Transhumanism and the Limits of Democracy. By Ronald Bailey
A paper presented at the Workshop on Transhumanism and Democracy
Reason, April 28, 2009
Below is a paper I presented at the Arizona State University's Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict Workshop on Transhumanism and the Future of Democracy last week. The workshop was directed by ASU history professor Hava Tirosh-Samuelson. My fellow participants were Case Western Reserve University law professor Maxwell Mehlman, Georgetown University law professor Steven Goldberg, University of Southern California law professor Michael Shapiro, University of Chicago political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain, Emory University bioethicist Paul Root Wolpe, with a closing response by University of California, Berkeley Nobelist Charles Townes.
The workshop addressed such questions as how does the enhancement of human beings through biotechnology, information technology, and applied cognitive sciences affect our understandings of autonomy, personhood, responsibility and free will? And how much and what type of societal control should be exercised over the use of enhancement technologies?
What is transhumanism? A pretty good definition is offered by bioethicist and transhumanist James Hughes who states that transhumanism is "the idea that humans can use reason to transcend the limitation of the human condition."[i] Specifically, transhumanists welcome the development of intimate technologies that will enable people to boost their life spans, enhance their intellectual capacities, augment their athletic abilities, and choose their preferred emotional states. What's particularly noteworthy is that Hughes argues that democratic decision-making is central to the task of guiding humanity into the transhuman future.
I will argue that where Hughes and others go wrong is in fetishizing democratic decision-making over the protection of minority rights. Second, I will argue that transhumanism should be accepted as a reasonable comprehensive doctrine and, as such, that it should be tolerated in liberal societies by those who disagree with its goals. Third, I will illustrate the problems of democratic authoritarianism by detailing some of the history of legal interference with reproductive rights. And then, I will briefly outline and analyze various arguments used by opponents of human enhancement which they hope will sway a majority into essentially outlawing the transhumanist enterprise.
Hughes and other would-be democratizers fail to recognize that the Enlightenment project that spawned modern liberal democracies sought to keep certain questions about the transcendent out of the public sphere. To keep the social peace and allow various visions of the human to flourish along side of one another, questions about the ultimate meaning and destiny of humanity were deemed to be private concerns.
Similarly, hostility to biotechnological progress must not to be used as an excuse to breach the Enlightenment understanding of what belongs in the private sphere and what belongs in the public. Technologies dealing with birth, death, and the meaning of life need protection from meddling—even democratic meddling—by those who want to control them as a way to force their visions of right and wrong on the rest of us. One's fellow citizens shouldn't get to vote on with whom you have sex, what recreational drugs you ingest, what you read and watch on TV and so forth. Hughes understands that democratic authoritarianism is possible, but discounts the possibility that the majority may well vote to ban the technologies that he believes promise a better world.
In fact, Hughes extols social democracy as the best guarantor of our future biotechnological liberty, while ignoring the fact that it is precisely those social democracies that he praises—Germany, France, Sweden, and Britain—which now, not in the future, outlaw germinal choice, genetic modification, reproductive and therapeutic cloning, and stem cell research. For example, Germany, Austria and Norway ban the creation of human embryonic stem cell lines. Britain outlaws various types of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis to enable parents to choose among embryos. (Despite worrisome political agitation against this type of biotech research, in the United States, private research in these areas remains legal. More recently, President Barack Obama directed the National Institutes of Health to begin formulating guidelines under which embryonic stem cell research might receive federal funding.)
This ideal of political equality arose from the Enlightenment's insistence that since no one has access to absolute truth, no one has a moral right to impose his or her values and beliefs on others. Or to put it another way, I may or may not have access to some absolute transcendent truth, but I'm pretty damned sure that you don't.
Under constitutional liberalism, there are questions that should not and cannot be decided by a majority vote. As James Madison eloquently explained in Federalist 51, "It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure."[ii] Alexis De Toqueville made the same point when he asked, "If it be admitted that a man possessing absolute power may misuse that power by wronging his adversaries, why should not a majority be liable to the same reproach?"[iii]
John Rawls updated and extended the arguments supporting these Enlightenment ideals in his Political Liberalism, where he made the case for a limited conception of politics that could reconcile and tolerate diverse "reasonable comprehensive doctrines." According to Rawls, a reasonable comprehensive doctrine has three features: it deals with the major religious, philosophical, and moral aspects of human life in a coherent and consistent fashion; it recognizes certain values as significant, and by giving some primacy of some values over others expresses an intelligible view of the world; and it is not unchanging, but generally evolves slowly over time in light of what its adherents see as good and sufficient reasons.
The result is "that many of our most important judgments are made under conditions where it is not to be expected that conscientious persons with full powers of reason, even after free discussion, will all arrive at the same conclusion. Some conflicting reasonable judgments (especially important are those belonging under people's comprehensive doctrines) may be true, others false; conceivably all may be false. These burdens of judgment of are the first significance for the democratic idea of toleration."[iv] Because there is no objective way to determine the truth or falsity of diverse beliefs, moral strangers can only get along by tolerating what each would regard as the other's errors.
Consequently, Rawls argues, "reasonable persons will think it unreasonable to use political power, should they possess it, to repress comprehensive views that are not unreasonable though different from their own." If, however, we insist that all members of a polity should adopt our beliefs because they are "true," then, "when we make such claims others, who are themselves reasonable, must count us unreasonable."[v] In such a case, members of the polity have the right to resist the imposition of views that they do not hold. Rawls concludes, "Once we accept the fact that reasonable pluralism is a permanent condition of public culture under free institutions, the idea of the reasonable is more suitable as part of the basis of public justification for a constitutional regime than the idea of moral truth."[vi]
Arguably, the kind of constitutional regime that is compatible with reasonable pluralism is one in which the powers that government can exercise over the choices of its citizens is limited. While certainly not endorsing it, the German political philosopher Jurgen Habermas describes the point of view of liberalism pretty well when he explains that the dispute between liberalism and radical democracy has "to do with how one can reconcile equality with liberty, unity with diversity, or the right of the majority with the right of the minority. Liberals begin with the legal institutionalization of equal liberties, conceiving these as rights held by individual subjects. In their view, human rights enjoy normative priority over democracy, and the constitutional separation of powers has priority over the will of the democratic legislature."[vii]
So the question is: Is transhumanism a reasonable comprehensive doctrine? Clearly, it fits Rawls' tripartite definition. Transhumanism deals with the major religious, philosophical, and moral aspects of human life in a coherent and consistent fashion. The transhumanist desire to deploy advanced technologies to increase healthy human life spans and to enhance human physical and intellectual capacities in order to foster excellence and human flourishing coherently addresses major religious and philosophical aspects of human life. Transhumanism recognizes certain values as significant, and by giving some primacy of some values over others expresses an intelligible view of the world.
Nick Bostrom outlines some transhumanist values including the core value of "promot[ing] the quest to develop further so that we can explore hitherto inaccessible realms of value."[viii] Beyond the limits that our current biology and level of technology impose on our physical, emotional, and intellectual capacities lay experiences and knowledge that can only be fully appreciated and understood by enhanced transhumans. Other values implicated in achieving the vision of an open-ended transhuman future, according to Bostrom, include encouraging sufficient global security, a strong advocacy for technological progress, and the opportunity that everyone have access to enhancement technologies.
Crucially, Bostrom adds that "transhumanists typically place emphasis on individual freedom and individual choice in the area of enhancement technologies. Humans differ widely in their conceptions of what their own perfection or improvement would consist in. Some want to develop in one direction, others in different directions, and some prefer to stay the way they are. It would ... be morally unacceptable for anybody to impose a single standard to which we would all have to conform. People should have the right to choose which enhancement technologies, if any, they want to use." This view is clearly consonant with Rawls' argument that in a liberal polity, reasonable persons will not use political power to repress comprehensive doctrines that are different from their own. A core transhumanist value is tolerance, and transhumanists clearly recognize that their fellow citizens adhere to other reasonable comprehensive doctrines.
And transhumanism certainly meets Rawls' third criterion for being a reasonable comprehensive doctrine since robust debate among its adherents shows that it is clearly not unchanging and is still evolving in light of what its adherents see as good and sufficient reasons
So if one accepts Rawls' arguments for how liberal societies must operate morally, transhumanism should be accommodated within the constitutional consensus of liberal democratic societies as a reasonable comprehensive doctrine.
But liberal concerns about majoritarian tyranny are far from being merely theoretical. Let's briefly consider some examples of how parts of what many of us would agree are "reasonable comprehensive doctrines" have been and are being repressed by democratic majorities.
For example, do we really want democratic majorities making and imposing ethical decisions about who people can marry; who can have children, and with whom they may enjoy sexual intimacy without the aim of bearing children? Consider the history of federal and state regulation in these areas. In 1800, abortion was legal in every state until the point of quickening in the womb. In the 1850's, the newly formed American Medical Association launched a campaign against abortion, in part, because abortion practitioners were competitors and, in part, because some feared that the Protestant majority was being outbred by Catholic immigrants. By 1910, abortion had been democratically criminalized in all but one state.
In 1873, Congress passed the Comstock Laws that outlawed "every obscene, lewd, or lascivious, and every filthy book, pamphlet, picture, paper, letter, writing, print, or other publication of an indecent character, and every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for preventing conception or producing abortion."[ix] The Comstock Laws authorized the U.S. Post Office to confiscate any publications providing advice on contraception and condoms shipped through the mail.
The first eugenics law was passed in Indiana in 1907 and eventually laws allowing the forced sterilization of "unfit" people were adopted by 30 states. Infamously, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld forced sterilization in the case of Buck v. Bell in 1927. By the 1960s, some 66,000 Americans had been forcibly neutered. In 1924, Virginia passed the Racial Integrity Act that prohibited whites from marrying anyone with "a single drop of Negro blood." By the 1920s, democratically elected legislatures had made marriage between whites and blacks illegal in thirty-eight states.In the last half of the 20th century, the U.S. Supreme Court finally stepped in to overrule democratically legislated state interference in the reproductive decisions of Americans. In 1965, the Court found unconstitutional the Connecticut law prohibiting use of birth control by married couples in Griswold v. Connecticut. In 1967, the Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that, "Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the state," striking down the laws in the 16 states that still banned interracial marriage. In 1972, the Court voided in the case of Eisenstadt v. Baird a Massachusetts law prohibiting the sale of contraceptives to unmarried people. And of course, the Supreme Court found prohibitions on abortion unconstitutional in 1973 in Roe v. Wade.
Interestingly, the U.S. Supreme Court has never comprehensively struck down forcible sterilization laws, although in 1942 it did overrule Oklahoma's Habitual Criminal Sterilization Act in the case of Skinner v. Oklahoma on the grounds that it violated the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause because it did not apply to white collar crimes like embezzlement. The point is probably moot for now since the last forcible sterilization in the United States reportedly took place in Oregon in 1981.[x] The point is that when all of these legal restrictions on human sexual and reproductive decisions were enacted, they presumably reflected and comported with the views of the majority of citizens. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that these laws were overturned on constitutional grounds of protecting minority rights.
We are still engaged in fighting majoritarian tyranny in the struggle to establish gay civil rights. In 1981, Congress overturned a District of Columbia ordinance that would have decriminalized sodomy. In 1986, the same year a Gallup poll found that more than half of Americans considered homosexuality a sin, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Georgia's anti-sodomy law in Bowers v. Hardwick. The Baptist minister Jerry Falwell crowed that the Supreme Court "has issued a clear statement that perverted moral behavior is not accepted practice in this country." It was not until 2003 that the Supreme Court finally overturned Texas' same-sex anti-sodomy law in the case of Lawrence v. Texas.
As of January 1, 2009, thirty states had democratically adopted constitutional amendments explicitly barring the recognition of same-sex marriage, confining civil marriage to a legal union between a man and a woman. More than 40 states explicitly restrict marriage to two persons of the opposite sex. In addition, Florida categorically prohibits gay parents from adopting, and Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Utah, and North Dakota do so as a matter of practice. In 2006, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, and Missouri were considering constitutional amendments or laws banning gay adoption. Arkansas, Nebraska, and Utah don't allow gay people to serve as foster parents.[xi]
The urge for democratically imposed restrictions on the use of reproductive technologies has not abated. Recall that the federal government imposed a moratorium in the 1970s on funding any research on in vitro fertilization techniques.[xii] In January, 1980, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), alarmed by the opening of the first IVF clinic in the United States, sent a letter to Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), who was then chairman of a health and scientific research subcommittee, urging him to convene hearings on the grounds that "prudence and our commitment to public participation in decision-making suggest that the test tube baby laboratory not become fully operational until we have had the opportunity to consider the matter in open congressional hearings."[xiii] Nine states, including New York, currently prohibit gestational surrogacy.
In 1993, President Bill Clinton rejected the recommendations from the NIH's Human Embryo Research Panel and prohibited federal funding of the creation of human embryos solely for research purposes.[xiv] This ban did not apply to research on spare embryos or privately funded research. In addition, in the wake of the announcement that Scottish researchers had cloned a sheep in 1997, President Clinton announced an immediate moratorium on any human cloning research. In 1998, Clinton urged Congress to ban human cloning experiments for at least five years.[xv] Today 13 states ban reproductive human cloning, and six outlaw therapeutic cloning.[xvi] The House of Representatives twice passed a bill that would have criminalized somatic cell nuclear transfer research and which would have criminalized any American who went abroad to take advantage of therapies developed using that technique—the penalty would have been 10 years in prison and $1 million in fines.
As noted above, democratically imposed restrictions on using advanced biotechnological techniques are not confined to the United States. For example, Britain established the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) in 1991 to regulate the use of embryos and gametes in infertility treatment and research. The HFEA has told couples that they could not select the sex of embryos to be implanted. Even now, parents wanting to use PGD to insure that their children will not be burdened with an inherited genetic disease must apply for permission from the HFEA. And the HFEA has banned paying women for providing eggs to be used in research. Crucially, the HFEA can regulate not just on the grounds of ensuring quality, safety, and efficacy, but also on ethical grounds.
Consider the case of the Whitaker family from Sheffield, England, to see just how perilous it is to allow a government agency to interfere in a family's reproductive decisions. In 2002, Michelle and Jayson Whitaker asked the HFEA for permission to use in vitro fertilization and PGD to produce a tissue-matched sibling for their son Charlie, who suffers from a rare anemia. That disease caused him to need a blood transfusion every three weeks. The HFEA refused, calling the procedure "unlawful and unethical," ruling that tissue matching is not a sufficient reason to attempt embryo selection.[xvii] Desperate, the Whitakers came to the United States, where PGD is still legal. In June 2003, Michelle Whitaker gave birth to James, whose umbilical cord stem cells are immunologically compatible with Charlie's. The stem cells were transplanted and, six years later, both boys are reported to be healthy. Please keep in mind that taking stem cells from James' umbilicus in no way endangered or harmed him.
Again, in this case, the HFEA's refusal was not based on safety or efficacy, but on the moral opinions of the Authority's governing panel. Such a regulatory authority necessarily turns differences over morality into win/lose propositions, with minority views—and rights—overridden by the majority.
Fortunately, Americans are allowed to use PGD to select "savior siblings" like James Whitaker and also to enable their progeny to avoid the risks of genetic diseases. For example, consider the 2002 case of a married 30-year-old geneticist who will almost certainly lose her mind to early-onset Alzheimer's disease by age 40 and who chose to have her embryos tested in vitro for the disease gene.[xviii] She then implanted only embryos without the gene into her womb. The result was the birth of a healthy baby girl—one who will not suffer Alzheimer's in her 40s. The mother in this case certainly knows what would face any child of hers born with the disease gene. Her father, a sister, and a brother have all already succumbed to early Alzheimer's.
Bioethicist Jeffrey Kahn objected to using PGD in this case arguing, "It's a social decision. This really speaks to the need for a larger policy discussion, and regulation or some kind of oversight of assisted reproduction."[xix] Kahn is right that parents will someday use PGD to screen embryos for desirable traits such as tougher immune systems, stronger bodies, and smarter brains. It is hard to see what is ethically wrong with parents taking advantage of such testing, since it is aimed at conferring general benefits that any child would want to have (see below for more on the issue of consent).
Kahn is wrong when he claims that the decision to use PGD by prospective parents is a "social decision" requiring more regulation. First of all, in the capacious sense implied by Kahn, any parent's decision to have a child, even by conventional means, has "social consequences" for us all. So would Kahn have neighbors, regulators, and bioethicists weigh in on everybody's reproductive decisions? Kahn would doubtless counter that, unlike conventional reproduction, assisted reproduction involves the use of scarce medical resources that could be used for other purposes (which they prefer).
Again, Kahn's notion of "social" could apply to anything—what if Kahn disapproved of someone buying non-union clothing or vacationing in the Caribbean rather than devoting his resources to building public parks or highways? In this case, the parents using assisted reproduction and PGD are spending their own money for the benefit of their own children to work with doctors who are freely devoting their skills.
Another often-heard objection is that genetic engineering will be imposed on "children-to-be" without their consent. First, I need to remind everyone reading this article that not one of you gave your consent to be born, much less to be born with the specific complement of genes that you bear. Thus, the children born by means of assisted reproductive therapies and those produced more conventionally stand in exactly the same ethical relationship to their parents. Habermas disagrees, claiming, "Eugenic interventions aiming at enhancement reduce ethical freedom insofar as they tie down the person concerned to rejected, but irreversible intentions of third parties, barring him from the spontaneous self-perception of being the undivided author of his own life."[xx] However, Allen Buchanan correctly points out that Habermas does not actually make clear why a person who develops from a genetically enhanced embryo should feel that they are not the "author" of her life or be regarded as being somehow less free by others. Habermas "is assuming that how one's genome was selected is relevant to one's moral status as a person. This error is no less fundamental than thinking that a person's pedigree—for example, whether she is of noble blood or ‘base-born'—determines her moral status," explains Buchanan.[xxi]
Another frequently heard assertion from opponents of enhancement technologies is that a genetically engineered child somehow feel less loved and appreciated than one who was born in the conventional way. Similar fears were expressed by many bioethicists when in vitro fertilization began to be used in the 1970s and 1980s. The good news is that recent research finds that IVF children and their parents are as well-adjusted as those born in the conventional way.[xxii] And this should be the case for enhanced children as well. As Frances Kamm argues, "Not accepting whatever characteristics nature will bring but altering them ex-ante does not show lack of love... This is because no conscious being yet exists who has to work hard to achieve new traits or suffer fears of rejection at the idea they should be changed. Importantly, it is rational and acceptable to seek good characteristics in a new person, even though we know when the child comes to be and we love him or her, many of these characteristics may come and go and we will continue to love the particular person."[xxiii]
The absurdity of a requirement for prenatal consent becomes transparent when you ask proponents of such a requirement if they would forbid fetal surgery to correct spina bifida or fetal heart defects? After all, those fetuses can't give their consent to those procedures, yet it is certainly the moral thing to do. For that matter, taking this strong position on consent to its logically extreme conclusion would mean that children couldn't be treated with drugs, or receive vaccinations. So using future biotechnical means to correct genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis or sickle cell anemia at the embryonic stage will similarly be morally laudatory activity. Surely one can assume that the beneficiary—the not-yet-born, possibly even the not-yet-conceived child—would happily have chosen to have those diseases corrected.
But what about enhancements, not just therapeutic biotechnical interventions? Let's say a parent could choose genes that would guarantee her child a 20 point IQ boost. It is reasonable to presume that the child would be happy to consent to this enhancement of her capacities. How about plugging in genes that would boost her immune system and guarantee that she would never get colon cancer, Alzheimer's, AIDS, or the common cold? Again, it seems reasonable to assume consent. These enhancements are general capacities that any human being would reasonably want to have. In fact, lots of children already do have these capacities naturally, so it's hard to see that there is any moral justification for outlawing access to them for others.
Fritz Allhoff has grappled nicely with the issue of consent. Allhoff offers a principle derived from the second formulation of Kant's categorical imperative[xxiv] that we treat individuals as ends and never merely as means or, more simply, to treat them in ways to which they would rationally consent.[xxv] Allhoff turns next to philosopher John Rawls' notion of primary goods. In A Theory of Justice Rawls defines primary goods as those goods that every rational person should value, regardless of his conception of the good. These goods include rights, liberties, opportunities, health, intelligence, and imagination.[xxvi] As Allhoff argues, "These are the things that, ex hypothesi, everyone should want; it would be irrational to turn them down when offered. Nobody could be better off with less health or with fewer talents, for example, regardless of her life goals.... Since primary goods are those that, by definition, any rational agent would want regardless of his conception of the good, all rational agents would consent to augmentation of their primary goods."
Allhoff then contends that such enhancements would be permissible if every future generation would consent to them. But the requirement that all future generations must consent adds nothing to the moral force of Allhoff's arguments since already all rational agents would consent to such enhancements. So again, safe genetic interventions that improve a prospective child's health, cognition, and so forth would be morally permissible because we can presume consent from the individuals who benefit from the enhancements.
