Saturday, March 31, 2018

Russian Splits

I’ve blogged a lot about Russian efforts to destabilize and further polarize within individual Western democracies by spreading disinformation, individually tailored based on personal data scraped from the Web-available resources (Cambridge Analytica/Facebook anyone?). We’ve seen the results of Russian hacks and some rather clear and dramatic interference with elections in various democracies, most notably the United States. With a rather vulnerable nexus of family global business connections, Trump’s family was particularly susceptible. The Art of the Deal admonition to get dirt “advantage” on “the other side” plus a love money created massive opportunities for savvy Russian operatives to wreak havoc within Washington’s already toxic political schisms.
What has not been given sufficient coverage in the press are the other “divide and conquer” targets of manipulative and secretive Russian efforts. I am certain that the Russians were blindsided by U.S. participation in a pan-European response to the failed assassination attempt (using a nerve agent) to kill former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter in London. 150 Russian diplomats expelled from the West (60 from the U.S. alone), quickly countered by an equal response by Russia. Up to that moment, Trump had followed the Russian script almost to the letter. Alienating Germany’s Angela Merkel, contradicting and criticizing UK’s Theresa May and generally disagreeing with the EU’s open global trading policies… it was music to Vladimir Putin’s ears.
Putin has also cozied up to increasingly anti-democratic Turkey, seeking to fracture NATO. Further, as global democracies expelled Russian officials, Putin announced a successful missile test (the band new RS-28 Sarmat ICBM InterContinental Ballistic Missile, pictured above), which the Russian president described as capable of reaching anywhere on earth. He also noted that each such missile could easily penetrate any existing anti-missile systems to deliver 15 separately targetable nuclear warheads. The West was his go-to rallying point to his constituents. See also my March 28th blog, Why Putin Needs Animosity from the West.
So somewhere inside the U.S. government, someone must have realized that Russia had crossed a red line, that Trump was literally forced into making a choice: Europe or Russia. With increasingly damning information – from the clear Russian ties to senior Trump campaign officials to a rather pro-Russian rewriting of the GOP platform on supporting Ukraine’s resistance to Russia – Trump was now in an awkward position; he could not be the odd man out in a global democracy condemnation of Russian criminal conduct.
But exactly what are Russian goals to disrupted targeted global alliances? The March 30th The Cipher Brief provides these answers: “[Data] collected by the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), a transatlantic, bipartisan initiative housed at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, shows that fraying transatlantic bonds – a critical part of Putin’s effort to undermine the international order – has been a consistent thread in Russia’s ongoing information war against the West.
“Since August, ASD has been monitoring, via its Hamilton 68 dashboard, pro-Kremlin Twitter accounts that have been linked to influence operations in the United States. Just before the German election in September, ASD launched Artikel 38, a similar tool that monitors the activity of pro-Kremlin Twitter accounts in Germany. The two dashboards now automatically monitor these accounts in real time and distill their content – with a focus on the themes and messaging they are pushing – into a readily analyzable format.
“Data harvested from the dashboards over the past six months reveals two primary messaging strategies used by pro-Kremlin accounts to drive a wedge between the United States and Europe. “The first involves directly discrediting the transatlantic partners in the eyes of each other by painting a negative picture of Europe to American audiences and of the United States to Germans. The second strategy is a more indirect effort at disrupting the alliance by promoting the Kremlin’s version of ‘traditional values’ and attacking the open, tolerant, liberal ideas that have long defined the West.
“The Kremlin’s indirect attempts at fraying transatlantic bonds look much alike on both sides of the Atlantic. In pushing an ‘anti-globalist’ narrative, Kremlin-oriented Twitter networks exploit issues that are contentious in both the United State and in Germany, most notably migration/immigration issues and the war in Syria. These topics have made Americans and Europeans question the desirability of the global liberal order, which has long formed the ideological bedrock of the transatlantic partnership. The central message behind the Russian-linked Tweets is thus: ‘Look what the post-war liberal order has created!’ – ‘Look what your partnership has brought about!’
“No political event of the past years has challenged the attractiveness of the liberal order more than the European refugee crisis. This is true for Germans that are still struggling to manage the inflow of more than a million migrants since 2015 as well as for Americans that were largely unaffected by the crisis but that have been roiled in debates over their own immigration policies.
“Russian-linked accounts targeting both countries have therefore consistently amplified xenophobic content that portrays immigrants as criminals, rapists, and cultural invaders. Headlines that have been promoted by accounts tracked on Hamilton 68 include: ‘Meanwhile in Sweden, crime hits all-time highs;’ ‘Italian city removes Christmas tree to avoid offending Muslims;’ and ‘Germany: Syrian migrant kills defenseless dog by throwing him out of a high window.’”
As you read some of the above bits of disinformation, you might recognize the basis for several tweets from our President who bought this clearly fake news hook, line and sinker. The subtext in all of this is increasingly that if Trump is stepping away from the traditional American leadership in the free world, as much as China is replacing the U.S. in economic and trading power, so too is Europe stepping in to replace America’s philosophical leadership. When Trump finally leaves the American presidency, he will leave a nation with vastly less power and influence in the world… second or third fiddle on the global power stage.
Just expelling Russian diplomats is just a tiny first step in countering Putin’s aspiration to fracture Western alliances; will Trump actually allow the United States to take all the necessary counter-measures, dealing with cyber warfare… and disrupt Putin’s own alliances?
I’m Peter Dekom, and the shifting sands of global power have rapidly become quick sands for longer-term American interests.

