The Path Forward for Honduras. By ROBERTO MICHELETTI
Zelaya’s removal from office was a triumph for the rule of law.
WSJ, Jul 27, 2009
One of America’s most loyal Latin American allies—Honduras—has been in the midst of a constitutional crisis that threatens its democracy. Sadly, key undisputed facts regarding the crisis have often been ignored by America’s leaders, at least during the earliest days of the crisis.
In recent days, the rhetoric from allies of former President Manuel Zelaya has also dominated media reporting in the U.S. The worst distortion is the repetition of the false statement that Mr. Zelaya was removed from office by the military and for being a “reformer.” The truth is that he was removed by a democratically elected civilian government because the independent judicial and legislative branches of our government found that he had violated our laws and constitution.
Let’s review some fundamental facts that cannot be disputed:
• The Supreme Court, by a 15-0 vote, found that Mr. Zelaya had acted illegally by proceeding with an unconstitutional “referendum,” and it ordered the Armed Forces to arrest him. The military executed the arrest order of the Supreme Court because it was the appropriate agency to do so under Honduran law.
• Eight of the 15 votes on the Supreme Court were cast by members of Mr. Zelaya’s own Liberal Party. Strange that the pro-Zelaya propagandists who talk about the rule of law forget to mention the unanimous Supreme Court decision with a majority from Mr. Zelaya’s own party. Thus, Mr. Zelaya’s arrest was at the instigation of Honduran’s constitutional and civilian authorities—not the military.
• The Honduran Congress voted overwhelmingly in support of removing Mr. Zelaya. The vote included a majority of members of Mr. Zelaya’s Liberal Party.
• Independent government and religious leaders and institutions—including the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, the Administrative Law Tribunal, the independent Human Rights Ombudsman, four-out-of-five political parties, the two major presidential candidates of the Liberal and National Parties, and Honduras’s Catholic Cardinal—all agreed that Mr. Zelaya had acted illegally.
• The constitution expressly states in Article 239 that any president who seeks to amend the constitution and extend his term is automatically disqualified and is no longer president. There is no express provision for an impeachment process in the Honduran constitution. But the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision affirmed that Mr. Zelaya was attempting to extend his term with his illegal referendum. Thus, at the time of his arrest he was no longer—as a matter of law, as far as the Supreme Court was concerned—president of Honduras.
• Days before his arrest, Mr. Zelaya had his chief of staff illegally withdraw millions of dollars in cash from the Central Bank of Honduras.
• A day or so before his arrest, Mr. Zelaya led a violent mob to overrun an Air Force base to seize referendum ballots that had been shipped into Honduras by Hugo Chávez’s Venezuelan government.
• I succeeded Mr. Zelaya under the Honduran constitution’s order of succession (our vice president had resigned before all of this began so that he could run for president). This is and has always been an entirely civilian government. The military was ordered by an entirely civilian Supreme Court to arrest Mr. Zelaya. His removal was ordered by an entirely civilian and elected Congress. To suggest that Mr. Zelaya was ousted by means of a military coup is demonstrably false.
Regarding the decision to expel Mr. Zelaya from the country the evening of June 28 without a trial, reasonable people can believe the situation could have been handled differently. But it is also necessary to understand the decision in the context of genuine fear of Mr. Zelaya’s proven willingness to violate the law and to engage in mob-led violence.
The way forward is to work with Costa Rican President Oscar Arias. He is proposing ways to ensure that Mr. Zelaya complies with Honduras’s laws and its constitution and allows the people of Honduras to elect a new president in the regularly scheduled Nov. 29 elections (or perhaps earlier, if the date is moved up as President Arias has suggested and as Honduran law allows).
If all parties reach agreement to allow Mr. Zelaya to return to Honduras—a big “if”—we believe that he cannot be trusted to comply with the law and therefore it is our position that he must be prosecuted with full due process.
President Arias’s proposal for a moratorium on prosecution of all parties may be considered, but our Supreme Court has indicated that such a proposal presents serious legal problems under our constitution.
Like America, our constitutional democracy has three co-equal and independent branches of government—a fact that Mr. Zelaya ignored when he openly defied the positions of both the Supreme Court and Congress. But we are ready to continue discussions once the Supreme Court, the attorney general and Congress analyze President Arias’s proposal. That proposal has been turned over to them so that they can review provisions that impact their legal authority. Once we know their legal positions we will proceed accordingly.
The Honduran people must have confidence that their Congress is a co-equal branch of government. They must be assured that the rule of law in Honduras applies to everyone, even their president, and that their Supreme Court’s orders will not be dismissed and swept aside by other nations as inconvenient obstacles.
Meanwhile, the other elements of the Arias proposal, especially the establishment of a Truth Commission to make findings of fact and international enforcement mechanisms to ensure Mr. Zelaya complies with the agreement, are worthy of serious consideration.
Mr. Zelaya’s irresponsible attempt on Friday afternoon to cross the border into Honduras before President Arias has obtained agreement from all parties—an attempt that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appropriately described as “reckless”—was just another example of why Mr. Zelaya cannot be trusted to keep his word.
Regardless of what happens, the worst thing the U.S. can do is to impose economic sanctions that would primarily hurt the poorest people in Honduras. Rather than impose sanctions, the U.S. should continue the wise policies of Mrs. Clinton. She is supporting President Arias’s efforts to mediate the issues. The goal is a peaceful solution that is consistent with Honduran law in a civil society where even the president is not above the law.
Mr. Micheletti, previously the president of the Honduran Congress, became president of Honduras upon the departure of Manuel Zelaya. He is a member of the Liberal Party, the same party as Mr. Zelaya.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
CNN: 5 freedoms you'd lose in health care reform
5 freedoms you'd lose in health care reform. By Shawn Tully, editor at large
If you read the fine print in the Congressional plans, you'll find that a lot of cherished aspects of the current system would disappear.
CNN, July 24, 2009: 10:17 AM ET
NEW YORK (Fortune) -- In promoting his health-care agenda, President Obama has repeatedly reassured Americans that they can keep their existing health plans -- and that the benefits and access they prize will be enhanced through reform.
A close reading of the two main bills, one backed by Democrats in the House and the other issued by Sen. Edward Kennedy's Health committee, contradict the President's assurances. To be sure, it isn't easy to comb through their 2,000 pages of tortured legal language. But page by page, the bills reveal a web of restrictions, fines, and mandates that would radically change your health-care coverage.
If you prize choosing your own cardiologist or urologist under your company's Preferred Provider Organization plan (PPO), if your employer rewards your non-smoking, healthy lifestyle with reduced premiums, if you love the bargain Health Savings Account (HSA) that insures you just for the essentials, or if you simply take comfort in the freedom to spend your own money for a policy that covers the newest drugs and diagnostic tests -- you may be shocked to learn that you could lose all of those good things under the rules proposed in the two bills that herald a health-care revolution.
In short, the Obama platform would mandate extremely full, expensive, and highly subsidized coverage -- including a lot of benefits people would never pay for with their own money -- but deliver it through a highly restrictive, HMO-style plan that will determine what care and tests you can and can't have. It's a revolution, all right, but in the wrong direction.
Let's explore the five freedoms that Americans would lose under Obamacare:
1. Freedom to choose what's in your plan
The bills in both houses require that Americans purchase insurance through "qualified" plans offered by health-care "exchanges" that would be set up in each state. The rub is that the plans can't really compete based on what they offer. The reason: The federal government will impose a minimum list of benefits that each plan is required to offer.
Today, many states require these "standard benefits packages" -- and they're a major cause for the rise in health-care costs. Every group, from chiropractors to alcohol-abuse counselors, do lobbying to get included. Connecticut, for example, requires reimbursement for hair transplants, hearing aids, and in vitro fertilization.
The Senate bill would require coverage for prescription drugs, mental-health benefits, and substance-abuse services. It also requires policies to insure "children" until the age of 26. That's just the starting list. The bills would allow the Department of Health and Human Services to add to the list of required benefits, based on recommendations from a committee of experts. Americans, therefore, wouldn't even know what's in their plans and what they're required to pay for, directly or indirectly, until after the bills become law.
2. Freedom to be rewarded for healthy living, or pay your real costs
As with the previous example, the Obama plan enshrines into federal law one of the worst features of state legislation: community rating. Eleven states, ranging from New York to Oregon, have some form of community rating. In its purest form, community rating requires that all patients pay the same rates for their level of coverage regardless of their age or medical condition.
Americans with pre-existing conditions need subsidies under any plan, but community rating is a dubious way to bring fairness to health care. The reason is twofold: First, it forces young people, who typically have lower incomes than older workers, to pay far more than their actual cost, and gives older workers, who can afford to pay more, a big discount. The state laws gouging the young are a major reason so many of them have joined the ranks of uninsured.
Under the Senate plan, insurers would be barred from charging any more than twice as much for one patient vs. any other patient with the same coverage. So if a 20-year-old who costs just $800 a year to insure is forced to pay $2,500, a 62-year-old who costs $7,500 would pay no more than $5,000.
Second, the bills would ban insurers from charging differing premiums based on the health of their customers. Again, that's understandable for folks with diabetes or cancer. But the bills would bar rewarding people who pursue a healthy lifestyle of exercise or a cholesterol-conscious diet. That's hardly a formula for lower costs. It's as if car insurers had to charge the same rates to safe drivers as to chronic speeders with a history of accidents.
3. Freedom to choose high-deductible coverage
The bills threaten to eliminate the one part of the market truly driven by consumers spending their own money. That's what makes a market, and health care needs more of it, not less.
Hundreds of companies now offer Health Savings Accounts to about 5 million employees. Those workers deposit tax-free money in the accounts and get a matching contribution from their employer. They can use the funds to buy a high-deductible plan -- say for major medical costs over $12,000. Preventive care is reimbursed, but patients pay all other routine doctor visits and tests with their own money from the HSA account. As a result, HSA users are far more cost-conscious than customers who are reimbursed for the majority of their care.
The bills seriously endanger the trend toward consumer-driven care in general. By requiring minimum packages, they would prevent patients from choosing stripped-down plans that cover only major medical expenses. "The government could set extremely low deductibles that would eliminate HSAs," says John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a free-market research group. "And they could do it after the bills are passed."
4. Freedom to keep your existing plan
This is the freedom that the President keeps emphasizing. Yet the bills appear to say otherwise. It's worth diving into the weeds -- the territory where most pundits and politicians don't seem to have ventured.
The legislation divides the insured into two main groups, and those two groups are treated differently with respect to their current plans. The first are employees covered by the Employee Retirement Security Act of 1974. ERISA regulates companies that are self-insured, meaning they pay claims out of their cash flow, and don't have real insurance. Those are the GEs (GE, Fortune 500) and Time Warners (TWX, Fortune 500) and most other big companies.
The House bill states that employees covered by ERISA plans are "grandfathered." Under ERISA, the plans can do pretty much what they want -- they're exempt from standard packages and community rating and can reward employees for healthy lifestyles even in restrictive states.
But read on.
The bill gives ERISA employers a five-year grace period when they can keep offering plans free from the restrictions of the "qualified" policies offered on the exchanges. But after five years, they would have to offer only approved plans, with the myriad rules we've already discussed. So for Americans in large corporations, "keeping your own plan" has a strict deadline. In five years, like it or not, you'll get dumped into the exchange. As we'll see, it could happen a lot earlier.
