Avoiding health-care chaos, by Michael Cannon
The Washington Times, Sunday, December 28, 2008
To hear the media tell it, comprehensive health care reform is a done deal. Democrats control both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. Business, labor and the insurance industry are on board. The lion has lain down with the lamb.
In reality, reform could crater for the same reasons it did in 1994: The leading Democratic plans include radical changes that would tax and disrupt the health care of millions. With a minimum price tag of $120 billion, universal health insurance coverage will require taxing the middle class during a recession, further expanding a $1 trillion deficit, or having the government deny medical care to patients. An estimated 30 million Americans would lose their current coverage under Barack Obama's plan. Millions could lose established relationships with their doctors.
Today's love-fest will quickly descend into a bloodbath once the lions make their intentions clear.
The carnage would mount over time. The leading plans would cost lives by effectively nationalizing health insurance and impeding innovations that make medicine better, cheaper and safer.
Republicans, centrist Democrats, and independents must protect Americans from the worst elements of those proposals. That means drawing three lines in the sand. Any proposal that crosses one of the following lines should be stopped. Not watered down. Not enacted and fixed later. Killed.
(1) No government-run health care for the middle class.
Echoing the Left's rallying cry of "Medicare for all," Mr. Obama proposes a Medicare-like option for everyone under age 65. Others endorse variants on that theme.
Medicare is an unwise model for reform. When private health plans and providers try to meet the glaring need for electronic medical records, coordinated care, and medical-error reduction, Medicare's change-resistant payment system punishes them for doing so. That discourages innovation and costs lives.
The average family of four pays $5,200 in taxes to fund Medicare, only to have Medicare waste one third of it (about $1,700) on services that do nothing to make seniors healthier or happier. That's a pure income transfer to providers of $150 billion - roughly the entire economic output of South Carolina. Diverting those resources from more productive uses, such as covering the uninsured, costs lives.
The Left's plans could cost additional lives by letting government bureaucrats decide who gets medical care. Merely providing current-law benefits under Medicare and other programs will require Congress to double income taxes by midcentury. Since Americans are not likely to tolerate rates that high, at some point Congress will be forced to limit Medicare spending.
The Left's idea of limiting Medicare spending is to have bureaucrats tell Mom she cannot have the cancer treatment she wants. Obama & Co. propose taxpayer-funded research that will help Medicare do just that. Expanding government health programs will hasten the day that government rations medical care to seniors.
Finally, a public plan would pay providers less than private insurance. Patients switching to public coverage may therefore find that their doctor can no longer see them, just as Medicare enrollees are having an increasingly difficult time finding primary care physicians.
(2) No mandates.
You cannot improve a bad product by forcing people to buy it. But you can make it worse. Mandating that people purchase health insurance - on their own or through an employer - will increase its cost and oust millions from their current source of coverage.
Mr. Obama's employer mandate could force 80 million Americans to switch from their current health plan to a more expensive one, threatening their current source of care. Premiums would climb further as providers and other special interests demand that Congress mandate coverage of their services. As premiums rise, more people will require government subsidies to comply with the mandate.
(3) No price controls.
Price controls have failed in every application throughout history, including health insurance.
Economists find that free markets provide secure health insurance to lots of sick people, and that forcing insurers to charge the same premiums to healthy and sick people offers no improvement. Instead, such premium controls encourage insurers to avoid the sick, and encourage healthy people to avoid insurance altogether.
Premium controls may even cost you your health plan. In the health insurance "exchanges" of the federal government, Harvard University and the University of California, premium controls forced carriers to eliminate comprehensive insurance options.
Taken together, mandates and premium controls would effectively socialize private health insurance. They would eliminate both low-cost and comprehensive insurance options, and slowly march everyone into a narrow range of health plans. If government controls the decision to purchase, what you purchase, and the price, that is government-run health care.
Holding the line against socialized medicine won't be easy, but it can be done. Blocking new public programs will be easiest thanks to industry opposition. According to one report, "Hospitals and doctors fear another public program would reduce what they are paid, as Medicare and Medicaid have done. Insurers worry they could lose customers to the government."
Mandates and price controls will be harder to stop, since the industry and certain struggling employers would love to use those measures to hurt their competitors or otherwise pad their bottom lines. The health insurance lobby, for example, is all too happy to force you to buy health insurance.
Fortunately, opponents have many arrows in their quiver. Mandates are anathema to most employers. Working families will resist being ousted from their current health plan and forced into one that's more expensive or that won't let them see their family doctor. Mandates would give Congress the power to force Americans to fund contraception and abortion, which will mobilize social conservatives.
The Left has been adding arrows to the quiver, too. Mr. Obama himself attacked Hillary Clinton for wanting to "force uninsured people to buy insurance." His prospective National Economic Council chairman, Larry Summers, describes employer mandates as "disguised tax and expenditure measures" that increase unemployment, work against the very people they purport to help, and expand the size of government. Obama campaign adviser David Cutler documented the effect of premium controls on coverage choices at Harvard.
The most important arrow in the quiver may be the self-interest of the Republican Party. Bill Clinton demonstrated that the most effective way to block tax cuts is to paint them as an assault on your health care. Twenty-eight percent of Americans already depend on government for health insurance. If that share grows, whether through government programs or subsidies for "private" coverage, we can start writing obituaries for the party of tax cuts.
An intolerable status quo is no excuse for making things worse. The center-right needs to mobilize now to stop left-wing Democrats from taking another large leap toward socialized medicine.
Michael F. Cannon is director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute and coauthor of "Healthy Competition: What's Holding Back Health Care and How to Free It."
Monday, December 29, 2008
Higher-ed Spending Is Not the Answer
Higher-ed Spending Not the Answer, by Neal McCluskey
This article appeared in the Baltimore Sun on December 17, 2008
Despite conventional wisdom - and the huge higher education spending increase just proposed for Maryland - giving academia more public bucks is not the path to economic success.
The cries for more money have certainly been abundant. In October, the New America Foundation's Michael Dannenberg declared that states should deficit spend on higher ed to keep tuitions low and economies running. In November, the Center for Studies in Higher Education implored Washington to fight recession by spending big on scholars. This month, the College Board, National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, and National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education all decried states' tight outlays.
Finally, on Wednesday, a commission chaired by Del. John L. Bohanan Jr., a St. Mary's County Democrat, proposed that Maryland expend an additional $760 million on its ivory towers to keep the state competitive.
But colleges, despite their claims, are not great growth-makers. Yes, individuals with college degrees tend to do better than those without, but that doesn't mean forced higher ed spending is an economic good.
For one thing, we put more people into universities than can benefit from them. Nationally, about one-third of college students need remedial work (Maryland's rate is roughly the same) and many never graduate. In fact, the six-year graduation rate for all bachelor's students is just 56 percent.
But isn't the problem that college prices keep rising, forcing students to work when they should be learning? And isn't that rooted in ever-skimpier state support?
It's true that prices have ballooned. According to the College Board, nationally the inflation-adjusted costs of tuition, fees, room, and board have risen about 52 percent at public four-year schools over the last 15 years, going from $9,460 to $14,340. Four-year private schools have seen a 42 percent price leap, from $24,060 to $34,130.
But shrinking public funds aren't to blame. For one thing, state appropriations have little impact on private institutions. For another, according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers, nationwide the nearly three-decade trend is essentially flat. And, between 1992 and 2007, real (inflation-adjusted) state and local government expenditures per student in Maryland increased roughly 23 percent.
So, what accounts for rampant tuition inflation? Many things, but one of the biggest is student aid. Nationally, real sticker prices rose 52 percent at public four-year institutions between 1993 and 2008, but the increase was a more modest 35 percent after accounting for grants and tax benefits such as credits and deductions - essentially free money. At private institutions, the after-free-cash increase was 34 percent. And those numbers ignore cheap federal loans, which after adjusting for inflation grew from $2,830 per pupil in 1993 to $4,841 in 2007.
Of course, all this forced largesse might be worth something if it actually strengthened the economy. But there is evidence it doesn't. Economist Richard Vedder has isolated the effects of higher ed spending and found that the more states spend, the lower their rates of economic growth.
Why is this? In part, it's a function of the bureaucratic inefficiencies - and special-interest payoffs - that accompany almost anything government does. More fundamentally, taxpayers know their needs better than anyone else, and when they can keep their money attend to them more effectively than does the ivory tower.
Scholars and politicians might not like to hear these things. But before the state drops three-quarters of a billion dollars on its universities, they're worth considering.
Neal McCluskey is associate director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom and author of Feds in the Classroom: How Big Government Corrupts, Cripples, and Compromises American Education.
This article appeared in the Baltimore Sun on December 17, 2008
Despite conventional wisdom - and the huge higher education spending increase just proposed for Maryland - giving academia more public bucks is not the path to economic success.
The cries for more money have certainly been abundant. In October, the New America Foundation's Michael Dannenberg declared that states should deficit spend on higher ed to keep tuitions low and economies running. In November, the Center for Studies in Higher Education implored Washington to fight recession by spending big on scholars. This month, the College Board, National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, and National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education all decried states' tight outlays.
Finally, on Wednesday, a commission chaired by Del. John L. Bohanan Jr., a St. Mary's County Democrat, proposed that Maryland expend an additional $760 million on its ivory towers to keep the state competitive.
But colleges, despite their claims, are not great growth-makers. Yes, individuals with college degrees tend to do better than those without, but that doesn't mean forced higher ed spending is an economic good.
For one thing, we put more people into universities than can benefit from them. Nationally, about one-third of college students need remedial work (Maryland's rate is roughly the same) and many never graduate. In fact, the six-year graduation rate for all bachelor's students is just 56 percent.
But isn't the problem that college prices keep rising, forcing students to work when they should be learning? And isn't that rooted in ever-skimpier state support?
It's true that prices have ballooned. According to the College Board, nationally the inflation-adjusted costs of tuition, fees, room, and board have risen about 52 percent at public four-year schools over the last 15 years, going from $9,460 to $14,340. Four-year private schools have seen a 42 percent price leap, from $24,060 to $34,130.
But shrinking public funds aren't to blame. For one thing, state appropriations have little impact on private institutions. For another, according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers, nationwide the nearly three-decade trend is essentially flat. And, between 1992 and 2007, real (inflation-adjusted) state and local government expenditures per student in Maryland increased roughly 23 percent.
So, what accounts for rampant tuition inflation? Many things, but one of the biggest is student aid. Nationally, real sticker prices rose 52 percent at public four-year institutions between 1993 and 2008, but the increase was a more modest 35 percent after accounting for grants and tax benefits such as credits and deductions - essentially free money. At private institutions, the after-free-cash increase was 34 percent. And those numbers ignore cheap federal loans, which after adjusting for inflation grew from $2,830 per pupil in 1993 to $4,841 in 2007.
Of course, all this forced largesse might be worth something if it actually strengthened the economy. But there is evidence it doesn't. Economist Richard Vedder has isolated the effects of higher ed spending and found that the more states spend, the lower their rates of economic growth.
Why is this? In part, it's a function of the bureaucratic inefficiencies - and special-interest payoffs - that accompany almost anything government does. More fundamentally, taxpayers know their needs better than anyone else, and when they can keep their money attend to them more effectively than does the ivory tower.
Scholars and politicians might not like to hear these things. But before the state drops three-quarters of a billion dollars on its universities, they're worth considering.
Neal McCluskey is associate director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom and author of Feds in the Classroom: How Big Government Corrupts, Cripples, and Compromises American Education.
Changing the tone in Washington is easier said than done
Rich's Derangement Syndrome, by Peter Wehner
The Corner/NRO, Monday, December 29, 2008
Frank Rich is perhaps the most reliably splenetic op-ed writer in America. He is chronically disenchanted, seemingly happiest when seething, and always in search of people to demonize. To put it another way: He is the print version of Keith Olbermann. Rich’s latest column criticizing Rick Warren, then, is par for the course. But it also illustrates something else, and something important, Barack Obama will find out soon enough. Changing the tone in Washington is easier said than done.
George W. Bush came to Washington hoping to do the same thing, and he had reason to be hopeful. As governor of Texas he worked well with Democrats and had no real stake in the bitter partisan battles of the 1990s. As president, Bush himself, if not perfect, was consistently civil and did not engage in personal attacks against his critics. That is in part because Bush is himself a man of admirable grace. Yet the president became a polarizing figure, hated by the Left, and gave rise to a politico-psychological phenomenon: Bush Derangement Syndrome. It turned out President Bush could control what he said, but he couldn’t control what others said about him.
My sense is that like Bush, Obama is a man of core decency. But sometimes even a president, driven by the best of intentions, cannot alter certain habits of mind and heart, or other people’s rage.
It turns out that some people in politics are perpetually angry. Their opposition to certain policies quickly and easily transmutes into the politics of personal destruction. And the dust-up over Rick Warren is evidence that contrary to the conventional wisdom, more than a few liberals have an investment in fueling the “culture wars.” They are even intent on ensuring that Obama’s inauguration becomes the latest battlefield in that clash. Obama, in trying to build a symbolic early bridge to conservative evangelicals, has been unable to keep his supporters from adding to the divisions in our nation.
It should be added that political divisions and acrimony are part of American history and typical of politics in almost every other nation. Political debates often ignite passionate feelings. And comity in politics, while certainly something worth striving for, is not the highest good in politics. Pursuing justice and advancing human dignity are more important — and sometimes championing justice and human dignity can create deep divisions within a society. Think of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and Ronald Reagan, to name just three of the more polarizing figures in American history.
In any event, Barack Obama remains a wildly popular figure among liberals. Yet one can sense how the unease they have about his Cabinet picks increased with Obama’s choice to have the Reverend Warren participate in his inauguration. Even before Obama has taken the oath of office, unalloyed joy has given way to a very slight but detectable fear: Obama isn’t going to be the embodiment of all of their hopes (and fury). As those concerns harden, they will begin to lay out their demands, which they will insist be met.
In addition, important Democratic figures like Barney Frank are making it clear that he will pursue politics his way, regardless of what Obama might like. Based on his comments, Representative Frank seems to view Obama as naive and far too confident of his capacity to change how politics in practiced in Washington. I suspect there are many other veteran Democrats on Capitol Hill who are not going to march in lock-step with Obama, even assuming he wants to change the nature of political discourse in America.
If Obama can succeed in his effort, more power to him. But I suspect the road ahead is fraught with far more obstacles than he imagined. And if the tone of politics does markedly improve in the next four years, it will be in large measure because Republicans decided to treat America’s 44th president with more civility and class than Democrats treated America’s 43rd president. I hope Republicans do, for the sake of our politics and our country.
The Corner/NRO, Monday, December 29, 2008
Frank Rich is perhaps the most reliably splenetic op-ed writer in America. He is chronically disenchanted, seemingly happiest when seething, and always in search of people to demonize. To put it another way: He is the print version of Keith Olbermann. Rich’s latest column criticizing Rick Warren, then, is par for the course. But it also illustrates something else, and something important, Barack Obama will find out soon enough. Changing the tone in Washington is easier said than done.
George W. Bush came to Washington hoping to do the same thing, and he had reason to be hopeful. As governor of Texas he worked well with Democrats and had no real stake in the bitter partisan battles of the 1990s. As president, Bush himself, if not perfect, was consistently civil and did not engage in personal attacks against his critics. That is in part because Bush is himself a man of admirable grace. Yet the president became a polarizing figure, hated by the Left, and gave rise to a politico-psychological phenomenon: Bush Derangement Syndrome. It turned out President Bush could control what he said, but he couldn’t control what others said about him.
My sense is that like Bush, Obama is a man of core decency. But sometimes even a president, driven by the best of intentions, cannot alter certain habits of mind and heart, or other people’s rage.
It turns out that some people in politics are perpetually angry. Their opposition to certain policies quickly and easily transmutes into the politics of personal destruction. And the dust-up over Rick Warren is evidence that contrary to the conventional wisdom, more than a few liberals have an investment in fueling the “culture wars.” They are even intent on ensuring that Obama’s inauguration becomes the latest battlefield in that clash. Obama, in trying to build a symbolic early bridge to conservative evangelicals, has been unable to keep his supporters from adding to the divisions in our nation.
It should be added that political divisions and acrimony are part of American history and typical of politics in almost every other nation. Political debates often ignite passionate feelings. And comity in politics, while certainly something worth striving for, is not the highest good in politics. Pursuing justice and advancing human dignity are more important — and sometimes championing justice and human dignity can create deep divisions within a society. Think of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and Ronald Reagan, to name just three of the more polarizing figures in American history.
In any event, Barack Obama remains a wildly popular figure among liberals. Yet one can sense how the unease they have about his Cabinet picks increased with Obama’s choice to have the Reverend Warren participate in his inauguration. Even before Obama has taken the oath of office, unalloyed joy has given way to a very slight but detectable fear: Obama isn’t going to be the embodiment of all of their hopes (and fury). As those concerns harden, they will begin to lay out their demands, which they will insist be met.
In addition, important Democratic figures like Barney Frank are making it clear that he will pursue politics his way, regardless of what Obama might like. Based on his comments, Representative Frank seems to view Obama as naive and far too confident of his capacity to change how politics in practiced in Washington. I suspect there are many other veteran Democrats on Capitol Hill who are not going to march in lock-step with Obama, even assuming he wants to change the nature of political discourse in America.
If Obama can succeed in his effort, more power to him. But I suspect the road ahead is fraught with far more obstacles than he imagined. And if the tone of politics does markedly improve in the next four years, it will be in large measure because Republicans decided to treat America’s 44th president with more civility and class than Democrats treated America’s 43rd president. I hope Republicans do, for the sake of our politics and our country.
Is There a Relationship between Guns and Freedom? Comparative Results from 59 Nations
Kopel, David B., Moody, Carlisle E. and Nemerov, Howard: Is There a Relationship between Guns and Freedom? Comparative Results from 59 Nations (December 23, 2008).
Texas Review of Law and Politics, Vol. 13.
Available at SSRN: http:// ssrn.com/abstract=1090441
Abstract:
There are 59 nations for which data about per capita gun ownership are available. This Article examines the relationship between gun density and several measures of freedom and prosperity: the Freedom House ratings of political rights and civil liberty, the Transparency International Perceived Corruption Index, the World Bank Purchasing Power Parity ratings, and the Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom. The data suggest that the relationships between gun ownership rates and these other measures are complex. The data show that (although exceptions can be found) the nations with the highest rates of gun ownership tend to have greater political and civil freedom, greater economic freedom and prosperity, and much less corruption than other nations. The relationship only exists for high-ownership countries. Countries with medium rates of gun density generally scored no better or worse than countries with the lowest levels of per capita gun ownership.
Article can be requested from Bipartisan Alliance.
Texas Review of Law and Politics, Vol. 13.