Thursday, March 29, 2018

It All Ads Up

As masses of younger protestors march across the land to put an end to civilian ownership of military assault weapons, specialized ammunition and oversized magazines – led by a bevy of highly articulate Parkland survivors – the National Rifle Association is doubling down on its efforts to insure that there are no new laws that materially impair free and open access to guns of all sort and sizes. These protestors are not picking political parties per se; they are just focused on gun control legislation. Never has the NRA faced such a public groundswell against their most cherished positions, exacerbated by the bankruptcy of Remington Outdoor Co, a manufacturer of the semi-automatic AR-15, used in so many of the recent mass shootings. With an estimated 15 million AR-15s in the U.S., perhaps the market was saturated already.
 
The DOJ is throwing little crumbs, like banning that bumpstock attachment that turns semi-automatic rifle into a fully automatic weapon. Congress threw some crumbs to improve background checks and additional research, but so far, the NRA is holding off the attempt to add common sense and logic to our nation’s gun laws. Senators like Florida Republican Marco Rubio – who conveniently is not facing a reelection vote this year – came out squarely against the protesting students, quickly joined by a number of Republican colleagues who toe the NRA line and fear the reprisals from that gun-lobby’s highly effective negative ad campaigns targeting any politician in a red or swing state that espouses any form of gun control. Until these young voters truly take over, I suspect that gun laws will face no significant changes in the foreseeable future.
 
The NRA has now mounted one of its fiercest ad campaigns to counter what they see as too many young people – the voters of the future (many in the next election) – not embracing gun ownership. Maybe one too many “active shooter” drills and watch their peers mowed down? According to the March 23rd Chicago Tribune (repeated in the March 27th Daily Kos), “Immediately after the horror of the February 14 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., the National Rifle Association halted all of its digital advertising, including ads on YouTube, banner ads on websites, and Facebook ads.
 
“Within four days, though, the NRA had returned in force, increasing its advertising aggressively on Facebook, and spending so widely and indiscriminately that its ads on YouTube showed up on videos for school-age kids. According to a previously unpublished review by Pathmatics, a company that scrapes data from online ads, the NRA spent more than six times as much on digital ads after the Parkland shooting than it did in the weeks before it. Its average daily spending in the 24 days before Parkland was $11,300, according to Pathmatics. In the 24 days after its silent period, that average jumped to $47,300.
 
