Thirty years into epidemic, AIDS remains a threat

Published
by
Andy
on November 30, 2009
in Uncategorized
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Every day I meet people who care passionately about their communities and the men, women, and children who live there. For each person or family in those communities, there are causes that mean much to them. To help illustrate or publicize those causes, people wear bracelets, carry signs, or wear ribbons. Folks fighting breast cancer have become very good about placing a pink ribbon on thousands of items to carry their message. This marketing tool is highly effective because the general public truly believes that anyone can be diagnosed with cancer. It is an illness that does not discriminate.

They would be correct in this assessment!

But what about the less well known ribbon, the red one? Who stands behind that ribbon and why? In the 1990s, AIDS activists were inspired by the ribbon medium, and decided to make ribbons for the people who fight against AIDS. The ribbon that represents AIDS became red as this is the color of passion.

During the Tony awards, a photo was taken of the actor Jeremy Irons, who had the bright red ribbon pinned on his chest. Most people who see the red ribbon assume that the person wearing it is a gay man or a person with a gay son. Although the virus is almost 30 years old, many people still believe it affects only gay men. They think to themselves, “I don’t need to wear a red ribbon, because I could never become infected.”

They would be terribly wrong in their assessment!

The Centers for Disease Control estimates that 468,578 people were living with AIDS in America at the end of 2007, around 20,000 more than 2006. An estimated 3,792 children aged under 13 were living with AIDS at the end of 2007. The vast majority of these children acquired HIV from their mothers during pregnancy, labor, delivery or breastfeeding.

In the 34 states with a history of confidential name-based reporting, adult or adolescent males accounted for nearly three-quarters of new HIV diagnoses, more than two-thirds of whom were infected by male-to-male sexual contact. However, heterosexual contact accounted for 83 percent of diagnoses among women and 14 percent among children. Injection drug use was the transmission route in 10 percent of male and 16 percent of female diagnoses in 2007. HIV was diagnosed in 159 children in 2007, all but 20 who became infected by mother-to-child transmission.

So, based upon these numbers, heterosexuals, homosexuals, children - all of us - are susceptible to contracting the virus.

Dec. 1 is World AIDS Day. When I get dressed, I’m going to pin a red ribbon on my lapel. I’m going to wear it with passion for a cause I believe in and fight for daily. I hope that you will join me in this effort and wear your red ribbon.

With 18,000 infected people in Michigan, we will wear it for our brothers, sisters, parents, co-workers, friends and children.

AIDS affects all of us, and all of us can help fight AIDS.

Big Summer for No Worker Left Behind

Published
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Andy
on September 22, 2009
in Uncategorized
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Wow, this was a big summer for No Worker Left Behind, one of the initiatives I created at the Department of Energy, Labor and Economic Growth. As our nation struggles economically, eyes have turned toward Michigan to learn about our signature workforce effort and Michigan’s cutting edge programs to build a green economy. This summer, national media outlets including the New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Huffington Post, CNBC, CNN and MSNBC all inquired about No Worker Left Behind (NWLB).

The biggest moment came when President Obama chose Michigan and Macomb Community College, to announce his proposal to make the largest investment in community colleges in 60 years. The President gave his seal of approval for NWLB and he told the rest of the nation to take notice.

“I want to applaud Governor Granholm for the No Worker Left Behind program,” said President Obama. “It’s providing up to two years’ worth of free tuition at community colleges and universities across the state. The rest of the country should learn from this effort.”

There can be no bigger compliment than the President of the United States calling No Worker Left Behind a model for the nation. It was even more special that he did it after being introduced by Joe Iezzi, a former autoworker who found a great new career as a  climate control specialist at Henry Ford hospital in West Bloomfield after retraining at Macomb Community College.

Why is everyone so excited about NWLB?  As we start the third year of the program, nearly 90,000 people have enrolled into training through NWLB - that puts us on pace to obliterate Governor Granholm’s original goal of putting 100,000 people into training over three years.