The outlook is worse for the second group. It encompasses employees who aren't under ERISA but get actual insurance either on their own or through small businesses. After the legislation passes, all insurers that offer a wide range of plans to these employees will be forced to offer only "qualified" plans to new customers, via the exchanges.
The employees who got their coverage before the law goes into effect can keep their plans, but once again, there's a catch. If the plan changes in any way -- by altering co-pays, deductibles, or even switching coverage for this or that drug -- the employee must drop out and shop through the exchange. Since these plans generally change their policies every year, it's likely that millions of employees will lose their plans in 12 months.
5. Freedom to choose your doctors
The Senate bill requires that Americans buying through the exchanges -- and as we've seen, that will soon be most Americans -- must get their care through something called "medical home." Medical home is similar to an HMO. You're assigned a primary care doctor, and the doctor controls your access to specialists. The primary care physicians will decide which services, like MRIs and other diagnostic scans, are best for you, and will decide when you really need to see a cardiologists or orthopedists.
Under the proposals, the gatekeepers would theoretically guide patients to tests and treatments that have proved most cost-effective. The danger is that doctors will be financially rewarded for denying care, as were HMO physicians more than a decade ago. It was consumer outrage over despotic gatekeepers that made the HMOs so unpopular, and killed what was billed as the solution to America's health-care cost explosion.
The bills do not specifically rule out fee-for-service plans as options to be offered through the exchanges. But remember, those plans -- if they exist -- would be barred from charging sick or elderly patients more than young and healthy ones. So patients would be inclined to game the system, staying in the HMO while they're healthy and switching to fee-for-service when they become seriously ill. "That would kill fee-for-service in a hurry," says Goodman.
In reality, the flexible, employer-based plans that now dominate the landscape, and that Americans so cherish, could disappear far faster than the 5 year "grace period" that's barely being discussed.
Companies would have the option of paying an 8% payroll tax into a fund that pays for coverage for Americans who aren't covered by their employers. It won't happen right away -- large companies must wait a couple of years before they opt out. But it will happen, since it's likely that the tax will rise a lot more slowly than corporate health-care costs, especially since they'll be lobbying Washington to keep the tax under control in the righteous name of job creation.
The best solution is to move to a let-freedom-ring regime of high deductibles, no community rating, no standard benefits, and cross-state shopping for bargains (another market-based reform that's strictly taboo in the bills). I'll propose my own solution in another piece soon on Fortune.com. For now, we suffer with a flawed health-care system, but we still have our Five Freedoms. Call them the Five Endangered Freedoms.
If you read the fine print in the Congressional plans, you'll find that a lot of cherished aspects of the current system would disappear.
CNN, July 24, 2009: 10:17 AM ET
NEW YORK (Fortune) -- In promoting his health-care agenda, President Obama has repeatedly reassured Americans that they can keep their existing health plans -- and that the benefits and access they prize will be enhanced through reform.
A close reading of the two main bills, one backed by Democrats in the House and the other issued by Sen. Edward Kennedy's Health committee, contradict the President's assurances. To be sure, it isn't easy to comb through their 2,000 pages of tortured legal language. But page by page, the bills reveal a web of restrictions, fines, and mandates that would radically change your health-care coverage.
If you prize choosing your own cardiologist or urologist under your company's Preferred Provider Organization plan (PPO), if your employer rewards your non-smoking, healthy lifestyle with reduced premiums, if you love the bargain Health Savings Account (HSA) that insures you just for the essentials, or if you simply take comfort in the freedom to spend your own money for a policy that covers the newest drugs and diagnostic tests -- you may be shocked to learn that you could lose all of those good things under the rules proposed in the two bills that herald a health-care revolution.
In short, the Obama platform would mandate extremely full, expensive, and highly subsidized coverage -- including a lot of benefits people would never pay for with their own money -- but deliver it through a highly restrictive, HMO-style plan that will determine what care and tests you can and can't have. It's a revolution, all right, but in the wrong direction.
Let's explore the five freedoms that Americans would lose under Obamacare:
1. Freedom to choose what's in your plan
The bills in both houses require that Americans purchase insurance through "qualified" plans offered by health-care "exchanges" that would be set up in each state. The rub is that the plans can't really compete based on what they offer. The reason: The federal government will impose a minimum list of benefits that each plan is required to offer.
Today, many states require these "standard benefits packages" -- and they're a major cause for the rise in health-care costs. Every group, from chiropractors to alcohol-abuse counselors, do lobbying to get included. Connecticut, for example, requires reimbursement for hair transplants, hearing aids, and in vitro fertilization.
The Senate bill would require coverage for prescription drugs, mental-health benefits, and substance-abuse services. It also requires policies to insure "children" until the age of 26. That's just the starting list. The bills would allow the Department of Health and Human Services to add to the list of required benefits, based on recommendations from a committee of experts. Americans, therefore, wouldn't even know what's in their plans and what they're required to pay for, directly or indirectly, until after the bills become law.
2. Freedom to be rewarded for healthy living, or pay your real costs
As with the previous example, the Obama plan enshrines into federal law one of the worst features of state legislation: community rating. Eleven states, ranging from New York to Oregon, have some form of community rating. In its purest form, community rating requires that all patients pay the same rates for their level of coverage regardless of their age or medical condition.
Americans with pre-existing conditions need subsidies under any plan, but community rating is a dubious way to bring fairness to health care. The reason is twofold: First, it forces young people, who typically have lower incomes than older workers, to pay far more than their actual cost, and gives older workers, who can afford to pay more, a big discount. The state laws gouging the young are a major reason so many of them have joined the ranks of uninsured.
Under the Senate plan, insurers would be barred from charging any more than twice as much for one patient vs. any other patient with the same coverage. So if a 20-year-old who costs just $800 a year to insure is forced to pay $2,500, a 62-year-old who costs $7,500 would pay no more than $5,000.
Second, the bills would ban insurers from charging differing premiums based on the health of their customers. Again, that's understandable for folks with diabetes or cancer. But the bills would bar rewarding people who pursue a healthy lifestyle of exercise or a cholesterol-conscious diet. That's hardly a formula for lower costs. It's as if car insurers had to charge the same rates to safe drivers as to chronic speeders with a history of accidents.
3. Freedom to choose high-deductible coverage
The bills threaten to eliminate the one part of the market truly driven by consumers spending their own money. That's what makes a market, and health care needs more of it, not less.
Hundreds of companies now offer Health Savings Accounts to about 5 million employees. Those workers deposit tax-free money in the accounts and get a matching contribution from their employer. They can use the funds to buy a high-deductible plan -- say for major medical costs over $12,000. Preventive care is reimbursed, but patients pay all other routine doctor visits and tests with their own money from the HSA account. As a result, HSA users are far more cost-conscious than customers who are reimbursed for the majority of their care.
The bills seriously endanger the trend toward consumer-driven care in general. By requiring minimum packages, they would prevent patients from choosing stripped-down plans that cover only major medical expenses. "The government could set extremely low deductibles that would eliminate HSAs," says John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a free-market research group. "And they could do it after the bills are passed."
4. Freedom to keep your existing plan
This is the freedom that the President keeps emphasizing. Yet the bills appear to say otherwise. It's worth diving into the weeds -- the territory where most pundits and politicians don't seem to have ventured.
The legislation divides the insured into two main groups, and those two groups are treated differently with respect to their current plans. The first are employees covered by the Employee Retirement Security Act of 1974. ERISA regulates companies that are self-insured, meaning they pay claims out of their cash flow, and don't have real insurance. Those are the GEs (GE, Fortune 500) and Time Warners (TWX, Fortune 500) and most other big companies.
The House bill states that employees covered by ERISA plans are "grandfathered." Under ERISA, the plans can do pretty much what they want -- they're exempt from standard packages and community rating and can reward employees for healthy lifestyles even in restrictive states.
But read on.
The bill gives ERISA employers a five-year grace period when they can keep offering plans free from the restrictions of the "qualified" policies offered on the exchanges. But after five years, they would have to offer only approved plans, with the myriad rules we've already discussed. So for Americans in large corporations, "keeping your own plan" has a strict deadline. In five years, like it or not, you'll get dumped into the exchange. As we'll see, it could happen a lot earlier.
The outlook is worse for the second group. It encompasses employees who aren't under ERISA but get actual insurance either on their own or through small businesses. After the legislation passes, all insurers that offer a wide range of plans to these employees will be forced to offer only "qualified" plans to new customers, via the exchanges.
The employees who got their coverage before the law goes into effect can keep their plans, but once again, there's a catch. If the plan changes in any way -- by altering co-pays, deductibles, or even switching coverage for this or that drug -- the employee must drop out and shop through the exchange. Since these plans generally change their policies every year, it's likely that millions of employees will lose their plans in 12 months.
5. Freedom to choose your doctors
The Senate bill requires that Americans buying through the exchanges -- and as we've seen, that will soon be most Americans -- must get their care through something called "medical home." Medical home is similar to an HMO. You're assigned a primary care doctor, and the doctor controls your access to specialists. The primary care physicians will decide which services, like MRIs and other diagnostic scans, are best for you, and will decide when you really need to see a cardiologists or orthopedists.
Under the proposals, the gatekeepers would theoretically guide patients to tests and treatments that have proved most cost-effective. The danger is that doctors will be financially rewarded for denying care, as were HMO physicians more than a decade ago. It was consumer outrage over despotic gatekeepers that made the HMOs so unpopular, and killed what was billed as the solution to America's health-care cost explosion.
The bills do not specifically rule out fee-for-service plans as options to be offered through the exchanges. But remember, those plans -- if they exist -- would be barred from charging sick or elderly patients more than young and healthy ones. So patients would be inclined to game the system, staying in the HMO while they're healthy and switching to fee-for-service when they become seriously ill. "That would kill fee-for-service in a hurry," says Goodman.
In reality, the flexible, employer-based plans that now dominate the landscape, and that Americans so cherish, could disappear far faster than the 5 year "grace period" that's barely being discussed.
Companies would have the option of paying an 8% payroll tax into a fund that pays for coverage for Americans who aren't covered by their employers. It won't happen right away -- large companies must wait a couple of years before they opt out. But it will happen, since it's likely that the tax will rise a lot more slowly than corporate health-care costs, especially since they'll be lobbying Washington to keep the tax under control in the righteous name of job creation.
The best solution is to move to a let-freedom-ring regime of high deductibles, no community rating, no standard benefits, and cross-state shopping for bargains (another market-based reform that's strictly taboo in the bills). I'll propose my own solution in another piece soon on Fortune.com. For now, we suffer with a flawed health-care system, but we still have our Five Freedoms. Call them the Five Endangered Freedoms.
Friday, July 24, 2009
WaPo: Why defend the rule of law in Honduras but not in Venezuela?
Democrats in Need of Defense. WaPo Editorial
Why defend the rule of law in Honduras but not in Venezuela?