Available at SSRN: http:// ssrn.com/abstract=1090441
Abstract:
There are 59 nations for which data about per capita gun ownership are available. This Article examines the relationship between gun density and several measures of freedom and prosperity: the Freedom House ratings of political rights and civil liberty, the Transparency International Perceived Corruption Index, the World Bank Purchasing Power Parity ratings, and the Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom. The data suggest that the relationships between gun ownership rates and these other measures are complex. The data show that (although exceptions can be found) the nations with the highest rates of gun ownership tend to have greater political and civil freedom, greater economic freedom and prosperity, and much less corruption than other nations. The relationship only exists for high-ownership countries. Countries with medium rates of gun density generally scored no better or worse than countries with the lowest levels of per capita gun ownership.
Article can be requested from Bipartisan Alliance.
CBO's Orszag, now Obama's budget chief, and health coverage costs
Orszag's Health Warning
Obama's budget chief delivers a reality check on costs
WSJ, Dec 28, 2008, 10:11 P.M. ET
Democrats are gearing up for a new run at health care next year, which is another way of saying that it's an arms race to promise the most while disguising the costs. So when the expensive realities of "universal" coverage somehow intrude, taxpayers can't afford to let those moments disappear down the Beltway memory hole.
The most recent such moment comes courtesy of Peter Orszag, the former head of the Congressional Budget Office. CBO is the shop responsible for estimating how much legislation will cost the government, and recently it released two important reports on health-care financing that should hit Democrats like a cinderblock, assuming they read them. The executive summary for busy politicians is that liberal health reforms will be extremely costly, while measures intended to "save" money won't even come close to the promises. None of this will come as a revelation anywhere besides Capitol Hill.
Even so, this skepticism is notable because Mr. Orszag has since left CBO to become Barack Obama's budget director. Mr. Orszag's useful work on the unchecked growth of U.S. health spending, especially entitlements, ought to put the cost issue at the center of the 2009 debate. CBO expects government outlays on Medicare and Medicaid to rise as a share of the economy to 6% from 4.2% in a decade -- to $1.4 trillion, or nearly 30% of the entire federal budget -- and eventually ruin federal solvency. If costs grow on pace, U.S. medical spending will rise to 25% of GDP in 2025 from 17% today.
The liberal solution to this looming catastrophe is to add even more obligations. The insurance program for children that Democrats plan to expand in January will cost an extra $80 billion over the next 10 years. Preventing automatic cuts in the reimbursement fees that doctors receive for treating Medicare patients -- as Congress does every few years -- runs to $556 billion.
Those are nothing compared to the centerpiece of the universal health-care agenda -- a "public option" to provide government insurance for Americans of all ages and incomes. In one scenario, CBO finds that allowing the nonpoor to buy into Medicaid would have net costs of $7.8 billion over the next decade. If that sounds like pocket change, keep in mind that Democrats want to make both the public option and private insurance less expensive for beneficiaries by transferring the extra costs onto the government. Just one subsidy plan CBO examined would run to $65.5 billion by 2019. Having the government assume responsibility for high-cost claims would hit $752 billion.
CBO rolls through 115 of these reform options -- and it quickly becomes evident why even Democrats concede that their new health programs will cost $150 billion or even $200 billion per year. The real numbers will be higher. Keep in mind, too, that these are new recurring obligations, not one-time spending like (presumably) the financial bailout. They're politically unrepealable programs that will remain for decades.
Democrats, including Mr. Obama, suggest that covering everyone under a government plan will reduce costs through efficiency. Not according to CBO. It notes that there are "difficult trade-offs between the objectives of expanding insurance coverage and controlling both federal and total costs for health care." CBO also finds that programs designed to trim costs, such as health information technology or comparative effectiveness research, will produce only modest savings.
Mr. Orszag is a centrist liberal, and he supports reforms intended to squeeze waste out of the health markets. But to his credit at CBO he didn't ignore the data. Many Democrats (and a few Republicans) are glad that he's departing and are searching for a CBO replacement who will "score" their bills more favorably. The best outcome would be if Mr. Orszag manages to introduce some health-care sobriety to the Obama White House.
Obama's budget chief delivers a reality check on costs
WSJ, Dec 28, 2008, 10:11 P.M. ET
Democrats are gearing up for a new run at health care next year, which is another way of saying that it's an arms race to promise the most while disguising the costs. So when the expensive realities of "universal" coverage somehow intrude, taxpayers can't afford to let those moments disappear down the Beltway memory hole.
The most recent such moment comes courtesy of Peter Orszag, the former head of the Congressional Budget Office. CBO is the shop responsible for estimating how much legislation will cost the government, and recently it released two important reports on health-care financing that should hit Democrats like a cinderblock, assuming they read them. The executive summary for busy politicians is that liberal health reforms will be extremely costly, while measures intended to "save" money won't even come close to the promises. None of this will come as a revelation anywhere besides Capitol Hill.
Even so, this skepticism is notable because Mr. Orszag has since left CBO to become Barack Obama's budget director. Mr. Orszag's useful work on the unchecked growth of U.S. health spending, especially entitlements, ought to put the cost issue at the center of the 2009 debate. CBO expects government outlays on Medicare and Medicaid to rise as a share of the economy to 6% from 4.2% in a decade -- to $1.4 trillion, or nearly 30% of the entire federal budget -- and eventually ruin federal solvency. If costs grow on pace, U.S. medical spending will rise to 25% of GDP in 2025 from 17% today.
The liberal solution to this looming catastrophe is to add even more obligations. The insurance program for children that Democrats plan to expand in January will cost an extra $80 billion over the next 10 years. Preventing automatic cuts in the reimbursement fees that doctors receive for treating Medicare patients -- as Congress does every few years -- runs to $556 billion.
Those are nothing compared to the centerpiece of the universal health-care agenda -- a "public option" to provide government insurance for Americans of all ages and incomes. In one scenario, CBO finds that allowing the nonpoor to buy into Medicaid would have net costs of $7.8 billion over the next decade. If that sounds like pocket change, keep in mind that Democrats want to make both the public option and private insurance less expensive for beneficiaries by transferring the extra costs onto the government. Just one subsidy plan CBO examined would run to $65.5 billion by 2019. Having the government assume responsibility for high-cost claims would hit $752 billion.
CBO rolls through 115 of these reform options -- and it quickly becomes evident why even Democrats concede that their new health programs will cost $150 billion or even $200 billion per year. The real numbers will be higher. Keep in mind, too, that these are new recurring obligations, not one-time spending like (presumably) the financial bailout. They're politically unrepealable programs that will remain for decades.
Democrats, including Mr. Obama, suggest that covering everyone under a government plan will reduce costs through efficiency. Not according to CBO. It notes that there are "difficult trade-offs between the objectives of expanding insurance coverage and controlling both federal and total costs for health care." CBO also finds that programs designed to trim costs, such as health information technology or comparative effectiveness research, will produce only modest savings.
Mr. Orszag is a centrist liberal, and he supports reforms intended to squeeze waste out of the health markets. But to his credit at CBO he didn't ignore the data. Many Democrats (and a few Republicans) are glad that he's departing and are searching for a CBO replacement who will "score" their bills more favorably. The best outcome would be if Mr. Orszag manages to introduce some health-care sobriety to the Obama White House.
TNYT Editorial On Mr Obama's Labor Agenda
The Labor Agenda
TNYT Editorial, December 29, 2008
There is no doubt that President-elect Barack Obama has chosen a labor secretary who could be a transformative force in a long-neglected arena. The question is whether he will let her.
Hilda Solis, a United States representative from Southern California, is the daughter of immigrant parents with union jobs. She has been an unfailing advocate of workers’ rights during eight years in Congress and before that, in California politics.
Ms. Solis has been a leader on traditional workplace issues, like a higher minimum wage and an enhanced right to form unions. She also has helped to expand the labor agenda by sponsoring legislation to create jobs in green technology, and in her support for community health workers and immigration reform.
Her record in Congress dovetails with the mission of the Labor Department, to protect and further the rights and opportunities of working people. It also dovetails with many of the promises Mr. Obama made during the campaign, both in its specifics and in its focus on the needs of America’s working families.
The main issue is whether the Obama administration will assert a forceful labor agenda in the face of certain protests from business that now — during a recession — is not the time to move forward.
The first and biggest test of Mr. Obama’s commitment to labor, and to Ms. Solis, will be his decision on whether or not to push the Employee Free Choice Act in 2009. Corporate America is determined to derail the bill, which would make it easier than it has been for workers to form unions by requiring that employers recognize a union if a majority of employees at a workplace sign cards indicating they wish to organize.
Ms. Solis voted for the bill when it passed the House in 2007. Senate Republicans prevented the bill from coming to a vote that same year. Mr. Obama voted in favor of bringing the bill to the Senate floor and supported it during the campaign.
The measure is vital legislation and should not be postponed. Even modest increases in the share of the unionized labor force push wages upward, because nonunion workplaces must keep up with unionized ones that collectively bargain for increases. By giving employees a bigger say in compensation issues, unions also help to establish corporate norms, the absence of which has contributed to unjustifiable disparities between executive pay and rank-and-file pay.
The argument against unions — that they unduly burden employers with unreasonable demands — is one that corporate America makes in good times and bad, so the recession by itself is not an excuse to avoid pushing the bill next year. The real issue is whether enhanced unionizing would worsen the recession, and there is no evidence that it would.
There is a strong argument that the slack labor market of a recession actually makes unions all the more important. Without a united front, workers will have even less bargaining power in the recession than they had during the growth years of this decade, when they largely failed to get raises even as productivity and profits soared. If pay continues to lag, it will only prolong the downturn by inhibiting spending.
Another question clouding the labor agenda is whether Mr. Obama will give equal weight to worker concerns — from reforming health care to raising the minimum wage — while the financial crisis is still playing out. Most members of his economic team are veterans of the Clinton administration who tilt toward Wall Street. In the Clinton era, financial issues routinely trumped labor concerns. If Mr. Obama’s campaign promises are to be kept, that mindset cannot prevail again. Mr. Obama’s creation of a task force on middle-class issues, to be led by Vice President-elect Joseph Biden and including Ms. Solis and other high-ranking officials, is an encouraging sign that labor issues will not be given short shrift.
There are many nonlegislative issues on the agenda for Ms. Solis. Safety standards must be updated: in the last eight years, the Labor Department has issued only one new safety rule of its own accord; it issued a few others only after being compelled by Congress or the courts. Overtime rules that were weakened in 2004 need to be restored. To enforce labor standards, the Labor Department will need more staff and more money, both of which have been cut deeply by President Bush.
Only the president can give the new labor secretary the clout she will need to do well at a job that has been done so badly for so long, at such great cost to the quality of Americans’ lives.
TNYT Editorial, December 29, 2008
There is no doubt that President-elect Barack Obama has chosen a labor secretary who could be a transformative force in a long-neglected arena. The question is whether he will let her.
Hilda Solis, a United States representative from Southern California, is the daughter of immigrant parents with union jobs. She has been an unfailing advocate of workers’ rights during eight years in Congress and before that, in California politics.
Ms. Solis has been a leader on traditional workplace issues, like a higher minimum wage and an enhanced right to form unions. She also has helped to expand the labor agenda by sponsoring legislation to create jobs in green technology, and in her support for community health workers and immigration reform.
Her record in Congress dovetails with the mission of the Labor Department, to protect and further the rights and opportunities of working people. It also dovetails with many of the promises Mr. Obama made during the campaign, both in its specifics and in its focus on the needs of America’s working families.
The main issue is whether the Obama administration will assert a forceful labor agenda in the face of certain protests from business that now — during a recession — is not the time to move forward.
The first and biggest test of Mr. Obama’s commitment to labor, and to Ms. Solis, will be his decision on whether or not to push the Employee Free Choice Act in 2009. Corporate America is determined to derail the bill, which would make it easier than it has been for workers to form unions by requiring that employers recognize a union if a majority of employees at a workplace sign cards indicating they wish to organize.
Ms. Solis voted for the bill when it passed the House in 2007. Senate Republicans prevented the bill from coming to a vote that same year. Mr. Obama voted in favor of bringing the bill to the Senate floor and supported it during the campaign.
The measure is vital legislation and should not be postponed. Even modest increases in the share of the unionized labor force push wages upward, because nonunion workplaces must keep up with unionized ones that collectively bargain for increases. By giving employees a bigger say in compensation issues, unions also help to establish corporate norms, the absence of which has contributed to unjustifiable disparities between executive pay and rank-and-file pay.
The argument against unions — that they unduly burden employers with unreasonable demands — is one that corporate America makes in good times and bad, so the recession by itself is not an excuse to avoid pushing the bill next year. The real issue is whether enhanced unionizing would worsen the recession, and there is no evidence that it would.
There is a strong argument that the slack labor market of a recession actually makes unions all the more important. Without a united front, workers will have even less bargaining power in the recession than they had during the growth years of this decade, when they largely failed to get raises even as productivity and profits soared. If pay continues to lag, it will only prolong the downturn by inhibiting spending.
Another question clouding the labor agenda is whether Mr. Obama will give equal weight to worker concerns — from reforming health care to raising the minimum wage — while the financial crisis is still playing out. Most members of his economic team are veterans of the Clinton administration who tilt toward Wall Street. In the Clinton era, financial issues routinely trumped labor concerns. If Mr. Obama’s campaign promises are to be kept, that mindset cannot prevail again. Mr. Obama’s creation of a task force on middle-class issues, to be led by Vice President-elect Joseph Biden and including Ms. Solis and other high-ranking officials, is an encouraging sign that labor issues will not be given short shrift.
There are many nonlegislative issues on the agenda for Ms. Solis. Safety standards must be updated: in the last eight years, the Labor Department has issued only one new safety rule of its own accord; it issued a few others only after being compelled by Congress or the courts. Overtime rules that were weakened in 2004 need to be restored. To enforce labor standards, the Labor Department will need more staff and more money, both of which have been cut deeply by President Bush.
Only the president can give the new labor secretary the clout she will need to do well at a job that has been done so badly for so long, at such great cost to the quality of Americans’ lives.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
In "The National Interest": Flight of the Neocons
Flight of the Neocons, by Jacob Heilbrunn
The National Interest, Dec 19, 2008
It can’t be quite called a victory lap because the victories have been too scarce and the defeats too prominent. Instead, President Bush’s remarks at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) on Thursday left the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank marveling at the transformation of a president who, he observed, “seems to be a walking confession booth.” Bush’s appearance was part of his attempt to shape his legacy and restore his reputation by projecting a more accommodating, thoughtful image than that of the imperious Decider.
But it also marked a return to the think tank that provided a good deal of the intellectual firepower for his administration. Like Bush, however, the think tank itself seems to be undergoing some changes that are causing consternation in the ranks of neoconservatives. Just as Bush veered more toward the center in his second term on foreign policy, so AEI appears to be attenuating its commitment to the neoconservative credo. The neocon world has been rocked by recent events at AEI. Numerous neocons told me that a vicious purge is being carried out at AEI, spearheaded by vice-president for foreign and defense policy studies, Danielle Pletka.
There can be no doubting that change is afoot at AEI. Recently, Michael Ledeen and Reuel Marc Gerecht have departed AEI. Joshua Muravchik is on the way out as well. Other scholars face possible eviction. Both Muravchik and Gerecht are serious intellectuals who have published prolifically. Muravchik has never been as unbridled in his writings as some other neocons. To put it another way, he does nuance. As the Soviet Union was collapsing, for example, he wrote an article stating that perhaps Mikhail Gorbachev was a Menshevik even as other neocons such as Norman Podhoretz condemned Gorbachev. Muravchik’s main mission has been to forward the democracy crusade. His first book criticized the human-rights policy of the Carter administration. His anticommunist views put him out of fashion in the Democratic Party and he never secured a position in the Clinton administration. I myself do not agree with his current endorsement of bombing Iran, but a recent piece in World Affairs, in which he gave a guarded endorsement to President Bush’s foreign policy, underscored that he is not simply a cheerleader for the administration.
Muravchik has been at AEI for two decades. Gerecht has been there for a much briefer period, but he has written extensively and provocatively on intelligence matters. Gerecht is currently at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which, along with the Hudson Institute, where Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, “Scooter” Libby and Douglas J. Feith are fellows, seems to functioning as something of a safe haven for neocons.
What do these developments actually add up to? They undoubtedly signal a splintering taking place in the neocon world. Pletka has been closely identified with neocon positions on Iraq and Iran. But now there is tremendous hostility toward her among neocons, who allege that, as a former staffer for Jesse Helms, who embodied more traditional Republican foreign-policy precepts, she is out to extirpate neocon influence at AEI. In this version of events, Muravchik was ousted for not being a true Republican. It would be very unfortunate if that were the real cause. What the conservative movement needs is ferment, not an ideological straitjacket—something that neocons have themselves sometimes tried to enforce.
The neocon movement will survive these changes. It will continue to stir up debate. Its real misfortune was to be able to exert power in the Bush administration, where officials such as Paul Wolfowitz and Feith made a hash of things. The notion of a liberated Iraq being the first freedom domino to fall in the greater Middle East was always a pipe dream. The strength of the neocons is to generate ideas, but whether they should actually be implemented is often another matter.
If neocon influence really is on the wane at AEI, however, it would signal the end of its domination over the think tank over the past several decades. Like Bush, AEI may be on the verge of trying to reinvent itself. The change that Obama promised during the campaign seems to be reaching Washington in unexpected places.
Jacob Heilbrunn is a senior editor at The National Interest.
The National Interest, Dec 19, 2008
It can’t be quite called a victory lap because the victories have been too scarce and the defeats too prominent. Instead, President Bush’s remarks at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) on Thursday left the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank marveling at the transformation of a president who, he observed, “seems to be a walking confession booth.” Bush’s appearance was part of his attempt to shape his legacy and restore his reputation by projecting a more accommodating, thoughtful image than that of the imperious Decider.
But it also marked a return to the think tank that provided a good deal of the intellectual firepower for his administration. Like Bush, however, the think tank itself seems to be undergoing some changes that are causing consternation in the ranks of neoconservatives. Just as Bush veered more toward the center in his second term on foreign policy, so AEI appears to be attenuating its commitment to the neoconservative credo. The neocon world has been rocked by recent events at AEI. Numerous neocons told me that a vicious purge is being carried out at AEI, spearheaded by vice-president for foreign and defense policy studies, Danielle Pletka.