NWLB creates a more strategic, demand driven workforce system capable of focusing on growing economic sectors and what our employers actually need. Too often, past systems have overlooked the existing needs of employers.  NWLB works with these employers to assess their actual workforce needs and aligns our education system to fulfill those needs.

NWLB is built on the proven link between higher education, higher employment and higher wages.

As a result of NWLB, many more Michiganders are engaged in long-term training, rather than short-term training or solely on job search assistance.  NWLB moves from workforce maintenance to workforce transformation.  It represents a fundamental shift from “quick fixes” that alone cannot address the needs of our dislocated workers, to an investment in increasing educational attainment that carries market-useful credentials.  With NWLB, Michigan leads the nation in shifting our focus to where President Obama and Congress are heading – reframing workforce investment policy to focus on people getting the skills they need to prosper in the 21st century economy.

Here are a handful of articles/videos/audio that represent the highlights of the summer:

Here in Michigan, a state ravaged by devastating layoffs in the automotive industry, and where unemployment stood at 14.1 percent in May, a collaboration between the state’s workforce development agencies, its largest employers and local community colleges has pioneered an innovative system that moves workers from automotive jobs into a burgeoning green economy. The Fast Start program is proving that through cooperation and detailed planning, the region can create a stream of “just-in-time workers” who are in great demand in the growing solar industry after four months of intensive, college-level training.

Saginaw’s move to develop employable workers is just part of an ambitious statewide program, called No Worker Left Behind, designed to retool workers and give them the training they require for jobs in biotechnology, advanced manufacturing, health care and other industries.

In the midst of the deep economic slump, thousands of laid-off Michiganders are going back to school to learn new skills in one of the biggest retraining efforts the state has seen.

The surge of unemployed residents flooding into classrooms has been sparked by the 2-year-old No Worker Left Behind program, a state initiative that provides up to two years of free tuition at Michigan community colleges, universities and some trade schools.

President Barack Obama took to a stage in Warren Tuesday afternoon and provided an outline of his plan to overhaul the nation’s community college system — something he described as an “undervalued” resource. At the heart of his plan is the goal for the United States to have the highest percentage of college graduates among all nations.

For almost a decade, Heather Vaughn worked as a spot welder at a factory in Jonesville, Mich., making auto parts for General Motors and others. In February, the plant was sold, and Vaughn, along with 300 other workers, was laid off in a phone call.

I was kinda like, ‘Huh,’” Vaughn told the Huffington Post. “I’d worked there nine years. That was my nine year anniversary.” The plant stayed open and rehired more than 100 workers, but Vaughn wasn’t one them. After joining the ranks of unemployed in Michigan — 12.7 percent of the state’s workforce, the highest rate in the nation — Vaughn is hoping a state program can train her to become an X-ray technician.

Gerald Crouterfield believes in the power of prayer, and good fortune.

Last September, the 40-year-old former automotive parts worker from Standish, Mich., was laid off from his job at auto parts supplier Tubular Metal Systems, where he built turbo pipes for GMC’s hulking Duramax diesel truck. Seeking a new direction, he attended a local job fair and connected with “No Worker Left Behind,” a state program to retrain unemployed workers.

By October, the organization had arranged and paid for Crouterfield to enroll at Delta College, a community college in nearby Saginaw, Mich., in an accelerated five-month program to train for a new career in the chemicals industry. He graduated in February and begins work at Dow Chemical in April.

Millions of Americans are making dramatic career turnabouts in this withering recession as a range of industries — including those involving cars, finance, real estate and construction — are shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs, many of which analysts say likely won’t return for years, if ever. Meanwhile, fields such as health care, clean energy, computer science and the government are expected to grow robustly in coming years.

Will you help beat AIDS?

