EDITORIAL : THE NEW YORK TIMES, USA

 

The Crisis Next Time

The federal government survived the hostage crisis created by House Republicans, but emerged staggering from the deal struck Friday night. The compromises were damaging, the amount of money cut from a sickly economy was severe, and the image of Washington as a back-alley dogfighting garage will not soon fade.

The Republicans set the terms of the debate at every point, and learned that they can push the fumbling and fearful Democrats far to the right. Within hours, they began revving up to create the next crisis.

Although much of the final deal has not yet been made public, it is clear it could have been far worse. The White House refused to accept many of the most radical cuts in the original House bill, including deep reductions to Head Start, AmeriCorps, Pell grants, public broadcasting and competitive education programs. Financial and health care reform will continue but with reduced money. The worst right-wing demands were dropped, including a cutoff of funds to providers of abortion and family planning, and an end to regulation of greenhouse gases. And nearly half the cuts came from a side of the budget that will do less harm to the economy and the most vulnerable.

Nonetheless, the Republicans did far better than they could possibly have imagined when the process began, winning $38.5 billion in cuts, more than even the House leadership had proposed. That’s on top of the $40 billion in additional spending that President Obama had originally proposed for this fiscal year, which was dropped. About $13 billion will be cut from the departments of Labor, Education, and Health and Human Services. The State Department and foreign assistance will lose $8 billion.

Key investments in roads, rails and other vital public works will again have to wait, and because these cuts will change the spending baseline for future budgets, may never be restored to their proper levels. (Defense spending will go up by only $5 billion over the next six months, not the $7 billion Republicans wanted.)

Democrats also agreed to the ideological demand of House conservatives that the District of Columbia be banned from spending any money for abortions, a cruel blow to the poor and largely African-American women who need those services. The ban was lifted in 2009.

The worst aspect of the deal, however, was the momentum it gave to Republicans who have hoodwinked many Americans into believing that short-term cuts in spending will be good for the economy. After the agreement was reached, President Obama actually patted himself on the back for agreeing to the “largest annual spending cut in our history.”

He should have used the moment to explain to Americans what irresponsible cuts the G.O.P. demanded just to keep the government open. Now, having won the philosophical terms of this debate, the House is eagerly anticipating the next and far more serious showdown: the need to raise the federal debt ceiling by May 16.

If it is not raised, the government will go into default, which could have a disastrous effect on the credit markets and the economy. House Speaker John Boehner said after the budget deal that there was “not a chance” the Republicans, who like to pretend they are the fiscally responsible party, would agree to raise the ceiling “without something really, really big attached to it.” He may be pandering to his Tea Party members, but the threat is real.

Mr. Obama will speak this week about a plan to reduce the long-term deficit, and aides are already making it clear he will finally demand that taxes for the rich must go up. The fight next time will be rougher and the principles need to be stronger. The Democrats’ message must be far more convincing than it has been, and their counterattack against Republican irresponsibility far more powerful.

Who Really Sent That E-Mail?

Americans are right to be concerned about a huge data breach at an online marketing company, Epsilon, which resulted in the theft of names and e-mail addresses for customers and employees of some of the nation’s largest businesses, including Citibank, Disney and Verizon.

Epsilon issued a statement assuring that no other information was compromised. But millions of consumers could still be vulnerable to sophisticated identity-theft ploys — “spear phishing” — in which scammers target e-mails to specific people and make it appear as if they came from a company they trust. Familiarity can lure victims into clicking on links, downloading malware, or responding to requests for account numbers or passwords.

This is not an isolated case. Last month, at RSA, which produces SecurID tokens, an employee received an e-mail entitled “2011 Recruitment Plan” and clicked on its Excel attachment. This released a program that gave hackers access to the company’s network and allowed them to lift information about the tokens.

Two years ago, the Justice Department charged a 28-year-old from Miami and two Russians with stealing 130 million credit card numbers from one of the world’s largest payment processing companies. Last year there were large-scale data breaches at Affinity Health Plan, Lincoln Financial Securities and Ohio State University.

Epsilon has provided few details, saying the breach is subject to an investigation. The public and policy makers need to understand how the hack took place to determine how vulnerable sensitive information really is and figure out what further safeguards are needed to protect it.

The breach at Epsilon underscores the urgent need for a federal standard of data safety that ensures companies follow adequate policies and procedures to protect consumers’ information and determines companies’ legal liability for breaches. As Congress debates new data privacy rules, it should put data security at the forefront.

Possibilities include imposing maximum periods for retaining personal data and rules about how to protect data that is flowing through corporate networks, stored on corporate servers or, increasingly, on the cloud. It certainly seems risky to have one company handle sensitive information about the customers of so many large firms.

Consumers must also be vigilant. For starters, they should be wary about clicking on any e-mail attachment, even if it comes with a seemingly personal greeting from a business they know and trust.

Sensible Rules to Make Bus Travel Safer

Three major bus accidents in the Northeast, including the horrific crash on Interstate 95 in the Bronx that killed 15 passengers and critically injured several others, may finally spur Congress to mandate bus safety improvements.
 

A bipartisan measure to require seat belts, roofs that can withstand a rollover, better windows to prevent passenger ejection in crashes, and other vital safety steps was introduced in the Senate by Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, and Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas.  The bill, which covers interstate motor coaches, also has new and more stringent requirements for driver fitness and bus company oversight to root out irresponsible operators. A companion bill is pending in the House.

 A nearly identical bill died at the close of last year when Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, imposed a hold on the legislation. Early Senate approval, with strong bipartisan support, may even embarrass the regulation-hostile House into acting. 

  The Department of Transportation is already preparing rules that will require buses to have seat belts and electronic recorders to replace easily falsified paper records of driver hours. Some companies have begun voluntarily adopting safety enhancements. Yet, having Congress require a reasonable set of changes, with a clear timetable, is the best way to ensure the reforms. 

 Buses carry roughly 750 million passengers a year and no legislation can prevent all accidents.  What Congress can and should do is establish common-sense safety standards designed to make crashes less likely, and decrease the death and injury toll when they occur. 

Bluefin Tuna Catch a (Small) Break

The numbers of endangered bluefin tuna are rapidly dwindling, due to vast overfishing fueled by Japan’s insatiable sushi appetite. The international body set up to conserve these fish has utterly failed to do its job. But a small and clever innovation may slow their decline: special hooks designed to help commercial fishing boats in the Gulf of Mexico avoid catching bluefin accidentally.

The hooks are simply thinner than usual, and bend under the weight of a bluefin, whose average size when caught in the gulf is 485 pounds. The hooks still work for yellowfin tuna and swordfish, which weigh a lot less. Fishing for bluefin in the gulf has been illegal since the 1980s, but longline boats often catch them without meaning to. Whether landed or released, the bluefin die.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will require the 50 longline vessels in the gulf to start using the hooks on May 5. Some fishermen are already using them, because they work so well. The sooner the better, because the gulf is where the bluefin spawn each spring.

Even if the new hook ends bluefin bycatch completely, it will only slow the species’ extinction spiral. The only real hope for survival is for the world to ban international trade in bluefin, as it has for the tiger and blue whale.

The United States supports such a move, and the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species could have done so last year. But its members buckled under ferocious lobbying from Japan. The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, responsible for regulating the bluefin catch, has for years ignored the advice of its own scientists and set quotas unsustainably high. Stocks of Atlantic and Mediterranean bluefin dropped by more than 60 percent just in the last decade. Time is running out.