Many opponents of human genetic engineering are either conscious or unconscious genetic determinists. They fear that biotechnological knowledge and practice will somehow undermine human freedom. In a sense, these genetic determinists believe that somehow human freedom resides in the gaps of our knowledge of our genetic makeup. If parents are allowed to choose their children's genes, then they will have damaged their children's autonomy and freedom. According to environmentalist Bill McKibben, "The person left without any choice at all [emphasis his] is the one you've engineered. You've decided, for once and for all, certain things about him: he'll have genes expressing proteins that send extra dopamine to alter his mood; he'll have genes expressing proteins to boost his memory; to shape his stature."[xxvii] People like McKibben apparently believe that our freedom and autonomy somehow depend on the unknown and random combinations of genes that a person inherits. But even if they were right—and they are not—genetic ignorance of this type will not last.
Advances in human whole genome testing will likely become available by 2014 so that every person's entire complement of genes can be scanned and known at his or her physician's office for as little as $1,000.[xxviii] Once whole genome testing is perfected we will all learn what even our randomly conferred genes may predispose us to do and from what future ills we are likely suffer. Already, my relatively inexpensive genotype scan from 23andMe tells me that I have alleles that give me a somewhat greater risk of developing celiac disease, a lower risk of rheumatoid arthritis, as well as having a higher sensitivity to warfarin, among other traits. With accumulation of genetic understanding, human freedom will then properly be seen as acting to overcome these predispositions, much like a former alcoholic can overcome his thirst for booze. Fortunately, biotech will help here as well as with the development of neuropharmaceuticals to enhance our cognitive abilities and change our moods.
Opponents of using biotechnical means to enhance humans often cite C.S. Lewis' worry: "If any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. They are weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have pre-ordained how they are to use them."[xxix] In other words, Lewis asserts that the one decisive generation that first masters genetic technologies will control the fate of all future generations.
But when has it not been true that past generations control the genetic fate of future generations? Our ancestors—through their mating and breeding choices—determined for us the complement of genes that we all bear today. They just didn't know which specific genes they were picking. Fortunately, our descendants will have at their disposal ever more powerful technologies and the benefit of our own experiences to guide them in their future reproductive and enhancement decisions. In no sense are they prisoners of our decisions now. Of course, there is one case in which future generations would be prisoners of our decisions now, and that's if we fearfully elect to deny them access to the benefits of biotechnology and safe genetic engineering. The future will not be populated by robots who may look human but who are unable to choose for themselves their own destinies—genetic or otherwise.
Other opponents of human genetic enhancement argue that it is not possible to ethically get from the human present to the transhuman future. Again, consent and the risks inherent in deploying novel biogenetic treatments are cited as reasons.[xxx] The assertion is that genetic enhancement necessarily implies experimentation without consent and this violates bedrock bioethical principles requiring the protection of human subjects. Consequently, there is an unbridgeable gap over which would-be enhancers cannot ethically cross.
This view incorporates a rather static view of what it will be possible for future genetic enhancers to know and test beforehand. Any genetic enhancement technique will first be extensively tested and perfected in animal models. Second, a vastly expanded bioinformatics enterprise will become crucial to understanding the ramifications of proposed genetic interventions.[xxxi] As scientific understanding improves, the risk versus benefit calculations of various prospective genetic enhancements of embryos will shift. The arc of scientific discovery and technological progress strongly suggests that it will happen in the next few decades. One possible threshold for morally acceptable genetic enhancement treatments is the current level of risk involved with current in vitro fertilization techniques.[xxxii]
Defenders of democratically restricting human enhancements often argue that human equality will fall victim to differential access to enhancement technologies, resulting is conflicts between the enhanced and the unenhanced. As bioethicists George Annas, Lori Andrews, and Rosario Isasi laid out in a rather apocalyptic scenario:
"The new species, or 'posthuman,' will likely view the old 'normal' humans as inferior, even savages, and fit for slavery or slaughter. The normals, on the other hand, may see the posthumans as a threat and if they can, may engage in a preemptive strike by killing the posthumans before they themselves are killed or enslaved by them. It is ultimately this predictable potential for genocide that makes species-altering experiments potential weapons of mass destruction, and makes the unaccountable genetic engineer a potential bioterrorist."[xxxiii]
Let's take their over-the-top scenario down a notch or two. The enhancements that are likely to be available in the relatively near term to people now living will be pharmacological—pills and shots to increase strength, lighten moods, and improve memory. Consequently, such interventions could be distributed to nearly everybody who wanted them. Later in this century, when safe genetic engineering becomes possible, it will likely be deployed gradually and will enable parents to give their children beneficial genes for improved health and intelligence that other children already get naturally. Thus, the argument can be made that safe genetic engineering in the long run is more likely to ameliorate than to exacerbate human inequality.
In any case, political and moral equality has never rested on the facts of human biology. In prior centuries, when humans were all "naturals," tyranny, aristrocracy, slavery, and purdah were common social and political arrangements. Our biology did not change in the past two centuries, our political ideals did. In fact, political liberalism is already the answer to questions about human and posthuman rights. In liberal societies the law is meant to apply equally to all, no matter how rich or poor, powerful or powerless, brilliant or stupid, enhanced or unenhanced.
One crowning achievement of the Enlightenment is the principle of tolerance, of putting up with people who look differently, talk differently, worship differently, and live differently than we do, or in Rawlsian terms, tolerating those who pursue differing reasonable comprehensive doctrines. In the future, our descendants may not all be natural homo sapiens, but they will still be moral beings who can be held accountable for their actions. There is no a priori reason to think that the same liberal political and moral principles that apply to diverse human beings today wouldn't apply to relations among future humans and transhumans.[xxxiv]
But what if enhanced posthumans did take the Nietzschean superman option? What if they really did see unenhanced people "as inferior, even savages, and fit for slavery or slaughter"?
It is an unfortunate historical fact that plenty of unenhanced humans have been quite capable of believing that millions of their fellow unenhanced humans were inferiors who needed to be eradicated.[xxxv] However, as liberal political institutions, with their limits on the power of the state, have spread and strengthened, they have increasingly restrained technologically superior groups from automatically wiping out less advanced peoples (which was usual throughout most of history). There is no a priori reason to believe that this dynamic will not continue in the future as biotechnologies, nanotechnologies, and computational technologies progressively increase people's capabilities and widen their choices.
Opponents of human enhancement focus on the alleged social harms that might result, while overlooking the huge social costs that foregoing the benefits of enhancement technologies would entail. Allen Buchanan posits "that some enhancements will increase human productivity very broadly conceived and thereby create the potential for large-scale increases in human well-being, and that the enhancements that are most likely to attract sufficient resources to become widespread will be those that promise increased productivity and will often exhibit what economists call network effects; the benefit to the individual of being enhanced will depend upon, or at least be greatly augmented by others having the enhancement as well."[xxxvi]
Buchanan points out that much of the ethical debate (cited above) about enhancements focuses on them as positional goods that primarily help an individual to outcompete his rivals. This characterization of enhancements leads quickly and ineluctably to pervasive zero sum thinking in which for every winner there is assumed to be a loser. Instead enhancements could produce substantial positive externalities. "Large numbers of individuals with increased cognitive capabilities will be able to accomplish what a single individual could not, just as one can do much more with a personal computer in a world of many computer users," writes Buchanan.[xxxvii]
Buchanan argues that modern people have already adopted a wide array of enhancements that display these beneficial network effects, including literacy, numeracy, and social institutions that "extend our abilities beyond what is natural for human beings."[xxxviii] Some future biomedical enhancements that would significantly increase both individual and social productivity include those that raise the cognitive capabilities of human beings (memory, attention, and processing speed), increase healthy life spans, and boost our immune systems. Indeed, economist William Nordhaus reports that the huge increase in average life expectancy since 1900 from 47 years to 77 years today has been responsible for about half the increase in our standard of living in the United States.[xxxix]
More disturbingly, Buchanan notes that if biotech enhancements do, in fact, dramatically increase social productivity, then the state and its citizens might be far less interested in imposing limits on enhancements and instead shift to promoting them for everyone. The analogy is that biotech enhancements might be treated like other productivity-boosting enhancements like education and immunization. "If a particular enhancement had very strong productivity-enhancing effects, the failure of the state to ensure that no one lacks access to it might be as culpable as its failure to ensure that all citizens are literate or have access to immunization," suggests Buchanan.[xl] The temptation for democratically imposing enhancements would be hard to resist and would result in imposing a particular vision of human flourishing on those who do not want them.
People should not be forced to use medicines and technologies that they find morally objectionable. Take the case of the Amish. Amish individuals live in an open society—ours—and can opt out of our society or theirs whenever they want. As followers of a reasonable comprehensive doctrine, they have a system for voluntarily deciding among themselves what new technologies they will embrace. The situation of the Amish demonstrates that technological choices don't have to involve everyone in a given society. (Although Amish practicality has caused them to embrace modern medicine when comes to treating genetic maladies that plague their community.[xli])
Eventually, one can imagine that in the future different treatment and enhancement regimens will be available to accommodate the different values and beliefs held by citizens. Christian Scientists would perhaps reject most of modern biotechnology outright; Jehovah's Witnesses might remain leery of treatments that they interpret to being akin to using blood products or blood transfusions; Roman Catholics might refuse to use regenerative treatments derived from human embryonic stem cells; and still others will wish to take the fullest advantage of all biomedical enhancements and treatments. In this way, a pluralistic society respects the reasonable comprehensive doctrines of their fellow citizens and enables social peace among moral strangers.
Julian Savulescu is right when he reminds us, "The Nazis sought to interfere directly in people's reproductive decisions (by forcing them to be sterilized) to promote social ideals, particularly around racial superiority. Not offering selection for nondisease genes would indirectly interfere (by denying choice) to promote social ideals such as equality or 'population welfare.' There is no relevant difference between direct and indirect eugenics. The lesson we learned from eugenics is that society should be loath to interfere (directly and indirectly) in reproductive decisionmaking."[xlii]
To the extent that new biotechnologies need regulation, agencies should be limited to deciding, as they have traditionally done, only questions about safety and efficacy. Regulatory agencies also have an important role in protecting research subjects and patients from force and fraud by imposing informed consent requirements on researchers. But when people of good will deeply disagree on moral issues that don't involve the prevention of force or fraud, it is a fraught exercise to submit their disagreement to a panel of political appointees or a democratic vote. That way leads to intolerance, repression, and social conflict.
The genius of a liberal society is that its citizens have wide scope to pursue their own visions of the good, including transhumanism, without excessive hindrance by their fellow citizens.
Ronald Bailey is Reason magazine's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.
Note of gratitude: I would like to thank Professor Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and the Center for inviting me to participate in the workshop. In addition, I want to thank the workshop co-sponsors for their support including the Templeton Foundation, the Metanexus Institute, and the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict.
Notes
[i] James Hughes, Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond To The Redesigned Human Of The Future, Westview Press, 2004.
[ii] James Madison, Federalist 51, http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa51.htm
[iii] Alexis de Tocqueville, "Tyranny of the Majority," Chapter XV, Book 1, Democracy in America.
[iv] John Rawls, Political Liberalism, Columbia University Press, 1996, p. 58.
[v] Rawls, pp. 60-61.
[vi] Rawls, p. 129.
[vii] Jurgen Habermas, "Popular Sovereignty as Procedure," Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, edited by James Bohman & William Regh, MIT Press, 1997, p. 44.
[viii] Nick Bostrom, "Transhumanist Values," World Transhumanist Association, 2005. http://www.transhumanism.org/index.php/WTA/more/transhumanist-values/
[ix] Mary Alden Hopkins, "Birth Control and Public Morals: An Interview with Anthony Comstock, Harper's Weekly, May 22, 1915, http://www.expo98.msu.edu/people/comstock.htm
[x] Julie Sullivan, "State will admit sterilization past", Portland Oregonian (November 15, 2002)
[xi] Dahlia Lithwick, Why Courts are Adopting Gay Parenting," Washington Post, March 12, 2006; Page B02, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/10/AR2006031002031.html
[xii] Victor Cohn, "HEW Urged to Support Test-Tube Fertilization," Washington Post, August 5, 1978, p. A8
[xiii] Cited in the Associated Press, "Kennedy Urged to Convene Congressional Hearings," January 15, 1980.
[xiv] John Schwartz & Ann Devroy, "Clinton to Ban U.S. Funds For Some Embryo Studies." Washington Post, December 3, 1994, p. A1
[xv] BBC News, "Clinton Calls for Human Cloning Ban," Jan. 10, 1998, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/46335.stm
[xvi] State Human Cloning Laws, National Conference of State Legislatures, updated January, 2008, http://www.ncsl.org/programs/health/Genetics/rt-shcl.htm
[xvii] Susan Kerr Bernal, "Ethical Offspring," Journal of Andrology, Vol. 25, No. 5, September/October 2004, p. 668.
[xviii] Yury Verlinsky et al., "Preimplantation Diagnosis for Early-Onset Alzheimer Disease Caused by V717L Mutation," Journal of the American Medical Association, February 27, 2002. http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/287/8/1018
[xix] Rick Weiss, "Alzheimer's Gene Screened From Newborn," Washington Post, Feb. 27, 2002. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7756-2002Feb26?language=printer
[xx] Jurgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 63.
[xxi] Allen Buchanan, "Enhancement and the Ethics of Development," Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, Vol. 18, No. 1, March, 2008. (draft) p. 25. http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/petrie-flom/PDFs/Buchanan.pdf
[xxii] H. Colpin and G. Bossaert, "Adolescents conceived by IVF: parenting and psychosocial adjustment," Human Reproduction, August 27, 2008. http://humrep.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/23/12/2724
[xxiii] Frances Kamm, What Is and Is Not Wrong with Enhancements," Human Enhancement, edited by Nick Bostrom & Julian Savulescu, Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 113.
[xxiv] Immanuel Kant, translated by Herbert James Paton, Moral Law: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Routledge, 1991. p. 66.
[xxv] Fritz Allhoff, "Germ-Line Genetic Enhancement and Rawlsian Primary Goods," Journal of Evolution and Technology, Vol. 18 Issue 1, May 2008, pgs 10-26, http://jetpress.org/v18/allhoff.htm
[xxvi] Rawls, John. 1999. A Theory of Justice. Rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 54-55.
[xxvii] Enough, p. 191.
[xxviii] National Cancer Institute, "Nanopore Sequencing Could Slash DNA Analysis Costs," March, 2009, http://nano.cancer.gov/news_center/2009/march/nanotech_news_2009-03-25g.asp
[xxix] C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, HarperCollins, 2001, p. 17.
[xxx] Paul R Billings; Ruth Hubbard; Stuart A. Newman, "Human germline gene modification: a dissent," The Lancet, May 29th, 1999, p. 1873 http://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article.php?id=175
[xxxi] National Resource for Cell Analysis and Modeling, The Virtual Cell, http://www.nrcam.uchc.edu/news/shortcourse_09.html
[xxxii] Darine El-Chaar et al., "Risk of birth defects increased in pregnancies conceived by assisted human reproduction," Fertility and Sterility, October 29, 2008 http://www.fertstert.org/article/S0015-0282%2808%2903574-7/abstract
[xxxiii] George Annas et al., "Protecting the Endangered Human: Toward an International Treaty Prohibiting Cloning and Inheritable Alterations," American Journal of Law and Medicine, Vol. 28, Number 2&3, 2002 p. 162
[xxxiv] James Wilson, "Transhumanism and Moral Equality," Bioethics, Vol. 21, No. 8, pp. 419-425.
[xxxv] R.J. Rummel, Death by Government, Transactions Publishers, 1994.
[xxxvi] Allen Buchanan, "Enhancement and the Ethics of Development," Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, Vol. 18, No. 1, March, 2008. (draft) p. 2. http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/petrie-flom/PDFs/Buchanan.pdf
[xxxvii] Buchanan, p.11
[xxxviii] Buchanan, p. 7
[xxxix] Nordhaus, William, "The Health of Nations: The Contribution of Improved Health to Living Standards," in Kevin Murphy and Robert Topel, eds., The Economic Value of Medical Research, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2002.
[xl] Buchanan. P.14.
[xli] Francis Clines, "Research Clinic Opens in Ohio for Genetic Maladies that Haunt Amish Families," New York Times, June 20, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/20/us/research-clinic-opens-in-ohio-for-genetic-maladies-that-haunt-amish-families.html?sec=health&&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=all
[xlii] Savulescu, Julian.,"In Defense of Selection for Nondisease Genes. The American Journal of Bioethics - Volume 1, Number 1, Winter 2001, pp. 16-19
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Why GOP Lost NY Special Election for Congress
Why GOP Lost NY Special Election for Congress. By Roger Stone
Newsmax, Sunday, April 26, 2009 11:38 PM
On paper at least, retaking the Congressional seat in New York should have been a chip shot for the GOP. The last Republican, Congressman John Sweeney, only lost the seat when his opponent Kirsten Gillibrand obtained confidential New York State Police documents and used them to smear Sweeney. It was widely thought that New York Governor George Pataki had slipped Gillibrand the documents when Pataki and Sweeney fell out over intra-party matters with Sweeney objecting to Pataki’s shift to the left.
In fact, the geography of the district was specially drawn for Sweeney and the Republicans by powerful State Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno, an ally of Sweeney, in the last Congressional redistricting. The District includes the tony suburbs of Albany but only skirts the city before stretching all the way through central New York to the tip of the Mid-Hudson Valley.
With the 75,000-Republican voter registration edge, it would seem that the Republicans would easily reclaim this seat when it was vacated. But recent elections show that the district was carried by Obama, Schumer and Clinton. Polling showed both President Obama and his pork laden stimulus bill to be popular in the District.
When Governor Paterson appointed Congresswoman Gillibrand to the Senate vacancy caused by Hillary Clinton’s resignation to become Secretary of State, the governor called a snap special election. Republicans nominated a potentially strong candidate in Jim Tedisco, a solid conservative who served as Minority Leader of the State Assembly and thus was fairly known in the suburban Albany part of the district.
Tedisco’s nomination over former Assemblyman John Faso, who was the Republican candidate for Governor in 2006, and State Senator Betty Little was engineered by GOP State chief Joe Mondello, although Tedisco lived just outside the District.
Tedisco, a local college basketball star, has been a consistent critic of New York’s runaway spending and borrowing and had dogged political style as the only conservative in state leadership. It was Tedisco who led the opposition to Governor Eliot Spitzer’s naïve plan to give driver’s licenses – government issued picture IDs – to illegal immigrants.
The Democrats nominated Scott Murphy, a Democratic fundraiser for Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, who had made modest millions on Wall Street and spent time in Indiana working for that state’s democratic governor. Murphy is tall and telegenic. More importantly, the businessman had a long business track record but little record on tax or spending issues.
Republican National Chairman Michael Steele declared the race a “top priority” but in the end contributed only $300,000 to the effort. For the first time, Democrats outraised Republicans for a special congressional election with Murphy raising almost $1 million more than Tedisco. While pro-Tedisco groups spent $2.1 Million, pro-Murphy groups spent only $1.2- making spending by both sides roughly equal.
Murphy’s fundraising juggernaut was assisted by former President Bill Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden, Governor David Paterson, Congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand and Speaker Nancy Pelosi and top operatives from the Democratic congressional campaign committee. These leading democrats picked up the phone to high dollar donors, collecting $1 million more than the Republicans.
The National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee weighed into the race with harsh negative ads blasting Murphy for being partners in a company which had outsourced some jobs to India. Despite heavy spending by the NRCC, there is little evidence that voters cared or held it against Murphy.
Tedisco stumbled when he attempted to finesse a question about whether he would have voted for or against President Obama’s stimulus bill. When the Minority Leader refused to take a position, Murphy effectively blasted him as a “waffler” while Republicans refused to rally to Tedisco’s side. A poll thirty days before the election showed that eight out of ten Democrats were supporting Murphy while only 6 out of 10 Republicans were supporting Tedisco. It also showed independents and moderate Republicans drifting to Murphy because they saw Tedisco as a “waffling politician.”
Murphy surged ahead in the race and probably would have won comfortably but for public outrage over the AIG bailout package which Murphy had said on his campaign website he would have voted for. Tedisco went on the attack. The National Republican Trust, an independent political action committee, began airing a TV commercial picking up Tedisco’s attack on Murphy over the AIG issue. Helping their cause was the fact that Murphy himself had paid fat bonuses to employees at of one of his failing companies at shareholders’ expense.
At that moment, the National Republican Congressional Committee began airing television commercials attacking Murphy for opposing the death penalty for terrorists, based on a radio interview Murphy had done on influential New York Post political reporter Fred Dicker’s radio show. While a vast majority of voters favor the death penalty for terrorists, the ad seemed like Bush – Cheney type deflection away from the economic issues which made terrorism irrelevant, but the mixed messages confused voters at a time that overnight polling showed Tedisco on the rebound and closing fast.
Murphy had the support of the New York State Working Families Party, which is essentially a front sponsored by big labor to provide money and manpower to liberal and leftist candidates they support. The State Chairman of the WFP sits on the board of ACORN, the notorious community voter organization that has been connected to voter fraud and other illegal Election Day high jinks in numerous states in 2008. The Working Families Party isn’t about working, has nothing to do with families and isn’t really a party. The Murphy campaign coordinated carefully with the WFP to conduct an aggressive door-to-door canvass to identify Murphy supporters.