Published
by
Andy
on September 11, 2009
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Will you take just a few minutes, right now, and click on the following link to help smack down AIDS in Michigan and around the world?

http://www.aidswalkdetroit.org/faf/donorReg/donorPledge.asp?ievent=292243&lis=1&kntae292243=7E63ED5A76D04C81A799A9960DF2EBDF&supId=267821444

Almost exactly nineteen years ago today, my friend Greg Witcher died of AIDS.  He was all of 32 years old, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal in Detroit, in the prime of life. I was staying with Greg the night he died, because Roy Roulhac, who was somehow taking care of Greg while keeping up his professional life, was on a work trip.  Greg died on my watch.

Last month, I agreed to join the board of the Michigan AIDS Coalition, because I realized I’m not done fighting for Greg.

My first concrete act will be to join thousands of others on Sunday, September 20 in Royal Oak for AIDS Walk Detroit.  If you’d like to join me in the walk, please e-mail me at asl@andylevin.org.  Most of you can’t do that. But you can make a donation, whatever you can afford, whether $5 or $50 or $500 or $5,000, to support me and more importantly people living with AIDS and people whom we can prevent from becoming infected with HIV.

Please hit this link now to donate:

http://www.aidswalkdetroit.org/faf/donorReg/donorPledge.asp?ievent=292243&lis=1&kntae292243=7E63ED5A76D04C81A799A9960DF2EBDF&supId=267821444

You may also visit the event’s homepage at:

http://www.aidswalkdetroit.org/faf/home/default.asp?ievent=292243&lis=1&kntae292243=840F54CBECAC4584B06A298F10714A03

Greg grew up in Anacostia, the poorest part of Washington DC.  Through brains and charm and the help of a few good people, he got a full scholarship to a fancy boarding school and then to Williams College, where I met him.  He was the president of the Black Student Union when someone burned a cross on campus.  I remember running to his room and waking him up to tell him.  He was hardly a radical, and a reluctant protest leader.  But he did what justice demanded of him.  The picture of Greg speaking to the mass rally many of us organized that day is part of Williams history.

After college, Greg became a reporter for the Boston Globe and then the Wall Street Journal.  We overlapped in Boston when I was an organizer there and in Detroit when I was in graduate school in Ann Arbor and in DC around holidays, because Greg never forgot where he came from and he got back to see his mom in Anacostia frequently.  Sadly, she outlived her youngest son.

HIV slowly sucked the lifeforce out of Greg.  He wasted away before my eyes, until he was only skin and bones and pain — shot through with his mordant sense of humor, right till the end.

We’ve made embarrassingly little progress in the battle against HIV and AIDS since then. Will you take a small step to help do more?  Please click on this link and donate what you can.

http://www.aidswalkdetroit.org/faf/home/default.asp?ievent=292243&lis=1&kntae292243=840F54CBECAC4584B06A298F10714A03

Please share this message with others as you see fit.

Green Jobs: From Hype to Reality – and Hope

Published
by
Andy
on June 18, 2009
in Green Jobs and Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

These days, it seems like the news is full of talk about green jobs. Here in Michigan, where we have lost thousands of good-paying jobs, the potential to leverage our water, wind, solar and advanced-manufacturing resources to create jobs makes the discussion about green jobs all the more exciting.

But how many green jobs actually exist? How can we create more of them? When can we expect a meaningful number of Michigan citizens to be working in the green economy?

On May 11, we started to answer these questions with the release of the Michigan Green Jobs Report, the first rigorous empirical study of the green economy in Michigan that includes specific green work in five areas:

1. agriculture and natural resources

2. clean transportation and fuels

3. increased energy efficiency

4. pollution prevention and environmental cleanup

5. renewable energy production

The results were impressive and represent a baseline to track future growth and change in Michigan’s green economy.

We found that Michigan currently has 109,067 private-sector green jobs, including 96,767 direct jobs and 12,300 support jobs. Already, green jobs make up 3 percent of private-sector employment.

Clean transportation and fuels is the largest green economy sector in Michigan, with just over 40 percent of green jobs. This is probably unique among the 50 states and reflects both our automotive heritage and a potential center of growth as hybrid and electric vehicles and advanced batteries develop.

While the report did not attempt to project green job growth, it suggests that there is huge potential for expansion over both the short and long term.

