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OPINIONS
THE NEW MEXICAN Sunday, October 5, 2014
The West’s oldest newspaper, founded 1849 Robin M. Martin Owner Robert M. McKinney Owner, 1949-2001 Inez Russell Gomez Editorial Page Editor
Ray Rivera Editor
OUR VIEW
Plastic bag bans keep spreading
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ith California becoming the first state to ban single-use plastic bags, it’s clear that Santa Fe’s ban — which went into effect in February 2014 — is part of a larger movement. The use-it-and-toss-it mentality is being replaced. That’s what banning plastic bags is about. However, a ban on single-use plastic bags has other purposes. Most importantly, banning the bags cuts down on litter. Judging from parks and fences around town, the ban in Santa Fe has started reducing the ubiquitous plastic bag presence around town. More should be done, though, to help consumers move to reusable bags now that plastic is no longer an option. Paper bags are not an environmentally friendly option, yet too many shoppers grab them when they forget their reusable bags. Too many other shoppers don’t even try to bring their own bags, a habit we all need to form. Unless people reuse bags, a ban on plastic bags doesn’t necessarily cut down on other environmental impacts. In California, the statewide ban — set to begin next summer — includes a charge of 10 cents per recycled paper bag, compostable bags or reusable plastic bag. The 10-cent fee will help encourage consumers to switch to reusable bags, and that switch is important for this legislation to have the broadest possible effect. Without a fee, shoppers tend just to choose paper. People on public assistance won’t have to pay the fee. (Hawaii also essentially has banned plastic bags, but on a county-by-county basis rather than statewide.) Of course, plastic bag manufacturers in California aren’t taking the new law sitting down. They will push for a ballot initiative against the ban, meaning the law could never take effect. That’s despite the sad reality that California residents toss some 14 billion bags a year, creating 123,000 tons of waste and who-knows-how-much litter. Additionally, the plastic in landfills won’t break down for 1,000 years and will leave behind particles that can leach chemicals into soil and water. For ocean creatures, who mistake plastic particles for food, the bags cause hundreds of thousands of deaths a year. Breaking the habit is good for the Earth. Santa Fe city councilors earlier decided to drop our city’s 10-cent bag fee, using the excuse that lawyers told them it was an impermissible tax. Perhaps California’s bold step will embolden the council to bring back a fee — even a 5-cent fee works, according to a 2013 dissertation by a Princeton University graduate student. A fee works better than a bag credit, the research found. It’s an incentive to change habits. But even without a bag charge, the city needs to do more to encourage residents to reuse bags. Education, public awareness and more reusable bag giveaways could all help reduce paper bag use. It’s not enough simply to ban the bags. New habits need to be formed. With consumers around the world estimated to use 1 trillion plastic bags each year, such bans are important to helping people change their ways. New Mexico should follow the example of Santa Fe, Hawaii and California and implement a broader bag ban. It would help reduce litter across the state — the fences along our highways are sad sights. Habits must change. One and done should be a relic of the past.
The past 100 years From The Santa Fe New Mexican: Oct. 5, 1914: Gallup — Between 40 and 50 of the refugees lately interned at Fort Wingate will remain in the United States, the majority of them probably to become residents of New Mexico. Immigration officers who have been examining those who did not wish to return to Mexico and whom the government would permit to remain, have declared more than 40 eligible. Oct. 5, 1964: Española — The Española Valley, fertile with chile and apples, has never been considered exactly suitable for that southland crop, cotton. But Mrs. Mildred Walker, home agent-atlarge for Taos and Rio Arriba Counties, is proving that it will grow. She decided to plant a few cotton seeds and see what happened. Now the stalks are nearing 2 feet in height and have formed “squares” where the bloom and eventually the boll develops. Planted too late, this year’s plants won’t have time before frost to make cotton, but the plant is beautiful and next year she plans to plant earlier. Oct. 5, 1989: Albuquerque — New Mexico savings and loan associations lost $185.1 million in the first six months of 1989, compared with a $409.8 million loss during the same period last year. The New Mexico thrifts ranked 11th nationwide in total losses. Fourteen of the savings and loans in the state showed a profit, while the other 10 lost money.
