the local Jordanian population. Now, however, with resources like food, health care and education severely overburdened, the mood has soured, and Iraqi refugees are increasingly viewed as unwelcome illegal aliens. The impact on women and children has been especially harsh. When families’ savings are gone, some women have fallen prey to sex traffickers, and girls and boys as young as 8 are drawn into prostitution in a desperate effort to help pay for basic necessities.

Internally displaced persons within Iraq have also fared poorly. Scorned in some quarters by those who say that if they had really been in danger, they would have found a way to escape Iraq, I.D.P.s often suffer not only the lack of shelter, but of food as well. Food insecurity is a daily reality. Iraq’s public distribution system—the centralized mechanism that for decades has provided food to vulnerable citizens at subsidized prices—is now near collapse in a nation that was once considered the most developed in the Middle East. The same is true of the sewage system. Less than 20 percent of the population have access to appropriate sanitation. Unclean water is one of the biggest causes of death for children.

Palestinian refugees constitute another overlooked group. Many Palestinians have lived in Iraq since 1948; some born there have never set foot outside Iraq. But hundreds now exist in deplorable conditions in camps on the border between Jordan and Syria, and additional thousands live in fear in Baghdad itself. Especially in Baghdad, they have been attacked and often killed as aliens. Over 600 have been murdered. Because of the ongoing violence, humanitarian aid organizations, moreover, have become increasingly limited in what aid they can offer in Iraq. Most have sent their non-Iraqi workers out of the country. And no wonder; since 2003, almost 100 aid workers have been killed. Even Iraq’s own Red Crescent Society has suffered losses, though it continues to function in most of the country.

The challenge, refugee advocates emphasize, is to work toward a more equitable sharing of the burden of refugee care through a massive injection of per capita grant aid. Adequate assistance, either in resettlement initiatives or money, has not been forthcoming from most of the first-world nations, including the United Kingdom and the United States. It is time for them to step forward with deeds, not words only.