WaPo, Friday, July 24, 2009
LATIN AMERICAN diplomats remain preoccupied with the political crisis in Honduras, which has been teetering between a negotiated solution that would conditionally restore ousted President Manuel Zelaya to office and an escalation of conflict that would play into the hands of anti-democratic forces around the region. While the drama drags on, those forces continue to advance in other countries, unremarked on by some of the same governments that rushed to condemn Mr. Zelaya's ouster. So it's worth reporting on a meeting that took place Tuesday at the Organization of American States headquarters in Washington between OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza and three elected Venezuelan leaders who, like Mr. Zelaya, have been deprived of their powers and threatened with criminal prosecution.
The three are Caracas Mayor Antonio Ledezma and the governors of two states, Pablo Pérez of Zulia and César Pérez Vivas of Tachira. All three won election in November, along with several other opposition leaders. But since then, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has used decrees, a rubber-stamp parliament and a politically compromised legal system to strip the officials of control over key services and infrastructure.
Mr. Insulza, a Chilean socialist who has been flamboyant in his defense of Mr. Zelaya, listened to the Venezuelans' account. But the OAS leader insisted that there was nothing he could do about Mr. Chávez's actions, even under the Inter-American Democratic Charter, which was adopted by all 34 active OAS members in 2001. This month, Mr. Insulza helped spur the OAS to suspend Honduras on the grounds that it had violated the charter. But in the case of Mr. Chávez's stripping power from the governors and mayors, Mr. Insulza said, "I can't say whether it is bad or good." His authority, he said, is limited to "trying to establish bridges between the parties."
That is not how Mr. Insulza handled the case of Honduras, of course. Far from promoting dialogue, the secretary general refused to negotiate or even speak with the president elected by the Honduran National Congress to replace Mr. Zelaya. Instead he joined in a Venezuelan-orchestrated attempt to force Mr. Zelaya's return that, predictably, led to violence. Now, with an attempted mediation by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias stalled, Mr. Zelaya is again threatening to enter the country without an agreement. Don't expect the OAS chief to dissuade him.
Still, Mr. Insulza has a point. The weakness of the Democratic Charter is that it protects presidents from undemocratic assault but does not readily allow OAS intervention in cases where the executive himself is responsible for violating the constitutional order -- as Mr. Zelaya did before his ouster. The Honduras crisis provides an opportunity for the Obama administration to seek changes in those rules. If the administration is to depend on organizations such as the OAS to advance its policies in Latin America, it must push it to counter attacks on democracy whenever and wherever they occur.
Why defend the rule of law in Honduras but not in Venezuela?
WaPo, Friday, July 24, 2009
LATIN AMERICAN diplomats remain preoccupied with the political crisis in Honduras, which has been teetering between a negotiated solution that would conditionally restore ousted President Manuel Zelaya to office and an escalation of conflict that would play into the hands of anti-democratic forces around the region. While the drama drags on, those forces continue to advance in other countries, unremarked on by some of the same governments that rushed to condemn Mr. Zelaya's ouster. So it's worth reporting on a meeting that took place Tuesday at the Organization of American States headquarters in Washington between OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza and three elected Venezuelan leaders who, like Mr. Zelaya, have been deprived of their powers and threatened with criminal prosecution.
The three are Caracas Mayor Antonio Ledezma and the governors of two states, Pablo Pérez of Zulia and César Pérez Vivas of Tachira. All three won election in November, along with several other opposition leaders. But since then, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has used decrees, a rubber-stamp parliament and a politically compromised legal system to strip the officials of control over key services and infrastructure.
Mr. Insulza, a Chilean socialist who has been flamboyant in his defense of Mr. Zelaya, listened to the Venezuelans' account. But the OAS leader insisted that there was nothing he could do about Mr. Chávez's actions, even under the Inter-American Democratic Charter, which was adopted by all 34 active OAS members in 2001. This month, Mr. Insulza helped spur the OAS to suspend Honduras on the grounds that it had violated the charter. But in the case of Mr. Chávez's stripping power from the governors and mayors, Mr. Insulza said, "I can't say whether it is bad or good." His authority, he said, is limited to "trying to establish bridges between the parties."
That is not how Mr. Insulza handled the case of Honduras, of course. Far from promoting dialogue, the secretary general refused to negotiate or even speak with the president elected by the Honduran National Congress to replace Mr. Zelaya. Instead he joined in a Venezuelan-orchestrated attempt to force Mr. Zelaya's return that, predictably, led to violence. Now, with an attempted mediation by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias stalled, Mr. Zelaya is again threatening to enter the country without an agreement. Don't expect the OAS chief to dissuade him.
Still, Mr. Insulza has a point. The weakness of the Democratic Charter is that it protects presidents from undemocratic assault but does not readily allow OAS intervention in cases where the executive himself is responsible for violating the constitutional order -- as Mr. Zelaya did before his ouster. The Honduras crisis provides an opportunity for the Obama administration to seek changes in those rules. If the administration is to depend on organizations such as the OAS to advance its policies in Latin America, it must push it to counter attacks on democracy whenever and wherever they occur.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Protecting Civil Aviation from MANPADS Attacks: New Milestone Reached
Protecting Civil Aviation from MANPADS Attacks: New Milestone Reached
US State Dept, Bureau of Public Affairs, Office of the Spokesman, Washington, DC, Thu, 23 Jul 2009 13:54:26 -0500
The United States in close cooperation with 29 countries has destroyed over 30,000 foreign, at-risk Man-Portable Air Defense Systems (MANPADS) since 2003, thus potentially preventing these weapons – commonly referred to as shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles – from falling into the hands of arms traffickers, criminals, and terrorists who could threaten civil aviation.
The threat posed by MANPADS to civil aviation is real. 40 civilian aircraft have been hit by these missiles since the 1970s. A total of 859 deaths resulted from these attacks.
The United States salutes the countries that have worked cooperatively to reduce their excess, aging stocks of MANPADS. The United States encourages all nations to voluntarily reduce the MANPADS and other conventional weapons that are not essential to their defense needs, and to reduce their old and unstable munitions.
The U.S. Department of State appreciates the assistance of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Transportation Security Administration, Organization of American States, NATO’s Partnership for Peace Program, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Regional Center on Small Arms in Kenya, and other international organizations for their vital collaboration on MANPADS threat reduction initiatives to make the world’s skies safer for airline passengers and international aviation.
As part of the U.S. Government’s inter-agency threat reduction response to the misuse of these light, easily concealed weapons, the Transportation Security Administration has since 2003 conducted 33 “Assist Visits” to airports in 26 countries in order to help the host nations identify vulnerabilities to potential MANPADS attacks, at a cost of approximately $500,000.
Since 2001, the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs has invested over $113 million to help destroy 1.3 million small arms and other conventional weapons around the world, including these more than 30,000 MANPADS. In fiscal year 2009, the Bureau’s Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement is investing approximately $130 million to destroy MANPADS and other conventional weapons, and to conduct humanitarian mine action in a continuous effort to make the world safer.
Visit www.state.gov/t/pm/wra to learn more about the Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement’s conventional weapons destruction and humanitarian mine action programs.
PRN: 2009/770
US State Dept, Bureau of Public Affairs, Office of the Spokesman, Washington, DC, Thu, 23 Jul 2009 13:54:26 -0500
The United States in close cooperation with 29 countries has destroyed over 30,000 foreign, at-risk Man-Portable Air Defense Systems (MANPADS) since 2003, thus potentially preventing these weapons – commonly referred to as shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles – from falling into the hands of arms traffickers, criminals, and terrorists who could threaten civil aviation.
The threat posed by MANPADS to civil aviation is real. 40 civilian aircraft have been hit by these missiles since the 1970s. A total of 859 deaths resulted from these attacks.
The United States salutes the countries that have worked cooperatively to reduce their excess, aging stocks of MANPADS. The United States encourages all nations to voluntarily reduce the MANPADS and other conventional weapons that are not essential to their defense needs, and to reduce their old and unstable munitions.
The U.S. Department of State appreciates the assistance of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Transportation Security Administration, Organization of American States, NATO’s Partnership for Peace Program, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Regional Center on Small Arms in Kenya, and other international organizations for their vital collaboration on MANPADS threat reduction initiatives to make the world’s skies safer for airline passengers and international aviation.
As part of the U.S. Government’s inter-agency threat reduction response to the misuse of these light, easily concealed weapons, the Transportation Security Administration has since 2003 conducted 33 “Assist Visits” to airports in 26 countries in order to help the host nations identify vulnerabilities to potential MANPADS attacks, at a cost of approximately $500,000.
Since 2001, the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs has invested over $113 million to help destroy 1.3 million small arms and other conventional weapons around the world, including these more than 30,000 MANPADS. In fiscal year 2009, the Bureau’s Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement is investing approximately $130 million to destroy MANPADS and other conventional weapons, and to conduct humanitarian mine action in a continuous effort to make the world safer.
Visit www.state.gov/t/pm/wra to learn more about the Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement’s conventional weapons destruction and humanitarian mine action programs.
PRN: 2009/770
US Surpasses Target of 75,000 Trained Peacekeepers by 2010
U.S. Department of State Surpasses Target of 75,000 Trained Peacekeepers by 2010
US State Dept, Bureau of Public Affairs, Office of the Spokesman, Washington, DC, Thu, 23 Jul 2009 13:55:37 -0500
The United States has surpassed its commitment, adopted at the 2004 G-8 Sea Island Summit, to train and equip 75,000 new peacekeepers to be able to participate in peacekeeping operations worldwide by 2010. As of this month, the Department of State’s Global Peace Operations Initiative (GPOI) has succeeded in training and equipping more than 81,000 new peacekeepers, and has facilitated the deployment of nearly 50,000 peacekeepers to 20 United Nations and regional peace support operations to secure the peace and protect at-risk populations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Lebanon, Somalia and Sudan. Additionally, GPOI provides support to the Italian-led Center of Excellence for Stability Police Units that instructs stability/formed police unit trainers and has graduated over 2,000 trainers from 29 countries.
This commitment to enhance global peacekeeping capabilities was made in support of the G-8 Action Plan to Expand Global Capability for Peace Support Operations, which was adopted at the 2004 G-8 Sea Island Summit. The bulk of the training in support of this commitment has been conducted in Africa by GPOI’s Africa Contingency Operations Training and Assistance (ACOTA) Program. Other G-8 member states are also making significant contributions to fulfilling commitments made under the G-8 Action Plan through efforts to build capacity for global peace support operations, which are often in partnership with or complementary to the United States’ projects.
GPOI represents the U.S. government’s contribution to the 2004 G-8 Action Plan to increase global capacity to meet the growing requirement and complexity of peace support operations. GPOI has provided peace support operations training and non-lethal equipment for the militaries of 56 partner countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Central/South America, as well as staff training, technical assistance, equipment, and building refurbishments for two regional headquarters and 23 peace support operations training centers.
GPOI capacity building activities are implemented through partnerships between the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Department of Defense. United States combatant commands – including Africa Command, Central Command, European Command, Pacific Command, and Southern Command – play critically important implementing roles. The United States coordinates extensively with international and regional organizations, especially the United Nations, to maximize complementarities and reduce redundancies in global peace support operations capacity building efforts.
Starting in October 2009, GPOI will embark on its second phase (Fiscal Years 2010-2014) in which it will build on its success with a shift in focus from providing direct training to increasing the self-sufficiency of partner countries to conduct sustainable, indigenous peace support operations training on their own. In doing so, GPOI will help partner countries achieve full operational capability in peace support operations training and consequently develop stronger partners in the shared goal of promoting peace and stability in post-conflict societies.