There can be no doubting that change is afoot at AEI. Recently, Michael Ledeen and Reuel Marc Gerecht have departed AEI. Joshua Muravchik is on the way out as well. Other scholars face possible eviction. Both Muravchik and Gerecht are serious intellectuals who have published prolifically. Muravchik has never been as unbridled in his writings as some other neocons. To put it another way, he does nuance. As the Soviet Union was collapsing, for example, he wrote an article stating that perhaps Mikhail Gorbachev was a Menshevik even as other neocons such as Norman Podhoretz condemned Gorbachev. Muravchik’s main mission has been to forward the democracy crusade. His first book criticized the human-rights policy of the Carter administration. His anticommunist views put him out of fashion in the Democratic Party and he never secured a position in the Clinton administration. I myself do not agree with his current endorsement of bombing Iran, but a recent piece in World Affairs, in which he gave a guarded endorsement to President Bush’s foreign policy, underscored that he is not simply a cheerleader for the administration.
Muravchik has been at AEI for two decades. Gerecht has been there for a much briefer period, but he has written extensively and provocatively on intelligence matters. Gerecht is currently at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which, along with the Hudson Institute, where Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, “Scooter” Libby and Douglas J. Feith are fellows, seems to functioning as something of a safe haven for neocons.
What do these developments actually add up to? They undoubtedly signal a splintering taking place in the neocon world. Pletka has been closely identified with neocon positions on Iraq and Iran. But now there is tremendous hostility toward her among neocons, who allege that, as a former staffer for Jesse Helms, who embodied more traditional Republican foreign-policy precepts, she is out to extirpate neocon influence at AEI. In this version of events, Muravchik was ousted for not being a true Republican. It would be very unfortunate if that were the real cause. What the conservative movement needs is ferment, not an ideological straitjacket—something that neocons have themselves sometimes tried to enforce.
The neocon movement will survive these changes. It will continue to stir up debate. Its real misfortune was to be able to exert power in the Bush administration, where officials such as Paul Wolfowitz and Feith made a hash of things. The notion of a liberated Iraq being the first freedom domino to fall in the greater Middle East was always a pipe dream. The strength of the neocons is to generate ideas, but whether they should actually be implemented is often another matter.
If neocon influence really is on the wane at AEI, however, it would signal the end of its domination over the think tank over the past several decades. Like Bush, AEI may be on the verge of trying to reinvent itself. The change that Obama promised during the campaign seems to be reaching Washington in unexpected places.
Jacob Heilbrunn is a senior editor at The National Interest.
Carnivore Bonobos and Human Nature
Of Monkeys and Utopia, by Lionel Tiger
The state of nature is not a state of pacifism.
WSJ, Dec 27, 2008
Reveries about human perfection do not exist solely in the enthusiastic systems confected by Karl Marx, or in the REM sleep of Hugo Chávez, or through the utopian certainties of millenarians. There has been a persistent belief through countless societies that life is better, much better, somewhere else. In some yet-unfound reality there is an expression of our best natures -- our loving, peaceful, lyrically fair human core.
Anthropologists have been at the center of this quest, its practitioners sailing off to find that elusive core of perfection everywhere else corrupted by civilization. In the 1920s, Margaret Mead found it in Samoa, where the people, she said, enjoyed untroubled lives. Adolescents in particular were not bothered by the sexual hang-ups that plague our repressive society. Decades later an Australian researcher, Derek Freeman, retraced her work and successfully challenged its validity. Still, Mead's work and that of others reinforced the notion that our way of life was artificial, inauthentic, just plain wrong.
Enter primatology, which provided yet more questions about essential hominid nature -- and from which species we could, perhaps, derive guidance about our inner core. First studied in the wild were the baboons, which turned out to have harsh power politics and sexual inequity. Then Jane Goodall brought back heartwarming film of African chimps who were loving, loyal, fine mothers, with none of the militarism of the big bad baboons. But her subjects were well fed, and didn't need to scratch for a living in their traditional way. Later it became clear that chimps in fact formed hunting posses. They tore baby baboons they captured limb from limb, and seemed to enjoy it.
Where to look now for that perfect, pacifistic and egalitarian core? Franz de Waal, a talented and genial primatologist, observed the behavior of bonobos at Emory University's primate lab in the 1980s. These chimpanzees, he found, engaged in a dramatic amount of sexual activity both genital and oral, heterosexual and homosexual -- and when conflicts threatened to arise a bout of sex settled the score and life went on. Bonobos made love, not war. No hunting, killing, male dominance, or threats to the sunny paradise of a species so closely related to us. His research attracted enormous attention outside anthropology. Why not? How can this lifestyle not be attractive to those of us struggling on a committee, in a marriage, and seeking lubricious resolution?
Alas, Mr. de Waal also hadn't studied his species in the wild. And, with a disappointing shock in some quarters, for the past five years bonobos have been studied in their natural habitat in a national park in the Congo.
There, along with colleagues, Gottfried Hohman of the Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig has seen groups of bonobos engage in clearly willful and challenging hunts. Indeed, female bonobos took full part in the some 10 organized hunts which have been observed thus far.
[...]
Mr. Tiger is the Charles Darwin professor of anthropology at Rutgers University.
The state of nature is not a state of pacifism.
WSJ, Dec 27, 2008
Reveries about human perfection do not exist solely in the enthusiastic systems confected by Karl Marx, or in the REM sleep of Hugo Chávez, or through the utopian certainties of millenarians. There has been a persistent belief through countless societies that life is better, much better, somewhere else. In some yet-unfound reality there is an expression of our best natures -- our loving, peaceful, lyrically fair human core.
Anthropologists have been at the center of this quest, its practitioners sailing off to find that elusive core of perfection everywhere else corrupted by civilization. In the 1920s, Margaret Mead found it in Samoa, where the people, she said, enjoyed untroubled lives. Adolescents in particular were not bothered by the sexual hang-ups that plague our repressive society. Decades later an Australian researcher, Derek Freeman, retraced her work and successfully challenged its validity. Still, Mead's work and that of others reinforced the notion that our way of life was artificial, inauthentic, just plain wrong.
Enter primatology, which provided yet more questions about essential hominid nature -- and from which species we could, perhaps, derive guidance about our inner core. First studied in the wild were the baboons, which turned out to have harsh power politics and sexual inequity. Then Jane Goodall brought back heartwarming film of African chimps who were loving, loyal, fine mothers, with none of the militarism of the big bad baboons. But her subjects were well fed, and didn't need to scratch for a living in their traditional way. Later it became clear that chimps in fact formed hunting posses. They tore baby baboons they captured limb from limb, and seemed to enjoy it.
Where to look now for that perfect, pacifistic and egalitarian core? Franz de Waal, a talented and genial primatologist, observed the behavior of bonobos at Emory University's primate lab in the 1980s. These chimpanzees, he found, engaged in a dramatic amount of sexual activity both genital and oral, heterosexual and homosexual -- and when conflicts threatened to arise a bout of sex settled the score and life went on. Bonobos made love, not war. No hunting, killing, male dominance, or threats to the sunny paradise of a species so closely related to us. His research attracted enormous attention outside anthropology. Why not? How can this lifestyle not be attractive to those of us struggling on a committee, in a marriage, and seeking lubricious resolution?
Alas, Mr. de Waal also hadn't studied his species in the wild. And, with a disappointing shock in some quarters, for the past five years bonobos have been studied in their natural habitat in a national park in the Congo.
There, along with colleagues, Gottfried Hohman of the Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig has seen groups of bonobos engage in clearly willful and challenging hunts. Indeed, female bonobos took full part in the some 10 organized hunts which have been observed thus far.
[...]
Mr. Tiger is the Charles Darwin professor of anthropology at Rutgers University.
TNYT believes it is necessary to expand the Army by 65,000 soldiers
Recruiting the Best
TNYT Editorial, December 28, 2008
As commander of the Army recruiting station in Patchogue, N.Y., Sgt. Clayton Dickinson sees firsthand why it is so hard to staff his military service at the prescribed levels. His station recruited 65 new soldiers in 2007-8, missing its target by 10.
Of the young people in his largely middle-class community who express interest in an Army career, roughly 70 percent do not qualify, he says. They either have criminal charges against them, cannot pass the drug test or cannot pass the military qualifying test, which measures math and verbal proficiency. “It’s pretty rare to find that one perfect individual,” he admits.
And those are the ones who want to join. Many of the young people Sergeant Dickinson and his fellow recruiters try to woo at high school career fairs and in telephone canvassing have one reaction: No way. They don’t want to fight in Iraq. Neither do their parents want them to fight.
We believe it is necessary to expand the Army by 65,000 soldiers to help rebuild the world’s best ground force after an extraordinary period of overuse. That expansion could magnify recruiters’ problems far into the future if steps are not taken quickly to address them.
The Army, which must remain an all-volunteer force, has borne the brunt of seven years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan —repeated and long-term deployments, disrupted families. More than 4,000 service members have died; thousands more have been injured.
Unlike the Marines, Navy and Air Force, the Army has had trouble meeting its recruiting targets since 2004 and fell short in 2005 by about 8 percent, or 6,400 recruits. After that, national targets were met, but only by lowering standards. In 2007, only 79 percent of recruits had high school diplomas; in 2008, the figure was 83 percent. This key measure of whether soldiers will complete their enlistment period is down from 92 percent in 2003.
The Army is also granting an increasing number of “moral waivers” to recruits with criminal records. In 2007, this affected some 14,000 Army recruits (18 percent) compared with an average of less than 6 percent annually between 2003 and 2006.
Retaining officers, especially majors but also lieutenant colonels and captains, is also a struggle. That is because of the two wars, which have kept upward of 200,000 troops on the battlefield, and because of a failure to recruit enough officers in the post-cold-war drawdown of the 1990s. Even officers produced by West Point — the cream of the crop — have been leaving at an accelerated rate after their obligatory five years of service. The way the Army restructured itself — expanding from 33 brigades to 42 smaller brigade combat teams — added more stress by increasing the demand for more officers.
To meet the need, the Army has accelerated promotions of junior officers (tapping some before they are ready) and has retained officers passed over for promotion, who in normal times would have been retired involuntarily. The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment says this has led to a decline in overall quality.
The economic crisis and sharp cuts in private-sector jobs, especially if prolonged, could make military careers more attractive. Recession could also persuade soldiers to stay on until retirement. That is no long-term solution. President-elect Barack Obama should consider these steps to ensure the high-quality Army America needs:
¶A democracy of 300 million led by an inspirational leader should be able to find high-quality recruits. Mr. Obama should fulfill his campaign pledge to call on Americans to contribute to the nation’s security, including serving in the military. By withdrawing troops from Iraq and pursuing a foreign policy that shuns such ill-advised wars, he could both reduce the stress on troops and make service more attractive. More forces are being shifted to Afghanistan, but the total is not expected to approach the commitment in Iraq.
¶All qualified Americans who wish to serve should be embraced. That means dropping the ban on women serving in combat and repealing the insulting “don’t ask, don’t tell” law that has marginalized gays.
¶Consider expanding a pilot program under which foreigners who have been living in the United States on student or work visas or with refugee or political asylum status are recruited as doctors, nurses and linguists. They should be given an accelerated path to citizenship. Noncitizens have served in the military since the United States was founded.
¶According to most experts, military pay and civilian pay are nearly comparable after a decade of steady Pentagon increases. Keep military pay competitive and invest in new inducements that are more cost-effective: more in cash benefits, less in non-cash benefits like pensions; more in re-enlistment and other bonuses, less in across-the-board raises. Most potential recruits and serving personnel are far more drawn to immediate cash benefits than deferred non-cash benefits, studies show.
¶Create more flexible personnel management systems so the services have more leeway to vary compensation and length of assignments according to individuals and the job slots needed to be filled.
¶Easier, quicker promotions may be a short-term necessity but should be ended as soon as practical. West Point and the Reserve Officer Training Corps are the best sources of top leaders and should be expanded.
All the fancy planes, helicopters and high-tech weaponry mean nothing without competent forces. A military increasingly dependent on technological advances must maintain an increasingly well-educated and well-trained force. People are the Army’s best assets. They must be managed accordingly.
TNYT Editorial, December 28, 2008
As commander of the Army recruiting station in Patchogue, N.Y., Sgt. Clayton Dickinson sees firsthand why it is so hard to staff his military service at the prescribed levels. His station recruited 65 new soldiers in 2007-8, missing its target by 10.
Of the young people in his largely middle-class community who express interest in an Army career, roughly 70 percent do not qualify, he says. They either have criminal charges against them, cannot pass the drug test or cannot pass the military qualifying test, which measures math and verbal proficiency. “It’s pretty rare to find that one perfect individual,” he admits.
And those are the ones who want to join. Many of the young people Sergeant Dickinson and his fellow recruiters try to woo at high school career fairs and in telephone canvassing have one reaction: No way. They don’t want to fight in Iraq. Neither do their parents want them to fight.
We believe it is necessary to expand the Army by 65,000 soldiers to help rebuild the world’s best ground force after an extraordinary period of overuse. That expansion could magnify recruiters’ problems far into the future if steps are not taken quickly to address them.
The Army, which must remain an all-volunteer force, has borne the brunt of seven years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan —repeated and long-term deployments, disrupted families. More than 4,000 service members have died; thousands more have been injured.
Unlike the Marines, Navy and Air Force, the Army has had trouble meeting its recruiting targets since 2004 and fell short in 2005 by about 8 percent, or 6,400 recruits. After that, national targets were met, but only by lowering standards. In 2007, only 79 percent of recruits had high school diplomas; in 2008, the figure was 83 percent. This key measure of whether soldiers will complete their enlistment period is down from 92 percent in 2003.
The Army is also granting an increasing number of “moral waivers” to recruits with criminal records. In 2007, this affected some 14,000 Army recruits (18 percent) compared with an average of less than 6 percent annually between 2003 and 2006.
Retaining officers, especially majors but also lieutenant colonels and captains, is also a struggle. That is because of the two wars, which have kept upward of 200,000 troops on the battlefield, and because of a failure to recruit enough officers in the post-cold-war drawdown of the 1990s. Even officers produced by West Point — the cream of the crop — have been leaving at an accelerated rate after their obligatory five years of service. The way the Army restructured itself — expanding from 33 brigades to 42 smaller brigade combat teams — added more stress by increasing the demand for more officers.
To meet the need, the Army has accelerated promotions of junior officers (tapping some before they are ready) and has retained officers passed over for promotion, who in normal times would have been retired involuntarily. The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment says this has led to a decline in overall quality.
The economic crisis and sharp cuts in private-sector jobs, especially if prolonged, could make military careers more attractive. Recession could also persuade soldiers to stay on until retirement. That is no long-term solution. President-elect Barack Obama should consider these steps to ensure the high-quality Army America needs:
¶A democracy of 300 million led by an inspirational leader should be able to find high-quality recruits. Mr. Obama should fulfill his campaign pledge to call on Americans to contribute to the nation’s security, including serving in the military. By withdrawing troops from Iraq and pursuing a foreign policy that shuns such ill-advised wars, he could both reduce the stress on troops and make service more attractive. More forces are being shifted to Afghanistan, but the total is not expected to approach the commitment in Iraq.
¶All qualified Americans who wish to serve should be embraced. That means dropping the ban on women serving in combat and repealing the insulting “don’t ask, don’t tell” law that has marginalized gays.
¶Consider expanding a pilot program under which foreigners who have been living in the United States on student or work visas or with refugee or political asylum status are recruited as doctors, nurses and linguists. They should be given an accelerated path to citizenship. Noncitizens have served in the military since the United States was founded.
¶According to most experts, military pay and civilian pay are nearly comparable after a decade of steady Pentagon increases. Keep military pay competitive and invest in new inducements that are more cost-effective: more in cash benefits, less in non-cash benefits like pensions; more in re-enlistment and other bonuses, less in across-the-board raises. Most potential recruits and serving personnel are far more drawn to immediate cash benefits than deferred non-cash benefits, studies show.
¶Create more flexible personnel management systems so the services have more leeway to vary compensation and length of assignments according to individuals and the job slots needed to be filled.
¶Easier, quicker promotions may be a short-term necessity but should be ended as soon as practical. West Point and the Reserve Officer Training Corps are the best sources of top leaders and should be expanded.
All the fancy planes, helicopters and high-tech weaponry mean nothing without competent forces. A military increasingly dependent on technological advances must maintain an increasingly well-educated and well-trained force. People are the Army’s best assets. They must be managed accordingly.
In The New Republic On Israel War Against HAMAS
Very Disproportionate, Indeed. By Marty Peretz
The New Republic Blogs. Saturday, December 27, 2008 9:22 PM
From January 1 until December 21, Hamas and its allies had launched exactly 1,250 rockets across the border between Gaza and Israel. Then the escalation really started: on Wednesday 70 projectile missiles landed in the Negev and its populated areas. On Thursday, more of the same. On Friday, two Palestinian girls, cousins of 5 and 12 years, were killed by a rocket that was launched in the Strip and landed in the Strip. But these unfortunates were not the targets of fire. It was just another day of blast offs into the Jewish state.
The government in Jerusalem had made it unmistakably clear that it would no longer tolerate this fire power aimed at innocent civilian life. It had been saying this for months to an increasingly skeptical and apprehensive, not to say, restive public. And to Hamas which didn't seem to care. Instead, it threatened Israel by word and follow-up deeds that confirmed the recklessness - as if confirmation was needed- of also this Palestinian "liberation" movement, the last in the long line of terrorist revolutionaries acting in the name of pathetic and blood-thirsty Palestine.
So at 11:30 on Saturday morning, according to both the Jerusalem Post and Ha'aretz, as well as the New York Times, 50 fighter jets and attack helicopters demolished some 40 to 50 sites in just about three minutes, maybe five. Message: do not fuck with the Jews. At roughly noon, another 60 air-attack vehicles went after other Hamas strategic positions. Israeli intelligence reported 225 people dead, mostly Hamas military leaders with some functionaries, besides, and perhaps 400 wounded. The Palestinians announced 300 dead, probably as a reflex in order to begin their whining about disproportionate Israeli acts of war. And 600 wounded.
Frankly, I am up to my gullet with this reflex criticism of Israel as going beyond proportionality in its responses to war waged against its population with the undisguised intention of putting an end to the political expression of the Jewish nation. Within hours, Nicolas Sarkozy was already taking up the cudgel of French righteousness and pronouncing the actually quite sober Israeli response to the continuous war on its borders "disproportionate." Enough. What would be proportionate, oh, so so proportionate apparently, are those tried-and-true half measures to contain Hamas that have never worked. Remember that in 2005 Israel ceded Gaza to the Palestinians waiting and hoping that they would make something of a civil society of their territory, civil for their own and civil to their neighbors. It was not to be.
There is only small likelihood that Hamas has learned its lesson. These Sunni fanatics are still supported by the Shi'a fanatics in Iran. And they are also backed by the House of Saud which cannot be seen to be turning its back on Sunni piety. Gaza is the only place in the Middle East where Tehran and Riyadh are allied. In both Lebanon and Iraq, they are the bankrollers (and more than bankrollers) of hostile sectarian forces engaged in killing each other. Thus, Hamas has still some rope with which to play. Cash, after all, is a great deluder.