“Nearly all of the increase was on social media, primarily Facebook, where the NRA took its spending from an average of $4,400 a day in the three weeks prior to Parkland to $34,000 a day in the three weeks after the silence. Florida was heavily targeted in the post-tragedy ad burst. The state went from ninth most targeted in January to third between mid-February and mid-March…
 
“Case in point, one of the YouTube channels where the advertisements have been running is called Kid’s Toys, which has video playlists of kids unboxing toys and dolls. Pathmatics found an NRA ad running before a video of a young girl unboxing a doll from Disney’s popular ‘Doc McStuffins’ show. According to Pathmatics, these ads were not targeted necessarily to gun owners. Anyone of any age could have seen them. The objectives appear to be to drive membership, as Pathmatics’ data show the ad material was created before the shooting. YouTube wasn’t the only youthful site displaying NRA material: Pathmatics’ data show there was an NRA display ad on comicbook.com, a site that covers comics, gaming and anime…
 
“Digital ads are generally more flexible and responsive to events in the news than traditional television or radio ads, said Franz. The Wesleyan Media Project released a study last week showing that references to guns in political ads has been increasing since 2012. ‘The NRA seems to be doing something a little differently with its digital outreach,’ said Franz. ‘Digital content is easier – and faster — to produce.’
 
“There hasn’t been much research comparing the ways that kids and adults respond to online advertisements, but efforts to reach children are ramping up. The kids digital advertising market is expected to hit $1.2 billion and represent 28 percent of all advertising directed at kids, according to a report by accounting firm PwC.” Just plain disgusting! Evil that cannot be justified.
 
The National Rifle Association’s approval ratings are slipping dramatically. Republican “Second Amendment” supporters, many of whom don’t understand that even the most conservative Supreme Court Justices (including the late Antonin Scalia) believe that this Amendment has limits that could very well permit the banning of military-grade weapons, are desperately trying to preserve their artificial voting districts to insure that this liberal view of gun ownership never becomes law. They are even trying to impeach state supreme courts (e.g., in Pennsylvania) that un-gerrymandered such distorted districts.
 
Can this nation change? After all, in poll after poll, most Americans want much stricter gun control. Perhaps, but it is going to take a very, very, very long time. Meanwhile, we are arming teachers and hiring more security guards… while ignoring that our nation’s public school face overcrowded classrooms, crumbling infrastructure, underpaid teachers, book and computer shortages and plunging test scores.
 
I’m Peter Dekom, and this is a nation of special interests supported by seriously distorted voting districts defying the clear will of the vast majority of Americans… rather blatantly and successfully.