Information about GPOI is available at http://www.state.gov/t/pm/ppa/gpoi/index.htm.
US State Dept, Bureau of Public Affairs, Office of the Spokesman, Washington, DC, Thu, 23 Jul 2009 13:55:37 -0500
The United States has surpassed its commitment, adopted at the 2004 G-8 Sea Island Summit, to train and equip 75,000 new peacekeepers to be able to participate in peacekeeping operations worldwide by 2010. As of this month, the Department of State’s Global Peace Operations Initiative (GPOI) has succeeded in training and equipping more than 81,000 new peacekeepers, and has facilitated the deployment of nearly 50,000 peacekeepers to 20 United Nations and regional peace support operations to secure the peace and protect at-risk populations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Lebanon, Somalia and Sudan. Additionally, GPOI provides support to the Italian-led Center of Excellence for Stability Police Units that instructs stability/formed police unit trainers and has graduated over 2,000 trainers from 29 countries.
This commitment to enhance global peacekeeping capabilities was made in support of the G-8 Action Plan to Expand Global Capability for Peace Support Operations, which was adopted at the 2004 G-8 Sea Island Summit. The bulk of the training in support of this commitment has been conducted in Africa by GPOI’s Africa Contingency Operations Training and Assistance (ACOTA) Program. Other G-8 member states are also making significant contributions to fulfilling commitments made under the G-8 Action Plan through efforts to build capacity for global peace support operations, which are often in partnership with or complementary to the United States’ projects.
GPOI represents the U.S. government’s contribution to the 2004 G-8 Action Plan to increase global capacity to meet the growing requirement and complexity of peace support operations. GPOI has provided peace support operations training and non-lethal equipment for the militaries of 56 partner countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Central/South America, as well as staff training, technical assistance, equipment, and building refurbishments for two regional headquarters and 23 peace support operations training centers.
GPOI capacity building activities are implemented through partnerships between the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Department of Defense. United States combatant commands – including Africa Command, Central Command, European Command, Pacific Command, and Southern Command – play critically important implementing roles. The United States coordinates extensively with international and regional organizations, especially the United Nations, to maximize complementarities and reduce redundancies in global peace support operations capacity building efforts.
Starting in October 2009, GPOI will embark on its second phase (Fiscal Years 2010-2014) in which it will build on its success with a shift in focus from providing direct training to increasing the self-sufficiency of partner countries to conduct sustainable, indigenous peace support operations training on their own. In doing so, GPOI will help partner countries achieve full operational capability in peace support operations training and consequently develop stronger partners in the shared goal of promoting peace and stability in post-conflict societies.
Information about GPOI is available at http://www.state.gov/t/pm/ppa/gpoi/index.htm.
On Federal President's Foreign Policy
O's Foreign Failures. By Peter Brookes
New York Post, Jul 23, 2009
MOST Americans have noticed that President Obama's economic policies aren't getting the job done. Fewer, however, realize that the administration's foreign policies are flagging after just six months in the White House, too.
Yup, that's right: All that Obama hopey-changey, blame- America-first, anything-but-W stuff hasn't restored, much less advanced, America's position in the world as was promised.
In fact, quite the opposite: Weak-kneed, apologetic "Obama-plomacy" is already being exploited across the globe -- at great expense to our national security.
Start with Iran: The Obama administration has extended an unclenched fist toward the mullahs, but the theocrats have done little more than slap it away -- repeatedly.
In fact, today they have even more uranium-enriching centrifuges spinning, meaning Iran is moving closer to having the bomb. Many analysts believe the fateful moment is just around the corner.
Yet the administration wants to give Tehran more time (till the end of the year) to see the error of its ways. Sorry, Mr. President: After 20-plus years of involvement in a mostly clandestine nuclear program, that's just not likely.
This "What, me worry?" attitude is putting Israel and the Arab Middle East increasingly on edge as they await the day Iran joins the Mushroom-Cloud Club.
And where was the leader of the Free World when Iranians were demonstrating -- indeed, dying -- for liberty on Tehran's streets recently? Spending weeks dithering with talking points to ensure he didn't look like he was "intervening."
Over in Asia, North Korea has launched missiles, set off a nuke and threatened war. The regime is refusing to come back to the nuclear-negotiating table and is holding two arrested US journalists. It's also likely trying to send bad stuff to the junta in Myanmar (possibly for transshipment to Iran or another rogue regime).
While he's rightly surged US troops in Afghanistan, Obama was unable to charm the Europeans into giving more troops, despite our mutual interest in keeping the country out of terrorists' mitts.
And then there's Russia. We made unilateral concessions in a strategic-arms agreement that may undermine the strength of our conventional forces by eliminating dual-mission bombers and submarines.
Obama's hope was that in exchange for the (in principle) nuke-arms-reducing pact, we'd get the Kremlin's help stopping Tehran's nuclear program. Oops: After the summit, Moscow publicly delinked the two issues.
Nor have we reached an understanding with Russia on the missile-defense bases the Bush administration was planning to build in Eastern Europe to protect us from Iran.
Speaking of Eastern Europe: America's fawning over Russia has left these nations wondering about Obama's commitment to their security in the looming shadow of an increasingly growly Moscow bear. In an open letter to Obama last week released in a Polish newspaper, 20 former senior officials from the region expressed concern about current US policies.
In Latin America, the Obamanistas totally botched the situation in Honduras, siding with power-grabbing, deposed President Manuel Zelaya -- and thus with his ally, Venezuelan caudillo Hugo Chavez.
They've also back-burnered getting Congress to ratify free-trade agreements with our best ally in Latin America, Colombia, as well as Panama -- and have gone cheap on helping Mexico fight the surging narcotraficantes just over the border.
Osama bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al Zawahiri and the rest of the al Qaeda gang haven't given up the ghost yet, either, despite Obama's can't-we-all-just-get-along speech in Cairo.
Sadly, there's nothing to balance out this string of losses in the wins column, sports fans. The hapless Washington Nationals have a better record.
OK, foreign policy is a tough business. But Obama overpromised on foreign affairs -- and, so far, he's underdelivered.
The president wrongly thought he could turn his perceived popularity abroad into results. Instead, like many liberals in the past, he's come face-to-face with the reality of the dog-eat-dog world of international politics, where some of the pooches are self-interested pit bulls. If current trends continue, we're going to end up on the wrong end of someone's canine teeth.
Indeed, as many have correctly said over the years, getting domestic policy wrong can cost people their jobs -- and it has. But getting foreign policy wrong can cost people their lives -- and it will.
Peter Brookes is a Heritage Foundation senior fellow and a former deputy assistant secretary of defense.
New York Post, Jul 23, 2009
MOST Americans have noticed that President Obama's economic policies aren't getting the job done. Fewer, however, realize that the administration's foreign policies are flagging after just six months in the White House, too.
Yup, that's right: All that Obama hopey-changey, blame- America-first, anything-but-W stuff hasn't restored, much less advanced, America's position in the world as was promised.
In fact, quite the opposite: Weak-kneed, apologetic "Obama-plomacy" is already being exploited across the globe -- at great expense to our national security.
Start with Iran: The Obama administration has extended an unclenched fist toward the mullahs, but the theocrats have done little more than slap it away -- repeatedly.
In fact, today they have even more uranium-enriching centrifuges spinning, meaning Iran is moving closer to having the bomb. Many analysts believe the fateful moment is just around the corner.
Yet the administration wants to give Tehran more time (till the end of the year) to see the error of its ways. Sorry, Mr. President: After 20-plus years of involvement in a mostly clandestine nuclear program, that's just not likely.
This "What, me worry?" attitude is putting Israel and the Arab Middle East increasingly on edge as they await the day Iran joins the Mushroom-Cloud Club.
And where was the leader of the Free World when Iranians were demonstrating -- indeed, dying -- for liberty on Tehran's streets recently? Spending weeks dithering with talking points to ensure he didn't look like he was "intervening."
Over in Asia, North Korea has launched missiles, set off a nuke and threatened war. The regime is refusing to come back to the nuclear-negotiating table and is holding two arrested US journalists. It's also likely trying to send bad stuff to the junta in Myanmar (possibly for transshipment to Iran or another rogue regime).
While he's rightly surged US troops in Afghanistan, Obama was unable to charm the Europeans into giving more troops, despite our mutual interest in keeping the country out of terrorists' mitts.
And then there's Russia. We made unilateral concessions in a strategic-arms agreement that may undermine the strength of our conventional forces by eliminating dual-mission bombers and submarines.
Obama's hope was that in exchange for the (in principle) nuke-arms-reducing pact, we'd get the Kremlin's help stopping Tehran's nuclear program. Oops: After the summit, Moscow publicly delinked the two issues.
Nor have we reached an understanding with Russia on the missile-defense bases the Bush administration was planning to build in Eastern Europe to protect us from Iran.
Speaking of Eastern Europe: America's fawning over Russia has left these nations wondering about Obama's commitment to their security in the looming shadow of an increasingly growly Moscow bear. In an open letter to Obama last week released in a Polish newspaper, 20 former senior officials from the region expressed concern about current US policies.
In Latin America, the Obamanistas totally botched the situation in Honduras, siding with power-grabbing, deposed President Manuel Zelaya -- and thus with his ally, Venezuelan caudillo Hugo Chavez.
They've also back-burnered getting Congress to ratify free-trade agreements with our best ally in Latin America, Colombia, as well as Panama -- and have gone cheap on helping Mexico fight the surging narcotraficantes just over the border.
Osama bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al Zawahiri and the rest of the al Qaeda gang haven't given up the ghost yet, either, despite Obama's can't-we-all-just-get-along speech in Cairo.
Sadly, there's nothing to balance out this string of losses in the wins column, sports fans. The hapless Washington Nationals have a better record.
OK, foreign policy is a tough business. But Obama overpromised on foreign affairs -- and, so far, he's underdelivered.
The president wrongly thought he could turn his perceived popularity abroad into results. Instead, like many liberals in the past, he's come face-to-face with the reality of the dog-eat-dog world of international politics, where some of the pooches are self-interested pit bulls. If current trends continue, we're going to end up on the wrong end of someone's canine teeth.
Indeed, as many have correctly said over the years, getting domestic policy wrong can cost people their jobs -- and it has. But getting foreign policy wrong can cost people their lives -- and it will.
Peter Brookes is a Heritage Foundation senior fellow and a former deputy assistant secretary of defense.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Intimidator in Chief: Bullying CBO
Bullying CBO. WSJ Editorial
Intimidator in Chief
WSJ, Jul 23, 2009
The Washington Post recently ran a story quoting Democrats as bragging that President Obama has deliberately patterned his legislative strategy after LBJ’s, circa 1965.This may explain the treatment of Douglas Elmendorf, the director of the supposedly nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office who last week told Congress that you can’t “save” money on health care by having government insure everyone.
For that bit of truth-telling, he was first excoriated by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Then he was summoned, er, invited to the White House for an extraordinary and inappropriate meeting Monday with President Obama and a phalanx of economic and health-care advisers.