Murphy, noting Gillibrand’s 100% National Rifle Association voting record, quietly mailed any voter with a gun permit or hunting license a last minute letter reaffirming his support for Second Amendment rights. Of course, the mail piece was mailed to arrive the day before the election, too late for Murphy’s more liberal supporters to learn about it and take offense. Tedisco made no effort in the District’s large and influential gun-owning community.
Union money poured into the District and the Tedisco campaign would have been outspent almost two to one on Albany television but for the efforts of the National Republican Trust which spent toe to toe with Murphy and pounded the Wall Street millionaire on the AIG bailout issue.
Election Day came and provided a photo finish. The lead seesawed between Tedisco and Murphy first for days, then for weeks. When Murphy picked up additional votes in the recounts of Greene and Columbia County, everyone waited with bated breath for the Republican stronghold of Saratoga County to report its final totals. Although Tedisco won Saratoga 58-42, the final tally put him 477 votes behind and the veteran pol threw in the towel and conceded.
There’s plenty of blame to go around for the loss of a seat with this kind of Republican voter registration advantage. With the Republican National Committee under Michael Steele and the National Republican Congressional Committee now essentially under the control of one Republican political consultant, their joint effort must be panned as a failure. Their harsh negative ads against Murphy for creating jobs in India and opposing the death penalty for terrorists had little impact on Murphy’s rise when the voters principal focus was on the economy and the need for jobs.
Who advised Tedisco not to slam the Obama stimulus bill remains a mystery. Whether that was the advice of national party operatives looking at polls showing Obama popular in the District or whether the veteran conservative lawmaker decided to hedge on his own isn’t known but the misstep on so fundamental an issue hurt him badly.
Likewise, credit must be given to Tedisco for grabbing the AIG issue and rebounding to an essential tie; if the election had been held ten days earlier he might have lost by as much as four points. Nor can Tedisco be blamed for a half-hearted effort. He campaigned hard and effectively.
Sadly, Tedisco’s loss is just part of a larger story about the large decline of the New York State Republican Party. Under Governor George Pataki, the Party lost crucial county executive races on Long Island and in the New York suburbs as Republican registration edges in upstate New York consistently shrank with the decline of the population.
Today, the New York GOP, which produced two time presidential nominee Governor Thomas E. Dewey, Republican presidential contender and Vice President Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and three term Republican Governor George Pataki, holds no statewide offices and, other than former Mayor Rudy Giuliani who’s run is unlikely, has no strong potential candidate for governor.
Jim Tedisco’s loss in the 20th District is just another step in the decline of the once-mighty New York Republican Party.
Newsmax, Sunday, April 26, 2009 11:38 PM
On paper at least, retaking the Congressional seat in New York should have been a chip shot for the GOP. The last Republican, Congressman John Sweeney, only lost the seat when his opponent Kirsten Gillibrand obtained confidential New York State Police documents and used them to smear Sweeney. It was widely thought that New York Governor George Pataki had slipped Gillibrand the documents when Pataki and Sweeney fell out over intra-party matters with Sweeney objecting to Pataki’s shift to the left.
In fact, the geography of the district was specially drawn for Sweeney and the Republicans by powerful State Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno, an ally of Sweeney, in the last Congressional redistricting. The District includes the tony suburbs of Albany but only skirts the city before stretching all the way through central New York to the tip of the Mid-Hudson Valley.
With the 75,000-Republican voter registration edge, it would seem that the Republicans would easily reclaim this seat when it was vacated. But recent elections show that the district was carried by Obama, Schumer and Clinton. Polling showed both President Obama and his pork laden stimulus bill to be popular in the District.
When Governor Paterson appointed Congresswoman Gillibrand to the Senate vacancy caused by Hillary Clinton’s resignation to become Secretary of State, the governor called a snap special election. Republicans nominated a potentially strong candidate in Jim Tedisco, a solid conservative who served as Minority Leader of the State Assembly and thus was fairly known in the suburban Albany part of the district.
Tedisco’s nomination over former Assemblyman John Faso, who was the Republican candidate for Governor in 2006, and State Senator Betty Little was engineered by GOP State chief Joe Mondello, although Tedisco lived just outside the District.
Tedisco, a local college basketball star, has been a consistent critic of New York’s runaway spending and borrowing and had dogged political style as the only conservative in state leadership. It was Tedisco who led the opposition to Governor Eliot Spitzer’s naïve plan to give driver’s licenses – government issued picture IDs – to illegal immigrants.
The Democrats nominated Scott Murphy, a Democratic fundraiser for Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, who had made modest millions on Wall Street and spent time in Indiana working for that state’s democratic governor. Murphy is tall and telegenic. More importantly, the businessman had a long business track record but little record on tax or spending issues.
Republican National Chairman Michael Steele declared the race a “top priority” but in the end contributed only $300,000 to the effort. For the first time, Democrats outraised Republicans for a special congressional election with Murphy raising almost $1 million more than Tedisco. While pro-Tedisco groups spent $2.1 Million, pro-Murphy groups spent only $1.2- making spending by both sides roughly equal.
Murphy’s fundraising juggernaut was assisted by former President Bill Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden, Governor David Paterson, Congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand and Speaker Nancy Pelosi and top operatives from the Democratic congressional campaign committee. These leading democrats picked up the phone to high dollar donors, collecting $1 million more than the Republicans.
The National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee weighed into the race with harsh negative ads blasting Murphy for being partners in a company which had outsourced some jobs to India. Despite heavy spending by the NRCC, there is little evidence that voters cared or held it against Murphy.
Tedisco stumbled when he attempted to finesse a question about whether he would have voted for or against President Obama’s stimulus bill. When the Minority Leader refused to take a position, Murphy effectively blasted him as a “waffler” while Republicans refused to rally to Tedisco’s side. A poll thirty days before the election showed that eight out of ten Democrats were supporting Murphy while only 6 out of 10 Republicans were supporting Tedisco. It also showed independents and moderate Republicans drifting to Murphy because they saw Tedisco as a “waffling politician.”
Murphy surged ahead in the race and probably would have won comfortably but for public outrage over the AIG bailout package which Murphy had said on his campaign website he would have voted for. Tedisco went on the attack. The National Republican Trust, an independent political action committee, began airing a TV commercial picking up Tedisco’s attack on Murphy over the AIG issue. Helping their cause was the fact that Murphy himself had paid fat bonuses to employees at of one of his failing companies at shareholders’ expense.
At that moment, the National Republican Congressional Committee began airing television commercials attacking Murphy for opposing the death penalty for terrorists, based on a radio interview Murphy had done on influential New York Post political reporter Fred Dicker’s radio show. While a vast majority of voters favor the death penalty for terrorists, the ad seemed like Bush – Cheney type deflection away from the economic issues which made terrorism irrelevant, but the mixed messages confused voters at a time that overnight polling showed Tedisco on the rebound and closing fast.
Murphy had the support of the New York State Working Families Party, which is essentially a front sponsored by big labor to provide money and manpower to liberal and leftist candidates they support. The State Chairman of the WFP sits on the board of ACORN, the notorious community voter organization that has been connected to voter fraud and other illegal Election Day high jinks in numerous states in 2008. The Working Families Party isn’t about working, has nothing to do with families and isn’t really a party. The Murphy campaign coordinated carefully with the WFP to conduct an aggressive door-to-door canvass to identify Murphy supporters.
Murphy, noting Gillibrand’s 100% National Rifle Association voting record, quietly mailed any voter with a gun permit or hunting license a last minute letter reaffirming his support for Second Amendment rights. Of course, the mail piece was mailed to arrive the day before the election, too late for Murphy’s more liberal supporters to learn about it and take offense. Tedisco made no effort in the District’s large and influential gun-owning community.
Union money poured into the District and the Tedisco campaign would have been outspent almost two to one on Albany television but for the efforts of the National Republican Trust which spent toe to toe with Murphy and pounded the Wall Street millionaire on the AIG bailout issue.
Election Day came and provided a photo finish. The lead seesawed between Tedisco and Murphy first for days, then for weeks. When Murphy picked up additional votes in the recounts of Greene and Columbia County, everyone waited with bated breath for the Republican stronghold of Saratoga County to report its final totals. Although Tedisco won Saratoga 58-42, the final tally put him 477 votes behind and the veteran pol threw in the towel and conceded.
There’s plenty of blame to go around for the loss of a seat with this kind of Republican voter registration advantage. With the Republican National Committee under Michael Steele and the National Republican Congressional Committee now essentially under the control of one Republican political consultant, their joint effort must be panned as a failure. Their harsh negative ads against Murphy for creating jobs in India and opposing the death penalty for terrorists had little impact on Murphy’s rise when the voters principal focus was on the economy and the need for jobs.
Who advised Tedisco not to slam the Obama stimulus bill remains a mystery. Whether that was the advice of national party operatives looking at polls showing Obama popular in the District or whether the veteran conservative lawmaker decided to hedge on his own isn’t known but the misstep on so fundamental an issue hurt him badly.
Likewise, credit must be given to Tedisco for grabbing the AIG issue and rebounding to an essential tie; if the election had been held ten days earlier he might have lost by as much as four points. Nor can Tedisco be blamed for a half-hearted effort. He campaigned hard and effectively.
Sadly, Tedisco’s loss is just part of a larger story about the large decline of the New York State Republican Party. Under Governor George Pataki, the Party lost crucial county executive races on Long Island and in the New York suburbs as Republican registration edges in upstate New York consistently shrank with the decline of the population.
Today, the New York GOP, which produced two time presidential nominee Governor Thomas E. Dewey, Republican presidential contender and Vice President Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and three term Republican Governor George Pataki, holds no statewide offices and, other than former Mayor Rudy Giuliani who’s run is unlikely, has no strong potential candidate for governor.
Jim Tedisco’s loss in the 20th District is just another step in the decline of the once-mighty New York Republican Party.
The US Should Cut Military Spending in Half
The US Should Cut Military Spending in Half, by Benjamin H. Friedman
The Christian Science Monitor, April 27, 2009
Hawks depicted the cuts that Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently proposed for the Pentagon's weapons programs as a savage assault on the military industrial complex. They insisted that Secretary Gates would leave us prostrate before future rivals.
Counterinsurgency enthusiasts, meanwhile cheered Mr. Gates's willingness to swap high-tech platforms for capabilities suited to the unconventional conflicts we are fighting.
The truth is that the Gates proposal is both too cautious and inadequate. After all, Gates isn't cutting non-war-related military spending; he's raising it slightly, to a whopping $534 billion.
If he has his druthers, the next military budget will look much like this one: It will still serve excessive objectives. We will still defend allies that can defend themselves, fight in other people's civil wars in a vain effort to "fix" their states, and burn tax dollars to serve the hubristic notion that US military hegemony is what keeps the world safe.
To really keep us safe, we should slash defense spending. Americans should prepare for fewer wars, not different ones. Far from providing our defense, our military posture endangers us. It drags us into others' conflicts, provokes animosity, and wastes resources. We need a defense budget worthy of the name. We need military restraint. And that would allow us to cut defense spending roughly in half.
Two points demonstrate how unambitious the Gates proposal is.
First, he would just replace most canceled programs. Gates suggested ending production of the Air Force's premier fighter, the F-22. But he wants to accelerate the Joint Strike Fighter program and to buy more F-18s. He would delay the Navy's procurement of cruisers and its next carrier, but only slightly. He would end the Navy's DDG-1000 destroyer program, but buy more of the Navy's older Arleigh Burke class destroyer, and keep buying the Navy's littoral combat ship.
He proposes breaking up the Army's modernization program, the Future Combat Systems, and canceling some of the vehicles – but they will be replaced with others. All told, spending on a national missile defense program would be cut by only about 15 percent.
Second, the military's size will barely budge under this plan. Yes, the Army would grow to only 45 brigade combat teams rather than 48, as was planned. But the people who were to fill out the 48 would be stuffed into 45 – the units will have higher readiness. The Navy is likely to shrink to 10 carrier battle groups instead of 11, but the decline will take decades. The Air Force will shrink only slightly. Gates wants to halt personnel reductions in the Air Force and Navy and continue to expand the Army and Marines by 90,000 servicemen.
To understand why that is conservative, consider how much we spend on defense relative to both our purported rivals and our past. Our defense budget is almost half the world's, even leaving out nuclear weapons, the wars, veterans, and homeland security. It is also more than we spent at any point during the cold war. When that struggle ended, we simply gave back the Reagan buildup and kept spending at average cold war levels. Then we began another buildup in 1998 that nearly doubled nonwar defense spending.
There are no enemies to justify such spending. Invasion and civil war are unthinkable here. North Korea, Syria, and Iran trouble their citizens and neighbors, but with small economies, shoddy militaries, and a desire to survive, they pose little threat to us. Their combined military spending is one-sixtieth of ours.
Russia and China are incapable of territorial expansion that should pose any worry, unless we put our troops on their borders. China's defense spending is less than one-fifth of ours. We spend more researching and developing new weapons than Russia spends on its military. And with an economy larger than ours, the European Union can protect itself. Our biggest security problem, terrorism, is chiefly an intelligence problem arising from a Muslim civil war. Our military has little to do with it.
We should embrace this geopolitical fortune, not look for trouble. If we decided to avoid Iraq-style occupations and fight only to defend ourselves or important allies, we could cut our ground forces in half.
If we admitted that we are not going to fight a war with China anytime soon, we could retire chunks of the Air Force and Navy that are justified by that mission. Even with a far smaller defense budget, ours will remain the world's most powerful military by a large margin. The recently enacted GI Bill, which gives veterans a subsidized or free college education, offers a vehicle for transitioning military personnel into the civilian economy.
Of course, powerful interests benefit from heavy defense spending, and cutting the military budget would be a tough sell. Both political parties believe that American primacy is the route to safety. But they're wrong.
A more restrained approach to defense is what would make us safer.
The Christian Science Monitor, April 27, 2009
Hawks depicted the cuts that Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently proposed for the Pentagon's weapons programs as a savage assault on the military industrial complex. They insisted that Secretary Gates would leave us prostrate before future rivals.
Counterinsurgency enthusiasts, meanwhile cheered Mr. Gates's willingness to swap high-tech platforms for capabilities suited to the unconventional conflicts we are fighting.
The truth is that the Gates proposal is both too cautious and inadequate. After all, Gates isn't cutting non-war-related military spending; he's raising it slightly, to a whopping $534 billion.
If he has his druthers, the next military budget will look much like this one: It will still serve excessive objectives. We will still defend allies that can defend themselves, fight in other people's civil wars in a vain effort to "fix" their states, and burn tax dollars to serve the hubristic notion that US military hegemony is what keeps the world safe.
To really keep us safe, we should slash defense spending. Americans should prepare for fewer wars, not different ones. Far from providing our defense, our military posture endangers us. It drags us into others' conflicts, provokes animosity, and wastes resources. We need a defense budget worthy of the name. We need military restraint. And that would allow us to cut defense spending roughly in half.
Two points demonstrate how unambitious the Gates proposal is.
First, he would just replace most canceled programs. Gates suggested ending production of the Air Force's premier fighter, the F-22. But he wants to accelerate the Joint Strike Fighter program and to buy more F-18s. He would delay the Navy's procurement of cruisers and its next carrier, but only slightly. He would end the Navy's DDG-1000 destroyer program, but buy more of the Navy's older Arleigh Burke class destroyer, and keep buying the Navy's littoral combat ship.
He proposes breaking up the Army's modernization program, the Future Combat Systems, and canceling some of the vehicles – but they will be replaced with others. All told, spending on a national missile defense program would be cut by only about 15 percent.
Second, the military's size will barely budge under this plan. Yes, the Army would grow to only 45 brigade combat teams rather than 48, as was planned. But the people who were to fill out the 48 would be stuffed into 45 – the units will have higher readiness. The Navy is likely to shrink to 10 carrier battle groups instead of 11, but the decline will take decades. The Air Force will shrink only slightly. Gates wants to halt personnel reductions in the Air Force and Navy and continue to expand the Army and Marines by 90,000 servicemen.
To understand why that is conservative, consider how much we spend on defense relative to both our purported rivals and our past. Our defense budget is almost half the world's, even leaving out nuclear weapons, the wars, veterans, and homeland security. It is also more than we spent at any point during the cold war. When that struggle ended, we simply gave back the Reagan buildup and kept spending at average cold war levels. Then we began another buildup in 1998 that nearly doubled nonwar defense spending.
There are no enemies to justify such spending. Invasion and civil war are unthinkable here. North Korea, Syria, and Iran trouble their citizens and neighbors, but with small economies, shoddy militaries, and a desire to survive, they pose little threat to us. Their combined military spending is one-sixtieth of ours.
Russia and China are incapable of territorial expansion that should pose any worry, unless we put our troops on their borders. China's defense spending is less than one-fifth of ours. We spend more researching and developing new weapons than Russia spends on its military. And with an economy larger than ours, the European Union can protect itself. Our biggest security problem, terrorism, is chiefly an intelligence problem arising from a Muslim civil war. Our military has little to do with it.
We should embrace this geopolitical fortune, not look for trouble. If we decided to avoid Iraq-style occupations and fight only to defend ourselves or important allies, we could cut our ground forces in half.
If we admitted that we are not going to fight a war with China anytime soon, we could retire chunks of the Air Force and Navy that are justified by that mission. Even with a far smaller defense budget, ours will remain the world's most powerful military by a large margin. The recently enacted GI Bill, which gives veterans a subsidized or free college education, offers a vehicle for transitioning military personnel into the civilian economy.
Of course, powerful interests benefit from heavy defense spending, and cutting the military budget would be a tough sell. Both political parties believe that American primacy is the route to safety. But they're wrong.
A more restrained approach to defense is what would make us safer.
American cities could host much larger immigrant populations and thrive
The Immigration Fallacy, by Will Wilkinson
American cities could host much larger immigrant populations and thrive
The Week, April 27, 2009
Here is what Toronto is not: Toronto is not dirty, dangerous, or poor. Toronto is not a hell of lost liberties or a babble of cultural incoherence or a ruin of failed institutions. Yet a popular argument against high levels of immigration suggests it should be.
In his 2004 book Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity, the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington warned that "the United States of America will suffer the fate of Sparta and Rome," should its founding Anglo-Protestant culture continue to wane. Commenting sympathetically on Huntington's argument, conservative writer John O'Sullivan asserts that if traditional patterns of national life are "removed or destroyed, then anomie, despair, and disintegration tend to be among the consequences." So we must take care to protect our precious cultural patrimony from the acid of "de-nationalizing" economic and cultural globalization. We must keep outsiders out.
Successful societies (so this argument goes) owe their liberty and prosperity to distinct institutions which, in turn, depend on the persistence and dominance of the culture that established and nurtured them. Should that culture fade—or become too diluted by the customs, religions, and tongues of outsiders—the foundation of all that is best and most attractive about that society cannot long last.
But somebody forgot to tell Toronto! Nearly half the denizens of Canada's most populous metropolis were born outside the nation's borders—47 percent according to the 2006 census, and the number is rising. This makes Toronto, the fifth biggest city in North America, also the most diverse city in North America. Neither Miami, Los Angeles, nor New York City can compete with Toronto's cosmopolitan credentials.
Here is what Toronto is: the fifth most livable city in the world. So said The Economist Intelligence Unit in a report last year drawing on indicators of stability, health care, culture, environment, education and infrastructure. (The Economist's world champion of livability, Vancouver, harbors a treacherous 40 percent foreign-born population.) Toronto is wealthy, healthy, well-educated, and much safer than any sizable American city. In 2006, its murder rate was 2.6 per 100,000 residents, which makes it less than half as deadly as Des Moines, Iowa. The most culturally mixed city on the continent truly is one of Earth's closest approximations of urban paradise.
Of course, Canada's legacy of slavery and segregation is far less brutal and defining than is America's. And Canada does not share a long border with a much poorer country, millions of whose people will cross it looking for opportunity no matter what the law says. High levels of low-skilled immigration from Mexico and Central America create real problems in the United States, and Americans are right to worry about them. But these problems have solutions (guest-worker programs, not walls) and imply nothing about the general viability of healthy immigrant-rich societies.
The United States, this fabled land of immigrants, has fallen dismally far behind countries like Australia and Canada in openness to immigration. The Statue of Liberty may as well be moved to Vancouver's English Bay where the "huddled masses yearning to breathe free" are now rather more welcome than in New York harbor. Many Americans, convinced by arguments like Samuel Huntington's, have come to believe that the institutions we so rightly cherish are too dependent on a feeble, endangered cultural inheritance to survive the bustling presence of strange languages, exotic gods and pungent foods. That cultural fragility argument is false, and it deserves to die.