Wednesday, March 28, 2018

Why Putin Needs Animosity from the West

The Russian “election” – where any real opposition candidates had been forced out of the race one way or the other (never well) – overwhelmingly placed Vladimir Putin as Russia’s president for the next six years. Facing term limits, Putin – unlikely to want to cede power even in six years – can either push for the elimination of term limits (which under Russian law only prohibits more than two consecutive terms) or trade places and become “prime minister” again (as he has in the past) but remain as his nation’s de factor chief executive officer in what would normally be a secondary role, for one election cycle. Putin must, however, continue to rally his constituency and suppress his critics to make this work.
But just as Donald Trump has embraced Washington swamp-dwellers and mainstream media as his/”America’s” mortal enemies (any reportage that does not agree 100% with his vacillating Trumpian policies is dismissed as “fake news”), a luscious feast of disinformation for deep state conspiracy theorists who will not let hard facts get in their way, so too does Vladimir Putin need “enemies” to rally his own people to his political mandate. The West, particularly the United States, have been the Russian/Soviet go-to traditional “enemies of state,” existential threats that have always required the Russian people to rally behind their autocrat-du-temps.
So with Russia’s propensity to destabilize the Western democracies, erode their functionality from within by exploiting natural political divisions into horrific self-destructive polarization, combined with a clear signal to any dissenters and political activists challenging the dictatorial status quo that “no matter where you are in the world, we will hunt you down and kill you,” they are able to continue to control their local constituency… at least for the foreseeable future.
Like Donald Trump, Russians label as “fake news” and “unsubstantiated conspiracies against us” any reportage concerning meddling in our or other Western-nation elections (all of our national security agencies confirm that meddling) as well as the litany of assassinations and assassination attempts against Russian dissidents overseas, most recently the failed attempt to use a nerve agent to kill former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter in London.
That assassination attempt was deemed “highly likely” to have been ordered by Moscow, considered a virtual certainty by Scotland Yard, and resulted in the initial expulsion of 23 Russian embassy and consular officials from the UK. Effectively, Britain hoped that it had eliminated the bulk of Russia’s espionage supervisors from its shores. Thereafter, this expulsion was followed by a massive and fully coordinated additional “sympathetic” expulsion of over 130 Russian embassy and consular officials from all over the Western world (U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Poland, etc.). As our President remained largely silent on this challenge to Russia, the United States not only expelled 60 such Russian officials but ordered the Russian consulate in Seattle closed as being too close to one this nation’s most important nuclear submarine bases.
Calling this unprecedented coordinated expulsion a “provocative gesture,” the Russian reaction to diplomatic expulsions, pretty much the “norm” in the diplomatic world, has been a quid pro quo expulsion of an equal number of Western diplomats, one-for-one if you will. So let’s look at the plusses and minuses of this course of diplomatic expulsions. For expertise, I turn several to reactions (excerpts) from several former high-ranking U.S. government officials as cited in the March 27th The Cipher Brief:
In the ‘win’ column, we send a strong message to Russia and we decrease their capability to collect intelligence here in the United States because the people who will be expelled will most likely be intelligence officers. Importantly, this is done in harmony with our NATO and other Western allies, who are pursuing similar lines of response to the attempted killing of Sergei Skripal.
In the ‘lose’ column, however—whenever we get into these expulsion battles with the Russians, we pay a significant price because they will in turn reciprocate by expelling American diplomats, and they will try to expel as many intelligence officers as they can identify. And if we’re talking about closing a Russian consulate in Seattle, then they are going to be looking at perhaps closing a U.S. facility in Russia.
Expelling diplomats is a good first step, but it is a little bit of fighting the war with very old weapons when the Russians have already moved on to the next generation—and that’s my biggest concern. Russia is defining this new form of warfare with hybrid warfare, attacking Western elections and at least attempting and setting the battlefield to conduct cyberattacks against critical infrastructure in the U.S.—and we’re responding by expelling diplomats, which is a Cold War era tactic.
There has been a disconnect between President Trump’s rhetoric and impulses—which are almost solely pro-Putin—and those of his national security team. It is surely as hard for Russia to comprehend as it is for our allies and others. The expulsion of Russian diplomats is a positive move in that it is being done in concert with our allies.
However, it is also something very easy for the Russians to reciprocate. In the past, the Russians have simply matched our actions – or even take harsher measures, so often we end up in the same place or worse off than before our action. It’s obviously a less-than-ideal way to “punish” another country when you end up worse than the actor being punished. From my perspective, we have to take action with our allies to impact things that matter to Putin – to his power and money. I don’t think throwing out diplomats is something that will change behavior. We have done it now numerous times and it has had little to no effect. Punishing diplomats is far less effective than hitting Putin where it really hurts.
As a former intelligence collector, I also worry how this will affect our ability to monitor Putin and Russia. Putin will surely kick out the remainder of our intelligence assets in Moscow, leaving us blind at an important time.
I think it is unlikely this diplomatic action will have much effect on Kremlin thinking.  Putin seems committed to the course of making Russia a rogue state. There is no doubt he is deeply committed to a course of confrontation with the West in general and the United States in particular. Frankly, it is difficult to find an area where Putin has chosen a path toward accommodation with the United States in the past decade. The 2007 cyber assault on NATO member Estonia, the August 2008 invasion of Georgia, the annexation of Crimea and support for the insurrection in the Donbass, cyber espionage and massive use of cyber to disrupt elections in the U.S. and elsewhere comprise a short list of Russian misbehavior.
The Litvinenko assassination, Skripal poisoning, interference in the U.S. election, Putin’s March 1 speech with a mock-up of a cruise missile targeting what appears to be Florida did not happen by accident but rather by design. And that design is nothing short of confrontation.
I would expect Russia to respond in kind, yes. And that suits Putin; he needs a degree of animosity between Russia and the West, again to support this narrative of Russia the besieged fortress, enemy-at-the-gates from the West. What he wants to do is conflate that supposed threat with our ideals of liberty, freedom and democracy so that his own people who might support those ideals would be branded a fifth column in support of the enemy—the UK, the European Union and the United States. Putin needs a bit of that.
The mutual expulsion of diplomats is a relatively minor inconvenience compared with sworn testimony before Congressional committees from high-ranking military and security agency leaders that the Trump administration has not authorized or directed these agencies to deploy effective countermeasures to Russia’s hacks and highly effective use of social media to spread disinformation in an effort to influence our political choices and accelerate our growing polarization. We are sitting ducks without camouflage or defenses. Putin is playing his cards sharply and close to the vest. Trump isn’t even at the table.
I’m Peter Dekom, and if you think this Russian malevolence is going away by itself, you clearly have not read the vast and relevant historical evidence to the contrary.