The current warfare will go on a bit longer. If there is a pause and if I were giving advice to the Israelis, this is what I would say to Hamas and to the people of Gaza: "If a rocket or missile is launched against us, if you take captive one of our soldiers (as you have held one for two and a half years), if you raise a new Intifada against us, there will be an immediate response. And it will be very disproportionate. Proportion does not work."
No sooner had I written these last words that Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader exiled in Damascus (which also apparently pines to make peace with Israel), announced the beginning of the Third Intifada.
The New Republic Blogs. Saturday, December 27, 2008 9:22 PM
From January 1 until December 21, Hamas and its allies had launched exactly 1,250 rockets across the border between Gaza and Israel. Then the escalation really started: on Wednesday 70 projectile missiles landed in the Negev and its populated areas. On Thursday, more of the same. On Friday, two Palestinian girls, cousins of 5 and 12 years, were killed by a rocket that was launched in the Strip and landed in the Strip. But these unfortunates were not the targets of fire. It was just another day of blast offs into the Jewish state.
The government in Jerusalem had made it unmistakably clear that it would no longer tolerate this fire power aimed at innocent civilian life. It had been saying this for months to an increasingly skeptical and apprehensive, not to say, restive public. And to Hamas which didn't seem to care. Instead, it threatened Israel by word and follow-up deeds that confirmed the recklessness - as if confirmation was needed- of also this Palestinian "liberation" movement, the last in the long line of terrorist revolutionaries acting in the name of pathetic and blood-thirsty Palestine.
So at 11:30 on Saturday morning, according to both the Jerusalem Post and Ha'aretz, as well as the New York Times, 50 fighter jets and attack helicopters demolished some 40 to 50 sites in just about three minutes, maybe five. Message: do not fuck with the Jews. At roughly noon, another 60 air-attack vehicles went after other Hamas strategic positions. Israeli intelligence reported 225 people dead, mostly Hamas military leaders with some functionaries, besides, and perhaps 400 wounded. The Palestinians announced 300 dead, probably as a reflex in order to begin their whining about disproportionate Israeli acts of war. And 600 wounded.
Frankly, I am up to my gullet with this reflex criticism of Israel as going beyond proportionality in its responses to war waged against its population with the undisguised intention of putting an end to the political expression of the Jewish nation. Within hours, Nicolas Sarkozy was already taking up the cudgel of French righteousness and pronouncing the actually quite sober Israeli response to the continuous war on its borders "disproportionate." Enough. What would be proportionate, oh, so so proportionate apparently, are those tried-and-true half measures to contain Hamas that have never worked. Remember that in 2005 Israel ceded Gaza to the Palestinians waiting and hoping that they would make something of a civil society of their territory, civil for their own and civil to their neighbors. It was not to be.
There is only small likelihood that Hamas has learned its lesson. These Sunni fanatics are still supported by the Shi'a fanatics in Iran. And they are also backed by the House of Saud which cannot be seen to be turning its back on Sunni piety. Gaza is the only place in the Middle East where Tehran and Riyadh are allied. In both Lebanon and Iraq, they are the bankrollers (and more than bankrollers) of hostile sectarian forces engaged in killing each other. Thus, Hamas has still some rope with which to play. Cash, after all, is a great deluder.
The current warfare will go on a bit longer. If there is a pause and if I were giving advice to the Israelis, this is what I would say to Hamas and to the people of Gaza: "If a rocket or missile is launched against us, if you take captive one of our soldiers (as you have held one for two and a half years), if you raise a new Intifada against us, there will be an immediate response. And it will be very disproportionate. Proportion does not work."
No sooner had I written these last words that Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader exiled in Damascus (which also apparently pines to make peace with Israel), announced the beginning of the Third Intifada.
TNYT On President-elect Barack Obama's Immigration Policy
Getting Immigration Right
TNYT Editorial, December 26, 2008
It’s way too early to tell whether the United States under President-elect Barack Obama will restore realism, sanity and lawfulness to its immigration system. But it’s never too early to hope, and the stars seem to be lining up, at least among his cabinet nominees.
If Mr. Obama’s team is confirmed, the country will have a homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano of Arizona, and a commerce secretary, Bill Richardson of New Mexico, who understand the border region and share a well-informed disdain for foolish, inadequate enforcement schemes like the Bush administration’s border fence. And it will have a labor secretary, Hilda Solis of California, who, as a state senator and congresswoman, has built a reputation as a staunch defender of immigrants and workers.
The confluence of immigrants and labor is exactly what this country — particularly, and disastrously, the Bush administration — has not been able to figure out.
In simplest terms, what Ms. Solis and Mr. Obama seem to know in their gut is this: If you uphold workers’ rights, even for those here illegally, you uphold them for all working Americans. If you ignore and undercut the rights of illegal immigrants, you encourage the exploitation that erodes working conditions and job security everywhere. In a time of economic darkness, the stability and dignity of the work force are especially vital.
This is why it is so important to reverse the Bush administration’s immigration tactics, which for years have attacked the problem upside down and backward. To appease Republican nativists, it lavished scarce resources solely on hunting down and punishing illegal immigrants. Its campaign of raids, detentions and border fencing was a moral failure. Among other things, it terrorized and broke apart families and led to some gruesome deaths in shoddy prisons. It mocked the American tradition of welcoming and assimilating immigrant workers.
But it also was a strategic failure because it did little or nothing to stem the illegal tide while creating the very conditions under which the off-the-books economy can thrive. Illegal immigrant workers are deterred from forming unions. And without a path to legalization and under the threat of a relentless enforcement-only regime, they cannot assert their rights.
It’s a system that the grubbiest and shabbiest industries and business owners — think of the hellish slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, running with immigrant child labor — could not have designed better. Through it all, the Bush administration’s response to criticism has been ever more enforcement.
Ms. Solis, whose father immigrated from Mexico and was a Teamsters shop steward and whose mother, from Nicaragua, worked on an assembly line, promises a clean break from that past. She lives in El Monte, a Los Angeles suburb where two compelling stories of immigrants and labor have emerged in recent years.
The first was tragic: a notorious 1995 raid at a sweatshop where Thai workers were kept in slave conditions behind barbed wire. The second is less well-known but far more encouraging: a present-day hiring site for day laborers at the edge of a Home Depot parking lot. The Latino men who gather in that safe, well-run space uphold an informal minimum wage and protect one another from abusive contractors and wage thieves. It’s good for the store, its customers and the workers.
Ms. Solis is a defender of such sites and has opposed efforts in other cities to enact ordinances to disperse day laborers and force them underground. She understands that if day laborers end up in our suburbs, it is better to give them safe places to gather rather than allow an uncontrolled job bazaar to drive wages and working conditions down.
That’s a bit of local wisdom that deserves to take root in the federal government.
TNYT Editorial, December 26, 2008
It’s way too early to tell whether the United States under President-elect Barack Obama will restore realism, sanity and lawfulness to its immigration system. But it’s never too early to hope, and the stars seem to be lining up, at least among his cabinet nominees.
If Mr. Obama’s team is confirmed, the country will have a homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano of Arizona, and a commerce secretary, Bill Richardson of New Mexico, who understand the border region and share a well-informed disdain for foolish, inadequate enforcement schemes like the Bush administration’s border fence. And it will have a labor secretary, Hilda Solis of California, who, as a state senator and congresswoman, has built a reputation as a staunch defender of immigrants and workers.
The confluence of immigrants and labor is exactly what this country — particularly, and disastrously, the Bush administration — has not been able to figure out.
In simplest terms, what Ms. Solis and Mr. Obama seem to know in their gut is this: If you uphold workers’ rights, even for those here illegally, you uphold them for all working Americans. If you ignore and undercut the rights of illegal immigrants, you encourage the exploitation that erodes working conditions and job security everywhere. In a time of economic darkness, the stability and dignity of the work force are especially vital.
This is why it is so important to reverse the Bush administration’s immigration tactics, which for years have attacked the problem upside down and backward. To appease Republican nativists, it lavished scarce resources solely on hunting down and punishing illegal immigrants. Its campaign of raids, detentions and border fencing was a moral failure. Among other things, it terrorized and broke apart families and led to some gruesome deaths in shoddy prisons. It mocked the American tradition of welcoming and assimilating immigrant workers.
But it also was a strategic failure because it did little or nothing to stem the illegal tide while creating the very conditions under which the off-the-books economy can thrive. Illegal immigrant workers are deterred from forming unions. And without a path to legalization and under the threat of a relentless enforcement-only regime, they cannot assert their rights.
It’s a system that the grubbiest and shabbiest industries and business owners — think of the hellish slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, running with immigrant child labor — could not have designed better. Through it all, the Bush administration’s response to criticism has been ever more enforcement.
Ms. Solis, whose father immigrated from Mexico and was a Teamsters shop steward and whose mother, from Nicaragua, worked on an assembly line, promises a clean break from that past. She lives in El Monte, a Los Angeles suburb where two compelling stories of immigrants and labor have emerged in recent years.
The first was tragic: a notorious 1995 raid at a sweatshop where Thai workers were kept in slave conditions behind barbed wire. The second is less well-known but far more encouraging: a present-day hiring site for day laborers at the edge of a Home Depot parking lot. The Latino men who gather in that safe, well-run space uphold an informal minimum wage and protect one another from abusive contractors and wage thieves. It’s good for the store, its customers and the workers.
Ms. Solis is a defender of such sites and has opposed efforts in other cities to enact ordinances to disperse day laborers and force them underground. She understands that if day laborers end up in our suburbs, it is better to give them safe places to gather rather than allow an uncontrolled job bazaar to drive wages and working conditions down.
That’s a bit of local wisdom that deserves to take root in the federal government.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Rushdie On the Bombay Attacks
FOR THE RECORD: Shalman Rushdie comments' transcription: 'Brutality, Incompetence And Cynical Duplicity'
OutlookIndia.com, Dec 19, 2008
The following remarks by Mr Salman Rushdie have been excerpted and transcribed from the audio recording of the panel discussion -- "Understanding the Mumbai Attacks" -- in which he participated along with authors Mira Kamdar and Suketu Mehta. It was organised jointly by the Asia Society, the South Asian Journalist Association (SAJA) and the Indo-American Arts Council. The discussion was moderated by Rome Hartman, executive producer for BBC World News America. The full audio, as well as the video of the conversation is available on the website of the Asia Society.
***
[Opening Remarks]
Well, first of all, I think, it is very difficult, as you said in the beginning, to articulate exactly how deeply we were affected by what we saw. I think there were many days when it was almost impossible to think, let alone to speak about what was happening, specially I think to those of us who grew up on those streets. And by the way, I think we have all agreed before hand that we are going to call the city by its proper name, which is Bombay. It is Bombay that was attacked and not Mumbai. And, by the way, I cannot say, and this is the only time I will say it, the words "Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus". This railway station is and always will be VT. And so, because these are the names of love, the others are the artificial names imposed by the politicians. But these are the names of the city that we love.
I think it was something like a perfect storm that happened in Bombay, that you put together the incredible brutality of the killers, fuelled as we now know by industrial quantities of cocaine and other drugs that were found in their bodies and in their possessions. Combine that with, what I think is generally seen as a collapse of the Indian response, the Indian security response really was negligible. Three hours to get a fire engine to the Taj, a hotel that stands right next to the water. Twelve hours before the commandos were able to go in because they didn't have a plane to get to Bombay. Etc Etc. So that's the second part of it.
But I think the third part of it that has become increasingly clear is perhaps the dominant element and that is the absolute duplicity and hypocrisy of the Pakistani state. So much so that even today, the President of Pakistan, interviewed by the BBC said there is no evidence that Pakistan was involved in this. Even when the father of the surviving terrorist has identified his son as being a Pakistani, the President of Pakistan says that is not evidence.
So here you have these three forces coming together: Brutality, incompetence and cynical duplicity and what that did was to create this horror.
I wanted to read just a brief passage about -- since we are talking about our beloved place, so let's talk about that. This is a passage I wrote in my novel, The Moor's Last Sigh and it was written actually after another series of atrocities in 1993 explosions in Bombay which themselves were in the aftermath of the destruction of Babri Masjid and so it's in that context. But I think it applies, and it certainly applies to what I think about, about the city...
....
[On Pakistan's Dysfunctional Power Elite]
We need to say something about where they came from. And about the enormous resentment that the Pakistani power elite has felt about the success of India. There is this you know this thriving... I mean, I think of course we can all, you know, elucidate the many things that are wrong with India. That would be an interesting discussion but... another one. We don't have time.
But here you have this country that is, broadly speaking, democratic and, broadly speaking, economically successful and, broadly speaking, free. On the other hand you have this basket case, you know, where the Punjabis hate the Sindhis and everybody hates the North West Frontier and Balochistan is trying to get away.
Laughs
And half the country already got away, you know. So you have this decreasingly functioning society which has no institutions on which a free society could be built, in which the army is increasingly Islamicised, the army leadership is increasingly Islamicised, the ISI -- the Inter Services Intelligence, the Pakistani intelligence agency -- is totally out of control and the civilian politicians are not that much better. President Zardari, I remember, when, as Benazir Bhutto's husband, he was known as Mr 10 Per cent because of the amount of government money he had siphoned off. And then in Pakistan they decided that it was unfair, unjust to call him Mr Ten Per Cent. So they changed his nickname to Mr Twenty Per Cent which was a clearer reflection of his actual skills.
Here you have a country in the face of the world's agreement about what happened, just blindly refusing to accept it: "No, we don't know. What is the evidence? Where is the evidence? Show us the evidence. And we will fearlessly prosecute them..."
...
[Interjecting when a reference to root causes and justice came up]
Speaking of the roots, I think one of the, I think one of the most worrying developments in the aftermath of the attacks, has been the willingness of a number of commentators, particularly on the left, to place the question of roots in the concept of justice. People have said that the the reason for these attack was that there is injustice, that Indian Muslims are economically disadvantaged in India, that they have much lower educational qualifications, they have much higher unemployment rates and then of course there is the great injustice of Kashmir. As the argument be that while those injustices exist that is the thing from which these actions spring. And as our colleague Arundhati Roy wrote the other night, as she ended her article, she said: You have a very simple choice: Justice or civil war -- and you choose. As Suketu said, that is the entire spectrum of possibility from A to B.
[Suketu Mehta on his part agreed with what Rushdie had to say and pointed out that the attack on Parliament in 2001 for example predated the Gujarat pogroms]
[Laughs]
I want to really take issue with this. Because I mean, I think, anyone who knows what I have written in my life knows that I am quite seriously concerned with the condition of Kashmir. And I think that Indian authorities are culpable in the way in which they have treated the ordinary people of Kashmir but so are Jaish-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Toiba.
And you have the people of Kashmir caught between a rock and a hard place. You know, you have a kind of fanatic Islam arriving from Pakistan which is not in keeping with the sufistic Islam that is traditional in Kashmir. So you have this Arabised Islam being forced upon people on the one hand, at the point of a gun, and on the other hand you have Indian security forces treating all Kashmiris as if they are terrorists, and often very brutally. So that's there.
But the point I want to make is that I do not believe that the terrorists such as these -- I do not believe that their project has anything to do with justice.
Ask yourself the question that if the Kashmir problem were resolve tomorrow, if Israel-Palestine reached a lasting peace, do we believe that al-Qaeda would disband? Do we believe that Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad would put their guns down and beat them into plough-shears and say we would now be farmers because our job is done.
I mean the point about is that is laughable, right? And the point about that is that that is not their project. Their project is power. This is a power grab by the most obscurantist, revanchist, old-fashioned, medievalist idea of modern culture that attempts to drag the world back into the middle ages at the point of modern weaponry...
[The moderator: "You mentioned Arundhati Roy. This leads me to a question that came from the audience and I want to make sure that we get to as many of these as we can. This question mentions another point that was made in this article, in which the phrase was "the Taj is not our icon" and a criticism that ... and I know you have written lovingly about the Taj... Address that criticism,that it may be somebody's icon but is not ours" [Arundhati Roy in her article had actually written: "We're told one of these hotels is an icon of the city of Mumbai. That's absolutely true. It's an icon of the easy, obscene injustice that ordinary Indians endure every day."--Ed.]
I thought that particular remark in her piece was disgusting. The idea that the deaths of the rich don't matter because they are rich is disgusting.
The idea that the 12 members of the Taj staff, who heroically gave their lives to save many of the guests, are to be discounted because they were presumably the lackeys of the rich -- this is nauseating. This is amoral. And she should be ashamed of herself.
[On the ineptitude of the response -- why the private sector is dynamic, efficient and responsive while the public sector is not]
Because of the venality and cynicism of so much of the political class in India, which I think now people in India feel an enormous amount of scorn and contempt for. You saw what happened after the attacks, that the father of one of the police officers who was killed, was was visited by the chief minister of a state, he threw him out. He didn't want to have anything to do with you. And that's a pretty general attitude towards politicians in India. I mean, look at the scale of how bad the response was.
We now hear that Indian intelligence had informed the coast guard on that evening that they were expecting an attack -- a Lashkar-e-Toiba attack by sea. That evening. And the coast guard had been alerted to go and find the ship. They failed to find it. The Taj hotel had been repeatedly told about an attack by sea and to beef up their security which they did for about two months and then nothing happens and so they took it down, the security down again. And then the attack happened.
The police officers who were wearing bullet-proof vests were wearing clothing so old that it could not stop the high velocity rifles that were being used and so three senior police officers were killed within moments of the attack beginning because the bullets just went through their protective armour.
The commandos who eventually went in were actually based in Delhi and had no dedicated aircraft. So they couldn't get to Bombay. It took them 12 hours to enter the buildings. And as I say, the fire engines. In a city that sits by the sea, hotels that sit by the water were allowed to burn for three hours before water got to them.
Well, this... People could of course with some legitimacy say that the United States was caught unprepared as well you know, and the radios didn't work in the wall street zone...and you could of course make a similar catalogue of errors about what happened on that day on Sept 2001...But it was awful to watch as this pile of mistakes grow, while meanwhile the city was burning...The fact that there were - four terrorists in the Taj - who could hold on the Indian army for four days...when they were coked out of their heads, you know, snorting coke in one nostril, while executing people...I mean, the idea that they were allowed to go on...for four days is unthinkable...