Toronto, which has an Anglo-Protestant heritage as strong as any, has proved it dead wrong. In fact, Toronto shows that a community and its core institutions can not only survive a massive and growing immigrant population but thrive with one. Multicultural Toronto and cities like it prove that the institutions of liberal modernity are robust. Life within them is so good that people the world over flock to them. And newcomers do not take these institutions for granted. They have a stake in seeing them last. They can and do make them stronger.
None of this is to say that Toronto doesn't have its problems. (Or that it's not boring to New Yorkers.). But we would do well to learn the lessons of cultural accommodation and integration from our neighbors to the north. American cities could host much larger immigrant populations and thrive. Maybe someday an American city will place in the top ten on the list of the world's most livable places. Maybe—if it becomes more like Toronto.
American cities could host much larger immigrant populations and thrive
The Week, April 27, 2009
Here is what Toronto is not: Toronto is not dirty, dangerous, or poor. Toronto is not a hell of lost liberties or a babble of cultural incoherence or a ruin of failed institutions. Yet a popular argument against high levels of immigration suggests it should be.
In his 2004 book Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity, the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington warned that "the United States of America will suffer the fate of Sparta and Rome," should its founding Anglo-Protestant culture continue to wane. Commenting sympathetically on Huntington's argument, conservative writer John O'Sullivan asserts that if traditional patterns of national life are "removed or destroyed, then anomie, despair, and disintegration tend to be among the consequences." So we must take care to protect our precious cultural patrimony from the acid of "de-nationalizing" economic and cultural globalization. We must keep outsiders out.
Successful societies (so this argument goes) owe their liberty and prosperity to distinct institutions which, in turn, depend on the persistence and dominance of the culture that established and nurtured them. Should that culture fade—or become too diluted by the customs, religions, and tongues of outsiders—the foundation of all that is best and most attractive about that society cannot long last.
But somebody forgot to tell Toronto! Nearly half the denizens of Canada's most populous metropolis were born outside the nation's borders—47 percent according to the 2006 census, and the number is rising. This makes Toronto, the fifth biggest city in North America, also the most diverse city in North America. Neither Miami, Los Angeles, nor New York City can compete with Toronto's cosmopolitan credentials.
Here is what Toronto is: the fifth most livable city in the world. So said The Economist Intelligence Unit in a report last year drawing on indicators of stability, health care, culture, environment, education and infrastructure. (The Economist's world champion of livability, Vancouver, harbors a treacherous 40 percent foreign-born population.) Toronto is wealthy, healthy, well-educated, and much safer than any sizable American city. In 2006, its murder rate was 2.6 per 100,000 residents, which makes it less than half as deadly as Des Moines, Iowa. The most culturally mixed city on the continent truly is one of Earth's closest approximations of urban paradise.
Of course, Canada's legacy of slavery and segregation is far less brutal and defining than is America's. And Canada does not share a long border with a much poorer country, millions of whose people will cross it looking for opportunity no matter what the law says. High levels of low-skilled immigration from Mexico and Central America create real problems in the United States, and Americans are right to worry about them. But these problems have solutions (guest-worker programs, not walls) and imply nothing about the general viability of healthy immigrant-rich societies.
The United States, this fabled land of immigrants, has fallen dismally far behind countries like Australia and Canada in openness to immigration. The Statue of Liberty may as well be moved to Vancouver's English Bay where the "huddled masses yearning to breathe free" are now rather more welcome than in New York harbor. Many Americans, convinced by arguments like Samuel Huntington's, have come to believe that the institutions we so rightly cherish are too dependent on a feeble, endangered cultural inheritance to survive the bustling presence of strange languages, exotic gods and pungent foods. That cultural fragility argument is false, and it deserves to die.
Toronto, which has an Anglo-Protestant heritage as strong as any, has proved it dead wrong. In fact, Toronto shows that a community and its core institutions can not only survive a massive and growing immigrant population but thrive with one. Multicultural Toronto and cities like it prove that the institutions of liberal modernity are robust. Life within them is so good that people the world over flock to them. And newcomers do not take these institutions for granted. They have a stake in seeing them last. They can and do make them stronger.
None of this is to say that Toronto doesn't have its problems. (Or that it's not boring to New Yorkers.). But we would do well to learn the lessons of cultural accommodation and integration from our neighbors to the north. American cities could host much larger immigrant populations and thrive. Maybe someday an American city will place in the top ten on the list of the world's most livable places. Maybe—if it becomes more like Toronto.
Reviewing India’s Nuclear Doctrine
Reviewing India’s Nuclear Doctrine, by Ali Ahmed
IDSA, April 24, 2009
A long standing observation on India’s strategic culture is that national strategy remains unarticulated. A significant departure from this characteristic was made by India following a review of the nuclear doctrine in Jan 2003. It is now more than six years since the event. There is a need to review doctrine periodically in any case. In this specific case the need is more acute given changes in strategic circumstances. The present juncture is an apposite one in that a new government would be coming into power soon. Therefore initiating a case for a review of India’s nuclear doctrine is in order. This policy brief proposes a direction of review by interrogating a principal pillar of the doctrine – that of ‘massive punitive retaliation’.
There are other contending directions of review. These include whether India should continue to include ‘minimal’ in its formulation ‘credible minimum deterrent’ in light of ‘minimum’ seemingly contradicting the important dimension of the two i.e., ‘credible’. There has even been a recommendation by a departing National Security Advisory Board on jettisoning ‘No First Use’ – perhaps the most salient pillar of the doctrine. The votaries of the Triad would prefer a mention of a Triad based second strike capability in the doctrine. These possible directions indicate that there is a need for review. It is another matter that in doing so, some of the proposals would be accommodated and some disregarded.
In this regard, the proposal requires a shift away from ‘massive punitive retaliation’ in favour of ‘flexible punitive retaliation’. The policy brief first establishes the need to do so by discussing three conflict scenarios highlighting the dangers of the formulation and the advantages from the proposed shift. It concludes that a strategic dialogue with both China and Pakistan is necessary for clarity in communication. This would enhance deterrence and dispel possible misperceptions and apprehensions. This is particularly necessary with respect to Pakistan, given that the state is perpetually poised on ‘failed state’ status with implications for India.
The current doctrinal precept
The sub-paragraph of interest of the press release subsequent to the Cabinet Committee on Security endorsing the nuclear doctrine of 04 Jan 03 reads: “(ii) A posture of “No First Use”: Nuclear weapons will only be used in retaliation against a nuclear attack on Indian territory or on Indian forces anywhere; (iii) Nuclear retaliation to a first strike will be massive and designed to inflict unacceptable damage.”
The inclusion of the term ‘massive’ was a discernible change from the earlier formulation of the Draft Nuclear Doctrine in which the term had not found mention. Instead the Draft had used the term ‘sufficient’ implying a degree of choice on the nature of the response being available to the political decision maker. The specific sentence in the sub-paragraph on Credibility in the Draft reads: ‘Any adversary must know that India can and will retaliate with sufficient nuclear weapons to inflict destruction and punishment that the aggressor will find unacceptable if nuclear weapons are used against India and its forces.’ Though the Draft was just that - a ‘draft’ to compel the government’s attention, the critique stands. The principal problem with the change is that it restricts the choice of the decision maker by excluding the set of less expansive responses.
‘Massive’, not defined explicitly, can be taken as a product of throw weight and target set that produces the promised ‘unacceptable damage’. There are three implications: one is in terms of ‘pain’ implying counter value targeting; second, is reducing the ability of the enemy to mount a counterstrike, which would be counter force; and third is a mix of both. Since in all three options ‘unacceptable damage’ is inflicted, it is worth questioning whether only ‘massive’ nuclear counter strike would cause ‘unacceptable damage’. It is well understood that even a single warhead through a counter value strike can be ‘catastrophic’. Therefore, the term ‘massive’, in its emphasis on throw weight or numbers, is superfluous. It has even been averred that the inclusion of ‘massive’ was likely an ‘unconsidered formulation’. On this count there is a need for review.
Massive nuclear retaliation is definitely a possibility and would be credible in case the enemy’s nuclear first use is in an expansive (‘massive’) form such as resort to first strike, decapitating strike or counter value targeting. However, should ‘first use’ be of a restricted nature such as at the tactical level, for India to up the ante by going ‘massive’ to counter it would be irrational. This was an observation true in the Cold War era as pointed out by Thomas Schelling in his landmark, The Strategy of Conflict: ‘The threat of massive retaliation, if ‘massive’ is interpreted to mean unlimited retaliation, does indeed lose credibility with the loss of our hope that a skillfully conducted all out strike might succeed in precluding counter retaliation.’ Since precluding counter retaliation is not possible in India’s case with respect to Pakistan, leave aside China, it would be prudent for India to go down a route traversed by the US during the McNamara years. The logic that persuaded McNamara in his own words was:
‘One cannot fashion a credible deterrent out of an incredible action…What we are proposing is a capability to strike back after absorbing a first blow. This means we have to build and maintain a second strike force. Such a force should have sufficient flexibility to permit a choice of strategies… Such a prospect would give the Soviets no incentive to withhold attack against our cities in a first strike. We want to give them a better alternative…the strongest possible incentive to refrain from attacking our cities.’
India’s promise of massive counter strikes to first use against its territory or its forces is wanting in credibility, particularly if the strike were of a tactical nature but with a strategic purpose of nuclear signaling for war termination. This is particularly important since both the likely adversaries are unlikely to resort to nuclear weapons in a massive mode in the first salvo.
Consider the case of China. Though bound by an NFU, it is reportedly a qualified NFU in not being applicable to territory it claims. In a border conflict with India it could resort to nuclear first use on its claimed territory of Arunachal Pradesh. Such use would likely involve the use of tactical nuclear weapons. Since India’s is an Assured Retaliation doctrine, India would only be complicating the aftermath of the nuclear exchange for itself should its counter strike be ‘massive’.
The same is the case with Pakistan. Pakistan, emulating NATO in the Cold War era does not profess NFU. In case it were to resort to nuclear first use, it is quite apparent that this would not be of an order of a debilitating ‘first strike’ given the imbalance in numbers and the security of information surrounding locations of Indian nuclear assets. Even if it were to attempt to do so, it could not preclude assured Indian counter value retaliation. Having fired off a major proportion of its arsenal in attempting a first strike, it would not have the numbers to mount a counter strike. In effect, it would ab initio be deterred from attempting a first strike. Therefore Islamabad’s most likely first use is a tactical strike with a strategic purpose of forestalling Indian conventional military advances or to bring about conflict termination by focusing the efforts of the international community. Counter retaliation in a ‘massive’ mode to such a symbolic strike would be to India’s disadvantage since there is no guarantee that some Pakistani weapons would not survive. These would inevitably be directed at counter value targets to maximize vengeance. To open itself to such a threat would be irrational.
The problem has been pointed out earlier following the release of the Draft nuclear doctrine in the following manner:
‘….Our intent of causing ‘unacceptable damage’ is credible only in case our population centers and nuclear-industrial concentrations are hit, inclusion of military forces as targets that will invite such a response makes it less credible…the point is having caused ‘unacceptable damage’ is no consolation for ending up a recipient of it…Thus there is a need to move beyond the avatar of ‘massive retaliation’…in favour of ‘flexible response’…’ (Ali Ahmed, ‘Doctrinal Challenge’, USI Journal, Jan 2000)
It is seen that the term ‘massive’ is not only tying down India’s options but dangerously so. This is elaborated through scenarios in the next section with respect to Pakistan as the nuclear adversary. In the case of China as an adversary in similar scenarios, there is no way India could survive the eventual nuclear exchange.
[Full brief at the link above.]
IDSA, April 24, 2009
A long standing observation on India’s strategic culture is that national strategy remains unarticulated. A significant departure from this characteristic was made by India following a review of the nuclear doctrine in Jan 2003. It is now more than six years since the event. There is a need to review doctrine periodically in any case. In this specific case the need is more acute given changes in strategic circumstances. The present juncture is an apposite one in that a new government would be coming into power soon. Therefore initiating a case for a review of India’s nuclear doctrine is in order. This policy brief proposes a direction of review by interrogating a principal pillar of the doctrine – that of ‘massive punitive retaliation’.
There are other contending directions of review. These include whether India should continue to include ‘minimal’ in its formulation ‘credible minimum deterrent’ in light of ‘minimum’ seemingly contradicting the important dimension of the two i.e., ‘credible’. There has even been a recommendation by a departing National Security Advisory Board on jettisoning ‘No First Use’ – perhaps the most salient pillar of the doctrine. The votaries of the Triad would prefer a mention of a Triad based second strike capability in the doctrine. These possible directions indicate that there is a need for review. It is another matter that in doing so, some of the proposals would be accommodated and some disregarded.
In this regard, the proposal requires a shift away from ‘massive punitive retaliation’ in favour of ‘flexible punitive retaliation’. The policy brief first establishes the need to do so by discussing three conflict scenarios highlighting the dangers of the formulation and the advantages from the proposed shift. It concludes that a strategic dialogue with both China and Pakistan is necessary for clarity in communication. This would enhance deterrence and dispel possible misperceptions and apprehensions. This is particularly necessary with respect to Pakistan, given that the state is perpetually poised on ‘failed state’ status with implications for India.
The current doctrinal precept
The sub-paragraph of interest of the press release subsequent to the Cabinet Committee on Security endorsing the nuclear doctrine of 04 Jan 03 reads: “(ii) A posture of “No First Use”: Nuclear weapons will only be used in retaliation against a nuclear attack on Indian territory or on Indian forces anywhere; (iii) Nuclear retaliation to a first strike will be massive and designed to inflict unacceptable damage.”
The inclusion of the term ‘massive’ was a discernible change from the earlier formulation of the Draft Nuclear Doctrine in which the term had not found mention. Instead the Draft had used the term ‘sufficient’ implying a degree of choice on the nature of the response being available to the political decision maker. The specific sentence in the sub-paragraph on Credibility in the Draft reads: ‘Any adversary must know that India can and will retaliate with sufficient nuclear weapons to inflict destruction and punishment that the aggressor will find unacceptable if nuclear weapons are used against India and its forces.’ Though the Draft was just that - a ‘draft’ to compel the government’s attention, the critique stands. The principal problem with the change is that it restricts the choice of the decision maker by excluding the set of less expansive responses.
‘Massive’, not defined explicitly, can be taken as a product of throw weight and target set that produces the promised ‘unacceptable damage’. There are three implications: one is in terms of ‘pain’ implying counter value targeting; second, is reducing the ability of the enemy to mount a counterstrike, which would be counter force; and third is a mix of both. Since in all three options ‘unacceptable damage’ is inflicted, it is worth questioning whether only ‘massive’ nuclear counter strike would cause ‘unacceptable damage’. It is well understood that even a single warhead through a counter value strike can be ‘catastrophic’. Therefore, the term ‘massive’, in its emphasis on throw weight or numbers, is superfluous. It has even been averred that the inclusion of ‘massive’ was likely an ‘unconsidered formulation’. On this count there is a need for review.
Massive nuclear retaliation is definitely a possibility and would be credible in case the enemy’s nuclear first use is in an expansive (‘massive’) form such as resort to first strike, decapitating strike or counter value targeting. However, should ‘first use’ be of a restricted nature such as at the tactical level, for India to up the ante by going ‘massive’ to counter it would be irrational. This was an observation true in the Cold War era as pointed out by Thomas Schelling in his landmark, The Strategy of Conflict: ‘The threat of massive retaliation, if ‘massive’ is interpreted to mean unlimited retaliation, does indeed lose credibility with the loss of our hope that a skillfully conducted all out strike might succeed in precluding counter retaliation.’ Since precluding counter retaliation is not possible in India’s case with respect to Pakistan, leave aside China, it would be prudent for India to go down a route traversed by the US during the McNamara years. The logic that persuaded McNamara in his own words was:
‘One cannot fashion a credible deterrent out of an incredible action…What we are proposing is a capability to strike back after absorbing a first blow. This means we have to build and maintain a second strike force. Such a force should have sufficient flexibility to permit a choice of strategies… Such a prospect would give the Soviets no incentive to withhold attack against our cities in a first strike. We want to give them a better alternative…the strongest possible incentive to refrain from attacking our cities.’
India’s promise of massive counter strikes to first use against its territory or its forces is wanting in credibility, particularly if the strike were of a tactical nature but with a strategic purpose of nuclear signaling for war termination. This is particularly important since both the likely adversaries are unlikely to resort to nuclear weapons in a massive mode in the first salvo.
Consider the case of China. Though bound by an NFU, it is reportedly a qualified NFU in not being applicable to territory it claims. In a border conflict with India it could resort to nuclear first use on its claimed territory of Arunachal Pradesh. Such use would likely involve the use of tactical nuclear weapons. Since India’s is an Assured Retaliation doctrine, India would only be complicating the aftermath of the nuclear exchange for itself should its counter strike be ‘massive’.
The same is the case with Pakistan. Pakistan, emulating NATO in the Cold War era does not profess NFU. In case it were to resort to nuclear first use, it is quite apparent that this would not be of an order of a debilitating ‘first strike’ given the imbalance in numbers and the security of information surrounding locations of Indian nuclear assets. Even if it were to attempt to do so, it could not preclude assured Indian counter value retaliation. Having fired off a major proportion of its arsenal in attempting a first strike, it would not have the numbers to mount a counter strike. In effect, it would ab initio be deterred from attempting a first strike. Therefore Islamabad’s most likely first use is a tactical strike with a strategic purpose of forestalling Indian conventional military advances or to bring about conflict termination by focusing the efforts of the international community. Counter retaliation in a ‘massive’ mode to such a symbolic strike would be to India’s disadvantage since there is no guarantee that some Pakistani weapons would not survive. These would inevitably be directed at counter value targets to maximize vengeance. To open itself to such a threat would be irrational.
The problem has been pointed out earlier following the release of the Draft nuclear doctrine in the following manner:
‘….Our intent of causing ‘unacceptable damage’ is credible only in case our population centers and nuclear-industrial concentrations are hit, inclusion of military forces as targets that will invite such a response makes it less credible…the point is having caused ‘unacceptable damage’ is no consolation for ending up a recipient of it…Thus there is a need to move beyond the avatar of ‘massive retaliation’…in favour of ‘flexible response’…’ (Ali Ahmed, ‘Doctrinal Challenge’, USI Journal, Jan 2000)
It is seen that the term ‘massive’ is not only tying down India’s options but dangerously so. This is elaborated through scenarios in the next section with respect to Pakistan as the nuclear adversary. In the case of China as an adversary in similar scenarios, there is no way India could survive the eventual nuclear exchange.
[Full brief at the link above.]
Panama's Promise - Amid a massive canal expansion, a pro-American supermarket tycoon is poised to be elected president
Panama's Promise, by Jaime Daremblum
Amid a massive canal expansion, a pro-American supermarket tycoon is poised to be elected president.
The Weekly Standard, Apr 28, 2009
In a 2006 national referendum, Panamanian voters approved a $5.2 billion project to expand the Panama Canal. As the Panama Star reports, "Percentage wise, the canal expansion dwarfs any stimulus project the United States is planning. The project represents nearly a quarter of Panama's $23 billion gross domestic product."
President MartÃn Torrijos, a member of the center-left Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), eagerly championed the canal expansion, but it won't be completed on his watch. This coming Sunday (May 3), Panamanians will elect his successor. PRD presidential candidate Balbina Herrera is trailing opposition candidate Ricardo Martinelli by double digits. It is hard to see how Herrera can make up so much ground in so little time. All signs point to a Martinelli victory.
Compared to a Herrera regime, a Martinelli administration "would be a much more pro-American government." At least that's what Martinelli told a Miami Herald columnist last month, saying he would push aggressively for the U.S. Congress to approve a bilateral free trade pact with Panama, which was signed in June 2007. Founder of the center-right Democratic Change party, the 57-year-old Martinelli is representing a multiparty coalition in the May 3 election. He is a supermarket tycoon with a range of other business interests and a record of government service. Martinelli has worked in two different Panamanian presidential administrations. When the government officially assumed control of the Panama Canal at the end of 1999, Martinelli was serving as both board chairman of the Panama Canal Authority and minister of canal affairs.
The scandal-plagued Herrera, meanwhile, has a background in radical left-wing politics. A former National Assembly deputy and mayor of San Miguelito, she was a close confidant of Manuel Noriega, the drug-trafficking Panamanian dictator who was toppled by U.S. military forces in December 1989. In fact, Herrera was a leader of the thuggish Dignity Battalions, Noriega's paramilitary units, and Noriega hid in her home during the American invasion. Under the Torrijos administration, Herrera served as housing minister.
In a global economic environment characterized by recession and financial upheaval, Panama stands out as a relative bright spot. The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean projects that Panama's economy will expand by 4 percent in 2009 while the regional economy as a whole will contract by 0.3 percent. But 4 percent annual GDP growth represents a major drop from 9.2 percent growth in 2008 and 11.5 percent growth in 2007. In those years, Panama benefited from robust global trade and a massive housing boom. Its unemployment rate plummeted. Now international trade is shrinking rapidly and, as Jeremy Schwartz notes in the Austin-American Statesman, the Panamanian real-estate sector "might be heading for a sharp downturn."