Tuesday, March 27, 2018

Sea Hack - NotPetya

The world is quivering at the expectation of rising hostile governmental and dark criminal online hacking, theft and misdirection.  Massive consumer and government information constantly spills into public awareness after a big hack. Ransomware, theft and total embarrassment are routine. We’ve heard of hospitals with sensitive medical information and even local police departments forced to pay ransom demands to restore access to their own data. We are hardly innocent, having deployed cyber-malware in the past to disable Iran’s nuclear enrichment centrifuges, but we have been more victim than perpetrator.
Remember North Korea’s revenge on Sony Pictures, back in December of 2014, for releasing a film (The Interview) that made fun of leader Kim Jong-un? This hack and the public release of private communications and commercially valuable intellectual property decimated that studio. The North released a bevy of embarrassing private emails from very senior executives – forced to resign as a result – and dumped five completed feature films, primed for release, into the get-it-for-free Web. Did we learning anything from that?
North Korea also has special cyber-units dedicated to trolling cyber-currency holders (e.g., bitcoins) to steal fungible currency in order to fund foreign purchases necessary for their weapons program – given U.S.-driven international sanctions – and to keep Kim’s opulent lifestyle going unabated. It’s no secret that a parallel group of highly specialized North Korean hackers are probing vulnerabilities everywhere, particularly anything that can destabilize or target the United States and its Western allies. They are very good at their jobs.
The DOJ just indicted nine Iranian nationals. Their targets? American Universities and corporations rich in technology research and patents. A modest goal… unless they really steal something military and very special. Ah, but the Russians; they’ve got hacking and spreading disinformation down!
The Russian approach is both direct, military and other government intelligence units plying their cyber-sleuthing, and indirect, where the government funds “private” hackers, some companies and some bands of crazy Russia “genius-hackers” who are provided with hard cash and sometimes with access to illicit drugs or prostitutes. This latter approach creates tons of plausible deniability, but there is zero doubt (other than with our President) that this is Putin-directed activity.
Our intelligence agencies have uniformly confirmed that weaponized disinformation, based on readily-available personal information (hence the Cambridge Analytica scandal over Facebook data), was heavily deployed by Russian operatives in an effort to discredit Hillary Clinton and elevate Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential elections. Both our intelligence agencies and Congressional committees have also revealed Russia probes of our power grid and institutional financial networks, particularly within smaller companies that have not adopted more stringent (read: expensive) cyber-security measures recommended by the government. Sometimes such malware intended for one arena is a contagion that spreads into unanticipated directions with horrible consequences.
Nothing brings home the potential devastation of our commercial routine like what happened to the global shipping industry (a $500 billion/year industry) in June of 2017, an experience that was downplayed at the time because of the magnitude of the damage. Cyber security had been way down the list of risks for that sector, behind weather, fuel costs, mechanical issues, strikes and boycotts, and war/piracy. The March 23rd FastCompany.com explains:
Then came NotPetya. Last June, computers at the Danish shipping giant Maersk were infected in [an] international malware outbreak, since attributed by U.S. authorities to Russia. The infection, in which Maersk isn’t believed to have been deliberately targeted, cost the business between $250 million and $300 million as it reduced its normal shipping volumes and scrambled to reinstall software on tens of thousands of PCs and servers.
‘Imagine a company where a ship with 10,000 to 20,000 containers enter a port every 10 minutes, and for 10 days you have no IT,’ Maersk chairman Jim Hagemann Snabe said in a panel session at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January. ‘It’s almost impossible to even imagine.’