So yes, I agree with Mira that to change the emphasis to these kind of draconian security laws is wrong because what you need to do is clearly to fix absence of a security machinery, you know...You need armoured vehicles, you need proper body protection, you need aircraft to bring people to the scene of the crime, you need a coastguard which can guard the coast, you know... I mean, India has a very long coastline. And y'know Karachi is only a hundred mile away from Bombay... So the idea that there can be an attack by sea is obvious, you know... And as I say, there were warnings...American intelligence says it told the Indian intelligence, many times. Indian intelligence itself says that it told the Bombay police, many times about it pand yet there is this colossal failure. The problem is there and to put it in the other place is to put it in the wrong place.
And I do mean to say, that when Suketu was talking about the quality of the city is what annoyed people.
There is a wonderful remark by, I think, HL Mencken that "Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone somewhere might be happy"...And, and I do think that happiness is a part of the thing that really, along with Cocaine, gets up their nose. The idea that, as Suketu said, that this is a city of pleasure makes it, in the same way as the people who tried to bomb night clubs in England, y'know, said that it was legitimate because there were these slags in short skirts there, y'know, who deserved to die because of their sexuality, y'know, so there is in this whole area of the Islamic terrorist project a real dislike of open society, of the way people ordinarily live with each other. And they attack it.
....
[On the role of Media]
I think it is the wrong argument. I mean, what would you have the media do? To look away from the burning building? To look away from the slaughter in the railway station? Not to cover the siege of the Chabad House?
[Did the media end up aiding and informing the terrorists?]
Well there were one or two moments of clumsiness like that where it was reported on NDTV -- which I was, I was in London at that time and I was glued to 24 hours NDTV there... because you can get it on satellite ... and someone reported that they received a phone call from a room on such and such floor of the Taj .... which then informed the listening terrorists where people were... I mean that clearly was a blunder... and I think there were no doubt others, but I think on the whole it is the wrong argument. That's not where the problem was. I mean, you had the journalists doing their best, you know, and sometimes the best of journalism is not good enough...but that doesn't mean that that's where the problem was... the problem I think is elsewhere ...
...
There was a problem of the rolling news that an enormous amount of what was announced as news was almost immediately afterwards, we were told, was not correct... So one minute these killers were supposed to be British, y'know or some of them anyway, and five minutes later they weren't. And originally, there were 20 of them, then there 25, then it turned out that there were only 10 of them ... and maybe some got away... you know, They came by ship, No they didn't. The ship had been arrested by the coastguard which was supposed to have been the mothership. Oh, maybe there wasn't such a ship. They had a room in the Taj hotel. No they didn't. They were members of the hotel staff. No, they weren't. You know, so it was very difficult, I think, which is why I didn't know what to write at that time because the facts were changing so much.
[On the real issue: Pakistan]
These are not the causes of what happened. I mean, this is no doubt significant and We should debate how the media covers events, whichever country we are in. we can no doubt say, they got this wrong, they got that right, you know, but this is not the issue. The issue is -- and it is important as there is a new President due to take office in this country -- what should be the world's policy towards Pakistan? It is a very important matter right now. Because you have the British Prime Minister two days ago, Gordon Brown said that British intelligence, following up leads of various terrorists' activities, they informed him that 75 per cent of what they were studying led back to Pakistan. All the roads of world's terrorism lead to Pakistan.
....
But it needs to be very very tough, that argument. It has to be made with enormous force. Who makes it? Let's start with the President of the United States. For the last years, since the 911 attacks, the American government policy towards Pakistan was to give them a lot of aid and to treat them as an ally in the war on terror.
So billions of dollar have been handed over first, mostly, to the Musharraf government and now its successor.
Without any requirement that that money should come with, let's say an agreement that Pakistan is not going to house the terrorists that we are supposed to be fighting against. Instead, Musharraf very skilfully played both ends against the middle. He was a westerner to the West and a Mullah to the mullahs. You know this is the man, remember, when Benazir was in power, it was Musharraf who set up the Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad. When these groups were being created to fight in Kashmir, he was the general n the army who was given the task of monitoring and supporting those groups.
So we have treated Pakistan with this very velvet glove for a very long time and we have got in return is zero.
The headquarters of al-Qaeda, The headquarters of Taliban, the headquarters of Lashkar-e-Toba, the headquarters of Jaish-e-Mohammad, the world's centre of terrorism: Pakistan.To be fair, even the last days of the Bush administration I think Condoleeza Rice's visit to Pakistan was very significant. I mean, it is quite clear that she told them that if they did not ban these groups, Pakistan will be declared a terrorist state. And they more or less said that when they gave their reasons for having made these restrictions.
But the problem with what's happened so far, it looks, certainly I think from an Indian perspective, things look like a sham. We have seen before, these leaders placed under house arrest, who continue to move freely. We have seen before the closing of an account, when another one springs up round the corner.
When Zardari says of course we will prosecute them if we can locate them... you know, the SFX: horse laughing.
It is only two months, that the Zardari government authorised the purchase of an armoured vehicle to drive the leader of the LeT around. So he is driving around Pakistan in a state armoured car.
...
[On the ordinary Pakistanis and the power elite]
When you talk about what it is, Pakistan. The Islamic parties received less than 2 percent of the vote. When people in Pakistan are allowed - which they are not very often allowed - to express their opinion in an election that is not fixed, you know, when the ballots are not stuffed.. so this time the vote against Musharraf was so big that he couldn't fix the election actually. So you actually got a reflection of what people think. And they think regionally, you know --the Punjab votes for Nawaz Sharief, the Sindh votes for the PPP -- but they don't think like religious extremists. They do not vote for them. So on the one hand you have the mass of the people not being interested in the rhetoric of the jehad. But on the other hand you have the power elite being completely enthralled with it. That's the problem.
[Whether there is a continuing shadow of Partition over India-Pakistan relations?]
Only, in that if there hadn't been a Partition, there would be no Pakistan...
But, you know, I don't know. Yes, because people have long memories. But, I think, realistically no, I think what, the kind of things we have been talking about the political dynamic of what Islam is, what Islam has been turned into by certain groups in Pakistan...that has very little to do with 1947. So I am not sure it is a post-colonial problem, this. I think we have gone post post, I mean this is a next phase.
And I do think that one of the things that could be beneficial if people in India become more, let's say, in Bombay, become more politically aware about their pwn city and protection. I mean they are right to say they do not, cannot trust the federal, the central government to protect their city. It has not done so. So Bombay must be given the right to protect itself. It must have its own authorities. I mean the fact that you know there wasn't even a commando force in Bombay. It was in a suburb of Delhi. And what it mostly did was protect political big wigs. That's what it did. It drove around in motorcades, making politicians feel important. And suddenly it had a real job to do. But I think it is very important that this city, and as you say, Bombay is this entrepreneurial hub. It is efficient. It understands efficiency. It better be given the power, the power, localised political power, to reorganise its own defence.
OutlookIndia.com, Dec 19, 2008
The following remarks by Mr Salman Rushdie have been excerpted and transcribed from the audio recording of the panel discussion -- "Understanding the Mumbai Attacks" -- in which he participated along with authors Mira Kamdar and Suketu Mehta. It was organised jointly by the Asia Society, the South Asian Journalist Association (SAJA) and the Indo-American Arts Council. The discussion was moderated by Rome Hartman, executive producer for BBC World News America. The full audio, as well as the video of the conversation is available on the website of the Asia Society.
***
[Opening Remarks]
Well, first of all, I think, it is very difficult, as you said in the beginning, to articulate exactly how deeply we were affected by what we saw. I think there were many days when it was almost impossible to think, let alone to speak about what was happening, specially I think to those of us who grew up on those streets. And by the way, I think we have all agreed before hand that we are going to call the city by its proper name, which is Bombay. It is Bombay that was attacked and not Mumbai. And, by the way, I cannot say, and this is the only time I will say it, the words "Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus". This railway station is and always will be VT. And so, because these are the names of love, the others are the artificial names imposed by the politicians. But these are the names of the city that we love.
I think it was something like a perfect storm that happened in Bombay, that you put together the incredible brutality of the killers, fuelled as we now know by industrial quantities of cocaine and other drugs that were found in their bodies and in their possessions. Combine that with, what I think is generally seen as a collapse of the Indian response, the Indian security response really was negligible. Three hours to get a fire engine to the Taj, a hotel that stands right next to the water. Twelve hours before the commandos were able to go in because they didn't have a plane to get to Bombay. Etc Etc. So that's the second part of it.
But I think the third part of it that has become increasingly clear is perhaps the dominant element and that is the absolute duplicity and hypocrisy of the Pakistani state. So much so that even today, the President of Pakistan, interviewed by the BBC said there is no evidence that Pakistan was involved in this. Even when the father of the surviving terrorist has identified his son as being a Pakistani, the President of Pakistan says that is not evidence.
So here you have these three forces coming together: Brutality, incompetence and cynical duplicity and what that did was to create this horror.
I wanted to read just a brief passage about -- since we are talking about our beloved place, so let's talk about that. This is a passage I wrote in my novel, The Moor's Last Sigh and it was written actually after another series of atrocities in 1993 explosions in Bombay which themselves were in the aftermath of the destruction of Babri Masjid and so it's in that context. But I think it applies, and it certainly applies to what I think about, about the city...
"Bombay was central, had been so from the moment of its creation: the bastard child of a Portuguese-English wedding, and yet the most Indian of Indian cities. In Bombay all Indias met and merged. In Bombay, too, all-India met what-was-not-India, what came across the black water to flow into our veins.
Everything north of Bombay was North India, everything south of it was the South. To the east lay India's East, and to the west, the world's West. Bombay was central; all rivers flowed into its human sea.It was an ocean of stories; we were all its narrators, and everybody talked at once. What magic was stirred into that insaan-soup, what harmony emerged from that cacophony! "In Punjab, Assam, Kashmir, Meerut--in Delhi, in Calcutta--from time to time they slit their neighbours' throats and took warm showers, or red bubble-baths, in all that spuming blood. They killed you for being circumcised and they killed you because your foreskins had been left on. Long hair got you murdered and haircuts too; light skin flayed dark skin and if you spoke the wrong language you could lose your twisted tongue. In Bombay, such things never happened. --Never, you say? -- OK: Never is too absolute a word. Bombay was not inoculated against the rest of the country, and what happened elsewhere, the language business for example, also spread into its streets. But on the way to Bombay the rivers of blood were usually diluted, other rivers poured into them, so that by the time they reached the city's streets the disfigurations were relatively slight. -- Am I sentimentalising? Now that I have left it all behind, have I, among my many losses, also lost clear sight? -- It may be said I have; but still I stand by my words. O Beautifiers of the City, did you not see that what was beautiful in Bombay was that it belonged to nobody, and to all? Did you not see the everyday live-and-let-live miracles thronging its overcrowded streets?
Bombay was central. In Bombay, as the old founding myth of the nation faded, the new god-and-mammon India was being born. The wealth of the country flowed through its exchanges, its ports. Those who hated India, those who sought to ruin it, would need to ruin Bombay..."
....
[On Pakistan's Dysfunctional Power Elite]
We need to say something about where they came from. And about the enormous resentment that the Pakistani power elite has felt about the success of India. There is this you know this thriving... I mean, I think of course we can all, you know, elucidate the many things that are wrong with India. That would be an interesting discussion but... another one. We don't have time.
But here you have this country that is, broadly speaking, democratic and, broadly speaking, economically successful and, broadly speaking, free. On the other hand you have this basket case, you know, where the Punjabis hate the Sindhis and everybody hates the North West Frontier and Balochistan is trying to get away.
Laughs
And half the country already got away, you know. So you have this decreasingly functioning society which has no institutions on which a free society could be built, in which the army is increasingly Islamicised, the army leadership is increasingly Islamicised, the ISI -- the Inter Services Intelligence, the Pakistani intelligence agency -- is totally out of control and the civilian politicians are not that much better. President Zardari, I remember, when, as Benazir Bhutto's husband, he was known as Mr 10 Per cent because of the amount of government money he had siphoned off. And then in Pakistan they decided that it was unfair, unjust to call him Mr Ten Per Cent. So they changed his nickname to Mr Twenty Per Cent which was a clearer reflection of his actual skills.
Here you have a country in the face of the world's agreement about what happened, just blindly refusing to accept it: "No, we don't know. What is the evidence? Where is the evidence? Show us the evidence. And we will fearlessly prosecute them..."
...
[Interjecting when a reference to root causes and justice came up]
Speaking of the roots, I think one of the, I think one of the most worrying developments in the aftermath of the attacks, has been the willingness of a number of commentators, particularly on the left, to place the question of roots in the concept of justice. People have said that the the reason for these attack was that there is injustice, that Indian Muslims are economically disadvantaged in India, that they have much lower educational qualifications, they have much higher unemployment rates and then of course there is the great injustice of Kashmir. As the argument be that while those injustices exist that is the thing from which these actions spring. And as our colleague Arundhati Roy wrote the other night, as she ended her article, she said: You have a very simple choice: Justice or civil war -- and you choose. As Suketu said, that is the entire spectrum of possibility from A to B.
[Suketu Mehta on his part agreed with what Rushdie had to say and pointed out that the attack on Parliament in 2001 for example predated the Gujarat pogroms]
[Laughs]
I want to really take issue with this. Because I mean, I think, anyone who knows what I have written in my life knows that I am quite seriously concerned with the condition of Kashmir. And I think that Indian authorities are culpable in the way in which they have treated the ordinary people of Kashmir but so are Jaish-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Toiba.
And you have the people of Kashmir caught between a rock and a hard place. You know, you have a kind of fanatic Islam arriving from Pakistan which is not in keeping with the sufistic Islam that is traditional in Kashmir. So you have this Arabised Islam being forced upon people on the one hand, at the point of a gun, and on the other hand you have Indian security forces treating all Kashmiris as if they are terrorists, and often very brutally. So that's there.
But the point I want to make is that I do not believe that the terrorists such as these -- I do not believe that their project has anything to do with justice.
Ask yourself the question that if the Kashmir problem were resolve tomorrow, if Israel-Palestine reached a lasting peace, do we believe that al-Qaeda would disband? Do we believe that Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad would put their guns down and beat them into plough-shears and say we would now be farmers because our job is done.
I mean the point about is that is laughable, right? And the point about that is that that is not their project. Their project is power. This is a power grab by the most obscurantist, revanchist, old-fashioned, medievalist idea of modern culture that attempts to drag the world back into the middle ages at the point of modern weaponry...
[The moderator: "You mentioned Arundhati Roy. This leads me to a question that came from the audience and I want to make sure that we get to as many of these as we can. This question mentions another point that was made in this article, in which the phrase was "the Taj is not our icon" and a criticism that ... and I know you have written lovingly about the Taj... Address that criticism,that it may be somebody's icon but is not ours" [Arundhati Roy in her article had actually written: "We're told one of these hotels is an icon of the city of Mumbai. That's absolutely true. It's an icon of the easy, obscene injustice that ordinary Indians endure every day."--Ed.]
I thought that particular remark in her piece was disgusting. The idea that the deaths of the rich don't matter because they are rich is disgusting.
The idea that the 12 members of the Taj staff, who heroically gave their lives to save many of the guests, are to be discounted because they were presumably the lackeys of the rich -- this is nauseating. This is amoral. And she should be ashamed of herself.
[On the ineptitude of the response -- why the private sector is dynamic, efficient and responsive while the public sector is not]
Because of the venality and cynicism of so much of the political class in India, which I think now people in India feel an enormous amount of scorn and contempt for. You saw what happened after the attacks, that the father of one of the police officers who was killed, was was visited by the chief minister of a state, he threw him out. He didn't want to have anything to do with you. And that's a pretty general attitude towards politicians in India. I mean, look at the scale of how bad the response was.
We now hear that Indian intelligence had informed the coast guard on that evening that they were expecting an attack -- a Lashkar-e-Toiba attack by sea. That evening. And the coast guard had been alerted to go and find the ship. They failed to find it. The Taj hotel had been repeatedly told about an attack by sea and to beef up their security which they did for about two months and then nothing happens and so they took it down, the security down again. And then the attack happened.
The police officers who were wearing bullet-proof vests were wearing clothing so old that it could not stop the high velocity rifles that were being used and so three senior police officers were killed within moments of the attack beginning because the bullets just went through their protective armour.
The commandos who eventually went in were actually based in Delhi and had no dedicated aircraft. So they couldn't get to Bombay. It took them 12 hours to enter the buildings. And as I say, the fire engines. In a city that sits by the sea, hotels that sit by the water were allowed to burn for three hours before water got to them.
Well, this... People could of course with some legitimacy say that the United States was caught unprepared as well you know, and the radios didn't work in the wall street zone...and you could of course make a similar catalogue of errors about what happened on that day on Sept 2001...But it was awful to watch as this pile of mistakes grow, while meanwhile the city was burning...The fact that there were - four terrorists in the Taj - who could hold on the Indian army for four days...when they were coked out of their heads, you know, snorting coke in one nostril, while executing people...I mean, the idea that they were allowed to go on...for four days is unthinkable...
So yes, I agree with Mira that to change the emphasis to these kind of draconian security laws is wrong because what you need to do is clearly to fix absence of a security machinery, you know...You need armoured vehicles, you need proper body protection, you need aircraft to bring people to the scene of the crime, you need a coastguard which can guard the coast, you know... I mean, India has a very long coastline. And y'know Karachi is only a hundred mile away from Bombay... So the idea that there can be an attack by sea is obvious, you know... And as I say, there were warnings...American intelligence says it told the Indian intelligence, many times. Indian intelligence itself says that it told the Bombay police, many times about it pand yet there is this colossal failure. The problem is there and to put it in the other place is to put it in the wrong place.
And I do mean to say, that when Suketu was talking about the quality of the city is what annoyed people.
There is a wonderful remark by, I think, HL Mencken that "Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone somewhere might be happy"...And, and I do think that happiness is a part of the thing that really, along with Cocaine, gets up their nose. The idea that, as Suketu said, that this is a city of pleasure makes it, in the same way as the people who tried to bomb night clubs in England, y'know, said that it was legitimate because there were these slags in short skirts there, y'know, who deserved to die because of their sexuality, y'know, so there is in this whole area of the Islamic terrorist project a real dislike of open society, of the way people ordinarily live with each other. And they attack it.
....
[On the role of Media]
I think it is the wrong argument. I mean, what would you have the media do? To look away from the burning building? To look away from the slaughter in the railway station? Not to cover the siege of the Chabad House?
[Did the media end up aiding and informing the terrorists?]
Well there were one or two moments of clumsiness like that where it was reported on NDTV -- which I was, I was in London at that time and I was glued to 24 hours NDTV there... because you can get it on satellite ... and someone reported that they received a phone call from a room on such and such floor of the Taj .... which then informed the listening terrorists where people were... I mean that clearly was a blunder... and I think there were no doubt others, but I think on the whole it is the wrong argument. That's not where the problem was. I mean, you had the journalists doing their best, you know, and sometimes the best of journalism is not good enough...but that doesn't mean that that's where the problem was... the problem I think is elsewhere ...