From 2005 to 2008, a sample of 358 green-related firms added over 2,500 jobs to Michigan’s economy. They grew by 7.7 percent at a time when Michigan’s overall private-sector employment actually shrank 5.4 percent.

Among renewable energy firms in this sample, the growth rate hit 30 percent. Renewable energy production, which today is Michigan’s smallest green sector, may be the fastest growing.

There’s more good news: the green economy appears to be a hotbed of entrepreneurial activity. Among the sample of 358 green-related firms, over 70 appeared to be newly created since 2005, accounting for nearly 600 new jobs already.

What is more, green jobs tend to pay well. Thirteen of the top 15 sectors of green employment boast average weekly wages above Michigan’s overall private sector average, several of them far above.

And green jobs encompass a wide range of occupations and skill levels. As the green economy grows, it appears there will be room and need for many types of workers to lend a hand and brain.

Education and training are key issues for green employers. In multiple focus groups, employers emphasized the need for basics in math and reading with additional skills to be acquired on the job or in formal training in community colleges and universities.

The best news of all may be what Michigan’s 109,000 green jobs do not represent. These jobs were largely already in place before Michigan adopted a requirement that 10 percent of our energy come from renewable sources by 2015; before we required regulated utilities to spend a portion of their revenue on energy efficiency measures for their customers; before Michigan created incentives to manufacture advanced batteries here; before the implementation of President Obama’s Recovery Act, which, among other things, will pour $243 million into Michigan to weatherize the homes of low-income residents.

The green economy is real and here to stay. Future reports may show that public policies spurring the growth of the sustainable economy mean many more good jobs for Michiganders and all Americans. Now we know – that’s not hype, it’s hope. And the administration is continuing to go anywhere and do anything to create these green jobs – and attract them – here in Michigan.

To view the entire Green Jobs Report, visit:

www.michigan.gov/documents/nwlb/GJC_GreenReport_Print_277833_7.pdf

Give Thanks for the Humble Public Servants

Published
by
Andy
on November 27, 2008
in Public Service
. 0 Comments

I’ve been wondering lately whether America is ready to embrace public service again.  These last several months, two developments have crashed together across our collective consciousness that give reason to hope. The first, of course, is the election – and also the campaign – of Barack Obama.  Our president-elect placed a call for each of us to serve and sacrifice for the common good at the center of his campaign like no successful candidate since JFK.  He built his campaign around the lessons learned from his formative years as a community organizer, and did not waiver when his opponents belittled that selfless work.  He not only inspired a new generation to believe that the government can help bring fundamental change, but built the broadest coalition of any Democratic candidate in decades.

The second development is the crashing down upon us of our financial system under the weight of avarice and greed unfettered by the kind of sensible regulation that allowed capitalism to flourish and a middle class to blossom in this country in the decades after the Great Depression.  In the last quarter century, Democratic and Republican administrations alike participated in the mechanistic “less government is better” trend, to the point where banks and investment houses and insurance companies could engage in virtually any scheme to make money, leverage dollars one hundred times or more, sell and resell and combine mortgages to the point that no one is responsible for making sure decisions are soundly made; and companies could pay their executives outrageous sums where reward bears no relationship to performance.

Still, one has to admit that public attitudes towards the federal government and those who serve in it could hardly be lower.  Approval ratings for the federal government sank to 37% this year, from a high of 73% six years earlier, according to the Pew Center.  While much of this has to do with attitudes towards the Bush administration and the gathering economic crisis, distrust towards “Washington bureaucrats” is a hearty feature of the American polity.

But this moment of political opening in reaction to economic crisis may change all that.  The public may be realizing that the goal is not more or less regulation per se but avoiding unnecessary regulation and ensuring smart regulation that achieves our public policy goals.  We need public servants, people whose goal is promoting and protecting the common good, to build a new financial system that encourages investment, the building of real things and the provision of useful services, and that holds financial decision makers accountable for their actions – the essence of capitalism.