Snabe called the malware incident ‘a very important wake-up call,’ and others in the maritime industry agree it’s brought cybersecurity issues to the forefront… ‘Stakeholders in the industry are now beginning to acknowledge, yes, there might be a problem,’ says Lars Jensen, cofounder and CEO of CyberKeel, a Copenhagen cybersecurity focused on the maritime world. After all, he says, Maersk ‘had not been as lax’ as other companies in the industry…
In the worst case, hackers could hijack navigational tools and cause collisions—high-profile crashes by U.S. Navy ships last year raised fears of such attacks, though no evidence of hackers was found—interfere with onboard machinery and cause stalls or even spills, or simply make sailors and passengers very uncomfortable.
‘In cruise vessels, all the auxiliary systems such as generators, air conditioning units, elevators, etc., can be attacked, which could lead to catastrophic experience for cruise guests,’ warned Itai Sela, CEO of Israeli maritime cybersecurity firm Naval Dome, in an email to Fast Company.
Recent reports have indicated that many yachts are vulnerable, including some of the ultra-high-end superyachts favored by millionaires and billionaires. Last year, the Guardianreported a hacking demonstration at a superyacht industry conference, where security experts showed how easy it was to access private files through yachts’ Wi-Fi networks and even connect to onboard navigation systems. And just this month, a report from Kaspersky Lab indicated that vulnerabilities in yacht digital entertainment systems could be used to remotely breach the vessels, potentially even gaining access to more sensitive systems.
Like many types of systems that predate the modern internet, many ship systems weren’t designed for security the way they likely would be in 2018. In a blog post last year, Ken Munro, a partner at the U.K. security consultancy Pen Test Partners, pointed to internet-enabled shipboard satellite communication systems that openly shared information about their communication hardware, ship coordinates, and even the names of crew members.
Munro compared the situation to industrial control systems, the often-antiquated, specialized computers used in factories and power plants that have sometimes been migrated from isolated, limited-access networks to networks linked to the public internet. In the worst case, a clever phishing attack on one of those identified crew members could be enough to take control of the ship’s computers… ‘You could influence or change the direction of travel on a ship—that’s quite scary, isn’t it?’ he tells Fast Company. ‘Most of these systems do have manual overrides, but they’re quite difficult to use.’
Americans in general, and our government more specifically, have been increasingly reactive to threats, from hurricanes and earthquakes to cyber-security. We spend billions to repair what could have been prevented or effectively reduced with a fraction of anticipatory proactive costs. Bigger for profit institutions, with sufficient financial resources, and the most clandestine arenas of government are probably more advanced in limiting cyber-damage.
There is little doubt that our financial networks and power grids remain vulnerable to attacks that could cripple the United States in minutes, bring aircraft into chaos, shipping into confusion, highways unregulated and individual consumer paralyzed. Since private vulnerabilities can create complete breakdowns of necessary social and operating systems impacting all of us, literally capable of bringing the United States to its knees, you’d think that Homeland Security and other governmental agencies would create security systems for those other than the biggest companies in the land.
Oh, I forget, they are using that money for tax breaks for companies that don’t need them. And money for a wall that really doesn’t do much but cost taxpayers? The Russians are smiling. The North Koreans are laughing. And an increasing number of cyber criminals are living a very luxurious lifestyle.
I’m Peter Dekom, and this chaos is the result of American gone rogue with priorities that put more of us at risk every day.