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Use education as tool in terror fight
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s we fight the Islamic State and advance of the Islamic State and averted other extremists, there’s somea genocide against the Yazidi population thing that President Barack in Iraq, but it’s very difficult to win a war Obama and all of us can learn from them. from the air. That’s why the Taliban still For, in one sense, the terrorists are fightthrives in Afghanistan after 13 years of ing smarter than we are. U.S. air attacks. These extremists use arms to Unfortunately, we’re not fight their battles in the short playing the long game, as the term, but, to hold ground in extremists are. We are vastly the long run, they also combat over-relying on the military Western education and womtoolbox and underemploying en’s empowerment. They know the education toolbox, the womthat illiteracy, ignorance and en’s empowerment toolbox, the oppression of women create the communications toolbox. We’re petri dish in which extremism tacticians; alas, the extremists Nicholas can flourish. may be better strategists. Kristof That’s why the Islamic State It’s not a question of kidnapped Samira Salih alresources, because bombs are The New York Nuaimi, a brave Iraqi woman more expensive than books. Times and human rights lawyer in The U.S. military campaign Mosul, tortured her and publicly against the Islamic State will executed her last week. That’s why the cost at least $2.4 billion a year and perTaliban shot Malala Yousafzai, then 15 haps many times that, according to an years old, after she campaigned for eduestimate from the Center for Strategic cating girls. And that’s why Boko Haram and Budgetary Assessments in Washingkidnapped hundreds of schoolgirls in ton. northern Nigeria and announced that it In contrast, Obama seems to have would turn them into slaves. dropped his 2008 campaign promise to In each case, the extremists recognized establish a $2 billion global fund for edua basic truth: Their greatest strategic cation. And the United States gives the threat comes not from a drone but from Global Partnership for Education, a major a girl with a book. We need to recognize, multilateral effort, less in a year than and act on, that truth as well. what we spend weekly in Syria and Iraq. For similar reasons, the financiers of This is an area where Congress seems extremism have invested heavily in funmore forward-looking than the president damentalist indoctrination. They have because Congress regularly appropriates built Wahhabi madrassas in poor Muslim substantially more for basic education countries like Pakistan, Niger and Mali, overseas than Obama requests. Bipartioffering free meals, as well as scholarships san legislation, the Education for All Act, for the best students to study in the Gulf. would elevate the issue; let’s hope that Shouldn’t we try to compete? Obama gets behind it. Shouldn’t we use weapons in the short No one is naive enough to think that run, but try to gain strategic advantage by education is a panacea. Al-Qaida leaders, focusing on education and on empowerincluding Osama bin Laden and Ayman ing women to build stable societies less al-Zawahri, have been university eduvulnerable to extremist manipulation? cated. Iraq, Syria and Lebanon were all The U.S. airstrikes have slowed the reasonably well-educated and supportive
of gender equality by regional standards, yet all have been torn apart by civil wars. Still, the historical record of the last half-century is that education tends to nurture a more cosmopolitan middle class and gives people a stake in the system. In Hong Kong today, we’re seeing how educated youth often behave. They are demanding democracy, but peacefully. Girls’ education seems to have more effect than boys’ education, partly because educated women have markedly fewer children. The result is lower birthrates and less of a youth bulge in the population, which highly correlates to civil conflict. I support judicious airstrikes in the short term against the Islamic State, but that should be only one part of a policy combating extremism. And a starting point should be to ensure that the 3 million Syrian refugees mostly in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon — especially girls — can get schooling. Right now, many are getting none, and one study published last month found that Syria had the worst reversal in educational attainment in recent history, with enrollment rates for Syrian children in Lebanon less than half the level of those in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet the UNICEF request for education funding for Syrians was only 40 percent financed as of mid-August. If we miss this opportunity, those children will be tinder for future wars and extremism, and we’ll be stuck dropping bombs for generations to come. So let’s learn from the extremists — and from those brave girls themselves who are willing to risk their lives in order to get an education. They all understand the power of education, and we should, too. Contact Nicholas Kristof at Facebook. com/Kristof, Twitter.com/NickKristof or by mail at The New York Times, 620 Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10018.