Writing on his blog after news of the meeting became public, Mr. Elmendorf diplomatically noted that “The President asked me and outside experts for our views about achieving cost savings in health reform.” No doubt he did. But Mr. Elmendorf, a Democrat, will also have received the message that continuing apostasy will not be good for his future political career.
As Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the Republican who ran CBO from 2003 to 2005, put it, “The only appearance could be that they’re leaning on him. CBO was created for Congress, for independent analysis. The White House did him [Elmendorf] a terrible disservice.” On second thought, perhaps we’re being unfair to LBJ, whose method was a combination of muscle and flattery. Mr. Obama learned his methods in Chicago.
Intimidator in Chief
WSJ, Jul 23, 2009
The Washington Post recently ran a story quoting Democrats as bragging that President Obama has deliberately patterned his legislative strategy after LBJ’s, circa 1965.This may explain the treatment of Douglas Elmendorf, the director of the supposedly nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office who last week told Congress that you can’t “save” money on health care by having government insure everyone.
For that bit of truth-telling, he was first excoriated by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Then he was summoned, er, invited to the White House for an extraordinary and inappropriate meeting Monday with President Obama and a phalanx of economic and health-care advisers.
Writing on his blog after news of the meeting became public, Mr. Elmendorf diplomatically noted that “The President asked me and outside experts for our views about achieving cost savings in health reform.” No doubt he did. But Mr. Elmendorf, a Democrat, will also have received the message that continuing apostasy will not be good for his future political career.
As Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the Republican who ran CBO from 2003 to 2005, put it, “The only appearance could be that they’re leaning on him. CBO was created for Congress, for independent analysis. The White House did him [Elmendorf] a terrible disservice.” On second thought, perhaps we’re being unfair to LBJ, whose method was a combination of muscle and flattery. Mr. Obama learned his methods in Chicago.
DLC: More Growth, Less Gridlock: Toward a New Trade Agenda
More Growth, Less Gridlock: Toward a New Trade Agenda. By Edward Gresser
DLC Policy Report, July 20, 2009
Editor's Note: The full text of this report is available in PDF format.
Executive Summary
Trade policy has made little progress over the last decade. Since 2000, the U.S. has reached no major multilateral trade agreement and has left its own trade regime static. The WTO's Doha Round has been stalled for years, and in the Bush era trade debates devolved into a series of emotional arguments over a free-trade agreement program that touches only a small fraction of America's trade and has had little impact on growth, employment or national security.
President Obama has a chance for a fresh start, and in most ways his global-economy policy has in most ways started out very well. The administration has taken a strong line against the revival of protectionism, which, as history has taught us, would otherwise pose a threat to recovery from the financial crisis. Policymakers have worked with Congress to ease public anxieties through a major expansion of Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), and the White House has embraced an ambitious Strategic and Economic Dialogue with China on macroeconomics, climate change and security policy. Focus is now turning toward legislation that would upgrade the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) inspection systems.
Trade liberalization has been slower to show progress. This reflects the fact that the trade agenda Obama inherited contributes much less than trade policy could to his new administration's main economic and foreign policy goals.
Over the next year, the administration needs first to clear the decks, and then shift the trade agenda to one that directly supports its top objectives: recovery from crisis, improved relations with the world generally and Muslim states in particular, and developing new, high-tech sources for America's future growth, innovation and high-wage employment. As the Obama administration works to pull the nation out of its economic crisis, trade policy should accordingly work to spur growth by promoting innovative new industries and clean technologies at home, and by supporting the globe's poorest citizens and reconciliation with the Muslim world.
Today's agenda has three big problems:
Archaic Tariffs: First, the U.S. trade regime contains archaic tariffs that fail to protect jobs, but are very effective at obstructing growth and job creation in poor countries and large majority-Muslim states. In so doing, the incumbent tariff regime conflicts with America's development and security goals. To date, the administration has not proposed any major overhaul.
Stalled Free Trade Agreements: Second, the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) program that has dominated trade debate for the last decade is delivering only modest results for the U.S. and poor results for our partners, while creating intense discord. The FTA program's effectiveness seems to be waning anyway, as companies value the flexibility of global supply chains more than the tariff benefits they receive through compliance with FTA rules of origin.
The Doha Hurdle: Third, the intense focus on agriculture in the Doha Round of the World Trade Organization (WTO), though a good idea in its own right, has not led to multilateral trade progress on farm trade reform, but has nevertheless blocked potential progress on larger industrial sectors.
The administration and its chief trade negotiator, U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk, face a daunting challenge in clearing the decks of the agenda they inherited. Over the next year, Kirk should work to pass the remaining three free trade agreements (with Panama, Korea and Colombia) and then shelve efforts to promote additional FTAs for the time being. Meanwhile negotiators should make a major effort to conclude the Doha Round.
Once the decks are cleared, the administration should center trade policy on a new agenda that does more for American economic and national security. This new agenda would include:
Tariff Reform: Providing broad tariff waivers for the low-income countries and large majority-Muslim states now excluded from the FTA network and other, more ambitious preference programs.
Broad, Sectoral Agreements: Concluding WTO "sectoral" agreements among the world's major economies (though not necessarily all WTO members) covering goods and services in the big new industries likely to be the sources of growth, innovation and job creation for the United States in the next decade, including information and media industries, health technology and services, clean energy and environmental technologies.
Regional Initiatives: Promoting regional initiatives with Europe and Asia, which should be focused not on existing disputes or regulatory issues, but on issues likely to emerge in the next decade: the treatment of nanotechnology, biotechnology, privacy and other technologically driven issues. Additionally, or alternatively, the Obama administration should work to rationalize the existing fragmented FTA networks in Latin America and the Pacific.
Download the full report
Ed Gresser is a Senior Fellow and Director of the DLC's Global Economy Project.
DLC Policy Report, July 20, 2009
Editor's Note: The full text of this report is available in PDF format.
Executive Summary
Trade policy has made little progress over the last decade. Since 2000, the U.S. has reached no major multilateral trade agreement and has left its own trade regime static. The WTO's Doha Round has been stalled for years, and in the Bush era trade debates devolved into a series of emotional arguments over a free-trade agreement program that touches only a small fraction of America's trade and has had little impact on growth, employment or national security.
President Obama has a chance for a fresh start, and in most ways his global-economy policy has in most ways started out very well. The administration has taken a strong line against the revival of protectionism, which, as history has taught us, would otherwise pose a threat to recovery from the financial crisis. Policymakers have worked with Congress to ease public anxieties through a major expansion of Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), and the White House has embraced an ambitious Strategic and Economic Dialogue with China on macroeconomics, climate change and security policy. Focus is now turning toward legislation that would upgrade the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) inspection systems.
Trade liberalization has been slower to show progress. This reflects the fact that the trade agenda Obama inherited contributes much less than trade policy could to his new administration's main economic and foreign policy goals.
Over the next year, the administration needs first to clear the decks, and then shift the trade agenda to one that directly supports its top objectives: recovery from crisis, improved relations with the world generally and Muslim states in particular, and developing new, high-tech sources for America's future growth, innovation and high-wage employment. As the Obama administration works to pull the nation out of its economic crisis, trade policy should accordingly work to spur growth by promoting innovative new industries and clean technologies at home, and by supporting the globe's poorest citizens and reconciliation with the Muslim world.
Today's agenda has three big problems:
Archaic Tariffs: First, the U.S. trade regime contains archaic tariffs that fail to protect jobs, but are very effective at obstructing growth and job creation in poor countries and large majority-Muslim states. In so doing, the incumbent tariff regime conflicts with America's development and security goals. To date, the administration has not proposed any major overhaul.
Stalled Free Trade Agreements: Second, the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) program that has dominated trade debate for the last decade is delivering only modest results for the U.S. and poor results for our partners, while creating intense discord. The FTA program's effectiveness seems to be waning anyway, as companies value the flexibility of global supply chains more than the tariff benefits they receive through compliance with FTA rules of origin.
The Doha Hurdle: Third, the intense focus on agriculture in the Doha Round of the World Trade Organization (WTO), though a good idea in its own right, has not led to multilateral trade progress on farm trade reform, but has nevertheless blocked potential progress on larger industrial sectors.
The administration and its chief trade negotiator, U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk, face a daunting challenge in clearing the decks of the agenda they inherited. Over the next year, Kirk should work to pass the remaining three free trade agreements (with Panama, Korea and Colombia) and then shelve efforts to promote additional FTAs for the time being. Meanwhile negotiators should make a major effort to conclude the Doha Round.
Once the decks are cleared, the administration should center trade policy on a new agenda that does more for American economic and national security. This new agenda would include:
Tariff Reform: Providing broad tariff waivers for the low-income countries and large majority-Muslim states now excluded from the FTA network and other, more ambitious preference programs.
Broad, Sectoral Agreements: Concluding WTO "sectoral" agreements among the world's major economies (though not necessarily all WTO members) covering goods and services in the big new industries likely to be the sources of growth, innovation and job creation for the United States in the next decade, including information and media industries, health technology and services, clean energy and environmental technologies.
Regional Initiatives: Promoting regional initiatives with Europe and Asia, which should be focused not on existing disputes or regulatory issues, but on issues likely to emerge in the next decade: the treatment of nanotechnology, biotechnology, privacy and other technologically driven issues. Additionally, or alternatively, the Obama administration should work to rationalize the existing fragmented FTA networks in Latin America and the Pacific.
Download the full report
Ed Gresser is a Senior Fellow and Director of the DLC's Global Economy Project.
Delivery of US Assistance to Aid Pakistan's Crisis Response
Delivery of U.S. Assistance to Aid Pakistan's Crisis Response
Bureau of Public Affairs, Office of the Spokesman, Washington, DC, July 22, 2009
Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard C. Holbrooke announced today that $165 million in U.S. funds are being committed to programs for humanitarian relief, early recovery, and long-term reconstruction efforts to support the internally displaced in Pakistan. The distribution of these previously pledged funds will boost the capacity of critical programs to meet the changing needs of displaced families in Pakistan.
The $165 million will be channeled both to meet the ongoing needs of displaced persons, located in camps and in host communities, and also to address the needs of families as they return to rebuild their homes and communities in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) of Pakistan.
Specifically:
· $45 million will be provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to support locally driven rehabilitation of basic infrastructure, including: water systems; health facilities; schools; roads; and bridges – maximizing the use of local labor and resources.
· $30 million will be contributed by USAID for small-scale infrastructure and community development grants for displaced families in NWFP.
· $25 million will be provided by USAID to give families resources needed to rebuild their homes and livelihood. This will be facilitated through community-driven, quick-impact cash-for-work programs in areas of reconstruction and return. This could include removal of rubble and rehabilitation of irrigation systems in conflict-affected areas. As part of this assistance, USAID will support Pakistani government efforts to rebuild public buildings and facilitate the return of civil servants.
· $23 million will be contributed to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) from the State Department’s Bureau for Refugees, Population and Migration (PRM) for humanitarian relief and managing the voluntary return of displaced families to their homes. This includes providing emergency shelter and non-food items to camps managed by UNHCR, as well as to displaced families in host communities. It also includes protecting children from violence and reuniting unaccompanied children with their parents, and funding facilitated transportation to assist the Pakistani authorities to support the return of displaced people to their homes.