I come from a family of public servants.  Harry Truman appointed my Great Uncle Theodore Levin to the federal bench in Detroit in 1946.  Uncle Ted’s son, Charles, was a distinguished Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court for over 20 years.  My dad, Congressman Sandy Levin and my uncle, Senator Carl Levin, have quietly become the longest serving brothers in the history of the U.S. Congress.

But it’s none of these men who set me to wondering whether we’re about to see a public service renaissance.  No, it’s my mom, Vicki Levin, who is not famous and was never elected to office.  But for almost 30 years, until she was forced to retire in the spring for health reasons, Mom worked hard as a federal employee.

We kids thought we knew a lot about Mom’s career.  She ran a committee of scientists and professors who decided which research proposals to fund in the area of infant and children’s mental health.  We watched her read through mountains of papers and proposals, often bringing work home.  We watched her sweat in preparation for the thrice-yearly meetings of her committee, making sure all the details were just right.

But I don’t think I ever appreciated what her work meant to her and to others, not fully.  Back when I lived in the Washington, DC area, I used to try to convince Mom that she should retire – so she could spend more time with my four kids and her other grandchildren.  After all, she was in her early 70s.  Why not kick back?

Mom bristled at the idea, saying her work and her relationships with colleagues were central to her life.

When her battle with breast cancer forced her to retire in April, we all learned just what Mom was talking about – and just how much public service can mean.  Letters of tribute poured in from colleagues, dozens and dozens of research scientists at universities from coast to coast.  Soon some people organized the letters, which can be viewed at http://eskoink.com/VL/Vickilevin.pdf. Many colleagues wanted to do more, so they commissioned an original painting as a retirement gift. Next April, there will be a symposium in Mom’s honor at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development.

More than anything, it was the content of the tribute letters that overwhelmed our family.  Dozens of scientists, many now the chairs of departments or professors with fancy titles, told detailed stories about how they got their research start with Mom’s help, or how she co-authored a paper with one scientist that is still her most cited work, or how her committee was the intellectual salon of their field.

Some credited her with helping create the emerging field of developmental psychopathology. More than one said she has made the lives of children everywhere better by helping spawn and nourish path breaking research on the biological and environmental factors necessary for a healthy childhood.  Many of them told personal stories about how Mom had counseled them through a divorce or an adoption or a rocky situation in their office.

OK, this is my mom, so you can imagine how reading all this felt.  But if you step back, Vicki Levin was like so many others among the twenty-one million federal, state and local public servants who make sure we have clean water to drink, who try to figure out how to keep our roads safe in winter while minimizing environmental damage, who protect our park lands, who try to save us from things like tainted Chinese milk without setting up crippling barriers to international movement of goods and services.

Thanksgiving will be hard for my family this year.  Mom died on September 4, just a few weeks shy of my parents’ fifty-first wedding anniversary.  But as we all get ready to eat our turkey and each family works through its private losses and gratitudes, I wonder whether our nation is ready to move on from the simplistic notion that “government is the problem.” Perhaps, with the consequences of unregulated greed staring us in the face in the vanishing balances of our IRA and 401k accounts, we are ready to give thanks for the humble public servants, who forego the greater monetary rewards available in the private sector to toil for the good of us all.

Thinking about the next Congress

Published
by
Andy
on October 30, 2008
in Election Day
. 1 Comment

Greetings, Friends. I am launching a blog to keep in touch about a wide range of issues I care about – from the workforce development problems and opportunities I struggle with in my work for the State of Michigan to health care, foreign affairs, and the meaning of public service.

With just five days left before Election Day (please remember to vote on Nov. 4!), I have been thinking a lot about what kind of Congress the next president will have to work with. But first, a word about that next president. . .

I have to pinch myself when I say it, and I have been unwilling to say it in public until recently, but I truly believe that Barack Obama will be the next POTUS! I have been hesitant to say it because I don’t want to lead myself or any of us to stop working –Obama will only win because each of us does everything we can to bring about the change we need, right up to 8:00 PM on Election Day.