...
There was a problem of the rolling news that an enormous amount of what was announced as news was almost immediately afterwards, we were told, was not correct... So one minute these killers were supposed to be British, y'know or some of them anyway, and five minutes later they weren't. And originally, there were 20 of them, then there 25, then it turned out that there were only 10 of them ... and maybe some got away... you know, They came by ship, No they didn't. The ship had been arrested by the coastguard which was supposed to have been the mothership. Oh, maybe there wasn't such a ship. They had a room in the Taj hotel. No they didn't. They were members of the hotel staff. No, they weren't. You know, so it was very difficult, I think, which is why I didn't know what to write at that time because the facts were changing so much.
[On the real issue: Pakistan]
These are not the causes of what happened. I mean, this is no doubt significant and We should debate how the media covers events, whichever country we are in. we can no doubt say, they got this wrong, they got that right, you know, but this is not the issue. The issue is -- and it is important as there is a new President due to take office in this country -- what should be the world's policy towards Pakistan? It is a very important matter right now. Because you have the British Prime Minister two days ago, Gordon Brown said that British intelligence, following up leads of various terrorists' activities, they informed him that 75 per cent of what they were studying led back to Pakistan. All the roads of world's terrorism lead to Pakistan.
....
But it needs to be very very tough, that argument. It has to be made with enormous force. Who makes it? Let's start with the President of the United States. For the last years, since the 911 attacks, the American government policy towards Pakistan was to give them a lot of aid and to treat them as an ally in the war on terror.
So billions of dollar have been handed over first, mostly, to the Musharraf government and now its successor.
Without any requirement that that money should come with, let's say an agreement that Pakistan is not going to house the terrorists that we are supposed to be fighting against. Instead, Musharraf very skilfully played both ends against the middle. He was a westerner to the West and a Mullah to the mullahs. You know this is the man, remember, when Benazir was in power, it was Musharraf who set up the Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad. When these groups were being created to fight in Kashmir, he was the general n the army who was given the task of monitoring and supporting those groups.
So we have treated Pakistan with this very velvet glove for a very long time and we have got in return is zero.
The headquarters of al-Qaeda, The headquarters of Taliban, the headquarters of Lashkar-e-Toba, the headquarters of Jaish-e-Mohammad, the world's centre of terrorism: Pakistan.To be fair, even the last days of the Bush administration I think Condoleeza Rice's visit to Pakistan was very significant. I mean, it is quite clear that she told them that if they did not ban these groups, Pakistan will be declared a terrorist state. And they more or less said that when they gave their reasons for having made these restrictions.
But the problem with what's happened so far, it looks, certainly I think from an Indian perspective, things look like a sham. We have seen before, these leaders placed under house arrest, who continue to move freely. We have seen before the closing of an account, when another one springs up round the corner.
When Zardari says of course we will prosecute them if we can locate them... you know, the SFX: horse laughing.
It is only two months, that the Zardari government authorised the purchase of an armoured vehicle to drive the leader of the LeT around. So he is driving around Pakistan in a state armoured car.
...
[On the ordinary Pakistanis and the power elite]
When you talk about what it is, Pakistan. The Islamic parties received less than 2 percent of the vote. When people in Pakistan are allowed - which they are not very often allowed - to express their opinion in an election that is not fixed, you know, when the ballots are not stuffed.. so this time the vote against Musharraf was so big that he couldn't fix the election actually. So you actually got a reflection of what people think. And they think regionally, you know --the Punjab votes for Nawaz Sharief, the Sindh votes for the PPP -- but they don't think like religious extremists. They do not vote for them. So on the one hand you have the mass of the people not being interested in the rhetoric of the jehad. But on the other hand you have the power elite being completely enthralled with it. That's the problem.
[Whether there is a continuing shadow of Partition over India-Pakistan relations?]
Only, in that if there hadn't been a Partition, there would be no Pakistan...
But, you know, I don't know. Yes, because people have long memories. But, I think, realistically no, I think what, the kind of things we have been talking about the political dynamic of what Islam is, what Islam has been turned into by certain groups in Pakistan...that has very little to do with 1947. So I am not sure it is a post-colonial problem, this. I think we have gone post post, I mean this is a next phase.
And I do think that one of the things that could be beneficial if people in India become more, let's say, in Bombay, become more politically aware about their pwn city and protection. I mean they are right to say they do not, cannot trust the federal, the central government to protect their city. It has not done so. So Bombay must be given the right to protect itself. It must have its own authorities. I mean the fact that you know there wasn't even a commando force in Bombay. It was in a suburb of Delhi. And what it mostly did was protect political big wigs. That's what it did. It drove around in motorcades, making politicians feel important. And suddenly it had a real job to do. But I think it is very important that this city, and as you say, Bombay is this entrepreneurial hub. It is efficient. It understands efficiency. It better be given the power, the power, localised political power, to reorganise its own defence.
DC voting rights in the Federal Popular Chamber
WsPo Editorial: Call the Vote
The new president and the new Congress should set a date for considering D.C. voting rights.
Saturday, December 27, 2008; A14
IN PUSHING congressional leaders for early action on voting rights for the District, D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) says she's mindful of the "unprecedented issues" facing the new Congress. Nonetheless, she wonders: Wouldn't it be appropriate to enact the measure close to the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth on Feb. 12? Ms. Norton is right about the symbolism. But an even better argument is that D.C. residents -- shut out of their government for 200 years -- should have a voice in deciding these important issues.
Democratic leaders in the House and Senate support D.C. voting rights but have not committed to scheduling a date for a vote that would give the District a true representative in the House. To be sure, there will be a crush of business -- with economic stimulus topping the list -- facing the new Congress and administration. But the voting rights bill, which would also give an extra House seat to predominantly Republican Utah to maintain the existing political balance, is teed up for approval. It enjoys broad bipartisan support, having easily passed the House last session but falling three votes short of the 60-vote hurdle for Senate passage. The bigger Democratic majorities in both houses of the incoming Congress dramatically improve the bill's prospects -- and the incoming Democratic president has said he would sign it.
The measure probably will be subject to a court challenge by those who dispute its constitutionality. Yet every day the bill is delayed is another day of injustice for disenfranchised District residents who continue to pay their taxes and march off to war. President-elect Barack Obama could send a powerful message by heeding the D.C. Council's suggestion that he use "Taxation Without Representation" license plates on the presidential limousine. President Bill Clinton did so before leaving office; President Bush reversed the practice. Even more important, however, Mr. Obama should urge the Democratic congressional leadership to give the residents of his new city the vote that they have too long been denied.
The new president and the new Congress should set a date for considering D.C. voting rights.
Saturday, December 27, 2008; A14
IN PUSHING congressional leaders for early action on voting rights for the District, D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) says she's mindful of the "unprecedented issues" facing the new Congress. Nonetheless, she wonders: Wouldn't it be appropriate to enact the measure close to the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth on Feb. 12? Ms. Norton is right about the symbolism. But an even better argument is that D.C. residents -- shut out of their government for 200 years -- should have a voice in deciding these important issues.
Democratic leaders in the House and Senate support D.C. voting rights but have not committed to scheduling a date for a vote that would give the District a true representative in the House. To be sure, there will be a crush of business -- with economic stimulus topping the list -- facing the new Congress and administration. But the voting rights bill, which would also give an extra House seat to predominantly Republican Utah to maintain the existing political balance, is teed up for approval. It enjoys broad bipartisan support, having easily passed the House last session but falling three votes short of the 60-vote hurdle for Senate passage. The bigger Democratic majorities in both houses of the incoming Congress dramatically improve the bill's prospects -- and the incoming Democratic president has said he would sign it.
The measure probably will be subject to a court challenge by those who dispute its constitutionality. Yet every day the bill is delayed is another day of injustice for disenfranchised District residents who continue to pay their taxes and march off to war. President-elect Barack Obama could send a powerful message by heeding the D.C. Council's suggestion that he use "Taxation Without Representation" license plates on the presidential limousine. President Bill Clinton did so before leaving office; President Bush reversed the practice. Even more important, however, Mr. Obama should urge the Democratic congressional leadership to give the residents of his new city the vote that they have too long been denied.
Friday, December 26, 2008
Comments to Spanish government-owned TV blog "Porque tú lo vales"
Comments to Spanish government-owned TV network blog "Desde Camelot", post "Porque tú lo vales", Dec 26, 2008:
hola, al respecto del comentario "Y los nombramientos no necesitan el visto bueno del Senado", implicando que es un favor inmerecido a la Secretaria y, además, se burlan los deseos del legislador, deseamos hacer algunos comentarios:
1 en realidad, tanto la cámara baja como el senado federales decidieron en una ley cuántos nombramientos para el centro Kennedy hace cada una de las cámaras o el Ejecutivo - esa ley está codificada en el capítulo 20 U.S.C. 76h, y apartado (b) dice, de los más de treinta miembros nombrados por el jefe del Ejecutivo, que "[p]ersons appointed to the Advisory Committee on the Arts, including officers or employees of the United States, shall be persons who are recognized for their knowledge of, or experience or interest in, one or more of the arts in the fields covered by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts" [1];
2 hay un ministro federal ya en ese consejo, Norman Mineta - quizá influye que no se le nombre tanto que es Demócrata...
3 dado que la ministro Condoleezza Rice ha presentado los últimos cuatro años la entrega de menciones honoríficas del Kennedy Center (ejemplo, la entrega de menciones a Barbra Streisand y Morgan Freeman, entre otros [2]) y dado su nivel como músico (suficiente para acompañar al piano al violonchelista Yo-yo Ma, abril de 2002 [3]), parece que se cumplen varios de los requisitos exigidos en "one or more of the arts in the fields covered by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts";
4 la Sra. Rice es tan buen músico o mejor que los siguientes miembros del Congreso también presentes en el Kennedy Center: Senator Harry Reid (D), Senator James Inhofe (R), Senator Dianne Feinstein (D), Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D) [hay más demócratas que republicanos porque son mayoría en ambas cámaras].
No ponemos en duda que, en el futuro, habrá injustas críticas contra el futuro presidente federal cuando haga lo mismo con su capacidad de nombramiento. Eso no hace justas las críticas al actual presidente federal.
Quedamos a su disposición para cualquier ampliación sobre cualquier asunto relacionado con los EE UU o los estados miembros.
Best Regards/Cordialement/Atentamente,
Jorge Mata
Press Office
Bipartisan Alliance,
a Society for the Study and Defense of the US Constitution
References
[1] There shall be an Advisory Committee on the Arts composed of such members as the President of the United States may designate, to serve at the pleasure of the President. Persons appointed to the Advisory Committee on the Arts, including officers or employees of the United States, shall be persons who are recognized for their knowledge of, or experience or interest in, one or more of the arts in the fields covered by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
[2] Secretary Condoleezza Rice: Remarks at the Kennedy Center Honors Dinner. Benjamin Franklin Room, Washington, DC. December 6, 2008. http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2008/12/112938.htm
[3] Cellist Yo-Yo Ma and then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice take their bow after performing a duet to a Brahms sonata at the presentation of awards by the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., USA, April 22, 2002. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yoyoma_rice.jpg
UPDATE, Dec 27, 2008: they posted the text there, http://blogs.rtve.es/desdecamelot/2008/12/26/porque-tu-vales#c61506, and replied to it, http://blogs.rtve.es/desdecamelot/2008/12/26/porque-tu-vales#c61522:
"
Gabriel Herrero dijo
Hola Jorge. Es un placer y un honor tenerte en el blog. Los puntos que señalas son correctos y estoy de acuerdo con todos ellos. Todos. Sin embargo discrepo en la raiz, en tu interpretación de la frase "Y los nombramientos no necesitan el visto bueno del Senado". No implico que sea un favor inmerecido. Merecido, en términos genéricos, lo puede ser. Sin duda Condoleeza posee un magnífico cerebro y es un músico excelente. No lo pongo en duda. Tampoco doy a entender que el nombramiento de Bush sea ilegal. Hasta ahí podíamos llegar. Si lo fuera, el tono del post sería mucho más ácido.
Otra cuestión es el uso que ha hecho Bush de los nombramientos a dedo durante su administración. Desde la financiación de los grupos antiabortistas a los últimos regalos de Nochebuena. Es su privilegio como jefe del Ejecutivo. Pero no me gusta. En el contexto de su trayectoria, creo que es criticable. Con todo, no es lo que más me repatea de él. Por eso sólo merece un párrafo. En todo caso, lo dicho, es un placer tenerte como lector y aprecio tus comentarios.
27 Diciembre 2008, 06:07
"
hola, al respecto del comentario "Y los nombramientos no necesitan el visto bueno del Senado", implicando que es un favor inmerecido a la Secretaria y, además, se burlan los deseos del legislador, deseamos hacer algunos comentarios:
1 en realidad, tanto la cámara baja como el senado federales decidieron en una ley cuántos nombramientos para el centro Kennedy hace cada una de las cámaras o el Ejecutivo - esa ley está codificada en el capítulo 20 U.S.C. 76h, y apartado (b) dice, de los más de treinta miembros nombrados por el jefe del Ejecutivo, que "[p]ersons appointed to the Advisory Committee on the Arts, including officers or employees of the United States, shall be persons who are recognized for their knowledge of, or experience or interest in, one or more of the arts in the fields covered by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts" [1];
2 hay un ministro federal ya en ese consejo, Norman Mineta - quizá influye que no se le nombre tanto que es Demócrata...
3 dado que la ministro Condoleezza Rice ha presentado los últimos cuatro años la entrega de menciones honoríficas del Kennedy Center (ejemplo, la entrega de menciones a Barbra Streisand y Morgan Freeman, entre otros [2]) y dado su nivel como músico (suficiente para acompañar al piano al violonchelista Yo-yo Ma, abril de 2002 [3]), parece que se cumplen varios de los requisitos exigidos en "one or more of the arts in the fields covered by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts";
4 la Sra. Rice es tan buen músico o mejor que los siguientes miembros del Congreso también presentes en el Kennedy Center: Senator Harry Reid (D), Senator James Inhofe (R), Senator Dianne Feinstein (D), Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D) [hay más demócratas que republicanos porque son mayoría en ambas cámaras].
No ponemos en duda que, en el futuro, habrá injustas críticas contra el futuro presidente federal cuando haga lo mismo con su capacidad de nombramiento. Eso no hace justas las críticas al actual presidente federal.
Quedamos a su disposición para cualquier ampliación sobre cualquier asunto relacionado con los EE UU o los estados miembros.
Best Regards/Cordialement/Atentamente,
Jorge Mata
Press Office
Bipartisan Alliance,
a Society for the Study and Defense of the US Constitution
References
[1] There shall be an Advisory Committee on the Arts composed of such members as the President of the United States may designate, to serve at the pleasure of the President. Persons appointed to the Advisory Committee on the Arts, including officers or employees of the United States, shall be persons who are recognized for their knowledge of, or experience or interest in, one or more of the arts in the fields covered by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
[2] Secretary Condoleezza Rice: Remarks at the Kennedy Center Honors Dinner. Benjamin Franklin Room, Washington, DC. December 6, 2008. http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2008/12/112938.htm
[3] Cellist Yo-Yo Ma and then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice take their bow after performing a duet to a Brahms sonata at the presentation of awards by the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., USA, April 22, 2002. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yoyoma_rice.jpg
UPDATE, Dec 27, 2008: they posted the text there, http://blogs.rtve.es/desdecamelot/2008/12/26/porque-tu-vales#c61506, and replied to it, http://blogs.rtve.es/desdecamelot/2008/12/26/porque-tu-vales#c61522:
"
Gabriel Herrero dijo
Hola Jorge. Es un placer y un honor tenerte en el blog. Los puntos que señalas son correctos y estoy de acuerdo con todos ellos. Todos. Sin embargo discrepo en la raiz, en tu interpretación de la frase "Y los nombramientos no necesitan el visto bueno del Senado". No implico que sea un favor inmerecido. Merecido, en términos genéricos, lo puede ser. Sin duda Condoleeza posee un magnífico cerebro y es un músico excelente. No lo pongo en duda. Tampoco doy a entender que el nombramiento de Bush sea ilegal. Hasta ahí podíamos llegar. Si lo fuera, el tono del post sería mucho más ácido.
Otra cuestión es el uso que ha hecho Bush de los nombramientos a dedo durante su administración. Desde la financiación de los grupos antiabortistas a los últimos regalos de Nochebuena. Es su privilegio como jefe del Ejecutivo. Pero no me gusta. En el contexto de su trayectoria, creo que es criticable. Con todo, no es lo que más me repatea de él. Por eso sólo merece un párrafo. En todo caso, lo dicho, es un placer tenerte como lector y aprecio tus comentarios.
27 Diciembre 2008, 06:07
"
Community health centers in medically underserved areas - review
In The NYT: Expansion of Clinics Shapes Bush Legacy. By Kevin Sack
December 26, 2008
NASHVILLE — Although the number of uninsured and the cost of coverage have ballooned under his watch, President Bush leaves office with a health care legacy in bricks and mortar: he has doubled federal financing for community health centers, enabling the creation or expansion of 1,297 clinics in medically underserved areas.
For those in poor urban neighborhoods and isolated rural areas, including Indian reservations, the clinics are often the only dependable providers of basic services like prenatal care, childhood immunizations, asthma treatments, cancer screenings and tests for sexually transmitted diseases.
As a crucial component of the health safety net, they are lauded as a cost-effective alternative to hospital emergency rooms, where the uninsured and underinsured often seek care.
Despite the clinics’ unprecedented growth, wide swaths of the country remain without access to affordable primary care. The recession has only magnified the need as hundreds of thousands of Americans have lost their employer-sponsored health insurance along with their jobs.
In response, Democrats on Capitol Hill are proposing even more significant increases, making the centers a likely feature of any health care deal struck by Congress and the Obama administration.
In Nashville, United Neighborhood Health Services, a 32-year-old community health center, has seen its federal financing rise to $4.2 million, from $1.8 million in 2001. That has allowed the organization to add eight clinics to its base of six, and to increase its pool of patients to nearly 25,000 from 10,000.
Still, says Mary Bufwack, the center’s chief executive, the clinics satisfy only a third of the demand in Nashville’s pockets of urban poverty and immigrant need.
One of the group’s recent grants helped open the Southside Family Clinic, which moved last year from a pair of public housing apartments to a gleaming new building on a once derelict corner.
As she completed a breathing treatment one recent afternoon, Willie Mai Ridley, a 68-year-old beautician, said she would have sought care for her bronchitis in a hospital emergency room were it not for the new clinic. Instead, she took a short drive, waited 15 minutes without an appointment and left without paying a dime; the clinic would bill her later for her Medicare co-payment of $18.88.