· $20 million will be provided by USAID to rebuild education infrastructure across Dir, Swat, and Buner. More than 315 schools in NWFP have been damaged or destroyed due to the Taliban insurgency, and nearly 4,000 more are serving as informal camps for approximately 200,000 internally displaced persons.
· $12 million will be contributed to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), from the State Department’s bureau for refugees, to be used for humanitarian operations and assistance for returning families as they rebuild their lives. This includes support for operations that assist displaced families in host communities and in camps run by the Pakistan Red Crescent Society/ICRC, help for those who need to trace their family members, and provision of aid to people living in conflict-affected areas.
· $10 million will be provided by USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) for immediate livelihood and agriculture programs, mobile health clinics in Buner and Swat, and cash-for-work activities. As part of this assistance, OFDA will provide tool kits valued at approximately $2 million, which will be distributed through the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and will include supplies such as shovels, pickaxes, and hammers.
Much of this money was included in the Obama Administration’s supplemental appropriation for Pakistan last month, and the new disbursements will enable UNHCR, ICRC, IOM and other courageous relief organizations to more effectively and expeditiously serve the Pakistani people.
In addition to new programs from existing financial commitments, the State Department will provide a new grant of nearly $1 million that will allow the Pakistani government to work with U.S. and Pakistani telecom companies to deploy an SMS-text messaging system designed to help displaced families obtain critical information from the government, international relief agencies, and local community members.
Today’s announcement is a further indication of the American people’s commitment to support the Pakistani people in their time of need. Since May 2009, the Obama Administration has committed more than $320 million to the Pakistani people to help them respond to this crisis. In addition to its own contributions, the U.S. Government has also actively encouraged financial contributions from other countries.
PRN: 2009/764
Bureau of Public Affairs, Office of the Spokesman, Washington, DC, July 22, 2009
Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard C. Holbrooke announced today that $165 million in U.S. funds are being committed to programs for humanitarian relief, early recovery, and long-term reconstruction efforts to support the internally displaced in Pakistan. The distribution of these previously pledged funds will boost the capacity of critical programs to meet the changing needs of displaced families in Pakistan.
The $165 million will be channeled both to meet the ongoing needs of displaced persons, located in camps and in host communities, and also to address the needs of families as they return to rebuild their homes and communities in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) of Pakistan.
Specifically:
· $45 million will be provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to support locally driven rehabilitation of basic infrastructure, including: water systems; health facilities; schools; roads; and bridges – maximizing the use of local labor and resources.
· $30 million will be contributed by USAID for small-scale infrastructure and community development grants for displaced families in NWFP.
· $25 million will be provided by USAID to give families resources needed to rebuild their homes and livelihood. This will be facilitated through community-driven, quick-impact cash-for-work programs in areas of reconstruction and return. This could include removal of rubble and rehabilitation of irrigation systems in conflict-affected areas. As part of this assistance, USAID will support Pakistani government efforts to rebuild public buildings and facilitate the return of civil servants.
· $23 million will be contributed to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) from the State Department’s Bureau for Refugees, Population and Migration (PRM) for humanitarian relief and managing the voluntary return of displaced families to their homes. This includes providing emergency shelter and non-food items to camps managed by UNHCR, as well as to displaced families in host communities. It also includes protecting children from violence and reuniting unaccompanied children with their parents, and funding facilitated transportation to assist the Pakistani authorities to support the return of displaced people to their homes.
· $20 million will be provided by USAID to rebuild education infrastructure across Dir, Swat, and Buner. More than 315 schools in NWFP have been damaged or destroyed due to the Taliban insurgency, and nearly 4,000 more are serving as informal camps for approximately 200,000 internally displaced persons.
· $12 million will be contributed to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), from the State Department’s bureau for refugees, to be used for humanitarian operations and assistance for returning families as they rebuild their lives. This includes support for operations that assist displaced families in host communities and in camps run by the Pakistan Red Crescent Society/ICRC, help for those who need to trace their family members, and provision of aid to people living in conflict-affected areas.
· $10 million will be provided by USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) for immediate livelihood and agriculture programs, mobile health clinics in Buner and Swat, and cash-for-work activities. As part of this assistance, OFDA will provide tool kits valued at approximately $2 million, which will be distributed through the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and will include supplies such as shovels, pickaxes, and hammers.
Much of this money was included in the Obama Administration’s supplemental appropriation for Pakistan last month, and the new disbursements will enable UNHCR, ICRC, IOM and other courageous relief organizations to more effectively and expeditiously serve the Pakistani people.
In addition to new programs from existing financial commitments, the State Department will provide a new grant of nearly $1 million that will allow the Pakistani government to work with U.S. and Pakistani telecom companies to deploy an SMS-text messaging system designed to help displaced families obtain critical information from the government, international relief agencies, and local community members.
Today’s announcement is a further indication of the American people’s commitment to support the Pakistani people in their time of need. Since May 2009, the Obama Administration has committed more than $320 million to the Pakistani people to help them respond to this crisis. In addition to its own contributions, the U.S. Government has also actively encouraged financial contributions from other countries.
PRN: 2009/764
Arrogance
Arrogance. By John Stossel
RealClearpolitics, July 22, 2009
It's crazy for a group of mere mortals to try to design 15 percent of the U.S. economy. It's even crazier to do it by August.
Yet that is what some members of Congress presume to do. They intend, as the New York Times puts it, "to reinvent the nation's health care system".
Let that sink in. A handful of people who probably never even ran a small business actually think they can reinvent the health care system.
Politicians and bureaucrats clearly have no idea how complicated markets are. Every day people make countless tradeoffs, in all areas of life, based on subjective value judgments and personal information as they delicately balance their interests, needs and wants. Who is in a better position than they to tailor those choices to best serve their purposes? Yet the politicians believe they can plan the medical market the way you plan a birthday party.
Leave aside how much power the state would have to exercise over us to run the medical system. Suffice it say that if government attempts to control our total medical spending, sooner or later, it will have to control us.
Also leave aside the inevitable huge cost of any such program. The administration estimates $1.5 trillion over 10 years with no increase in the deficit. But no one should take that seriously. When it comes to projecting future costs, these guys may as well be reading chicken entrails. In 1965, hospitalization coverage under Medicare was projected to cost $9 billion by 1990. The actual price tag was $66 billion.
The sober Congressional Budget Office debunked the reformers' cost projections. Trust us, Obama says. "At the end of the day, we'll have significant cost controls," presidential adviser David Axelrod said. Give me a break.
Now focus on the spectacle of that handful of men and women daring to think they can design the medical marketplace. They would empower an even smaller group to determine -- for millions of diverse Americans -- which medical treatments are worthy and at what price.
How do these arrogant, presumptuous politicians believe they can know enough to plan for the rest of us? Who do they think they are? Under cover of helping uninsured people get medical care, they live out their megalomaniacal social-engineering fantasies -- putting our physical and economic health at risk in the process.
Will the American people say "Enough!"?
I fear not, based on the comments on my blog. When I argued last week that medical insurance makes people indifferent to costs, I got comments like: "I guess the 47 million people who don't have health care should just die, right, John?" "You will always be a shill for corporate America."
Like the politicians, most people are oblivious to F.A. Hayek's insight that the critical information needed to run an economy -- or even 15 percent of one -- doesn't exist in any one place where it is accessible to central planners. Instead, it is scattered piecemeal among millions of people. All those people put together are far wiser and better informed than Congress could ever be. Only markets -- private property, free exchange and the price system -- can put this knowledge at the disposal of entrepreneurs and consumers, ensuring the system will serve the people and not just the political class.
This is no less true for medical care than for food, clothing and shelter. It is profit-seeking entrepreneurship that gave us birth control pills, robot limbs, Lasik surgery and so many other good things that make our lives longer and more pain free.
To the extent the politicians ignore this, they are the enemy of our well-being. The belief that they can take care of us is rank superstition.
Who will save us from these despots? What Adam Smith said about the economic planner applies here, too: The politician who tries to design the medical marketplace would "assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it."
Copyright 2009, Creators Syndicate Inc.
RealClearpolitics, July 22, 2009
It's crazy for a group of mere mortals to try to design 15 percent of the U.S. economy. It's even crazier to do it by August.
Yet that is what some members of Congress presume to do. They intend, as the New York Times puts it, "to reinvent the nation's health care system".
Let that sink in. A handful of people who probably never even ran a small business actually think they can reinvent the health care system.
Politicians and bureaucrats clearly have no idea how complicated markets are. Every day people make countless tradeoffs, in all areas of life, based on subjective value judgments and personal information as they delicately balance their interests, needs and wants. Who is in a better position than they to tailor those choices to best serve their purposes? Yet the politicians believe they can plan the medical market the way you plan a birthday party.
Leave aside how much power the state would have to exercise over us to run the medical system. Suffice it say that if government attempts to control our total medical spending, sooner or later, it will have to control us.
Also leave aside the inevitable huge cost of any such program. The administration estimates $1.5 trillion over 10 years with no increase in the deficit. But no one should take that seriously. When it comes to projecting future costs, these guys may as well be reading chicken entrails. In 1965, hospitalization coverage under Medicare was projected to cost $9 billion by 1990. The actual price tag was $66 billion.
The sober Congressional Budget Office debunked the reformers' cost projections. Trust us, Obama says. "At the end of the day, we'll have significant cost controls," presidential adviser David Axelrod said. Give me a break.
Now focus on the spectacle of that handful of men and women daring to think they can design the medical marketplace. They would empower an even smaller group to determine -- for millions of diverse Americans -- which medical treatments are worthy and at what price.
How do these arrogant, presumptuous politicians believe they can know enough to plan for the rest of us? Who do they think they are? Under cover of helping uninsured people get medical care, they live out their megalomaniacal social-engineering fantasies -- putting our physical and economic health at risk in the process.
Will the American people say "Enough!"?
I fear not, based on the comments on my blog. When I argued last week that medical insurance makes people indifferent to costs, I got comments like: "I guess the 47 million people who don't have health care should just die, right, John?" "You will always be a shill for corporate America."
Like the politicians, most people are oblivious to F.A. Hayek's insight that the critical information needed to run an economy -- or even 15 percent of one -- doesn't exist in any one place where it is accessible to central planners. Instead, it is scattered piecemeal among millions of people. All those people put together are far wiser and better informed than Congress could ever be. Only markets -- private property, free exchange and the price system -- can put this knowledge at the disposal of entrepreneurs and consumers, ensuring the system will serve the people and not just the political class.
This is no less true for medical care than for food, clothing and shelter. It is profit-seeking entrepreneurship that gave us birth control pills, robot limbs, Lasik surgery and so many other good things that make our lives longer and more pain free.
To the extent the politicians ignore this, they are the enemy of our well-being. The belief that they can take care of us is rank superstition.
Who will save us from these despots? What Adam Smith said about the economic planner applies here, too: The politician who tries to design the medical marketplace would "assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it."
Copyright 2009, Creators Syndicate Inc.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Jindal: How to Make Health-Care Reform Bipartisan
How to Make Health-Care Reform Bipartisan. By BOBBY JINDAL
WSJ, Jul 22, 2009
In Washington, it seems history always repeats itself. That’s what’s happening now with health-care reform. This is an unfortunate turn of events for Americans who are legitimately concerned about the skyrocketing cost of a basic human need.