Panama's economic slowdown has been deep and abrupt, and Panamanians seem increasingly unhappy with the incumbent Torrijos government, which has been in power since 2004. Torrijos, the son of former Panamanian military ruler Omar Torrijos, has pursued a range social programs but only managed to achieve a small drop in the national poverty rate, which fell from 32 percent in 2003 to 28 percent in 2008. Given Panama's strong economic growth over that period, the public expected more progress on poverty reduction. Living costs have increased sharply due to inflation, and Panamanians remain widely dissatisfied with their public services (namely health care and education). The country has also been dealing with a spike in crime.
For all these reasons and more, the Panamanian electorate is restless, and many voters appear to be taking out their frustrations on the PRD. However, the party currently holds a majority of seats in Panama's National Assembly, so even if Martinelli wins the presidential election, his agenda may be constrained by legislative opposition.
Twenty years after the U.S. operation that overthrew Noriega, Americans don't pay much attention to Panama. But it is a strategically important country that is playing a growing role in global trade. Indeed, it is estimated that 5 percent of all international trade-and a much higher percentage of U.S. trade-goes through the Panama Canal. Torrijos has successfully promoted Panama as a tourist hotspot and commercial hub. It is an increasingly popular retirement destination for Americans; indeed, U.S. expatriates helped fuel the recent Panamanian housing boom.
Now more than ever, responsible management of the Panama Canal is deeply important to the global economy in general and the U.S. economy in particular. Efficient canal management depends on political stability and sound governance. Torrijos has provided such governance. Let's hope his successor does too.
Jaime Daremblum, who served as Costa Rica's ambassador to the United States from 1998 to 2004, is director of the Center for Latin American Studies at the Hudson Institute.
Amid a massive canal expansion, a pro-American supermarket tycoon is poised to be elected president.
The Weekly Standard, Apr 28, 2009
In a 2006 national referendum, Panamanian voters approved a $5.2 billion project to expand the Panama Canal. As the Panama Star reports, "Percentage wise, the canal expansion dwarfs any stimulus project the United States is planning. The project represents nearly a quarter of Panama's $23 billion gross domestic product."
President MartÃn Torrijos, a member of the center-left Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), eagerly championed the canal expansion, but it won't be completed on his watch. This coming Sunday (May 3), Panamanians will elect his successor. PRD presidential candidate Balbina Herrera is trailing opposition candidate Ricardo Martinelli by double digits. It is hard to see how Herrera can make up so much ground in so little time. All signs point to a Martinelli victory.
Compared to a Herrera regime, a Martinelli administration "would be a much more pro-American government." At least that's what Martinelli told a Miami Herald columnist last month, saying he would push aggressively for the U.S. Congress to approve a bilateral free trade pact with Panama, which was signed in June 2007. Founder of the center-right Democratic Change party, the 57-year-old Martinelli is representing a multiparty coalition in the May 3 election. He is a supermarket tycoon with a range of other business interests and a record of government service. Martinelli has worked in two different Panamanian presidential administrations. When the government officially assumed control of the Panama Canal at the end of 1999, Martinelli was serving as both board chairman of the Panama Canal Authority and minister of canal affairs.
The scandal-plagued Herrera, meanwhile, has a background in radical left-wing politics. A former National Assembly deputy and mayor of San Miguelito, she was a close confidant of Manuel Noriega, the drug-trafficking Panamanian dictator who was toppled by U.S. military forces in December 1989. In fact, Herrera was a leader of the thuggish Dignity Battalions, Noriega's paramilitary units, and Noriega hid in her home during the American invasion. Under the Torrijos administration, Herrera served as housing minister.
In a global economic environment characterized by recession and financial upheaval, Panama stands out as a relative bright spot. The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean projects that Panama's economy will expand by 4 percent in 2009 while the regional economy as a whole will contract by 0.3 percent. But 4 percent annual GDP growth represents a major drop from 9.2 percent growth in 2008 and 11.5 percent growth in 2007. In those years, Panama benefited from robust global trade and a massive housing boom. Its unemployment rate plummeted. Now international trade is shrinking rapidly and, as Jeremy Schwartz notes in the Austin-American Statesman, the Panamanian real-estate sector "might be heading for a sharp downturn."
Panama's economic slowdown has been deep and abrupt, and Panamanians seem increasingly unhappy with the incumbent Torrijos government, which has been in power since 2004. Torrijos, the son of former Panamanian military ruler Omar Torrijos, has pursued a range social programs but only managed to achieve a small drop in the national poverty rate, which fell from 32 percent in 2003 to 28 percent in 2008. Given Panama's strong economic growth over that period, the public expected more progress on poverty reduction. Living costs have increased sharply due to inflation, and Panamanians remain widely dissatisfied with their public services (namely health care and education). The country has also been dealing with a spike in crime.
For all these reasons and more, the Panamanian electorate is restless, and many voters appear to be taking out their frustrations on the PRD. However, the party currently holds a majority of seats in Panama's National Assembly, so even if Martinelli wins the presidential election, his agenda may be constrained by legislative opposition.
Twenty years after the U.S. operation that overthrew Noriega, Americans don't pay much attention to Panama. But it is a strategically important country that is playing a growing role in global trade. Indeed, it is estimated that 5 percent of all international trade-and a much higher percentage of U.S. trade-goes through the Panama Canal. Torrijos has successfully promoted Panama as a tourist hotspot and commercial hub. It is an increasingly popular retirement destination for Americans; indeed, U.S. expatriates helped fuel the recent Panamanian housing boom.
Now more than ever, responsible management of the Panama Canal is deeply important to the global economy in general and the U.S. economy in particular. Efficient canal management depends on political stability and sound governance. Torrijos has provided such governance. Let's hope his successor does too.
Jaime Daremblum, who served as Costa Rica's ambassador to the United States from 1998 to 2004, is director of the Center for Latin American Studies at the Hudson Institute.
Iran's New Target: Egypt - Cairo's desire for Mideast peace threatens Tehran's ambitions
Iran's New Target: Egypt. By ABDEL MONEM SAID ALY
Cairo's desire for Mideast peace threatens Tehran's ambitions.
WSJ, Apr 28, 2009
On April 8, Egypt announced it had uncovered a Hezbollah cell operating inside its borders. This startling pronouncement offers a rare insight into the way Iran and its proxies are manipulating Middle East politics.
According to Egyptian authorities, the cell was tasked with planning attacks against tourist sites in Sinai, conducting surveillance on strategic targets including the Suez Canal, and funneling arms and money to Hamas. Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has admitted that the ringleader of the cell was indeed a member of his organization to provide "logistical support to help the Palestinian brothers in transporting ammunition and individuals."
These latest actions by an emboldened Hezbollah have been spurred on by Iran, which is seeking to further its quest for power in the Arab Middle East. In the past six months, there have been irrefutable signs of Iran's determined effort to sabotage Egypt's attempts at regional stability. At Tehran's instigation, Hamas rejected the renewal of the six-month, Egypt-brokered cease-fire last summer between it and Israel. This rejection led to the Gaza war in December. At the height of that war, Mr. Nasrallah called on the people of Egypt and its army to march on the city of Rafah to open the border to Gaza by force, a highly inflammatory appeal aimed at causing insurrection.
After the war ended, Egypt resumed its efforts to reach a long-term cease-fire. Iran pressured the Hamas leadership to resist. Cairo's ongoing effort to build a Palestinian unity government, by bringing together Fatah and Hamas, has also been undermined by intense Iranian pressure on Hamas.
Tehran sees Egypt as its greatest rival in the region, and the most formidable Arab bulwark opposing its influence. It is in this context that Hezbollah actions in Egypt should be assessed. Acting as a front for Iranian objectives, Hezbollah is tasked with distracting Egypt from the diplomatic process that will hopefully lead one day to a two-state solution in the Palestine-Israel conflict.
Egypt's persistent attempts to bring about peace in this arena and its encouragement of other Arab countries to follow its path with Israel threaten to deprive Iran of the single most potent regional issue that it can exploit to further its radical agenda. Thus Tehran seeks to undermine the prospects for this peace -- and it, along with its clients, believe the way to do this is by undermining Egypt. Similarly, Egypt's security interests in the Gulf, and its traditional role as a force for regional stability, present a clear obstacle to Iran's wider regional ambitions.
For President Barack Obama and members of his administration watching from the sidelines, the implications should be clear. A final settlement of the Palestine-Israel conflict is indispensable if the U.S. wishes to check Iran's expanding influence in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, the U.S. administration will have to contend with a right-wing Israeli government that has yet to subscribe to the principle of a two-state solution in defiance of international consensus. It will also have to press Israel to halt its illegal settlement activity, which now more than ever endangers the fundamental basis for a solution.
The administration's focus on the immediate issue of Iran's nuclear program should not distract it from addressing Tehran's overall posture towards the peace process or its support for terrorism. Iran's challenge to the regional status quo is multifaceted, which is why Washington must adopt a comprehensive approach as it formulates its nascent engagement with Iran.
It is said that Mr. Obama is still weighing when and where to deliver a major speech to the Arab world. If he were to make such a speech in Cairo, it would give heart to millions in the region who want to see the peace process succeed. It would also send a firm message to Tehran that America stands with Egypt on the side of peace and stability.
Mr. Aly is director of the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo.
Cairo's desire for Mideast peace threatens Tehran's ambitions.
WSJ, Apr 28, 2009
On April 8, Egypt announced it had uncovered a Hezbollah cell operating inside its borders. This startling pronouncement offers a rare insight into the way Iran and its proxies are manipulating Middle East politics.
According to Egyptian authorities, the cell was tasked with planning attacks against tourist sites in Sinai, conducting surveillance on strategic targets including the Suez Canal, and funneling arms and money to Hamas. Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has admitted that the ringleader of the cell was indeed a member of his organization to provide "logistical support to help the Palestinian brothers in transporting ammunition and individuals."
These latest actions by an emboldened Hezbollah have been spurred on by Iran, which is seeking to further its quest for power in the Arab Middle East. In the past six months, there have been irrefutable signs of Iran's determined effort to sabotage Egypt's attempts at regional stability. At Tehran's instigation, Hamas rejected the renewal of the six-month, Egypt-brokered cease-fire last summer between it and Israel. This rejection led to the Gaza war in December. At the height of that war, Mr. Nasrallah called on the people of Egypt and its army to march on the city of Rafah to open the border to Gaza by force, a highly inflammatory appeal aimed at causing insurrection.
After the war ended, Egypt resumed its efforts to reach a long-term cease-fire. Iran pressured the Hamas leadership to resist. Cairo's ongoing effort to build a Palestinian unity government, by bringing together Fatah and Hamas, has also been undermined by intense Iranian pressure on Hamas.
Tehran sees Egypt as its greatest rival in the region, and the most formidable Arab bulwark opposing its influence. It is in this context that Hezbollah actions in Egypt should be assessed. Acting as a front for Iranian objectives, Hezbollah is tasked with distracting Egypt from the diplomatic process that will hopefully lead one day to a two-state solution in the Palestine-Israel conflict.
Egypt's persistent attempts to bring about peace in this arena and its encouragement of other Arab countries to follow its path with Israel threaten to deprive Iran of the single most potent regional issue that it can exploit to further its radical agenda. Thus Tehran seeks to undermine the prospects for this peace -- and it, along with its clients, believe the way to do this is by undermining Egypt. Similarly, Egypt's security interests in the Gulf, and its traditional role as a force for regional stability, present a clear obstacle to Iran's wider regional ambitions.
For President Barack Obama and members of his administration watching from the sidelines, the implications should be clear. A final settlement of the Palestine-Israel conflict is indispensable if the U.S. wishes to check Iran's expanding influence in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, the U.S. administration will have to contend with a right-wing Israeli government that has yet to subscribe to the principle of a two-state solution in defiance of international consensus. It will also have to press Israel to halt its illegal settlement activity, which now more than ever endangers the fundamental basis for a solution.
The administration's focus on the immediate issue of Iran's nuclear program should not distract it from addressing Tehran's overall posture towards the peace process or its support for terrorism. Iran's challenge to the regional status quo is multifaceted, which is why Washington must adopt a comprehensive approach as it formulates its nascent engagement with Iran.
It is said that Mr. Obama is still weighing when and where to deliver a major speech to the Arab world. If he were to make such a speech in Cairo, it would give heart to millions in the region who want to see the peace process succeed. It would also send a firm message to Tehran that America stands with Egypt on the side of peace and stability.
Mr. Aly is director of the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo.
Swine flu: Tools developed in the last few years will help the Obama administration fight back
How Bush Prepared for the Outbreak. By Tevi Troy
Tools developed in the last few years will help the Obama administration fight back.
WSJ, Apr 28, 2009
Swine flu has presented the Obama administration with its first major public-health crisis. Fortunately for the Obama team, the Bush administration developed new tools that will prove critical in meeting this challenge.
Under President Bush, the federal government worked with manufacturers to accelerate vaccine development, stockpiled crucial antivirals like Tamiflu, war-gamed pandemic scenarios with senior officials, and increased the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) sample identification capabilities. These activities are bearing fruit today.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has already deployed 12.5 million courses of antivirals -- out of a total of 50 million -- to states and local agencies. In addition, CDC's new capacities have allowed Mexican officials to send flu samples to CDC for quick identification, a capability that did not exist a few years ago. Collaboration between the government and the private sector on vaccines -- which Mr. Bush and his HHS team actively encouraged -- could potentially allow manufacturers to shepherd a vaccine to market within four months of identifying the strain and getting the go-ahead from CDC or the World Health Organization.
But new tools aside, top health officials must answer difficult questions about response efforts. One is when and where to deploy antivirals.
The Bush administration considered a "forest fire" approach to pandemic outbreaks abroad. This strategy calls for sharing some of our precious supply of antivirals with a foreign country in order to stop a small flame from becoming a forest fire. The risk is that we have only a limited number of courses, and the use of antivirals increases the odds that the flu strain in question will become resistant to that antiviral. With 37.5 million courses remaining in the federal stockpile, the administration needs to think very carefully about how to use them.
Another issue: Under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act of 2006, the government has the authority to issue "Prep Act Declarations" granting liability protection to manufacturers whose products were used in public-health emergencies. This helps encourage manufacturers to develop countermeasures. The government issued a series of such declarations in 2007 and 2008. They protected the development and use of influenza vaccines and pandemic antivirals, as well as anthrax, smallpox and botulism products. The Obama administration should consider granting more of them -- if appropriate -- in the weeks ahead.
A third policy question has to do with how to stop the spread of the disease both across borders and within countries. The administration has so far initiated "passive surveillance": Border guards are assessing if people entering the U.S. seem sick, but aren't actively stopping anyone. If things get worse, they may have to intensify border security.
The Bush administration examined the question of closing the borders in certain circumstances but determined that it would probably be ineffective. Worse, it could lead other nations to retaliate by closing their own borders, which could hurt Americans traveling abroad.
Another strategy, already in use to some degree in Mexico, is social distancing -- asking citizens to refrain from large social gatherings. During the 1918 influenza pandemic, St. Louis embraced such measures while Philadelphia eschewed them, and Philadelphia suffered a much higher death rate as a result. We are probably not yet at the point where such drastic measures are necessary, but senior officials had better start thinking about how they would address these questions.
Most importantly, the federal government must figure out how to reassure a nervous public. It doesn't help that none of the 20 top officials at HHS has been confirmed. Some of them, like FDA commissioner-designate Dr. Margaret Hamburg, are experts in biopreparedness and could help reassure Americans. Alas, she and her potential future colleagues, including the new secretary of HHS, are still in limbo. They need to be in place and on the job.
Mr. Troy, deputy secretary of Health and Human Services from 2007 to 2009, is a visiting senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
Tools developed in the last few years will help the Obama administration fight back.
WSJ, Apr 28, 2009
Swine flu has presented the Obama administration with its first major public-health crisis. Fortunately for the Obama team, the Bush administration developed new tools that will prove critical in meeting this challenge.
Under President Bush, the federal government worked with manufacturers to accelerate vaccine development, stockpiled crucial antivirals like Tamiflu, war-gamed pandemic scenarios with senior officials, and increased the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) sample identification capabilities. These activities are bearing fruit today.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has already deployed 12.5 million courses of antivirals -- out of a total of 50 million -- to states and local agencies. In addition, CDC's new capacities have allowed Mexican officials to send flu samples to CDC for quick identification, a capability that did not exist a few years ago. Collaboration between the government and the private sector on vaccines -- which Mr. Bush and his HHS team actively encouraged -- could potentially allow manufacturers to shepherd a vaccine to market within four months of identifying the strain and getting the go-ahead from CDC or the World Health Organization.
But new tools aside, top health officials must answer difficult questions about response efforts. One is when and where to deploy antivirals.
The Bush administration considered a "forest fire" approach to pandemic outbreaks abroad. This strategy calls for sharing some of our precious supply of antivirals with a foreign country in order to stop a small flame from becoming a forest fire. The risk is that we have only a limited number of courses, and the use of antivirals increases the odds that the flu strain in question will become resistant to that antiviral. With 37.5 million courses remaining in the federal stockpile, the administration needs to think very carefully about how to use them.
Another issue: Under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act of 2006, the government has the authority to issue "Prep Act Declarations" granting liability protection to manufacturers whose products were used in public-health emergencies. This helps encourage manufacturers to develop countermeasures. The government issued a series of such declarations in 2007 and 2008. They protected the development and use of influenza vaccines and pandemic antivirals, as well as anthrax, smallpox and botulism products. The Obama administration should consider granting more of them -- if appropriate -- in the weeks ahead.
A third policy question has to do with how to stop the spread of the disease both across borders and within countries. The administration has so far initiated "passive surveillance": Border guards are assessing if people entering the U.S. seem sick, but aren't actively stopping anyone. If things get worse, they may have to intensify border security.
The Bush administration examined the question of closing the borders in certain circumstances but determined that it would probably be ineffective. Worse, it could lead other nations to retaliate by closing their own borders, which could hurt Americans traveling abroad.
Another strategy, already in use to some degree in Mexico, is social distancing -- asking citizens to refrain from large social gatherings. During the 1918 influenza pandemic, St. Louis embraced such measures while Philadelphia eschewed them, and Philadelphia suffered a much higher death rate as a result. We are probably not yet at the point where such drastic measures are necessary, but senior officials had better start thinking about how they would address these questions.
Most importantly, the federal government must figure out how to reassure a nervous public. It doesn't help that none of the 20 top officials at HHS has been confirmed. Some of them, like FDA commissioner-designate Dr. Margaret Hamburg, are experts in biopreparedness and could help reassure Americans. Alas, she and her potential future colleagues, including the new secretary of HHS, are still in limbo. They need to be in place and on the job.
Mr. Troy, deputy secretary of Health and Human Services from 2007 to 2009, is a visiting senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
Monday, April 27, 2009
A Pacific Alliance for Peace - Japan and the US
A Pacific Alliance for Peace. By William R. Hawkins
FrontPageMagazine.com, Monday, April 27, 2009
Excerpts:
As [some] relish reports that President Barack Obama is seeking to temper the image of the United States as the world’s preeminent power, it can be forgotten that there are overseas allies who want and need America to remain strong and vigilant against rising threats. They want America to continue its leadership role in forging coalitions to meet global dangers. This message was very clear at a conference April 17 in Washington sponsored by two Japanese think tanks, the Sasakawa Peace Foundation and the Ocean Policy Research Foundation.
The theme of the conference was the U.S.-Japan Maritime Alliance and how it can be expanded. Japan’s ambassador Shotaro Yachi opened the session by reading a message from Prime Minister Taro Aso calling for Washington and Tokyo to take the lead in building an “Arc of Freedom and Prosperity” which would sweep across “Japan, the Republic of Korea, Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, Central Asia, Guam, Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltic region and Scandinavia roughly speaking.” This geographical description is of the opposite side of the “Arc of Instability” that has been used since the 1970s to describe the main trouble spots in the Eurasian landmass. The positive concept of the Arc would be founded on the values of “freedom, democracy, basic human rights, the rule of law and the market economy” according to Aso. The Asia-Pacific section of the Arc, extending as far as the Persian Gulf, would be backed by a “Seapower Network” that should expand beyond the current U.S.-Japan alliance to include Australia, India and the United Kingdom.
In this formulation, it is not difficult to understand from where the threats to those protected by the Arc alliance are expected to come. For diplomatic reasons, Aso had to say that the Arc “is not intended to contain China or Russia,” but his extended remarks were filled with examples of the dangers Beijing and Moscow pose to peace, stability and economic development. The Prime Minister noted China’s advancement to the ocean is particularly spectacular. The Chinese Navy is proactively modernizing. We also have information that China is working to build aircraft carriers. China’s opaque expansion and modernization of its military, including the Navy, may greatly impact the maritime security environment which is so important to both Japan and the U.S. Moreover, Russia is increasingly more actively engaged in military activities in the Far East.