Monday, March 26, 2018

Sittin’ Around, Chewin’ the Fat – An American Tradition


Are we depressed? Lazy? Compulsive? Self-destructive? Undisciplined? What is it with Americans and getting fat… OK, I won’t mince words… even obese or morbidly obese? A March 23rd report from the Journal of the American Medical Association – entitled Trends in Obesity and Severe Obesity Prevalence in US Youth and Adults by Sex and Age, 2007-2008 to 2015-2016 – supplies the down and dirty numbers, to no one’s surprise: Americans are, on average, getting fatter.
In the time periods studied (noted in the above title), obesity in American adults increased from 33.7% in 2007-2008 to 39.6% in 2015-16. The numbers for “severe obesity” over the same period went from 5.7% to 7.7%. The only mildly good news is that younger people aren’t getting as chubby as their adult counterparts, but around 65% of all American adults are at least overweight.
It is useful to understand the terms used to describe various medical categories of body size and health standards: the Body Mass Index (BMI) which is an objective measurement, a ratio based on height and weight. Because global standards are determined under the metric system, scholarly works speak in kilos (2.2 lbs to a kilo) and centimeters (39.37 inches to a meter). Here’s how the Centers for Disease Control define those ratios:
·         If your BMI is less than 18.5, it falls within the underweight range.
·         If your BMI is 18.5 to <25 falls="" it="" normal.="" span="" the="" within="">
·         If your BMI is 25.0 to <30 falls="" it="" overweight="" range.="" span="" the="" within="">
·         If your BMI is 30.0 or higher, it falls within the obese range.
Obesity is frequently subdivided into categories:
·         Class 1: BMI of 30 to < 35
·         Class 2: BMI of 35 to < 40
·         Class 3: BMI of 40 or higher. Class 3 obesity is sometimes categorized as “extreme” or “severe” obesity.
As healthcare is a particularly difficult topic in polarized America today, the fact that we are getter fatter makes related medical costs skyrocket. Diabetes is epidemic. Heart disease is spreading like wildfire; what was once a predominantly male ailment is rapidly escalating among women. The list of weight-related diseases is long, as our shift to a GOP-dominated, anti-social program, Congress (and most state legislatures) pulls money out of medical services, the demand for those services is exploding. Weight gain is perhaps the major contributor to that upward demand. To exacerbate what is already under-funded government healthcare, a GOP-led move to cut regulations on business has prompted food manufacturers to fight against labeling and regulations in their sector, including fighting school lunch programs where fatty manufactured “fast” foods are restricted. Where tobacco-related disease trailed off, obesity jumped rapidly to succeed its ravages.
What’s worse, even as information about the devastation of obesity is now well-publicized, Americans struggle with food and exercise like never before. “Public health experts said that they were alarmed by the continuing rise in obesity among adults and by the fact that efforts to educate people about the health risks of a poor diet do not seem to be working.
“‘Most people know that being overweight or obese is unhealthy, and if you eat too much that contributes to being overweight,’ said Dr. James Krieger, clinical professor of medicine at the University of Washington and executive director of Healthy Food America, an advocacy group. ‘But just telling people there’s a problem doesn’t solve it.’
“The latest data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey comes at a time when the food industry is pushing back against stronger public health measures aimed at combating obesity.
“In recent NAFTA negotiations, the Trump administration has proposed rules favored by major food companies that would limit the ability of the United States, Mexico and Canada to require prominent labels on packaged foods warning about the health risks of foods high in sugar and fat.
“While the latest survey data doesn’t explain why Americans continue to get heavier, nutritionists and other experts cite lifestyle, genetics, and, most importantly, a poor diet as factors. Fast food sales in the United States rose 22.7 percent from 2012 to 2017, according to Euromonitor, while packaged food sales rose 8.8 percent.
“The latest survey data found that American youth are faring somewhat better than adults. Among Americans ages 2 to 19, 18.5 percent were obese in the 2015 and 2016, while 5.6 percent were severely obese. (A severely obese youth is defined as being 120 percent above the 95th percentile of body-mass-index for age and gender.)” New York Times, March 23rd. And yes, by comparison, Americans are fatter than their European counterparts. We see proportionately fatter people in rural versus urban communities; those with more education or higher up the economic ladder are also less likely to be obese.
Make no mistake; it’s a trade-off. To manage healthcare costs to increase healthcare coverage, we are also going to have to tackle the most obvious pressures that challenge good health. Eating and exercise have to become the new values drilled into young minds, just as essential as reading, writing and math. Clean air and water shouldn’t be balancing acts between business and human life. And while these decisions start with individual choices, the impact on the social and economic cost to all of us, in hard dollars, requires that these issues be addressed with implementable goals by government itself. Your fat hits my wallet!
I’m Peter Dekom, and we are slowly killing ourselves with our individual and social priorities.