In 1993 and 1994, Hillary Clinton’s health-care reform proposal failed because it was concocted in secret without the guiding hand of public consensus-building, and because it was a philosophical over-reach. Today President Barack Obama is repeating these mistakes.
The reason is plain: The left in Washington has concluded that honesty will not yield its desired policy result. So it resorts to a fundamentally dishonest approach to reform. I say this because the marketing of the Democrats’ plans as presented in the House of Representatives and endorsed heartily by President Obama rests on three falsehoods.
First, Mr. Obama doggedly promises that if you like your (private) health-care coverage now, you can keep it. That promise is hollow, because the Democrats’ reforms are designed to push an ever-increasing number of Americans into a government-run health-care plan.
If a so-called public option is part of health-care reform, the Lewin Group study estimates over 100 million Americans may leave private plans for government-run health care. Any government plan will benefit from taxpayer subsidies and be able to operate at a financial loss—competing unfairly in the marketplace until private plans are driven out of business. The government plan will become so large that it will set, rather than negotiate, prices. This will inevitably lead to monopoly, with a resulting threat to the quality of our health care.
Second, the Democrats disingenuously argue their reforms will not diminish the quality of our health care even as government involvement in the delivery of that health care increases massively. For all of us who have seen the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to hurricanes, this contention is laughable on its face. When government bureaucracies drive the delivery of services—in this case inserting themselves between health-care providers and their patients—quality degradation will surely come. House Democrats seem willing to accept that problem to achieve their philosophical aim—the long-term removal of for-profit entities from the health-care landscape.
Third, Mr. Obama’s rhetoric paints a picture of a massive new benefit that will actually cost average Americans less than what they pay today. The Democrats want middle-class taxpayers to believe they won’t feel the pinch of this initiative, even as their employers are assessed massive new taxes. They might as well try to argue that up is down. The analysis of the Democrats’ proposal by the Congressional Budget Office shows that it will not reduce government spending on health care, and that it will substantially increase the federal deficit—and this despite all the tax increases.
I served in the U.S. House with a majority of the current 435 representatives, and I am confident that if given the proper amount of legislative review, they will not accept the flawed Pelosi plan that is currently stuck in committee. Yet there is general agreement among Republicans and Democrats that we need health-care reform to bring costs down. This agreement can be the basis of a genuine, bipartisan reform, once the current over-reach by Mr. Obama and Mrs. Pelosi fails. Leaders of both parties can then come together behind health-care reform that stresses these seven principles:
•Consumer choice guided by transparency. We need a system where individuals choose an integrated plan that adopts the best disease-management practices, as opposed to fragmented care. Pricing and outcomes data for all tests, treatments and procedures should be posted on the Internet. Portable electronic health-care records can reduce paperwork, duplication and errors, while also empowering consumers to seek the provider that best meets their needs.
•Aligned consumer interests. Consumers should be financially invested in better health decisions through health-savings accounts, lower premiums and reduced cost sharing. If they seek care in cost-effective settings, comply with medical regimens, preventative care, and lifestyles that reduce the likelihood of chronic disease, they should share in the savings.
•Medical lawsuit reform. The practice of defensive medicine costs an estimated $100 billion-plus each year, according to the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, which used a study by economists Daniel P. Kessler and Mark B. McClellan. No health reform is serious about reducing costs unless it reduces the costs of frivolous lawsuits.
•Insurance reform. Congress should establish simple guidelines to make policies more portable, with more coverage for pre-existing conditions. Reinsurance, high-risk pools, and other mechanisms can reduce the dangers of adverse risk selection and the incentive to avoid covering the sick. Individuals should also be able to keep insurance as they change jobs or states.
•Pooling for small businesses, the self-employed, and others. All consumers should have equal opportunity to buy the lowest-cost, highest-quality insurance available. Individuals should benefit from the economies of scale currently available to those working for large employers. They should be free to purchase their health coverage without tax penalty through their employer, church, union, etc.
•Pay for performance, not activity. Roughly 75% of health-care spending is for the care of chronic conditions such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes—and there is little coordination of this care. We can save money and improve outcomes by using integrated networks of care with rigorous, transparent outcome measures emphasizing prevention and disease management.
•Refundable tax credits. Low-income working Americans without health insurance should get help in buying private coverage through a refundable tax credit. This is preferable to building a separate, government-run health-care plan.
These steps would bring down health-care costs. They would not bankrupt our nation or increase taxes in the midst of a recession. They are achievable reforms with bipartisan consensus and public support. All they require is a willingness by the president to slow down and have an honest discussion with Americans about the real downstream consequences of his ideas. Let’s start there.
Mr. Jindal is governor of Louisiana.
WSJ, Jul 22, 2009
In Washington, it seems history always repeats itself. That’s what’s happening now with health-care reform. This is an unfortunate turn of events for Americans who are legitimately concerned about the skyrocketing cost of a basic human need.
In 1993 and 1994, Hillary Clinton’s health-care reform proposal failed because it was concocted in secret without the guiding hand of public consensus-building, and because it was a philosophical over-reach. Today President Barack Obama is repeating these mistakes.
The reason is plain: The left in Washington has concluded that honesty will not yield its desired policy result. So it resorts to a fundamentally dishonest approach to reform. I say this because the marketing of the Democrats’ plans as presented in the House of Representatives and endorsed heartily by President Obama rests on three falsehoods.
First, Mr. Obama doggedly promises that if you like your (private) health-care coverage now, you can keep it. That promise is hollow, because the Democrats’ reforms are designed to push an ever-increasing number of Americans into a government-run health-care plan.
If a so-called public option is part of health-care reform, the Lewin Group study estimates over 100 million Americans may leave private plans for government-run health care. Any government plan will benefit from taxpayer subsidies and be able to operate at a financial loss—competing unfairly in the marketplace until private plans are driven out of business. The government plan will become so large that it will set, rather than negotiate, prices. This will inevitably lead to monopoly, with a resulting threat to the quality of our health care.
Second, the Democrats disingenuously argue their reforms will not diminish the quality of our health care even as government involvement in the delivery of that health care increases massively. For all of us who have seen the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to hurricanes, this contention is laughable on its face. When government bureaucracies drive the delivery of services—in this case inserting themselves between health-care providers and their patients—quality degradation will surely come. House Democrats seem willing to accept that problem to achieve their philosophical aim—the long-term removal of for-profit entities from the health-care landscape.
Third, Mr. Obama’s rhetoric paints a picture of a massive new benefit that will actually cost average Americans less than what they pay today. The Democrats want middle-class taxpayers to believe they won’t feel the pinch of this initiative, even as their employers are assessed massive new taxes. They might as well try to argue that up is down. The analysis of the Democrats’ proposal by the Congressional Budget Office shows that it will not reduce government spending on health care, and that it will substantially increase the federal deficit—and this despite all the tax increases.
I served in the U.S. House with a majority of the current 435 representatives, and I am confident that if given the proper amount of legislative review, they will not accept the flawed Pelosi plan that is currently stuck in committee. Yet there is general agreement among Republicans and Democrats that we need health-care reform to bring costs down. This agreement can be the basis of a genuine, bipartisan reform, once the current over-reach by Mr. Obama and Mrs. Pelosi fails. Leaders of both parties can then come together behind health-care reform that stresses these seven principles:
•Consumer choice guided by transparency. We need a system where individuals choose an integrated plan that adopts the best disease-management practices, as opposed to fragmented care. Pricing and outcomes data for all tests, treatments and procedures should be posted on the Internet. Portable electronic health-care records can reduce paperwork, duplication and errors, while also empowering consumers to seek the provider that best meets their needs.
•Aligned consumer interests. Consumers should be financially invested in better health decisions through health-savings accounts, lower premiums and reduced cost sharing. If they seek care in cost-effective settings, comply with medical regimens, preventative care, and lifestyles that reduce the likelihood of chronic disease, they should share in the savings.
•Medical lawsuit reform. The practice of defensive medicine costs an estimated $100 billion-plus each year, according to the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, which used a study by economists Daniel P. Kessler and Mark B. McClellan. No health reform is serious about reducing costs unless it reduces the costs of frivolous lawsuits.
•Insurance reform. Congress should establish simple guidelines to make policies more portable, with more coverage for pre-existing conditions. Reinsurance, high-risk pools, and other mechanisms can reduce the dangers of adverse risk selection and the incentive to avoid covering the sick. Individuals should also be able to keep insurance as they change jobs or states.
•Pooling for small businesses, the self-employed, and others. All consumers should have equal opportunity to buy the lowest-cost, highest-quality insurance available. Individuals should benefit from the economies of scale currently available to those working for large employers. They should be free to purchase their health coverage without tax penalty through their employer, church, union, etc.
•Pay for performance, not activity. Roughly 75% of health-care spending is for the care of chronic conditions such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes—and there is little coordination of this care. We can save money and improve outcomes by using integrated networks of care with rigorous, transparent outcome measures emphasizing prevention and disease management.
•Refundable tax credits. Low-income working Americans without health insurance should get help in buying private coverage through a refundable tax credit. This is preferable to building a separate, government-run health-care plan.
These steps would bring down health-care costs. They would not bankrupt our nation or increase taxes in the midst of a recession. They are achievable reforms with bipartisan consensus and public support. All they require is a willingness by the president to slow down and have an honest discussion with Americans about the real downstream consequences of his ideas. Let’s start there.
Mr. Jindal is governor of Louisiana.
WSJ Editorial: Repealing ERISA
Repealing Erisa. WSJ Editorial
WSJ, Jul 20, 2009
One by one, President Obama’s health-care promises are being exposed by the details of the actual legislation: Costs will explode, not fall; taxes will have to soar to pay for it; and now we are learning that you won’t be able to “keep your health-care plan” either.
The reality is that the House health bill, which the Administration praised to the rafters, will force drastic changes in almost all insurance coverage, including the employer plans that currently work best. About 177 million people—or 62% of those under age 65—get insurance today through their jobs, and while rising costs are a problem, according to every survey most employees are happy with the coverage. A major reason for this relative success is a 1974 federal law known by the acronym Erisa, or the Employee Retirement Income Security Act.
Erisa allows employers that self-insure—that is, those large enough to build their own risk pools and pay benefits directly—to offer uniform plans across state lines. This lets thousands of businesses avoid, for the most part, the costly federal and state regulations on covered treatments, pricing, rate setting and so on. It also gives them flexibility to design insurance to recruit and retain workers in a competitive labor market. Roughly 75% of employer-based coverage is governed by Erisa’s “freedom of purchase” rules.
Goodbye to all that. The House bill says that after a five-year grace period all Erisa insurance offerings will have to win government approval—both by the Department of Labor and a new “health choices commissioner” who will set federal standards for what is an acceptable health plan. This commissar—er, commissioner—can fine employers that don’t comply and even has “suspension of enrollment” powers for plans that he or she has vetoed, until “satisfied that the basis for such determination has been corrected and is not likely to recur.”