A major element in the “Japan-United States Seapower Alliance for Stability and Prosperity on the Oceans” paper presented at the conference by the Ocean Policy Research Foundation is development of seabed resources, both minerals and energy. The proposal calls for joint research and the sharing of new technology that can reach these untapped resources. But it is also clear that ocean wealth will also have to be protected from rivals. Prime Minister Aso pointed out that Japan and China have conflicting claims in the East China Sea, and that “China continues to carry out unilateral development based on its own claims. This cannot be considered to be an action of a responsible major power.” He also noted “excessive claims of jurisdiction by coastal states. This is a problem the U.S. Navy has faced from Chinese harassment of its ships in international waters. Beijing claims that the Exclusive Economic Zones awarded by the UN Law of the Sea Treaty confer sovereignty over large ocean expanses and not just a limited right to exploit resources.
Japan also has territorial disputes with Russia, and Aso mentioned the construction plan Moscow has for a strategic nuclear submarine base on the Kamchatka peninsula. China has recently built a similar base on Hainan Island menacing the South China Sea.
Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe appeared in person to deliver the keynote address at the Sasakawa conference. He echoed Aso’s arguments, and even compared, without naming names, the rising Chinese threat to that posed earlier by the Soviet Union. He stated that during the Cold War, Japan was the “cap in the bottle” past which the Soviet fleet could not pass from its Pacific base at Vladivostok. He then observed that the “Japanese island chain can fulfill the same role against another power if it pushes the envelop.” Geographically that chain could be seen as extending all the way south to Taiwan and the Philippines, forming a base for containing China’s naval ambitions.
Beijing is well aware of island geography. In the 2005 report on China Military Power issued annually by the U.S. Defense Department, General Wen Zongren, Political Commissar of the elite People’s Liberation Army Academy of Military Science, is quoted as saying that taking control of Taiwan is of “far reaching significance to breaking international forces’ blockade against China’s maritime security….to rise suddenly, China must pass through oceans and go out of the oceans in its future development.” Chinese strategists have discussed the creation of their own “string of pearls” naval bases to control the sea lanes of the Pacific Rim.
The OPRF paper urges Washington and Tokyo “to cooperate with all nations opposing the emergence of any aspiring hegemonic state that could disrupt the balance of power on the seas and create instability in the security environment” another thinly veiled reference to the rise of China. “The process of building the new seapower alliance will also serve as a new challenge for the Japan-U.S. alliance that many believe is beginning to waiver, “says the OPRF document.
An example of those who believe the alliance should not just waiver but dissolve was presented during the question period following Abe’s speech. Stanley Kober, a research fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, cited out of context George Washington’s warning against “entangling alliances.” He then claimed such alliances only serve to keep the world divided. He asked the former Prime Minister, “If the U.S. and Japan strengthen their alliance, what will Russia and China do?” Kober also thought it was a mistake to try to include India in the alliance. Cato has a history of trying to undermine American defense policy, and has been exhibiting a growing pro-Chinese bias.
Cato Vice President Gene Healy made the same reference to “entangling alliances” in a recent op-ed calling for “genuine, and deep, cuts in military spending” in which he also cited the “counterintuitive claim” of Christopher Preble, Cato’s Director of Foreign Policy Studies, that “our military dominance actually makes us less safe.” Last summer, Malou Innocent, another Cato foreign policy analyst, wrote an op-ed criticizing presidential candidate Sen. John McCain for “talking too tough on Russia and China.” She called on the next president “to continue cooperating with China and Russia.” Cato pronouncements are obsessed with trade and investment in China [...].
Abe responded to Kober by restating that the U.S., Japan and India “are democracies with shared interests” who also believe in human rights and the rule of law. Next year will mark the 60th anniversary of the U.S.-Japan alliance. Abe declared, “The United States has no better friend in the world than Japan.” Other Japanese speakers at the conference reinforced this point. Shunji Yanai, an advisor to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and professor at Waseda University argued that the Iraq War has helped pull Washington and Tokyo closer together, as has the crisis over North Korean nuclear and missile programs. Japan sent military engineers to Iraq to help with reconstruction and has deployed naval units to support coalition operations in Afghanistan. Yanai also believes that North Korea has a secret uranium enrichment program that has not been addressed by the Six Party Talks orchestrated by China.
Naoyuki Agawa, a Dean at Keio University, joined Yanai in support of changes in Japanese constitutional interpretation to allow Tokyo to play a more active role in collective security operations. He agreed that joint operations in the Middle East have pulled the two fleets together and proclaimed, “Despite legal and constitutional restraints, the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force is willing to fight alongside its fellow sailors” in the U.S. Navy.
It may not come to that. A strengthened and expanded alliance of maritime nations can serve as a powerful deterrent to the ambitions of China, Russia and their dangerous prodigies in Iran, Burma, North Korea and elsewhere. It will, however, take more than proclamations. Words must lead to actions.
The lunch speaker at the conference was Deputy Chief of Naval Operations Vice Admiral William Crowder, who had been commander of the U.S. 7th Fleet in the Pacific. He was dismayed by how much the size of the U.S. Navy has declined in recent decades. Today it has less than half the warships that were as sea when Ronald Reagan was president. The cuts in naval programs announced April 6 by the Obama administration, along with other cuts in high end programs involving aviation and missile defense that are part of the proposed 2010 defense budget, will undermine the favorable balance of power now enjoyed by the United States.
A warning from Japanese leaders of what is at stake in Asia could not have come at a more important moment.
William Hawkins is a consultant on international economics and national security issues.
FrontPageMagazine.com, Monday, April 27, 2009
Excerpts:
As [some] relish reports that President Barack Obama is seeking to temper the image of the United States as the world’s preeminent power, it can be forgotten that there are overseas allies who want and need America to remain strong and vigilant against rising threats. They want America to continue its leadership role in forging coalitions to meet global dangers. This message was very clear at a conference April 17 in Washington sponsored by two Japanese think tanks, the Sasakawa Peace Foundation and the Ocean Policy Research Foundation.
The theme of the conference was the U.S.-Japan Maritime Alliance and how it can be expanded. Japan’s ambassador Shotaro Yachi opened the session by reading a message from Prime Minister Taro Aso calling for Washington and Tokyo to take the lead in building an “Arc of Freedom and Prosperity” which would sweep across “Japan, the Republic of Korea, Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, Central Asia, Guam, Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltic region and Scandinavia roughly speaking.” This geographical description is of the opposite side of the “Arc of Instability” that has been used since the 1970s to describe the main trouble spots in the Eurasian landmass. The positive concept of the Arc would be founded on the values of “freedom, democracy, basic human rights, the rule of law and the market economy” according to Aso. The Asia-Pacific section of the Arc, extending as far as the Persian Gulf, would be backed by a “Seapower Network” that should expand beyond the current U.S.-Japan alliance to include Australia, India and the United Kingdom.
In this formulation, it is not difficult to understand from where the threats to those protected by the Arc alliance are expected to come. For diplomatic reasons, Aso had to say that the Arc “is not intended to contain China or Russia,” but his extended remarks were filled with examples of the dangers Beijing and Moscow pose to peace, stability and economic development. The Prime Minister noted China’s advancement to the ocean is particularly spectacular. The Chinese Navy is proactively modernizing. We also have information that China is working to build aircraft carriers. China’s opaque expansion and modernization of its military, including the Navy, may greatly impact the maritime security environment which is so important to both Japan and the U.S. Moreover, Russia is increasingly more actively engaged in military activities in the Far East.
A major element in the “Japan-United States Seapower Alliance for Stability and Prosperity on the Oceans” paper presented at the conference by the Ocean Policy Research Foundation is development of seabed resources, both minerals and energy. The proposal calls for joint research and the sharing of new technology that can reach these untapped resources. But it is also clear that ocean wealth will also have to be protected from rivals. Prime Minister Aso pointed out that Japan and China have conflicting claims in the East China Sea, and that “China continues to carry out unilateral development based on its own claims. This cannot be considered to be an action of a responsible major power.” He also noted “excessive claims of jurisdiction by coastal states. This is a problem the U.S. Navy has faced from Chinese harassment of its ships in international waters. Beijing claims that the Exclusive Economic Zones awarded by the UN Law of the Sea Treaty confer sovereignty over large ocean expanses and not just a limited right to exploit resources.
Japan also has territorial disputes with Russia, and Aso mentioned the construction plan Moscow has for a strategic nuclear submarine base on the Kamchatka peninsula. China has recently built a similar base on Hainan Island menacing the South China Sea.
Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe appeared in person to deliver the keynote address at the Sasakawa conference. He echoed Aso’s arguments, and even compared, without naming names, the rising Chinese threat to that posed earlier by the Soviet Union. He stated that during the Cold War, Japan was the “cap in the bottle” past which the Soviet fleet could not pass from its Pacific base at Vladivostok. He then observed that the “Japanese island chain can fulfill the same role against another power if it pushes the envelop.” Geographically that chain could be seen as extending all the way south to Taiwan and the Philippines, forming a base for containing China’s naval ambitions.
Beijing is well aware of island geography. In the 2005 report on China Military Power issued annually by the U.S. Defense Department, General Wen Zongren, Political Commissar of the elite People’s Liberation Army Academy of Military Science, is quoted as saying that taking control of Taiwan is of “far reaching significance to breaking international forces’ blockade against China’s maritime security….to rise suddenly, China must pass through oceans and go out of the oceans in its future development.” Chinese strategists have discussed the creation of their own “string of pearls” naval bases to control the sea lanes of the Pacific Rim.
The OPRF paper urges Washington and Tokyo “to cooperate with all nations opposing the emergence of any aspiring hegemonic state that could disrupt the balance of power on the seas and create instability in the security environment” another thinly veiled reference to the rise of China. “The process of building the new seapower alliance will also serve as a new challenge for the Japan-U.S. alliance that many believe is beginning to waiver, “says the OPRF document.
An example of those who believe the alliance should not just waiver but dissolve was presented during the question period following Abe’s speech. Stanley Kober, a research fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, cited out of context George Washington’s warning against “entangling alliances.” He then claimed such alliances only serve to keep the world divided. He asked the former Prime Minister, “If the U.S. and Japan strengthen their alliance, what will Russia and China do?” Kober also thought it was a mistake to try to include India in the alliance. Cato has a history of trying to undermine American defense policy, and has been exhibiting a growing pro-Chinese bias.
Cato Vice President Gene Healy made the same reference to “entangling alliances” in a recent op-ed calling for “genuine, and deep, cuts in military spending” in which he also cited the “counterintuitive claim” of Christopher Preble, Cato’s Director of Foreign Policy Studies, that “our military dominance actually makes us less safe.” Last summer, Malou Innocent, another Cato foreign policy analyst, wrote an op-ed criticizing presidential candidate Sen. John McCain for “talking too tough on Russia and China.” She called on the next president “to continue cooperating with China and Russia.” Cato pronouncements are obsessed with trade and investment in China [...].
Abe responded to Kober by restating that the U.S., Japan and India “are democracies with shared interests” who also believe in human rights and the rule of law. Next year will mark the 60th anniversary of the U.S.-Japan alliance. Abe declared, “The United States has no better friend in the world than Japan.” Other Japanese speakers at the conference reinforced this point. Shunji Yanai, an advisor to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and professor at Waseda University argued that the Iraq War has helped pull Washington and Tokyo closer together, as has the crisis over North Korean nuclear and missile programs. Japan sent military engineers to Iraq to help with reconstruction and has deployed naval units to support coalition operations in Afghanistan. Yanai also believes that North Korea has a secret uranium enrichment program that has not been addressed by the Six Party Talks orchestrated by China.
Naoyuki Agawa, a Dean at Keio University, joined Yanai in support of changes in Japanese constitutional interpretation to allow Tokyo to play a more active role in collective security operations. He agreed that joint operations in the Middle East have pulled the two fleets together and proclaimed, “Despite legal and constitutional restraints, the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force is willing to fight alongside its fellow sailors” in the U.S. Navy.
It may not come to that. A strengthened and expanded alliance of maritime nations can serve as a powerful deterrent to the ambitions of China, Russia and their dangerous prodigies in Iran, Burma, North Korea and elsewhere. It will, however, take more than proclamations. Words must lead to actions.
The lunch speaker at the conference was Deputy Chief of Naval Operations Vice Admiral William Crowder, who had been commander of the U.S. 7th Fleet in the Pacific. He was dismayed by how much the size of the U.S. Navy has declined in recent decades. Today it has less than half the warships that were as sea when Ronald Reagan was president. The cuts in naval programs announced April 6 by the Obama administration, along with other cuts in high end programs involving aviation and missile defense that are part of the proposed 2010 defense budget, will undermine the favorable balance of power now enjoyed by the United States.
A warning from Japanese leaders of what is at stake in Asia could not have come at a more important moment.
William Hawkins is a consultant on international economics and national security issues.
Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program - quarterly report
Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program - quarterly report to Congress. By John Hinderaker
Powerline blog, Apr 27, 2009
Excerpts:
On April 21, the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program Act of 2009--"SIGTARP"--submitted his quarterly report to Congress on his office's activities in relation to the TARP program. The report is a disquieting document that should be read by every American--certainly be every taxpayer.
The Inspector General's report documents the stunning and at least partly illegal expansion of TARP from the $700 billion originally allocated by Congress to what is now a $3 trillion complex of programs. This chart shows the various programs that are now included within SIGTARP's oversight, and how they have expanded from the initial $700 billion. Note that some of the programs are still incipient; $3 trillion is by no means a final number. [...]
The report is valuable for a number of reasons, not least because it provides the most coherent description I've seen of the various programs now underway to bail out--or take over, as the case may be--the country's financial sector. So far, the report's most commented-upon feature is its description of the many criminal investigations that are now underway, arising out of TARP:
Both from the Hotline and from other leads, SIGTARP has initiated, to date, almost 20 preliminary and full criminal investigations. Although the details of those investigations generally will not be discussed unless and until public action is taken, the cases vary widely in subject matter and include large corporate and securities fraud matters affecting TARP investments, tax matters, insider trading, public corruption, and mortgage-modification fraud.
It is safe to assume, however, that the investigations now in progress represent not even the tip of the iceberg. The most troubling feature of the SIG's report is its documentation of reluctance on the part of Tim Geithner's Treasury Department to make even modest efforts to protect the interests of the taxpayers. To take just one glaring example, Treasury has refused to require banks to account for what they do with the billions of dollars they receive in TARP money:
Treasury has indicated, however, that it will not adopt SIGTARP's recommendation that all TARP recipients be required to do the following:
• account for the use of TARP funds
• set up internal controls to comply with such accounting
• report periodically to Treasury on the results, with appropriate sworn certifications
In light of the fact that the American taxpayer has been asked to fund this extraordinary effort to stabilize the financial system, it is not unreasonable that the public be told how those funds have been used by TARP recipients. Treasury is now conducting regular surveys of the banks' lending activities; however, with the exception of Citigroup and Bank of America, Treasury has refused to seek further details on TARP recipients' use of funds.
Not just failed, but "refused." The report adds:
The American people have a right to know how their tax dollars are being used, particularly as billions of dollars are going to institutions for which banking is certainly not part of the institution's core business and may be little more than a way to gain access to the low-cost capital provided under TARP.
Later, with respect to the Capital Assistance Program specifically, the report says:
Treasury announced that it would require CAP applicants to set forth how they intend to use CAP funding. Notwithstanding this requirement, Treasury adamantly continues to refuse to adopt SIGTARP's recommendation that it require CAP recipients (and indeed all TARP recipients) to report on how they actually used TARP funds. Putting aside the value of this recommendation in other TARP programs, SIGTARP submits that it is largely meaningless to require an applicant to report on its intended use of funds without setting up a mechanism to monitor its actual use of funds.
[...]
The Treasury Department is now managing a vast portfolio of "troubled assets" on behalf of the American people. It has not, however, developed any plan for how to dispose of them, or how to manage them in the meantime. This may relate to the Obama administration's failure to staff the Department:
In its Initial Report, SIGTARP noted that "[t]o date, Treasury has not fully developed significant policies or controls with respect to asset management issues," and recommended that "Treasury needs, in the near term, to begin developing a more complete strategy on what to do with the substantial portfolio that it now manages on behalf of the American people."
As of the drafting of this report, however, no asset manager had been hired to manage the existing asset portfolio, and no investment strategy has been developed.
The Special Inspector General's office employs a number of people who are experts with respect to the various kinds of fraud that are invited by TARP's manifold programs. It is obvious from his report that the SIG foresees the prospect of fraud on a truly massive scale. Yet, for some reason, Treasury does not appear to have the same level of concern about fraud that could cost the taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.
With respect to specific TARP programs, the report goes into considerable detail about the features of the programs that make them susceptible to fraud and manipulation. Here, the SIG discusses the "Public-Private Investment Program," one of the most controversial aspects of TARP. PPIP is intended to form public-private "partnerships" to buy distressed assets, mostly mortgage-backed securities. But the vast majority of the risk lies with the taxpayers, while the program is rife with opportunities for connected insiders to make a fortune. The following excerpt is lengthy, but easily understandable:
Many aspects of PPIP could make it inherently vulnerable to fraud, waste, and abuse. First, PPIP deals with assets that have recently been illiquid, making valuation difficult, therefore raising the danger that the Government will overpay for the assets. Second, many of the participants in these markets, such as hedge funds, are substantially unregulated and the internal oversight and compliance capability at those institutions vary widely. Next, the interrelationships between the market participants can be extremely complex and difficult to anticipate: the same entity might buy and sell toxic assets for its own benefit and manage portfolios of toxic assets for others, all while holding or managing equity or debt securities of the banks and other institutions that have large positions in the same toxic assets. Finally, the sheer size of the program -- up to a trillion dollars for the PPIFs and up to another trillion dollars for the expansion of TALF -- is so large and the leverage being provided to the private equity participants so beneficial, that the taxpayer risk is many times that of the private parties, thereby potentially skewing the economic incentives.
After receiving initial briefings from Treasury on PPIP and discussing the issue with law enforcement partners, SIGTARP has identified three of the most significant areas of potential vulnerability to fraud and abuse applicable across the program.
The program is rife with potential conflicts of interest. Again, the explanation is lengthy but is clearly written:
The first area of vulnerability is that the private parties managing the PPIFs might have a powerful incentive to make investment decisions that benefit themselves at the expense of the taxpayer. By their nature and design, including the availability of significant leverage, the PPIF transactions in these frozen markets will have a significant impact on how any particular asset is priced in the market. As a result, the increase in the price of such an asset will greatly benefit anyone who owns or manages the same asset, including the PPIF manager who is making the investment decisions.
As an extremely simplified example from the Legacy Securities Program, assume that the fund manager of the PPIF owns 1 million bonds of MBS [Mortgage-Backed Security] X in its own account. MBS X is currently valued on the fund manager's books at 20% of its original value, or $20 per bond, for a total of $20 million. The fund manager does an estimate and believes that, in a fully functioning market, MBS X is actually worth 30% of face value, or $30 per bond. In the absence of a conflict of interest, the fund manager, using PPIF funds, might be willing to pay up to $30 per bond in the market. However, the fund manager realizes that it can make more money for itself if it drives the price even higher. It thus uses the funds it controls in the PPIF to buy 1 million MBS X bonds from someone else at $40 per bond, or $40 million. This transaction has the potential, in the current illiquid market, of setting the market price for that MBS X at $40, even though that price is far above what the MBS is actually worth. As a result, the fund manager could sell the MBS on its own books and recognize a profit of $20 million. Over time, however, the price of MBS X declines to its actual value, $30 per bond, and results in a $10 million loss to the PPIF fund. This loss has no negative impact to the fund manager, however, because it did not have any of its own money invested in the fund. Indeed, the fund manager has made money on the PPIF, because it has received fees from both Treasury and the private investors based only on the total size of the PPIF. In other words, the conflict results in an enormous profit for the fund manager at the expense of the taxpayer.
The same incentives to overpay could exist in the Legacy Loans Program and in numerous other factual circumstances. The incentives exist, for example, even if the fund manager does not own MBS X but is merely managing other funds that hold MBS X, as the manager earns fees based on the value of that fund, a value that would, in this example, be significantly overstated (temporarily) as it can increase the value of that fund based on valuing, or "marking" the MBS X at the inflated "market" price that it set.
A second risk identified by the Special Inspector General is collusion between participants in the PPIP program--the issue that we highlighted here:
A closely related vulnerability is that PPIF managers might be persuaded, through kickbacks, quid pro quo transactions, or other collusive arrangements, to manage the PPIFs not for the benefit of the PPIF (and taxpayers), but rather for the benefit of themselves and their collusive partners. In both the Legacy Loans Program and the Legacy Securities Program, the significant Government-financed leverage presents a great incentive for collusion between the buyer and seller of the asset, or the buyer and other buyers, whereby, once again, the taxpayer takes a significant loss while others profit.
This time, consider an example from the Legacy Loans Program. Imagine that a bank owns a pool of mortgage loans that both it and the private equity firm investing in a PPIF values at $600 million. The private equity firm invests $60 million into the PPIF, which is matched by $60 million of TARP funds, and which is leveraged by a loan of $720 million guaranteed by FDIC (the 6-to-1 debt-to-equity ratio). The PPIF private equity firm surreptitiously agrees with the bank to overpay for the pool of loans and causes the PPIF to bid $840 million at auction for that pool. After the auction, the bank secretly pays the PPIF private equity firm a kickback of $120 million, or half the difference between the auction price ($840 million) and the true value ($600 million).