And I have been hesitant because who can really say that our beloved country will elect an African American man president until it happens, what with our troubled history of slavery and racism and with the unreliability of polls when it comes to race?

But I have been an Obama supporter from early on because, to me, Barack Obama IS this moment in American history. He is black, he is white, he is Kansan, he is Hawaiian, he is Kenyan – he is globalization incarnate, the global village, individual merit and opportunity for all, an intellectual and a tough South Side politician – the quintessential American. He is an African American man who, by his own smarts and interpersonal skills, not only got into Harvard Law School and not only made Law Review, but became its president.

He represents Americans voting for someone we understand to be really smart at a time when we have really big problems.

He represents an open embrace of the shrinking global village at a time when we desperately need to repair our relations with the world and to create a foreign policy appropriate for a new, instant communication century, in which soft power will be more important than military power in shaping a just course for the denizens of our planet.

And he represents the hope and possibility of thinking beyond and outside of the stale polarizations of the “Great” and Baby Boom generations. I remember arguing with my dad during the primaries (he supported Hillary, I Barack) about what he considered Obama’s questionable post partisan rhetoric. Dad had, as ever, strong arguments to marshal. He pointed to the extremely partisan Republican leadership in the House he has to deal with. I responded that Obama is not running for the House or Senate, but for President – to lead us all.

My idea of a President Obama problem solving outside the old boxes is him calling the CEOs of major U.S. corporations to the Oval Office. These men (sadly, they are virtually all men) are symbols of a core GOP constituency. But their chief job is practical, guarding their companies’ bottom line. I picture a President Obama saying: “Look, there’s no way you can compete successfully with German and Japanese and Indian companies unless we take sole responsibility for health care off your books and set up a rational system that provides good care for all of our people. We can figure this out together – with your workers’ unions, with the pointy headed experts – but it’s up to you to make the deal with me. Who’s in?”

Which brings me to what kind of Congress a President Obama will have to work with. Given the generational shift and intellectual rigor Obama represents, the multiple crises facing our nation, and the earthquake of dissatisfaction rumbling through the American electorate just as the election approaches, we face an opportunity to make 2009 the greatest year of legislative accomplishment since the presidencies of the Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt.

Michiganders and all who love Michigan have a chance to play an outsize role in shaping the next Congress. For Michigan is a state Republicans shamelessly gerrymandered after the 2000 election. They moved us from having nine Democrats and seven Republicans in the House to nine R’s and seven D’s in one fell swoop – despite the fact that we have elected a Democratic governor and two Democratic U.S. senators and voted Democratic in four straight presidential elections.

Well, now that house of political cards is about to fall down – if all of us do our part. Both Gary Peters in the 9th District and Mark Schauer in the 7th District are great guys I know personally. They will both be reliable allies and creative thinkers to help Barack Obama tackle the big problems: health care, retirement security, the growing gap between the very wealthy and everyone else, creating a sustainable economy, America’s tattered image abroad.

And both have a real chance to win!

So I want to ask each one of you to do two things.

First, in the spirit of mass democratic financial giving that has helped Obama turn the presidential race upside down, I want to ask everybody to give both Mark and Gary any amount you can afford – whether it’s maxing out at $2,300 or giving $5 – really, $5! The point is for all of us to give.

Give to Mark by visiting http://www.actblue.com/page/schauerforcongress

Give to Gary by visiting https://secure.actblue.com/contribute/entity/18229?refcode=web

Please do it right now, so Gary and Mark have all necessary resources to battle the lies being told about them in these final days.

Second, if you’re planning to knock on doors or make calls this weekend to elect Obama president, do it in Pontiac, or Jackson – or elsewhere in one of these two districts. You’ll be getting a twofer – doing your part to make history by electing Obama, but giving him a chance to alter history with a Congress ready to take bold action.

Volunteer with Mark in the 7th by visiting http://www.markschauer.com/action/volunteer.

Volunteer with Gary in the 9th by visiting http://www.petersforcongress.com/volunteer.asp.

Together, we can take back our country and repair our world.