Secret Service no stranger to scandal
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o power couple cut a wider social swath in post-Civil War Washington than President Ulysses S. Grant’s attorney general, George H. Williams, and his wife, Kate. Then Kate Williams’ abandoned son from a previous marriage spoiled things by showing up in the capital, gambling and consorting with prostitutes — sometimes bringing them to receptions at the Williamses’ grand home on Rhode Island Avenue. He financed this embarrassing lifestyle by blackmailing the attorney general. So George Williams called in the chief of the Secret Service, Hiram C. Whitley. Get rid of my stepson, he said, and do it quietly. No blood. Whitley promptly obliged. Undercover Secret Service men got the youth drunk, convinced him, after he regained consciousness, that he had committed murder while intoxicated, then helped him “escape” to Veracruz, Mexico — where they abandoned him. He never bothered the Williamses again. Now that’s a Secret Service scandal. At least it would have been, if the story had come out before Whitley told it decades later in his memoir, a book that few people read in the year of its publication, 1894, and even fewer have read since. Still, the tale provides a dash of historical context for the travails of today’s Secret Service, an agency justly proud of its record but never free of controversy, even in its earliest days. Congress established the Secret Service as a division of the Treasury Department in 1865; its mission was to combat counterfeiting of the new paper currency issued during the Civil War. As such, it was the first-ever federal detective force, long before the FBI. (The Secret Service still investigates counterfeiters; it did not
Editorial page editor: Inez Russell Gomez, 986-3053, igomez@sfnewmexican.com, Twitter @inezrussell
take on presidential bodyguard duty fulltime until after the 1901 assassination of William McKinley.) Hiram C. Whitley was its second chief and a genuine innovator. During his tenure, which began in 1869, the Secret Service instituted a written code of conduct, developed files on criminals, photos included — and authorized the first Secret Service badges. Whitley busted not only counterfeiters but also smugglers of cigars, liquor and diamonds in New York. Long before J. Edgar Hoover’s 10 Most Wanted, Whitley manipulated the press with juicy leaks and colorful tales of his agents’ exploits. Whitley’s finest hour was the Secret Service infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan. At the special request of the Justice Department, his disguised operatives fanned out across the South, gathering intelligence — often with the aid of African Americans — that helped bring white terrorists to justice. The crackdown enabled black voters to participate freely in the 1872 elections. Whitley boasted lavishly of this noble effort, yet he was hardly noble by nature. A teenage runaway whose pre-Civil War résumé included fraudulent pawnbroking in Massachusetts and kidnapping fugitive slaves in Kansas, he had served during the war as a hit man for the Union army in New Orleans, dispatching criminals and Confederate infiltrators with no questions asked. In short, for Whitley, law enforcement and covert operations were more of an adventure than a mission — and the ends always justified the means. Even his first Klan-fighting job, a special assignment in Georgia in 1868 prior to his Secret Service tenure, was marred by credible allegations that he had tortured a black witness.
Confronted after the war about his slave-catching past, Whitley unapologetically argued that he had simply been obeying the Fugitive Slave Law. In due course, Whitley found himself hauled before Congress to answer charges that his men were pocketing contraband and otherwise abusing their power. Some criticism was politically motivated; Southerners and their Northern sympathizers despised Whitley’s covert war on the Klan. But there was more than a little truth to the charges. As his dirty trick on behalf of the Williamses showed, Whitley relished intrigue for its own sake. By the mid1870s, even his superiors at the Treasury Department thought that the Secret Service and its formerly useful boss had gotten out of control. Whitley’s downfall came in 1874, when his men became entangled in a bizarre conspiracy to frame opponents of the District of Columbia’s pro-Grant government for the theft of documents from a government strongbox. The Safe Burglary Case, as it was known, was perhaps the first domestic intelligence scandal in U.S. history, eerily similar to Watergate. Though Whitley’s precise role was never clarified, he was forced to resign and faced a federal trial — which ended in a hung jury. Whitley left the capital and moved to Emporia, Kan., where he ran a successful hotel and built an opera house. He died at the age of 84 in 1919, a man of sizable wealth but unwarranted obscurity. For today’s far different Secret Service, and its now-former director, Julia Pierson, her predecessor’s rise and fall does offer one possibly comforting moral: There is life after Washington. Charles Lane is a member of The Washington Post’s editorial board.
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