Although the PPIF will eventually perform poorly as a result of the overpayment, the private equity firm's loss is relatively small. Even if the PPIF was completely wiped out, the most the PPIF private equity firm could lose is $60 million, which would still give it a guaranteed profit of at least $60 million as a result of the kickback, a 100% return. Meanwhile, the bank would have gained an illegal benefit of $120 million, all at the expense of the taxpayer and FDIC. Of course, in practice, the collusive scheme would be far more complex and would likely involve a series of affiliates and offsetting transactions, but the principle would be the same.
The same collusion could occur in the Legacy Securities Program between buyer and seller. Similarly, collusion could occur among other buyers.
The third broad area of risk identified by SIG is money laundering:
Because of the significant leveraging available and the inherent imprimatur of legitimacy associated with PPIP and TALF, these programs present an ideal opportunity to money-laundering organizations. If a criminal organization can successfully invest $10 million of illicit proceeds into a PPIF, not only does the organization enjoy the possibility of profiting through the Government-backed leverage, but any eventual distributions from the PPIF are successfully laundered because they appear to be PPIF investment gains rather than drug, prostitution, or illegal gambling proceeds.
[...] But it gets worse. Because Treasury has now announced that Public-Private Investment Fund money will be available to purchase mortgage-backed securities under the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility program. This makes the Special Inspector General distinctly unhappy:
In announcing the details of PPIP, Treasury has indicated that PPIFs under the Legacy Securities Program could, in turn, use the leveraged PPIF funds (two-thirds of which will likely be taxpayer money) to purchase legacy MBS through TALF, greatly increasing taxpayer exposure to losses with no corresponding increase of potential profits. By way of example, a PPIF manager could raise $500 million of private equity, which would be matched with $500 million of TARP funds, and a loan of an additional $500 million from TARP funds (according to the term sheet, loans will only be given up to 50% of the total equity if investments will be made through TALF rather than 100% otherwise). The PPIF could then take the total $1.5 billion, bring it to the TALF window, and effectively use that money as the "haircut" amount in a TALF financing to purchase legacy RMBS [Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities].
Assuming that the haircut will be 20% (larger than any existing haircut), the PPIF will be able to receive a non-recourse loan from FRBNY [the Federal Reserve Bank of New York] for an additional $6 billion, enabling the PPIF to purchase $7.5 billion in legacy RMBS. The private investors would thus enjoy 50% of the profits from this enhanced buying power, but only be exposed to less than 7% of the total losses if the fund were wiped out.
Aside from potential unfairness to the taxpayer, this leverage upon leverage on legacy RMBS raises other significant issues. First, it only magnifies the dangerous incentives discussed above (the conflicts of interest and collusion issues), because the fund manager now has up to five times the buying power than it would if it participated in the Legacy Securities PPIF alone. Moreover, it severely undermines the validity of the methodology that the Federal Reserve has used to build the haircut percentages in TALF thus far. The Federal Reserve has told SIGTARP that it has determined its haircut percentage based at least in part on the fact that the haircut represents a TALF borrower's "skin in the game" -- someone's own capital at risk -- that incentivizes appropriate due diligence on the borrower's part. If leveraged PPIFs are permitted to participate in TALF, that effectively lowers the private equity's skin in the game by at least the amount of money borrowed from TARP, materially diminishing the incentive to do due diligence. Put in simpler terms, an investor who is funding 100% of the haircut amount with his own money (as is typical in TALF) can logically be expected to be far more careful than one only putting up 33% (as would occur under this example).
It strikes me as a deep irony that the Treasury Department is creating perverse incentives similar to those that plunged the country into a financial crisis in the first place.
Surely that must be the end of the bad news? No. We haven't yet gotten to the government's Mortgage Modification Program, which bails out individual homeowners. Here, the Special Inspector General brings considerable expertise to the table:
SIGTARP's recommendations were made in the context of the Special Inspector General's prior experience as the founder of the Mortgage Fraud Group in the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York and after consultation with and advice from mortgage fraud experts at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The recommendations address some of the patterns of the rampant mortgage fraud that contributed to the current financial crisis, including corruption of many of the potential gatekeepers who were supposed to limit such fraud: attorneys, appraisers, notaries, mortgage brokers, title insurance agents, and insiders at banks and mortgage originators.
Recognizing that many of the most prevalent frauds had common characteristics, SIGTARP's recommendations reflected an attempt to shield the program from such schemes before they could be adapted to the mortgage modification plan.
Is the Treasury Department heeding the experts' warnings about how to avoid fraud in the mortgage modification program? The short answer is No. Read the report for the details.
What conclusions can we draw? 1) The government's $3 trillion and counting TARP program represents the greatest opportunity for sharp operators to profit at taxpayer expense in history. 2) The Obama administration is either in favor of giving Wall Street sharks this opportunity or, at a minimum, doesn't much mind doing so. (If this seems odd, remember where Obama got the biggest chunk of campaign contributions in 2008.) 3) It may be that the TARP complex of programs is the beginning of a national-socialist type takeover of the financial services industry by the federal government. Thus, 4) we can only hope that this turns out not to be the case, and TARP is only the biggest--and perhaps, by the end of the day, the crookedest--waste of taxpayer money in history. Finally, 5) so far the only person or organization who appears to be looking out for the taxpayers is the Special Inspector General. We will be reading his future reports with great interest.
Powerline blog, Apr 27, 2009
Excerpts:
On April 21, the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program Act of 2009--"SIGTARP"--submitted his quarterly report to Congress on his office's activities in relation to the TARP program. The report is a disquieting document that should be read by every American--certainly be every taxpayer.
The Inspector General's report documents the stunning and at least partly illegal expansion of TARP from the $700 billion originally allocated by Congress to what is now a $3 trillion complex of programs. This chart shows the various programs that are now included within SIGTARP's oversight, and how they have expanded from the initial $700 billion. Note that some of the programs are still incipient; $3 trillion is by no means a final number. [...]
The report is valuable for a number of reasons, not least because it provides the most coherent description I've seen of the various programs now underway to bail out--or take over, as the case may be--the country's financial sector. So far, the report's most commented-upon feature is its description of the many criminal investigations that are now underway, arising out of TARP:
Both from the Hotline and from other leads, SIGTARP has initiated, to date, almost 20 preliminary and full criminal investigations. Although the details of those investigations generally will not be discussed unless and until public action is taken, the cases vary widely in subject matter and include large corporate and securities fraud matters affecting TARP investments, tax matters, insider trading, public corruption, and mortgage-modification fraud.
It is safe to assume, however, that the investigations now in progress represent not even the tip of the iceberg. The most troubling feature of the SIG's report is its documentation of reluctance on the part of Tim Geithner's Treasury Department to make even modest efforts to protect the interests of the taxpayers. To take just one glaring example, Treasury has refused to require banks to account for what they do with the billions of dollars they receive in TARP money:
Treasury has indicated, however, that it will not adopt SIGTARP's recommendation that all TARP recipients be required to do the following:
• account for the use of TARP funds
• set up internal controls to comply with such accounting
• report periodically to Treasury on the results, with appropriate sworn certifications
In light of the fact that the American taxpayer has been asked to fund this extraordinary effort to stabilize the financial system, it is not unreasonable that the public be told how those funds have been used by TARP recipients. Treasury is now conducting regular surveys of the banks' lending activities; however, with the exception of Citigroup and Bank of America, Treasury has refused to seek further details on TARP recipients' use of funds.
Not just failed, but "refused." The report adds:
The American people have a right to know how their tax dollars are being used, particularly as billions of dollars are going to institutions for which banking is certainly not part of the institution's core business and may be little more than a way to gain access to the low-cost capital provided under TARP.
Later, with respect to the Capital Assistance Program specifically, the report says:
Treasury announced that it would require CAP applicants to set forth how they intend to use CAP funding. Notwithstanding this requirement, Treasury adamantly continues to refuse to adopt SIGTARP's recommendation that it require CAP recipients (and indeed all TARP recipients) to report on how they actually used TARP funds. Putting aside the value of this recommendation in other TARP programs, SIGTARP submits that it is largely meaningless to require an applicant to report on its intended use of funds without setting up a mechanism to monitor its actual use of funds.
[...]
The Treasury Department is now managing a vast portfolio of "troubled assets" on behalf of the American people. It has not, however, developed any plan for how to dispose of them, or how to manage them in the meantime. This may relate to the Obama administration's failure to staff the Department:
In its Initial Report, SIGTARP noted that "[t]o date, Treasury has not fully developed significant policies or controls with respect to asset management issues," and recommended that "Treasury needs, in the near term, to begin developing a more complete strategy on what to do with the substantial portfolio that it now manages on behalf of the American people."
As of the drafting of this report, however, no asset manager had been hired to manage the existing asset portfolio, and no investment strategy has been developed.
The Special Inspector General's office employs a number of people who are experts with respect to the various kinds of fraud that are invited by TARP's manifold programs. It is obvious from his report that the SIG foresees the prospect of fraud on a truly massive scale. Yet, for some reason, Treasury does not appear to have the same level of concern about fraud that could cost the taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.
With respect to specific TARP programs, the report goes into considerable detail about the features of the programs that make them susceptible to fraud and manipulation. Here, the SIG discusses the "Public-Private Investment Program," one of the most controversial aspects of TARP. PPIP is intended to form public-private "partnerships" to buy distressed assets, mostly mortgage-backed securities. But the vast majority of the risk lies with the taxpayers, while the program is rife with opportunities for connected insiders to make a fortune. The following excerpt is lengthy, but easily understandable:
Many aspects of PPIP could make it inherently vulnerable to fraud, waste, and abuse. First, PPIP deals with assets that have recently been illiquid, making valuation difficult, therefore raising the danger that the Government will overpay for the assets. Second, many of the participants in these markets, such as hedge funds, are substantially unregulated and the internal oversight and compliance capability at those institutions vary widely. Next, the interrelationships between the market participants can be extremely complex and difficult to anticipate: the same entity might buy and sell toxic assets for its own benefit and manage portfolios of toxic assets for others, all while holding or managing equity or debt securities of the banks and other institutions that have large positions in the same toxic assets. Finally, the sheer size of the program -- up to a trillion dollars for the PPIFs and up to another trillion dollars for the expansion of TALF -- is so large and the leverage being provided to the private equity participants so beneficial, that the taxpayer risk is many times that of the private parties, thereby potentially skewing the economic incentives.
After receiving initial briefings from Treasury on PPIP and discussing the issue with law enforcement partners, SIGTARP has identified three of the most significant areas of potential vulnerability to fraud and abuse applicable across the program.
The program is rife with potential conflicts of interest. Again, the explanation is lengthy but is clearly written:
The first area of vulnerability is that the private parties managing the PPIFs might have a powerful incentive to make investment decisions that benefit themselves at the expense of the taxpayer. By their nature and design, including the availability of significant leverage, the PPIF transactions in these frozen markets will have a significant impact on how any particular asset is priced in the market. As a result, the increase in the price of such an asset will greatly benefit anyone who owns or manages the same asset, including the PPIF manager who is making the investment decisions.
As an extremely simplified example from the Legacy Securities Program, assume that the fund manager of the PPIF owns 1 million bonds of MBS [Mortgage-Backed Security] X in its own account. MBS X is currently valued on the fund manager's books at 20% of its original value, or $20 per bond, for a total of $20 million. The fund manager does an estimate and believes that, in a fully functioning market, MBS X is actually worth 30% of face value, or $30 per bond. In the absence of a conflict of interest, the fund manager, using PPIF funds, might be willing to pay up to $30 per bond in the market. However, the fund manager realizes that it can make more money for itself if it drives the price even higher. It thus uses the funds it controls in the PPIF to buy 1 million MBS X bonds from someone else at $40 per bond, or $40 million. This transaction has the potential, in the current illiquid market, of setting the market price for that MBS X at $40, even though that price is far above what the MBS is actually worth. As a result, the fund manager could sell the MBS on its own books and recognize a profit of $20 million. Over time, however, the price of MBS X declines to its actual value, $30 per bond, and results in a $10 million loss to the PPIF fund. This loss has no negative impact to the fund manager, however, because it did not have any of its own money invested in the fund. Indeed, the fund manager has made money on the PPIF, because it has received fees from both Treasury and the private investors based only on the total size of the PPIF. In other words, the conflict results in an enormous profit for the fund manager at the expense of the taxpayer.
The same incentives to overpay could exist in the Legacy Loans Program and in numerous other factual circumstances. The incentives exist, for example, even if the fund manager does not own MBS X but is merely managing other funds that hold MBS X, as the manager earns fees based on the value of that fund, a value that would, in this example, be significantly overstated (temporarily) as it can increase the value of that fund based on valuing, or "marking" the MBS X at the inflated "market" price that it set.
A second risk identified by the Special Inspector General is collusion between participants in the PPIP program--the issue that we highlighted here:
A closely related vulnerability is that PPIF managers might be persuaded, through kickbacks, quid pro quo transactions, or other collusive arrangements, to manage the PPIFs not for the benefit of the PPIF (and taxpayers), but rather for the benefit of themselves and their collusive partners. In both the Legacy Loans Program and the Legacy Securities Program, the significant Government-financed leverage presents a great incentive for collusion between the buyer and seller of the asset, or the buyer and other buyers, whereby, once again, the taxpayer takes a significant loss while others profit.
This time, consider an example from the Legacy Loans Program. Imagine that a bank owns a pool of mortgage loans that both it and the private equity firm investing in a PPIF values at $600 million. The private equity firm invests $60 million into the PPIF, which is matched by $60 million of TARP funds, and which is leveraged by a loan of $720 million guaranteed by FDIC (the 6-to-1 debt-to-equity ratio). The PPIF private equity firm surreptitiously agrees with the bank to overpay for the pool of loans and causes the PPIF to bid $840 million at auction for that pool. After the auction, the bank secretly pays the PPIF private equity firm a kickback of $120 million, or half the difference between the auction price ($840 million) and the true value ($600 million).
Although the PPIF will eventually perform poorly as a result of the overpayment, the private equity firm's loss is relatively small. Even if the PPIF was completely wiped out, the most the PPIF private equity firm could lose is $60 million, which would still give it a guaranteed profit of at least $60 million as a result of the kickback, a 100% return. Meanwhile, the bank would have gained an illegal benefit of $120 million, all at the expense of the taxpayer and FDIC. Of course, in practice, the collusive scheme would be far more complex and would likely involve a series of affiliates and offsetting transactions, but the principle would be the same.
The same collusion could occur in the Legacy Securities Program between buyer and seller. Similarly, collusion could occur among other buyers.
The third broad area of risk identified by SIG is money laundering:
Because of the significant leveraging available and the inherent imprimatur of legitimacy associated with PPIP and TALF, these programs present an ideal opportunity to money-laundering organizations. If a criminal organization can successfully invest $10 million of illicit proceeds into a PPIF, not only does the organization enjoy the possibility of profiting through the Government-backed leverage, but any eventual distributions from the PPIF are successfully laundered because they appear to be PPIF investment gains rather than drug, prostitution, or illegal gambling proceeds.
[...] But it gets worse. Because Treasury has now announced that Public-Private Investment Fund money will be available to purchase mortgage-backed securities under the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility program. This makes the Special Inspector General distinctly unhappy:
In announcing the details of PPIP, Treasury has indicated that PPIFs under the Legacy Securities Program could, in turn, use the leveraged PPIF funds (two-thirds of which will likely be taxpayer money) to purchase legacy MBS through TALF, greatly increasing taxpayer exposure to losses with no corresponding increase of potential profits. By way of example, a PPIF manager could raise $500 million of private equity, which would be matched with $500 million of TARP funds, and a loan of an additional $500 million from TARP funds (according to the term sheet, loans will only be given up to 50% of the total equity if investments will be made through TALF rather than 100% otherwise). The PPIF could then take the total $1.5 billion, bring it to the TALF window, and effectively use that money as the "haircut" amount in a TALF financing to purchase legacy RMBS [Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities].
Assuming that the haircut will be 20% (larger than any existing haircut), the PPIF will be able to receive a non-recourse loan from FRBNY [the Federal Reserve Bank of New York] for an additional $6 billion, enabling the PPIF to purchase $7.5 billion in legacy RMBS. The private investors would thus enjoy 50% of the profits from this enhanced buying power, but only be exposed to less than 7% of the total losses if the fund were wiped out.
Aside from potential unfairness to the taxpayer, this leverage upon leverage on legacy RMBS raises other significant issues. First, it only magnifies the dangerous incentives discussed above (the conflicts of interest and collusion issues), because the fund manager now has up to five times the buying power than it would if it participated in the Legacy Securities PPIF alone. Moreover, it severely undermines the validity of the methodology that the Federal Reserve has used to build the haircut percentages in TALF thus far. The Federal Reserve has told SIGTARP that it has determined its haircut percentage based at least in part on the fact that the haircut represents a TALF borrower's "skin in the game" -- someone's own capital at risk -- that incentivizes appropriate due diligence on the borrower's part. If leveraged PPIFs are permitted to participate in TALF, that effectively lowers the private equity's skin in the game by at least the amount of money borrowed from TARP, materially diminishing the incentive to do due diligence. Put in simpler terms, an investor who is funding 100% of the haircut amount with his own money (as is typical in TALF) can logically be expected to be far more careful than one only putting up 33% (as would occur under this example).
It strikes me as a deep irony that the Treasury Department is creating perverse incentives similar to those that plunged the country into a financial crisis in the first place.
Surely that must be the end of the bad news? No. We haven't yet gotten to the government's Mortgage Modification Program, which bails out individual homeowners. Here, the Special Inspector General brings considerable expertise to the table:
SIGTARP's recommendations were made in the context of the Special Inspector General's prior experience as the founder of the Mortgage Fraud Group in the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York and after consultation with and advice from mortgage fraud experts at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The recommendations address some of the patterns of the rampant mortgage fraud that contributed to the current financial crisis, including corruption of many of the potential gatekeepers who were supposed to limit such fraud: attorneys, appraisers, notaries, mortgage brokers, title insurance agents, and insiders at banks and mortgage originators.
Recognizing that many of the most prevalent frauds had common characteristics, SIGTARP's recommendations reflected an attempt to shield the program from such schemes before they could be adapted to the mortgage modification plan.
Is the Treasury Department heeding the experts' warnings about how to avoid fraud in the mortgage modification program? The short answer is No. Read the report for the details.
What conclusions can we draw? 1) The government's $3 trillion and counting TARP program represents the greatest opportunity for sharp operators to profit at taxpayer expense in history. 2) The Obama administration is either in favor of giving Wall Street sharks this opportunity or, at a minimum, doesn't much mind doing so. (If this seems odd, remember where Obama got the biggest chunk of campaign contributions in 2008.) 3) It may be that the TARP complex of programs is the beginning of a national-socialist type takeover of the financial services industry by the federal government. Thus, 4) we can only hope that this turns out not to be the case, and TARP is only the biggest--and perhaps, by the end of the day, the crookedest--waste of taxpayer money in history. Finally, 5) so far the only person or organization who appears to be looking out for the taxpayers is the Special Inspector General. We will be reading his future reports with great interest.
WaPo: Reforming Health Care
Reforming Health Care. WaPo Editorial
How a government-run plan could fit -- or not
WaPo, Monday, April 27, 2009
OF THE many possible issues that could snarl health-care reform, one of the biggest is whether the measure should include a government-run health plan to compete with private insurers. The public plan has become an unfortunate litmus test for both sides. The opposition to a public plan option is understandable; conservatives, health insurers, health-care providers and others see it as a slippery step down the slope to a single-payer system because, they contend, the government's built-in advantages will allow it to unfairly squash competitors.
For liberals, labor unions and others pushing to make health care available to all Americans, however, the fixation on a public plan is bizarre and counterproductive. Their position elevates the public plan way out of proportion to its importance in fixing health care. It is entirely possible to imagine effective health-care reform -- changes that would expand coverage and help control costs -- without a public option.
President Obama has said that he favors a public option but has been sketchy on details. His nominee for secretary of health and human services, Kathleen Sebelius, said that she wants a public plan to "challenge private insurers to compete on cost and quality" but "recognizes the importance of a level playing field between plans and ensuring that private insurance plans are not disadvantaged."
The argument for a public plan is that, without the need to extensively market itself or make a profit, it would do a better job of providing good health care at a reasonable cost, setting an important benchmark against which private insurers would be forced to compete. Even in a system where insurers are required to take all applicants, public plan advocates argue, incentives will remain for private plans to discourage the less healthy from signing up; a public plan is a necessary backstop. Moreover, if the playing field is level, public plan advocates argue, private insurers -- and those who extol the virtues of a competitive marketplace -- should have nothing to fear.