Ms. Ridley said she appreciated both the dignity and the affordability of her care. “This place is really very, very important to me,” she said, “because you can go and feel like you’re being treated like a person and get the same medical care you would get somewhere else and have to pay $200 to $300.”
As governor of Texas, Mr. Bush came to admire the missionary zeal and cost-efficiency of the not-for-profit community health centers, which qualify for federal operating grants by being located in designated underserved areas and treating patients regardless of their ability to pay. He pledged support for the program while campaigning for president in 2000 on a platform of “compassionate conservatism.”
In Mr. Bush’s first year in office, he proposed to open or expand 1,200 clinics over five years (mission accomplished) and to double the number of patients served (the increase has ended up closer to 60 percent). With the health centers now serving more than 16 million patients at 7,354 sites, the expansion has been the largest since the program’s origins in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on poverty, federal officials said.
“They’re an integral part of a health care system because they provide care for the low-income, for the newly arrived, and they take the pressure off of our hospital emergency rooms,” Mr. Bush said last year while touring a clinic in Omaha.
With federal encouragement, the centers have made a major push this decade to expand dental and mental health services, open on-site pharmacies, extend hours to nights and weekends and accommodate recent immigrants — legal and otherwise — by employing bilingual staff. More than a third of patients are now Hispanic, according to the National Association of Community Health Centers.
The centers now serve one of every three people who live in poverty and one of every eight without insurance. But a study released in August by the Government Accountability Office found that 43 percent of the country’s medically underserved areas lack a health center site. The National Association of Community Health Centers and the American Academy of Family Physicians estimated last year that 56 million people were “medically disenfranchised” because they lived in areas with inadequate primary care.
President-elect Barack Obama has said little about how the centers may fit into his plans to remake American health care. But he was a sponsor of a Senate bill in August that would quadruple federal spending on the program — to $8 billion from $2.1 billion — and increase incentives for medical students to choose primary care. His wife, Michelle, worked closely with health centers in Chicago as vice president for community and external relations at the University of Chicago Medical Center.
And Mr. Obama’s choice to become secretary of health and human services, former Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, argues in his recent book on health care that financing should be increased, describing the health centers as “a godsend.”
The federal program, which was first championed in Congress by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, has earned considerable bipartisan support. Leading advocates, like Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, and Representative James E. Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina, the House majority whip, argue that any success Mr. Obama has in reducing the number of uninsured will be meaningless if the newly insured cannot find medical homes. In Massachusetts, health centers have seen increased demand since the state began mandating health coverage two years ago.
At $8 billion, the Senate measure may be considered a relative bargain compared with the more than $100 billion needed for Mr. Obama’s proposal to subsidize coverage for the uninsured. If his plan runs into fiscal obstacles, a vast expansion of community health centers may again serve as a stopgap while universal coverage waits for flusher times.
Recent job losses, meanwhile, are stoking demand for the clinics’ services, often from first-time users. The United Neighborhood Health Services clinics in Nashville have seen a 35 percent increase in patients this year, with much of the growth from the newly jobless.
“I’m seeing a lot of professionals that no longer have their insurance or they’re laid off from their jobs,” said Dr. Marshelya D. Wilson, a physician at the center’s Cayce clinic. “So they come here and get their health care.”
Studies have generally shown that the health centers — which must be governed by patient-dominated boards — are effective at reducing racial and ethnic disparities in medical treatment and save substantial sums by keeping patients out of hospitals. Their trade association estimates that they save the health care system $17.6 billion a year, and that an equivalent amount could be saved if avoidable emergency room visits were diverted to clinics. Some centers, including here in Nashville, have brokered agreements with hospitals to do exactly that.
Many centers are finding that federal support is not keeping pace with the growing cost of treating the uninsured. Government grants now account for 19 percent of community health center revenues, compared with 22 percent in 2001, according to the Health Resources and Services Administration, which oversees the program. The largest revenue sources are public insurance plans like Medicaid, Medicare and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, making the centers vulnerable to government belt-tightening.
The centers are known for their efficiency. Though United Neighborhood Health Services has more than doubled in size this decade, Ms. Bufwack, its chief executive, manages to run five neighborhood clinics, five school clinics, a homeless clinic, two mobile clinics and a rural clinic, with 24,391 patients, on a budget of $8.1 million. Starting pay for her doctors is $120,000. Patients are charged on an income-based sliding scale, and the uninsured are expected to pay at least $20 for an office visit. One clinic is housed in a double-wide trailer.
Because of a nationwide shortage of primary care physicians, the clinics rely on federal programs like the National Health Service Corps that entice medical students with grants and loan write-offs in exchange for agreements to practice as generalists in underserved areas. Of the 16 doctors working for United Neighborhood, seven are current or former participants.
Dr. LaTonya D. Knott, 37, who treated Ms. Ridley for her bronchitis, is among them. Born to a 15-year-old mother in south Nashville, she herself had been a regular childhood patient at one of the center’s clinics. After graduating as her high school’s valedictorian, she went to college on scholarships and then to medical school on government grants, with an obligation to serve for two years.
She said she now felt a responsibility to be a role model. “I do a whole lot of social work,” she said, noting that it was not uncommon for children to drop by the clinic for help with homework, or for a peanut butter sandwich. “It’s not just that we provide the medical care. I’m trying to provide you with a future.”
Despite such commitment, national staffing shortages have reinforced concerns about the quality of care at health centers, notably the management of chronic diseases. This year, the government started collecting data at the centers on performance measures like cervical cancer screening and diabetes control.
“The question is not just, ‘Are you going to have more community health centers?’ ” said Dr. H. Jack Geiger, founder of the health centers movement and a professor emeritus at the City University of New York. “It’s, ‘Are you going to have adequate services?’ ”
A deeper frustration for health centers concerns their difficulty in securing follow-up appointments with specialists for patients who are uninsured or have Medicaid. All too often, said Ms. Bufwack, medical care ends at the clinic door, reinforcing the need to expand both primary care and health insurance coverage.
“That’s when our doctors feel they’re practicing third world medicine,” she said. “You will die if you have cancer or a heart condition or bad asthma or horrible diabetes. If you need a specialist and specialty tests and specialty meds and specialty surgery, those things are totally out of your reach.”
December 26, 2008
NASHVILLE — Although the number of uninsured and the cost of coverage have ballooned under his watch, President Bush leaves office with a health care legacy in bricks and mortar: he has doubled federal financing for community health centers, enabling the creation or expansion of 1,297 clinics in medically underserved areas.
For those in poor urban neighborhoods and isolated rural areas, including Indian reservations, the clinics are often the only dependable providers of basic services like prenatal care, childhood immunizations, asthma treatments, cancer screenings and tests for sexually transmitted diseases.
As a crucial component of the health safety net, they are lauded as a cost-effective alternative to hospital emergency rooms, where the uninsured and underinsured often seek care.
Despite the clinics’ unprecedented growth, wide swaths of the country remain without access to affordable primary care. The recession has only magnified the need as hundreds of thousands of Americans have lost their employer-sponsored health insurance along with their jobs.
In response, Democrats on Capitol Hill are proposing even more significant increases, making the centers a likely feature of any health care deal struck by Congress and the Obama administration.
In Nashville, United Neighborhood Health Services, a 32-year-old community health center, has seen its federal financing rise to $4.2 million, from $1.8 million in 2001. That has allowed the organization to add eight clinics to its base of six, and to increase its pool of patients to nearly 25,000 from 10,000.
Still, says Mary Bufwack, the center’s chief executive, the clinics satisfy only a third of the demand in Nashville’s pockets of urban poverty and immigrant need.
One of the group’s recent grants helped open the Southside Family Clinic, which moved last year from a pair of public housing apartments to a gleaming new building on a once derelict corner.
As she completed a breathing treatment one recent afternoon, Willie Mai Ridley, a 68-year-old beautician, said she would have sought care for her bronchitis in a hospital emergency room were it not for the new clinic. Instead, she took a short drive, waited 15 minutes without an appointment and left without paying a dime; the clinic would bill her later for her Medicare co-payment of $18.88.
Ms. Ridley said she appreciated both the dignity and the affordability of her care. “This place is really very, very important to me,” she said, “because you can go and feel like you’re being treated like a person and get the same medical care you would get somewhere else and have to pay $200 to $300.”
As governor of Texas, Mr. Bush came to admire the missionary zeal and cost-efficiency of the not-for-profit community health centers, which qualify for federal operating grants by being located in designated underserved areas and treating patients regardless of their ability to pay. He pledged support for the program while campaigning for president in 2000 on a platform of “compassionate conservatism.”
In Mr. Bush’s first year in office, he proposed to open or expand 1,200 clinics over five years (mission accomplished) and to double the number of patients served (the increase has ended up closer to 60 percent). With the health centers now serving more than 16 million patients at 7,354 sites, the expansion has been the largest since the program’s origins in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on poverty, federal officials said.
“They’re an integral part of a health care system because they provide care for the low-income, for the newly arrived, and they take the pressure off of our hospital emergency rooms,” Mr. Bush said last year while touring a clinic in Omaha.
With federal encouragement, the centers have made a major push this decade to expand dental and mental health services, open on-site pharmacies, extend hours to nights and weekends and accommodate recent immigrants — legal and otherwise — by employing bilingual staff. More than a third of patients are now Hispanic, according to the National Association of Community Health Centers.
The centers now serve one of every three people who live in poverty and one of every eight without insurance. But a study released in August by the Government Accountability Office found that 43 percent of the country’s medically underserved areas lack a health center site. The National Association of Community Health Centers and the American Academy of Family Physicians estimated last year that 56 million people were “medically disenfranchised” because they lived in areas with inadequate primary care.
President-elect Barack Obama has said little about how the centers may fit into his plans to remake American health care. But he was a sponsor of a Senate bill in August that would quadruple federal spending on the program — to $8 billion from $2.1 billion — and increase incentives for medical students to choose primary care. His wife, Michelle, worked closely with health centers in Chicago as vice president for community and external relations at the University of Chicago Medical Center.
And Mr. Obama’s choice to become secretary of health and human services, former Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, argues in his recent book on health care that financing should be increased, describing the health centers as “a godsend.”
The federal program, which was first championed in Congress by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, has earned considerable bipartisan support. Leading advocates, like Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, and Representative James E. Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina, the House majority whip, argue that any success Mr. Obama has in reducing the number of uninsured will be meaningless if the newly insured cannot find medical homes. In Massachusetts, health centers have seen increased demand since the state began mandating health coverage two years ago.
At $8 billion, the Senate measure may be considered a relative bargain compared with the more than $100 billion needed for Mr. Obama’s proposal to subsidize coverage for the uninsured. If his plan runs into fiscal obstacles, a vast expansion of community health centers may again serve as a stopgap while universal coverage waits for flusher times.
Recent job losses, meanwhile, are stoking demand for the clinics’ services, often from first-time users. The United Neighborhood Health Services clinics in Nashville have seen a 35 percent increase in patients this year, with much of the growth from the newly jobless.
“I’m seeing a lot of professionals that no longer have their insurance or they’re laid off from their jobs,” said Dr. Marshelya D. Wilson, a physician at the center’s Cayce clinic. “So they come here and get their health care.”
Studies have generally shown that the health centers — which must be governed by patient-dominated boards — are effective at reducing racial and ethnic disparities in medical treatment and save substantial sums by keeping patients out of hospitals. Their trade association estimates that they save the health care system $17.6 billion a year, and that an equivalent amount could be saved if avoidable emergency room visits were diverted to clinics. Some centers, including here in Nashville, have brokered agreements with hospitals to do exactly that.
Many centers are finding that federal support is not keeping pace with the growing cost of treating the uninsured. Government grants now account for 19 percent of community health center revenues, compared with 22 percent in 2001, according to the Health Resources and Services Administration, which oversees the program. The largest revenue sources are public insurance plans like Medicaid, Medicare and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, making the centers vulnerable to government belt-tightening.
The centers are known for their efficiency. Though United Neighborhood Health Services has more than doubled in size this decade, Ms. Bufwack, its chief executive, manages to run five neighborhood clinics, five school clinics, a homeless clinic, two mobile clinics and a rural clinic, with 24,391 patients, on a budget of $8.1 million. Starting pay for her doctors is $120,000. Patients are charged on an income-based sliding scale, and the uninsured are expected to pay at least $20 for an office visit. One clinic is housed in a double-wide trailer.
Because of a nationwide shortage of primary care physicians, the clinics rely on federal programs like the National Health Service Corps that entice medical students with grants and loan write-offs in exchange for agreements to practice as generalists in underserved areas. Of the 16 doctors working for United Neighborhood, seven are current or former participants.
Dr. LaTonya D. Knott, 37, who treated Ms. Ridley for her bronchitis, is among them. Born to a 15-year-old mother in south Nashville, she herself had been a regular childhood patient at one of the center’s clinics. After graduating as her high school’s valedictorian, she went to college on scholarships and then to medical school on government grants, with an obligation to serve for two years.
She said she now felt a responsibility to be a role model. “I do a whole lot of social work,” she said, noting that it was not uncommon for children to drop by the clinic for help with homework, or for a peanut butter sandwich. “It’s not just that we provide the medical care. I’m trying to provide you with a future.”
Despite such commitment, national staffing shortages have reinforced concerns about the quality of care at health centers, notably the management of chronic diseases. This year, the government started collecting data at the centers on performance measures like cervical cancer screening and diabetes control.
“The question is not just, ‘Are you going to have more community health centers?’ ” said Dr. H. Jack Geiger, founder of the health centers movement and a professor emeritus at the City University of New York. “It’s, ‘Are you going to have adequate services?’ ”
A deeper frustration for health centers concerns their difficulty in securing follow-up appointments with specialists for patients who are uninsured or have Medicaid. All too often, said Ms. Bufwack, medical care ends at the clinic door, reinforcing the need to expand both primary care and health insurance coverage.
“That’s when our doctors feel they’re practicing third world medicine,” she said. “You will die if you have cancer or a heart condition or bad asthma or horrible diabetes. If you need a specialist and specialty tests and specialty meds and specialty surgery, those things are totally out of your reach.”
Ignatius: A New Partner In Syria?
In the WaPo: A New Partner In Syria? By David Ignatius
Wednesday, December 24, 2008; A11
DAMASCUS, Syria -- President Bashar al-Assad says he doesn't want to send a message to Barack Obama, exactly, but to express a three-part hope for the incoming administration's Middle East policy:
First, he hopes Obama won't start "another war anywhere in the world, especially not in the Middle East." And he trusts that the doctrine of "preemptive war" will end when George W. Bush leaves office.
Second, Assad said, "We would like to see this new administration sincerely involved in the peace process." He hopes that Obama will back Syria's indirect negotiations with Israel, and he urges the new administration to pursue "the Lebanese track and the Palestinian track, as well."
Asked whether he would mind if the Syrian track went first (a sequence that has worried some Syrians who prefer the ideological purity of following the Palestinians), Assad answered: "Of course not. Each track will help the other."
Third, he says he wants Syria and the United States to work together to stabilize Iraq as American troops begin to leave. "We can't turn the clock back," Assad said. "The war happened. Now we have to talk about the future. We have to forge a process, a political vision and a timetable for withdrawal."
In all three "hopes," Assad seemed to be looking for a new start with Obama after years of chilly relations with Bush. Assad said he knew little about Obama or his policies but has heard that he is more in contact with ordinary people than Bush has been, which, Assad contended, would give Obama a better understanding of America.
Assad spoke in English during the 30-minute interview Monday. He was accompanied only by his political and media adviser Bouthaina Shaaban. This time, in contrast to my interview with him in 2003, when Assad was often stiff and doctrinaire, he was loose and informal, breaking several times into laughter.
Assad's easy demeanor suggested that he's more firmly in charge now. The Bush administration's attempt to isolate Syria has failed, even in the judgment of senior White House officials. That leaves Assad in the catbird seat, courted by European and Arab nations and conducting back-channel talks through Turkey with his erstwhile enemy Israel.
Asked, for example, about reports that Saudi Arabia is seeking to improve its relations with Damascus because it sees U.S. engagement with Syria ahead and fears that "the train may be leaving the station," Assad laughed.
"Maybe it has already left the station," he said. But he vows that he is ready to receive any emissaries. "I have no problem with the Saudis. We would like good relations with every country in this region."
Assad said that he is ready to move to direct talks with Israel as soon as he receives clarification on two points: One, he wants assurance that the Israelis will withdraw fully from the Golan Heights. To clarify that issue, he sent a "borders document" to the Israelis this month that highlights some points along the pre-1967 border. As of Monday, he said, he hadn't received an Israeli response. His second condition for direct talks is that the United States join as a sponsor.
On the crucial question of Syria's future relations with Iran, Assad was noncommittal. He said the relationship with Iran wasn't about the "kind of statehood" Syria has or its cultural affinities but about protecting Syrian interests against hostile neighbors. "It's about who plays a role in this region, who supports my rights," he said. "It's not that complicated."
Asked whether Syria was prepared to restrain Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite militia in Lebanon, Assad said this was a matter the Israelis should sort out in separate negotiations with the Lebanese. Indeed, he promoted the idea of the other negotiating tracks -- which would draw in, at least indirectly, Hezbollah and Hamas.
"The longer the border, the bigger the peace," Assad said. "Hezbollah is on the Lebanese border, not Syrian. Hamas is on the Palestinian border. . . . They should look at those other tracks. They should be comprehensive. If you want peace, you need three peace treaties, on three tracks."
A relaxed Assad clearly believes that Syria is emerging from its pariah status. An international tribunal is still scheduled to meet in The Hague to weigh Syria's alleged role in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. But in the meantime, Assad is receiving a stream of visiting diplomats. He looks like a ready partner for Obama's diplomacy, but a cautious one -- waiting to see what's on offer before he shows more of his hand.
The writer is co-host of PostGlobal, an online discussion of international issues.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008; A11
DAMASCUS, Syria -- President Bashar al-Assad says he doesn't want to send a message to Barack Obama, exactly, but to express a three-part hope for the incoming administration's Middle East policy:
First, he hopes Obama won't start "another war anywhere in the world, especially not in the Middle East." And he trusts that the doctrine of "preemptive war" will end when George W. Bush leaves office.
Second, Assad said, "We would like to see this new administration sincerely involved in the peace process." He hopes that Obama will back Syria's indirect negotiations with Israel, and he urges the new administration to pursue "the Lebanese track and the Palestinian track, as well."
Asked whether he would mind if the Syrian track went first (a sequence that has worried some Syrians who prefer the ideological purity of following the Palestinians), Assad answered: "Of course not. Each track will help the other."