We disagree. It is difficult to imagine a truly level playing field that would simultaneously produce benefits from a government-run system. While prescription drugs are not a perfect comparison, the experience of competing plans in the Medicare prescription drug arena suggests that a government-run option is not essential to energize a competitive system that has turned out to cost less than expected. Insurers and private companies have been at least as innovative as the federal government in recent years in finding ways to provide quality care at lower costs. Medicare keeps costs under control in part because of its 800-pound-gorilla capacity to dictate prices -- in effect, to force the private sector to subsidize it. Such power, if exercised in a public health option, eventually would produce a single-payer system; if that's where the country wants to go, it should do so explicitly, not by default. If the chief advantage of a public option is to set a benchmark for private competitors, that could be achieved in other ways, for example, by providing for the entry of a public plan in case the private marketplace did not perform as expected.
Maybe we're wrong. Maybe it's possible to design a public option that aids consumers without undermining competition. If so, we certainly wouldn't oppose a program that included a public component. But it would be a huge mistake for the left to torpedo reform over this question.
How a government-run plan could fit -- or not
WaPo, Monday, April 27, 2009
OF THE many possible issues that could snarl health-care reform, one of the biggest is whether the measure should include a government-run health plan to compete with private insurers. The public plan has become an unfortunate litmus test for both sides. The opposition to a public plan option is understandable; conservatives, health insurers, health-care providers and others see it as a slippery step down the slope to a single-payer system because, they contend, the government's built-in advantages will allow it to unfairly squash competitors.
For liberals, labor unions and others pushing to make health care available to all Americans, however, the fixation on a public plan is bizarre and counterproductive. Their position elevates the public plan way out of proportion to its importance in fixing health care. It is entirely possible to imagine effective health-care reform -- changes that would expand coverage and help control costs -- without a public option.
President Obama has said that he favors a public option but has been sketchy on details. His nominee for secretary of health and human services, Kathleen Sebelius, said that she wants a public plan to "challenge private insurers to compete on cost and quality" but "recognizes the importance of a level playing field between plans and ensuring that private insurance plans are not disadvantaged."
The argument for a public plan is that, without the need to extensively market itself or make a profit, it would do a better job of providing good health care at a reasonable cost, setting an important benchmark against which private insurers would be forced to compete. Even in a system where insurers are required to take all applicants, public plan advocates argue, incentives will remain for private plans to discourage the less healthy from signing up; a public plan is a necessary backstop. Moreover, if the playing field is level, public plan advocates argue, private insurers -- and those who extol the virtues of a competitive marketplace -- should have nothing to fear.
We disagree. It is difficult to imagine a truly level playing field that would simultaneously produce benefits from a government-run system. While prescription drugs are not a perfect comparison, the experience of competing plans in the Medicare prescription drug arena suggests that a government-run option is not essential to energize a competitive system that has turned out to cost less than expected. Insurers and private companies have been at least as innovative as the federal government in recent years in finding ways to provide quality care at lower costs. Medicare keeps costs under control in part because of its 800-pound-gorilla capacity to dictate prices -- in effect, to force the private sector to subsidize it. Such power, if exercised in a public health option, eventually would produce a single-payer system; if that's where the country wants to go, it should do so explicitly, not by default. If the chief advantage of a public option is to set a benchmark for private competitors, that could be achieved in other ways, for example, by providing for the entry of a public plan in case the private marketplace did not perform as expected.
Maybe we're wrong. Maybe it's possible to design a public option that aids consumers without undermining competition. If so, we certainly wouldn't oppose a program that included a public component. But it would be a huge mistake for the left to torpedo reform over this question.
Costa Rica Follow-Up: Fatal Dependence on Renewable Electricity
Costa Rica Follow-Up: Fatal Dependence on Renewable Electricity (Tom Friedman’s energy paradise loses its luck). By Donald Hertzmark
Master Resource, April 25, 2009
“When an abundant natural fall of water is at hand, nothing can be cheaper or better than water power. But everything depends upon local circumstances. The occasional mountain torrent is simply destructive. Many streams and rivers only contain sufficient water half the year round and costly reservoirs alone could keep up the summer supply. In flat countries no engineering art could procure any considerable supply of natural water power, and in very few places do we find water power free from occasional failure by drought.”
- W. S. Jevons, The Coal Question (London: Macmillan and Co., 1865), p. 129.
Thomas Friedman in the New York Times has presented Costa Rica as a model for the energy world, noting its reliance on renewable energy (hydro) to generate electricity. In response, we posted last week about how such dependence had left it vulnerable to the vagaries of rainfall, and (to a much lesser degree) wind. W. S. Jevons, the father of energy economics, said as much in 1865.
With all hydro development in the hands of the government, and with hydro responsible for 75-80% of power generation, any shortfall in rain can, within 1-2 weeks result in reduced electricity generation. And the odds have now caught up with Costa Rica – recent dryer conditions have led to blackouts in the country.
Exacerbating the country’s policy of hydro dependence for its power sector, recent investments have been run-of-river. This means that new dams have little storage capability and power output can be regulated only within broad ranges and depend on rainfall patterns over a very short period, ranging from hours to less than two weeks. Run-of-river projects are the ecologically preferred type of hydro development these days, since the construction does not involve flooding a large amount of land to create a reservoir. At the same time, the project’s output will fluctuate – not as much as wind or solar, but significant nevertheless.
When run-of-river hydro provides an essential element of a country’s electricity output, the system can be highly sensitive to even small variations in rainfall. For Costa Rica, a small reduction in rainfall, down just a bit over 2008, has proven beyond the capabilities of the country’s storage reservoirs to buffer.
As a result of recent rainfall variations, even the country’s modest electricity growth of just over 2% could not be met from current generation resources. The result has been cutbacks in electricity supply through periodic load shedding across the country. Predictably, the country’s industrial sector bears the brunt of unreliable electricity supply, and is 2% below last year’s level. Fluctuating electricity supply is bound to lead to problems with modern industrial process technologies and the country has virtually assured its continued dependence on tourism and plantation crop exports with such an energy policy.
The results of the country’s energy policy, denying citizens the ability to develop better sources of power generation, will be applauded by foreign eco-tourists who will return to an electricity supply rendered utterly reliable by reliance on coal, gas and nuclear. But what of the supposed beneficiaries – the citizens of Costa Rica – do they all really want to see their economic horizons shrink to hotel and restaurant jobs and agricultural labor? Talk about McJobs!
Master Resource, April 25, 2009
“When an abundant natural fall of water is at hand, nothing can be cheaper or better than water power. But everything depends upon local circumstances. The occasional mountain torrent is simply destructive. Many streams and rivers only contain sufficient water half the year round and costly reservoirs alone could keep up the summer supply. In flat countries no engineering art could procure any considerable supply of natural water power, and in very few places do we find water power free from occasional failure by drought.”
- W. S. Jevons, The Coal Question (London: Macmillan and Co., 1865), p. 129.
Thomas Friedman in the New York Times has presented Costa Rica as a model for the energy world, noting its reliance on renewable energy (hydro) to generate electricity. In response, we posted last week about how such dependence had left it vulnerable to the vagaries of rainfall, and (to a much lesser degree) wind. W. S. Jevons, the father of energy economics, said as much in 1865.
With all hydro development in the hands of the government, and with hydro responsible for 75-80% of power generation, any shortfall in rain can, within 1-2 weeks result in reduced electricity generation. And the odds have now caught up with Costa Rica – recent dryer conditions have led to blackouts in the country.
Exacerbating the country’s policy of hydro dependence for its power sector, recent investments have been run-of-river. This means that new dams have little storage capability and power output can be regulated only within broad ranges and depend on rainfall patterns over a very short period, ranging from hours to less than two weeks. Run-of-river projects are the ecologically preferred type of hydro development these days, since the construction does not involve flooding a large amount of land to create a reservoir. At the same time, the project’s output will fluctuate – not as much as wind or solar, but significant nevertheless.
When run-of-river hydro provides an essential element of a country’s electricity output, the system can be highly sensitive to even small variations in rainfall. For Costa Rica, a small reduction in rainfall, down just a bit over 2008, has proven beyond the capabilities of the country’s storage reservoirs to buffer.
As a result of recent rainfall variations, even the country’s modest electricity growth of just over 2% could not be met from current generation resources. The result has been cutbacks in electricity supply through periodic load shedding across the country. Predictably, the country’s industrial sector bears the brunt of unreliable electricity supply, and is 2% below last year’s level. Fluctuating electricity supply is bound to lead to problems with modern industrial process technologies and the country has virtually assured its continued dependence on tourism and plantation crop exports with such an energy policy.
The results of the country’s energy policy, denying citizens the ability to develop better sources of power generation, will be applauded by foreign eco-tourists who will return to an electricity supply rendered utterly reliable by reliance on coal, gas and nuclear. But what of the supposed beneficiaries – the citizens of Costa Rica – do they all really want to see their economic horizons shrink to hotel and restaurant jobs and agricultural labor? Talk about McJobs!
The "Idea of India" after Mumbai
The "Idea of India" after Mumbai. By Apoorva Shah
AEI, Friday, April 24, 2009
India's founding ideal of multicultural democracy is critical to both domestic cohesion and geopolitical interest, and it has defined how the country confronts terrorism at home. Modern India has much experience with terrorism, but most attacks have been rooted in separatist and ethnic insurgencies in rural frontier provinces. In the last decade, however, India has seen a steep rise in the number of attacks in urban areas, aimed at civilians, and committed not by rural insurgents but by young, middle-class jihadists. These domestic threats, which expose fault lines in the "idea of India," have been welcomed and at times supported by Pakistan, whose existence is founded in opposition to India. In fact, the apparent paradox between Pakistan's tolerance of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorist group leading up to the November 26, 2008, attacks in Mumbai and Pakistan's internal struggle against extremists can be understood in the framework of these conflicting ideologies. For India, countering the threat of domestic jihadism is not only a security imperative; it is also a strategic necessity. This merits a new counterterrorism response by the Indian government and a renewed understanding of Indian Muslims and their place in India's pluralistic society.
Full outlook here.
AEI, Friday, April 24, 2009
India's founding ideal of multicultural democracy is critical to both domestic cohesion and geopolitical interest, and it has defined how the country confronts terrorism at home. Modern India has much experience with terrorism, but most attacks have been rooted in separatist and ethnic insurgencies in rural frontier provinces. In the last decade, however, India has seen a steep rise in the number of attacks in urban areas, aimed at civilians, and committed not by rural insurgents but by young, middle-class jihadists. These domestic threats, which expose fault lines in the "idea of India," have been welcomed and at times supported by Pakistan, whose existence is founded in opposition to India. In fact, the apparent paradox between Pakistan's tolerance of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorist group leading up to the November 26, 2008, attacks in Mumbai and Pakistan's internal struggle against extremists can be understood in the framework of these conflicting ideologies. For India, countering the threat of domestic jihadism is not only a security imperative; it is also a strategic necessity. This merits a new counterterrorism response by the Indian government and a renewed understanding of Indian Muslims and their place in India's pluralistic society.
Full outlook here.
Misconceptions About the Interrogation Memos
Misconceptions About the Interrogation Memos. By William M McSwain
Their goal was to allow the CIA and military to stay within the parameters of a murky area of the law.
WSJ, Apr 26, 2009
President Barack Obama has reinvigorated the critics of George W. Bush's antiterror policies by opening the door to prosecuting or sanctioning those who crafted interrogation policy in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. These critics -- including the president -- are laboring under numerous misconceptions. Many of them have no experience with or understanding of military or CIA interrogation, the purpose of which is to gain actionable intelligence to safeguard our country. The recently released memos by lawyers in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel were written to assist interrogators in that critical mission. The memos cannot be fairly evaluated without that mission in mind.
Military and CIA interrogators are trained to use creative means of deception, and to play on detainee emotions and fears. This can be a nasty business. People unfamiliar with it, therefore, might even view a perfectly legitimate interrogation of a prisoner of war that is in full compliance with the Geneva Conventions as abhorrent by its very nature.
But military interrogation is not akin to a friendly chat across a conference table -- nor is it designed to gather evidence in a criminal trial, as an FBI interview might be. There is a fundamental distinction between law enforcement and military interrogations that we ignore at our peril.
Second-guessers can also fail to appreciate the increased importance of interrogation (and human intelligence in general) in the post 9/11 world. We face an enemy that wears no uniform, blends in with civilian populations, and operates in the shadows. This has made eliciting information from captured terrorists vital to the effort of finding other terrorists. As interrogation has become more important, drawing out useful information has become more difficult -- because hardened terrorists are often trained to resist traditional U.S. interrogation methods.
Fortunately, aggressive interrogation techniques like those outlined in the memos to the CIA are effective. As the memos explain, high-value detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the mastermind of 9/11, and Abu Zubaydah, one of Osama bin Laden's key lieutenants, provided no actionable intelligence when facing traditional U.S. methods. It is doubtful that any high-level al Qaeda operative would ever provide useful intelligence in response to traditional methods.
Yet KSM and Zubaydah provided critical information after being waterboarded -- information that, among other things, helped to prevent a "Second Wave" attack in Los Angeles, according to the memos. Similarly, the 2005 report by Vice Adm. Albert Church on Defense Department interrogation policies, the "Church Report" -- of which I served as the executive editor -- documented the success of aggressive techniques against high-value detainees like Mohamed al Kahtani, 9/11's "20th hijacker."
The aggressive techniques in the CIA memos are also undeniably safe, having been adopted from Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) training used with our own troops.
I have personally been waterboarded, put into stress positions, sleep deprived, slapped in the face. While none of this was enjoyable, I am none the worse for wear.
While such techniques are used in U.S. military training, some apparently consider them too brutal, too abusive, too inhumane -- in short, too much like "torture" -- to be used on fanatics like KSM who are bent on the mass murder of innocent American civilians. And if legal advisers such as Steven G. Bradbury, Jay S. Bybee and John Yoo are to be prosecuted for having sanctioned their use under careful controls, who's next? Every commander who ever implemented a SERE course?
Many critics also play the Abu Ghraib "trump card": The abuses of prisoners at that facility in Iraq allegedly "prove" the Bush administration's supposed policy of abuse, first codified in its legal memos. This ignores all relevant evidence.
As the Church Report concluded, after a thorough review of all Defense Department interrogation policies, the pictured abuses at Abu Ghraib bore no resemblance to approved policies at any level, in any theater. The 2004 Independent Panel to Review Department of Defense Detention Operations -- whose four members included two former secretaries of defense under President Jimmy Carter -- also stated that "no approved procedures called for or allowed the kinds of abuse that in fact occurred. There is no evidence of a policy of abuse promulgated by senior officials or military authorities."
Similarly, the critics like to default to Guantanamo as a symbol of the kind of abuse that Mr. Bush's antiterror policies allowed. Yet, at the time of the Church Report, there had been more than 24,000 interrogation sessions at Guantanamo and only three cases of substantiated interrogation-related abuse. All of them consisted of minor assaults in which military interrogators had exceeded the bounds of approved interrogation policy. Notably, the Church Report found that detainees at Guantanamo were more likely to have been injured playing recreational sports than in confrontations with interrogators or guards.
Mr. Bush's advisers were public servants with the memory of 9/11 still fresh in their minds, doing their best to give legitimate legal advice in a murky, largely undefined area of the law. Is this the stuff of which federal prosecutions, or even sanctions, are made?
As a former federal prosecutor, I know a good case from a bad one. I know a case based on solid evidence and even-handed application of the law versus one based on scoring political points. Mr. Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, have professed their desire to take politics out of the Justice Department, to restore integrity to a department that they believe had gone astray under Mr. Bush. Their recent actions, however, speak otherwise.
The bottom line is that any attempt to prosecute or sanction lawyers such as Messrs. Bradbury, Bybee or Yoo would be a fool's errand. And whatever our new president and his attorney general are, they aren't fools. Or at least I don't think they are. For the good of the country, I hope they don't prove me wrong.
Mr. McSwain, a former scout/sniper platoon commander in the Marines and assistant U.S. attorney, was executive editor of the 2005 Review of Department of Defense Detention Operations and Detainee Interrogation Techniques (The Church Report). He is an attorney in private practice in Philadelphia.
Their goal was to allow the CIA and military to stay within the parameters of a murky area of the law.
WSJ, Apr 26, 2009
President Barack Obama has reinvigorated the critics of George W. Bush's antiterror policies by opening the door to prosecuting or sanctioning those who crafted interrogation policy in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. These critics -- including the president -- are laboring under numerous misconceptions. Many of them have no experience with or understanding of military or CIA interrogation, the purpose of which is to gain actionable intelligence to safeguard our country. The recently released memos by lawyers in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel were written to assist interrogators in that critical mission. The memos cannot be fairly evaluated without that mission in mind.
Military and CIA interrogators are trained to use creative means of deception, and to play on detainee emotions and fears. This can be a nasty business. People unfamiliar with it, therefore, might even view a perfectly legitimate interrogation of a prisoner of war that is in full compliance with the Geneva Conventions as abhorrent by its very nature.
But military interrogation is not akin to a friendly chat across a conference table -- nor is it designed to gather evidence in a criminal trial, as an FBI interview might be. There is a fundamental distinction between law enforcement and military interrogations that we ignore at our peril.
Second-guessers can also fail to appreciate the increased importance of interrogation (and human intelligence in general) in the post 9/11 world. We face an enemy that wears no uniform, blends in with civilian populations, and operates in the shadows. This has made eliciting information from captured terrorists vital to the effort of finding other terrorists. As interrogation has become more important, drawing out useful information has become more difficult -- because hardened terrorists are often trained to resist traditional U.S. interrogation methods.
Fortunately, aggressive interrogation techniques like those outlined in the memos to the CIA are effective. As the memos explain, high-value detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the mastermind of 9/11, and Abu Zubaydah, one of Osama bin Laden's key lieutenants, provided no actionable intelligence when facing traditional U.S. methods. It is doubtful that any high-level al Qaeda operative would ever provide useful intelligence in response to traditional methods.
Yet KSM and Zubaydah provided critical information after being waterboarded -- information that, among other things, helped to prevent a "Second Wave" attack in Los Angeles, according to the memos. Similarly, the 2005 report by Vice Adm. Albert Church on Defense Department interrogation policies, the "Church Report" -- of which I served as the executive editor -- documented the success of aggressive techniques against high-value detainees like Mohamed al Kahtani, 9/11's "20th hijacker."
The aggressive techniques in the CIA memos are also undeniably safe, having been adopted from Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) training used with our own troops.
I have personally been waterboarded, put into stress positions, sleep deprived, slapped in the face. While none of this was enjoyable, I am none the worse for wear.
While such techniques are used in U.S. military training, some apparently consider them too brutal, too abusive, too inhumane -- in short, too much like "torture" -- to be used on fanatics like KSM who are bent on the mass murder of innocent American civilians. And if legal advisers such as Steven G. Bradbury, Jay S. Bybee and John Yoo are to be prosecuted for having sanctioned their use under careful controls, who's next? Every commander who ever implemented a SERE course?
Many critics also play the Abu Ghraib "trump card": The abuses of prisoners at that facility in Iraq allegedly "prove" the Bush administration's supposed policy of abuse, first codified in its legal memos. This ignores all relevant evidence.
As the Church Report concluded, after a thorough review of all Defense Department interrogation policies, the pictured abuses at Abu Ghraib bore no resemblance to approved policies at any level, in any theater. The 2004 Independent Panel to Review Department of Defense Detention Operations -- whose four members included two former secretaries of defense under President Jimmy Carter -- also stated that "no approved procedures called for or allowed the kinds of abuse that in fact occurred. There is no evidence of a policy of abuse promulgated by senior officials or military authorities."
Similarly, the critics like to default to Guantanamo as a symbol of the kind of abuse that Mr. Bush's antiterror policies allowed. Yet, at the time of the Church Report, there had been more than 24,000 interrogation sessions at Guantanamo and only three cases of substantiated interrogation-related abuse. All of them consisted of minor assaults in which military interrogators had exceeded the bounds of approved interrogation policy. Notably, the Church Report found that detainees at Guantanamo were more likely to have been injured playing recreational sports than in confrontations with interrogators or guards.
Mr. Bush's advisers were public servants with the memory of 9/11 still fresh in their minds, doing their best to give legitimate legal advice in a murky, largely undefined area of the law. Is this the stuff of which federal prosecutions, or even sanctions, are made?
As a former federal prosecutor, I know a good case from a bad one. I know a case based on solid evidence and even-handed application of the law versus one based on scoring political points. Mr. Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, have professed their desire to take politics out of the Justice Department, to restore integrity to a department that they believe had gone astray under Mr. Bush. Their recent actions, however, speak otherwise.
The bottom line is that any attempt to prosecute or sanction lawyers such as Messrs. Bradbury, Bybee or Yoo would be a fool's errand. And whatever our new president and his attorney general are, they aren't fools. Or at least I don't think they are. For the good of the country, I hope they don't prove me wrong.
Mr. McSwain, a former scout/sniper platoon commander in the Marines and assistant U.S. attorney, was executive editor of the 2005 Review of Department of Defense Detention Operations and Detainee Interrogation Techniques (The Church Report). He is an attorney in private practice in Philadelphia.
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