Third, he says he wants Syria and the United States to work together to stabilize Iraq as American troops begin to leave. "We can't turn the clock back," Assad said. "The war happened. Now we have to talk about the future. We have to forge a process, a political vision and a timetable for withdrawal."
In all three "hopes," Assad seemed to be looking for a new start with Obama after years of chilly relations with Bush. Assad said he knew little about Obama or his policies but has heard that he is more in contact with ordinary people than Bush has been, which, Assad contended, would give Obama a better understanding of America.
Assad spoke in English during the 30-minute interview Monday. He was accompanied only by his political and media adviser Bouthaina Shaaban. This time, in contrast to my interview with him in 2003, when Assad was often stiff and doctrinaire, he was loose and informal, breaking several times into laughter.
Assad's easy demeanor suggested that he's more firmly in charge now. The Bush administration's attempt to isolate Syria has failed, even in the judgment of senior White House officials. That leaves Assad in the catbird seat, courted by European and Arab nations and conducting back-channel talks through Turkey with his erstwhile enemy Israel.
Asked, for example, about reports that Saudi Arabia is seeking to improve its relations with Damascus because it sees U.S. engagement with Syria ahead and fears that "the train may be leaving the station," Assad laughed.
"Maybe it has already left the station," he said. But he vows that he is ready to receive any emissaries. "I have no problem with the Saudis. We would like good relations with every country in this region."
Assad said that he is ready to move to direct talks with Israel as soon as he receives clarification on two points: One, he wants assurance that the Israelis will withdraw fully from the Golan Heights. To clarify that issue, he sent a "borders document" to the Israelis this month that highlights some points along the pre-1967 border. As of Monday, he said, he hadn't received an Israeli response. His second condition for direct talks is that the United States join as a sponsor.
On the crucial question of Syria's future relations with Iran, Assad was noncommittal. He said the relationship with Iran wasn't about the "kind of statehood" Syria has or its cultural affinities but about protecting Syrian interests against hostile neighbors. "It's about who plays a role in this region, who supports my rights," he said. "It's not that complicated."
Asked whether Syria was prepared to restrain Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite militia in Lebanon, Assad said this was a matter the Israelis should sort out in separate negotiations with the Lebanese. Indeed, he promoted the idea of the other negotiating tracks -- which would draw in, at least indirectly, Hezbollah and Hamas.
"The longer the border, the bigger the peace," Assad said. "Hezbollah is on the Lebanese border, not Syrian. Hamas is on the Palestinian border. . . . They should look at those other tracks. They should be comprehensive. If you want peace, you need three peace treaties, on three tracks."
A relaxed Assad clearly believes that Syria is emerging from its pariah status. An international tribunal is still scheduled to meet in The Hague to weigh Syria's alleged role in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. But in the meantime, Assad is receiving a stream of visiting diplomats. He looks like a ready partner for Obama's diplomacy, but a cautious one -- waiting to see what's on offer before he shows more of his hand.
The writer is co-host of PostGlobal, an online discussion of international issues.
Rich people should be forced to invest 2 pct of their wealth in government bonds paying a maximum interest of 2.5 pct
Der Spiegel: German Politician Wants Compulsory Bond for Rich People
Dec 22, 2008
A Social Democrat fighting an uphill campaign in the state of Hesse has an idea to raise €50 billion to help fight the looming recession. Rich people, he says, should be forced to invest two percent of their wealth in government bonds paying a maximum interest of 2.5 percent. Response has been muted.
Thomas Schäfer-Gümbel, a little-known Social Democrat candidate fighting to be governor of the western German state of Hesse in an election on January 18, has come up with an unconventional idea that is attracting the -- presumably desired -- attention of the media.
He says wealthy people with cash and real estate assets exceeding €750,000 ($1.04 million) should be forced to lend the state two percent of their assets for a period of 15 years, and at an interest rate no higher than 2.5 percent.
"A compulsory state bond would be a rapidly effective instrument to mobilize additional funds to overcome the economic crisis," Schäfer-Gümbel, 39, told Bild newspaper on Monday. "That would be very fair because only the very wealthy would be drawn on."
The projected proceeds of €50 billion would fund energy-saving buses and trains for public transport, new research projects and energy savings technologies, he added.
Schäfer-Gümbel was plucked from obscurity to fight the Hesse election next month. He was chosen after previous SPD candidate Andrea Ypsilanti stepped aside following her repeated failure to form an alliance with the Left Party to remove conservative Hesse governor Roland Koch from power in the wake of an inconclusive state election last January.
He is trailing Koch by 20 points, according to an opinion poll published last week.
A German government spokesman dismissed the idea on Monday. "Not every noise made in the Hesse campaign brings results in Berlin," said Thomas Steg on Monday.
Dec 22, 2008
A Social Democrat fighting an uphill campaign in the state of Hesse has an idea to raise €50 billion to help fight the looming recession. Rich people, he says, should be forced to invest two percent of their wealth in government bonds paying a maximum interest of 2.5 percent. Response has been muted.
Thomas Schäfer-Gümbel, a little-known Social Democrat candidate fighting to be governor of the western German state of Hesse in an election on January 18, has come up with an unconventional idea that is attracting the -- presumably desired -- attention of the media.
He says wealthy people with cash and real estate assets exceeding €750,000 ($1.04 million) should be forced to lend the state two percent of their assets for a period of 15 years, and at an interest rate no higher than 2.5 percent.
"A compulsory state bond would be a rapidly effective instrument to mobilize additional funds to overcome the economic crisis," Schäfer-Gümbel, 39, told Bild newspaper on Monday. "That would be very fair because only the very wealthy would be drawn on."
The projected proceeds of €50 billion would fund energy-saving buses and trains for public transport, new research projects and energy savings technologies, he added.
Schäfer-Gümbel was plucked from obscurity to fight the Hesse election next month. He was chosen after previous SPD candidate Andrea Ypsilanti stepped aside following her repeated failure to form an alliance with the Left Party to remove conservative Hesse governor Roland Koch from power in the wake of an inconclusive state election last January.
He is trailing Koch by 20 points, according to an opinion poll published last week.
A German government spokesman dismissed the idea on Monday. "Not every noise made in the Hesse campaign brings results in Berlin," said Thomas Steg on Monday.
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Chertoff: Post 9/11 policies and practices are working
Keeping America safe. By Michael Chertoff
Post 9/11 policies and practices are working
Washington Times. Friday, December 26, 2008
Why has our country remained safe since September 11? Because of concrete policies the president has pursued - policies that range from reorganizing the intelligence community to taking the fight to our enemies, from monitoring terrorist communications to creating the Department of Homeland Security.
We live in dangerous times and face numerous threats to our security. Managing this risk is daunting. On an average day, the men and women of my department will screen more than 2 million domestic air travelers, inspect more than 300,000 vehicles crossing our borders, check more than 70,000 shipping containers for dangerous materials, and secure thousands of pieces of critical infrastructure.
We recognize there is no perfect security. Moreover, we know it is impossible to eliminate all risk. Our goal - and President Bush's vision - has been to provide risk-based protection against the most significant threats, reduce our major vulnerabilities, and mitigate potential consequences, with minimal disruption and inconvenience.
I believe we have achieved these aims. Across land, sea, and air, our nation is better equipped to deal with the threats of the 21st century. In many cases, we have implemented programs and capabilities that did not exist prior to September 11.
Today, our aviation system benefits from more than 20 layers of security, including hardened cockpit doors, federal air marshals, 100 percent screening of passengers and their bags, and new air cargo security requirements.
At our borders, we have built hundreds of miles of pedestrian and vehicle fence, doubled the size of the U.S. Border Patrol, and added new technology to prevent the entry of terrorists, criminals, illegal aliens, and dangerous drugs and weapons.
In the interior, we have arrested record numbers of illegal aliens, including more than 11,000 gang members and 34,000 fugitives. We also have cracked down on employers that violate immigration laws, while giving businesses better tools, such as E-Verify, to maintain a legal workforce. The result has been a historic reversal in illegal immigration, with no net increase in the illegal immigrant population in our country for the first time in decades.
At our ports, we have deployed radiation scanning equipment to check virtually 100 percent of incoming cargo for weapons of mass destruction. Prior to September 11, no cargo was scanned for such threats. In addition, we have stationed our inspectors overseas to screen cargo before it leaves foreign ports.
We have strengthened the security of identification documents, requiring passports or other secure documents to enter the United States from within our own hemisphere. This closes a pre-September 11 loophole that left our nation vulnerable. Under US-VISIT, we now record fingerprints from foreign visitors and check them in real time against terrorist and criminal watch lists - all while maintaining rigorous privacy protections. Before September 11, we didn't have this capability. And to prevent the use of fraudulent identification, we have implemented new standards for secure driver's licenses.
To protect our nation's chemical plants, we require high risk facilities to develop security plans and harden their assets. We have implemented new regulations for chemicals traveling by rail. To guard against biological threats, we have deployed early warning systems to 30 major metropolitan areas under the BioWatch program. We have built new national facilities to characterize and respond to biological attacks. And to counter emerging threats in cyberspace, we have launched a major, multiagency initiative to protect cyber systems and infrastructure.
Finally, we have integrated lessons from Hurricane Katrina and other disasters to ensure the federal government is prepared to support our state and local partners and the American people during major disasters. We have strengthened the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), built new capabilities for tracking commodities, improved emergency communications and developed stronger connections with our partners at all levels, including the Department of Defense and the private sector. FEMA responded to nearly 100 disasters this year, from the historic Midwest floods and unprecedented California wildfires, to damaging tornadoes and back-to-back hurricanes. In each instance, its response was able and effective.
On Jan. 20, we intend to turn over to our successors an integrated, well-functioning Department that has addressed or is on a path to addressing the most significant risks facing our nation. That's not to say there isn't more work ahead or additional room for improvement. But on the fundamental issues, we have acted with urgency and we have worked tirelessly to keep our nation safe.
Sadly, excluding Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorists have killed more than 20,000 innocent men and women and wounded more than 43,000 around the world since September 11. Yet not one of those horrific acts of violence occurred in the United States. That is a testament to the president's leadership and to the deliberate efforts of the 218,000 men and women of the Department of Homeland Security who serve our nation every day.
Michael Chertoff is secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
Post 9/11 policies and practices are working
Washington Times. Friday, December 26, 2008
Why has our country remained safe since September 11? Because of concrete policies the president has pursued - policies that range from reorganizing the intelligence community to taking the fight to our enemies, from monitoring terrorist communications to creating the Department of Homeland Security.
We live in dangerous times and face numerous threats to our security. Managing this risk is daunting. On an average day, the men and women of my department will screen more than 2 million domestic air travelers, inspect more than 300,000 vehicles crossing our borders, check more than 70,000 shipping containers for dangerous materials, and secure thousands of pieces of critical infrastructure.
We recognize there is no perfect security. Moreover, we know it is impossible to eliminate all risk. Our goal - and President Bush's vision - has been to provide risk-based protection against the most significant threats, reduce our major vulnerabilities, and mitigate potential consequences, with minimal disruption and inconvenience.
I believe we have achieved these aims. Across land, sea, and air, our nation is better equipped to deal with the threats of the 21st century. In many cases, we have implemented programs and capabilities that did not exist prior to September 11.
Today, our aviation system benefits from more than 20 layers of security, including hardened cockpit doors, federal air marshals, 100 percent screening of passengers and their bags, and new air cargo security requirements.
At our borders, we have built hundreds of miles of pedestrian and vehicle fence, doubled the size of the U.S. Border Patrol, and added new technology to prevent the entry of terrorists, criminals, illegal aliens, and dangerous drugs and weapons.
In the interior, we have arrested record numbers of illegal aliens, including more than 11,000 gang members and 34,000 fugitives. We also have cracked down on employers that violate immigration laws, while giving businesses better tools, such as E-Verify, to maintain a legal workforce. The result has been a historic reversal in illegal immigration, with no net increase in the illegal immigrant population in our country for the first time in decades.
At our ports, we have deployed radiation scanning equipment to check virtually 100 percent of incoming cargo for weapons of mass destruction. Prior to September 11, no cargo was scanned for such threats. In addition, we have stationed our inspectors overseas to screen cargo before it leaves foreign ports.
We have strengthened the security of identification documents, requiring passports or other secure documents to enter the United States from within our own hemisphere. This closes a pre-September 11 loophole that left our nation vulnerable. Under US-VISIT, we now record fingerprints from foreign visitors and check them in real time against terrorist and criminal watch lists - all while maintaining rigorous privacy protections. Before September 11, we didn't have this capability. And to prevent the use of fraudulent identification, we have implemented new standards for secure driver's licenses.
To protect our nation's chemical plants, we require high risk facilities to develop security plans and harden their assets. We have implemented new regulations for chemicals traveling by rail. To guard against biological threats, we have deployed early warning systems to 30 major metropolitan areas under the BioWatch program. We have built new national facilities to characterize and respond to biological attacks. And to counter emerging threats in cyberspace, we have launched a major, multiagency initiative to protect cyber systems and infrastructure.
Finally, we have integrated lessons from Hurricane Katrina and other disasters to ensure the federal government is prepared to support our state and local partners and the American people during major disasters. We have strengthened the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), built new capabilities for tracking commodities, improved emergency communications and developed stronger connections with our partners at all levels, including the Department of Defense and the private sector. FEMA responded to nearly 100 disasters this year, from the historic Midwest floods and unprecedented California wildfires, to damaging tornadoes and back-to-back hurricanes. In each instance, its response was able and effective.
On Jan. 20, we intend to turn over to our successors an integrated, well-functioning Department that has addressed or is on a path to addressing the most significant risks facing our nation. That's not to say there isn't more work ahead or additional room for improvement. But on the fundamental issues, we have acted with urgency and we have worked tirelessly to keep our nation safe.
Sadly, excluding Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorists have killed more than 20,000 innocent men and women and wounded more than 43,000 around the world since September 11. Yet not one of those horrific acts of violence occurred in the United States. That is a testament to the president's leadership and to the deliberate efforts of the 218,000 men and women of the Department of Homeland Security who serve our nation every day.
Michael Chertoff is secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
WaPo: Somalia goes from bad to worse
Still Sinking
Somalia goes from bad to worse.
Washington Post. Friday, December 26, 2008; A22
THE BUSH administration is trying to head off another disaster in Somalia, a failed state that has confounded three successive U.S. administrations. The administration won't succeed. Somalia's Western-backed "transitional government" is crumbling, and Islamic militants allied with al-Qaeda are threatening to take over the small parts of the country they don't already control -- mainly the capital, its port and the town where the remains of the parliament sit. U.S. diplomats have attempted to stop this by trying to persuade the United Nations to sponsor a peacekeeping mission; they have also urged Ethiopia to postpone the withdrawal of its troops, which have been fighting the Islamists for the past two years.
Neither proposal has gained traction. As the United States painfully learned in the early 1990s, even a large and capable foreign military force with a U.N. mandate would be seriously challenged in Mogadishu, where it is easy to rally gunmen against a perceived invader. In any case, there is no prospect for assembling such an expedition. U.N.-mandated peacekeeping operations are already failing in Congo and Sudan because of inadequate resources and the peacekeeping troops' lack of professionalism. Unless President Bush chooses to end his term as his father did, by landing Marines in Mogadishu, no international force will rescue Somalia.
That means this strategically located country will continue to grow more miserable and more threatening to the rest of the world. The radical Islamists known as al-Shabab are comparable to the Taliban of Afghanistan in the extremism of their rule and in their willingness to harbor foreigners recruited by al-Qaeda. Some of the authors of the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa are believed to be sheltered by the movement, along with fresh recruits from other African countries. Somalia could become a base for terrorist operations around the region, even as pirates based along its northern coast continue to threaten international shipping lanes.
The Obama administration, which will inherit this mess, will have to hope that Somalis will react against harsh Islamic fundamentalism that has no precedent in the country. As veteran analyst John Prendergast of the Enough Project points out, there are moderate Islamic factions; one of them recently reached a power-sharing agreement with part of the transitional government at U.N.-sponsored talks. If African neighbors and Western governments continue to support the consolidation and expansion of that centrist alliance, the fundamentalists may eventually face serious opposition. U.S. forces in the region, meanwhile, will have to seize opportunities to strike at known al-Qaeda targets, and more determined naval action is needed to stop the pirates. Somalia requires a vast nation-building effort, sponsored, supported and funded -- if not carried out -- by outside powers. The sad truth is that neither the United Nations nor any other alliance is up to the job.
Somalia goes from bad to worse.
Washington Post. Friday, December 26, 2008; A22
THE BUSH administration is trying to head off another disaster in Somalia, a failed state that has confounded three successive U.S. administrations. The administration won't succeed. Somalia's Western-backed "transitional government" is crumbling, and Islamic militants allied with al-Qaeda are threatening to take over the small parts of the country they don't already control -- mainly the capital, its port and the town where the remains of the parliament sit. U.S. diplomats have attempted to stop this by trying to persuade the United Nations to sponsor a peacekeeping mission; they have also urged Ethiopia to postpone the withdrawal of its troops, which have been fighting the Islamists for the past two years.
Neither proposal has gained traction. As the United States painfully learned in the early 1990s, even a large and capable foreign military force with a U.N. mandate would be seriously challenged in Mogadishu, where it is easy to rally gunmen against a perceived invader. In any case, there is no prospect for assembling such an expedition. U.N.-mandated peacekeeping operations are already failing in Congo and Sudan because of inadequate resources and the peacekeeping troops' lack of professionalism. Unless President Bush chooses to end his term as his father did, by landing Marines in Mogadishu, no international force will rescue Somalia.
That means this strategically located country will continue to grow more miserable and more threatening to the rest of the world. The radical Islamists known as al-Shabab are comparable to the Taliban of Afghanistan in the extremism of their rule and in their willingness to harbor foreigners recruited by al-Qaeda. Some of the authors of the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa are believed to be sheltered by the movement, along with fresh recruits from other African countries. Somalia could become a base for terrorist operations around the region, even as pirates based along its northern coast continue to threaten international shipping lanes.
The Obama administration, which will inherit this mess, will have to hope that Somalis will react against harsh Islamic fundamentalism that has no precedent in the country. As veteran analyst John Prendergast of the Enough Project points out, there are moderate Islamic factions; one of them recently reached a power-sharing agreement with part of the transitional government at U.N.-sponsored talks. If African neighbors and Western governments continue to support the consolidation and expansion of that centrist alliance, the fundamentalists may eventually face serious opposition. U.S. forces in the region, meanwhile, will have to seize opportunities to strike at known al-Qaeda targets, and more determined naval action is needed to stop the pirates. Somalia requires a vast nation-building effort, sponsored, supported and funded -- if not carried out -- by outside powers. The sad truth is that neither the United Nations nor any other alliance is up to the job.
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