In other words, the insurance coverage of 132 million people—the product of enormously complex business and health-care decisions—will now be subject to bureaucratic nanomanagement. If employers don’t meet some still-to-be-defined minimum package, they’ll have to renegotiate thousands of contracts nationwide to Washington’s specifications. The political incentives will of course demand an ever-more generous “minimum” benefit and less cost-sharing, much as many states have driven up prices in the individual insurance market with mandates. Erisa’s pluralistic structure will gradually constrict toward a single national standard.
Yet a computer programming firm, say, and a grocery store chain have very different insurance needs, and in any case may not be able to afford the same kind and level of benefits. Innovation in insurance products will also be subject to political tampering. Likely casualties include the wellness initiatives that give workers financial incentives to take more responsibility for their own health, such as Safeway’s. Some politicians will claim that’s unfair. High-deductible plans with health savings accounts are also out of political favor, therefore certain to go overboard. If you have one of those and like it, too bad.
The new Erisa regime will be especially difficult to meet for businesses that operate with very slim profit margins or have large numbers of part-time or seasonal workers. They may simply “cash out” and surrender 8% of their payroll under the employer-mandate tax. A new analysis by the Lewin Group, prepared for the Heritage Foundation, finds that some 88.1 million people will be shifted out of private employer health insurance under the House bill. If those people preferred their prior plan, well, too bad again.
The largest employers—though not all—may clear the minimum bar, at least at first. But in addition to the “health choices” administrative burden, the cost of labor will rise because the House guts another key section of Erisa. Currently, lawsuits about employee benefits are barred under the law, allowing large employers to avoid the state tort lotteries in disputes over coverage. No longer. As a gratuity to the trial bar, Democrats will now subject businesses to these liabilities in the name of health “reform.”
So when Mr. Obama says that “If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what,” he’s wrong. Period. What he’s not telling the American people is that the government will so dramatically change the rules of the insurance market that employers will find it impossible to maintain their current coverage, and many will drop it altogether. The more we inspect the House bill, the more it looks to be one of the worst pieces of legislation ever introduced in Congress.
WSJ, Jul 20, 2009
One by one, President Obama’s health-care promises are being exposed by the details of the actual legislation: Costs will explode, not fall; taxes will have to soar to pay for it; and now we are learning that you won’t be able to “keep your health-care plan” either.
The reality is that the House health bill, which the Administration praised to the rafters, will force drastic changes in almost all insurance coverage, including the employer plans that currently work best. About 177 million people—or 62% of those under age 65—get insurance today through their jobs, and while rising costs are a problem, according to every survey most employees are happy with the coverage. A major reason for this relative success is a 1974 federal law known by the acronym Erisa, or the Employee Retirement Income Security Act.
Erisa allows employers that self-insure—that is, those large enough to build their own risk pools and pay benefits directly—to offer uniform plans across state lines. This lets thousands of businesses avoid, for the most part, the costly federal and state regulations on covered treatments, pricing, rate setting and so on. It also gives them flexibility to design insurance to recruit and retain workers in a competitive labor market. Roughly 75% of employer-based coverage is governed by Erisa’s “freedom of purchase” rules.
Goodbye to all that. The House bill says that after a five-year grace period all Erisa insurance offerings will have to win government approval—both by the Department of Labor and a new “health choices commissioner” who will set federal standards for what is an acceptable health plan. This commissar—er, commissioner—can fine employers that don’t comply and even has “suspension of enrollment” powers for plans that he or she has vetoed, until “satisfied that the basis for such determination has been corrected and is not likely to recur.”
In other words, the insurance coverage of 132 million people—the product of enormously complex business and health-care decisions—will now be subject to bureaucratic nanomanagement. If employers don’t meet some still-to-be-defined minimum package, they’ll have to renegotiate thousands of contracts nationwide to Washington’s specifications. The political incentives will of course demand an ever-more generous “minimum” benefit and less cost-sharing, much as many states have driven up prices in the individual insurance market with mandates. Erisa’s pluralistic structure will gradually constrict toward a single national standard.
Yet a computer programming firm, say, and a grocery store chain have very different insurance needs, and in any case may not be able to afford the same kind and level of benefits. Innovation in insurance products will also be subject to political tampering. Likely casualties include the wellness initiatives that give workers financial incentives to take more responsibility for their own health, such as Safeway’s. Some politicians will claim that’s unfair. High-deductible plans with health savings accounts are also out of political favor, therefore certain to go overboard. If you have one of those and like it, too bad.
The new Erisa regime will be especially difficult to meet for businesses that operate with very slim profit margins or have large numbers of part-time or seasonal workers. They may simply “cash out” and surrender 8% of their payroll under the employer-mandate tax. A new analysis by the Lewin Group, prepared for the Heritage Foundation, finds that some 88.1 million people will be shifted out of private employer health insurance under the House bill. If those people preferred their prior plan, well, too bad again.
The largest employers—though not all—may clear the minimum bar, at least at first. But in addition to the “health choices” administrative burden, the cost of labor will rise because the House guts another key section of Erisa. Currently, lawsuits about employee benefits are barred under the law, allowing large employers to avoid the state tort lotteries in disputes over coverage. No longer. As a gratuity to the trial bar, Democrats will now subject businesses to these liabilities in the name of health “reform.”
So when Mr. Obama says that “If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what,” he’s wrong. Period. What he’s not telling the American people is that the government will so dramatically change the rules of the insurance market that employers will find it impossible to maintain their current coverage, and many will drop it altogether. The more we inspect the House bill, the more it looks to be one of the worst pieces of legislation ever introduced in Congress.
The Fed’s Exit Strategy, by Ben Bernanke
The Fed’s Exit Strategy. By BEN BERNANKE
WSJ, Jul 21, 2009
The depth and breadth of the global recession has required a highly accommodative monetary policy. Since the onset of the financial crisis nearly two years ago, the Federal Reserve has reduced the interest-rate target for overnight lending between banks (the federal-funds rate) nearly to zero. We have also greatly expanded the size of the Fed’s balance sheet through purchases of longer-term securities and through targeted lending programs aimed at restarting the flow of credit.
These actions have softened the economic impact of the financial crisis. They have also improved the functioning of key credit markets, including the markets for interbank lending, commercial paper, consumer and small-business credit, and residential mortgages.
My colleagues and I believe that accommodative policies will likely be warranted for an extended period. At some point, however, as economic recovery takes hold, we will need to tighten monetary policy to prevent the emergence of an inflation problem down the road. The Federal Open Market Committee, which is responsible for setting U.S. monetary policy, has devoted considerable time to issues relating to an exit strategy. We are confident we have the necessary tools to withdraw policy accommodation, when that becomes appropriate, in a smooth and timely manner.
The exit strategy is closely tied to the management of the Federal Reserve balance sheet. When the Fed makes loans or acquires securities, the funds enter the banking system and ultimately appear in the reserve accounts held at the Fed by banks and other depository institutions. These reserve balances now total about $800 billion, much more than normal. And given the current economic conditions, banks have generally held their reserves as balances at the Fed.
But as the economy recovers, banks should find more opportunities to lend out their reserves. That would produce faster growth in broad money (for example, M1 or M2) and easier credit conditions, which could ultimately result in inflationary pressures—unless we adopt countervailing policy measures. When the time comes to tighten monetary policy, we must either eliminate these large reserve balances or, if they remain, neutralize any potential undesired effects on the economy.
To some extent, reserves held by banks at the Fed will contract automatically, as improving financial conditions lead to reduced use of our short-term lending facilities, and ultimately to their wind down. Indeed, short-term credit extended by the Fed to financial institutions and other market participants has already fallen to less than $600 billion as of mid-July from about $1.5 trillion at the end of 2008. In addition, reserves could be reduced by about $100 billion to $200 billion each year over the next few years as securities held by the Fed mature or are prepaid. However, reserves likely would remain quite high for several years unless additional policies are undertaken.
Even if our balance sheet stays large for a while, we have two broad means of tightening monetary policy at the appropriate time: paying interest on reserve balances and taking various actions that reduce the stock of reserves. We could use either of these approaches alone; however, to ensure effectiveness, we likely would use both in combination.
Congress granted us authority last fall to pay interest on balances held by banks at the Fed. Currently, we pay banks an interest rate of 0.25%. When the time comes to tighten policy, we can raise the rate paid on reserve balances as we increase our target for the federal funds rate.
Banks generally will not lend funds in the money market at an interest rate lower than the rate they can earn risk-free at the Federal Reserve. Moreover, they should compete to borrow any funds that are offered in private markets at rates below the interest rate on reserve balances because, by so doing, they can earn a spread without risk.
Thus the interest rate that the Fed pays should tend to put a floor under short-term market rates, including our policy target, the federal-funds rate. Raising the rate paid on reserve balances also discourages excessive growth in money or credit, because banks will not want to lend out their reserves at rates below what they can earn at the Fed.
Considerable international experience suggests that paying interest on reserves effectively manages short-term market rates. For example, the European Central Bank allows banks to place excess reserves in an interest-paying deposit facility. Even as that central bank’s liquidity-operations substantially increased its balance sheet, the overnight interbank rate remained at or above its deposit rate. In addition, the Bank of Japan and the Bank of Canada have also used their ability to pay interest on reserves to maintain a floor under short-term market rates.
Despite this logic and experience, the federal-funds rate has dipped somewhat below the rate paid by the Fed, especially in October and November 2008, when the Fed first began to pay interest on reserves. This pattern partly reflected temporary factors, such as banks’ inexperience with the new system.
However, this pattern appears also to have resulted from the fact that some large lenders in the federal-funds market, notably government-sponsored enterprises such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are ineligible to receive interest on balances held at the Fed, and thus they have an incentive to lend in that market at rates below what the Fed pays banks.
Under more normal financial conditions, the willingness of banks to engage in the simple arbitrage noted above will tend to limit the gap between the federal-funds rate and the rate the Fed pays on reserves. If that gap persists, the problem can be addressed by supplementing payment of interest on reserves with steps to reduce reserves and drain excess liquidity from markets—the second means of tightening monetary policy. Here are four options for doing this.
First, the Federal Reserve could drain bank reserves and reduce the excess liquidity at other institutions by arranging large-scale reverse repurchase agreements with financial market participants, including banks, government-sponsored enterprises and other institutions. Reverse repurchase agreements involve the sale by the Fed of securities from its portfolio with an agreement to buy the securities back at a slightly higher price at a later date.
Second, the Treasury could sell bills and deposit the proceeds with the Federal Reserve. When purchasers pay for the securities, the Treasury’s account at the Federal Reserve rises and reserve balances decline.
The Treasury has been conducting such operations since last fall under its Supplementary Financing Program. Although the Treasury’s operations are helpful, to protect the independence of monetary policy, we must take care to ensure that we can achieve our policy objectives without reliance on the Treasury.
Third, using the authority Congress gave us to pay interest on banks’ balances at the Fed, we can offer term deposits to banks—analogous to the certificates of deposit that banks offer their customers. Bank funds held in term deposits at the Fed would not be available for the federal funds market.
Fourth, if necessary, the Fed could reduce reserves by selling a portion of its holdings of long-term securities into the open market.
Each of these policies would help to raise short-term interest rates and limit the growth of broad measures of money and credit, thereby tightening monetary policy.
Overall, the Federal Reserve has many effective tools to tighten monetary policy when the economic outlook requires us to do so. As my colleagues and I have stated, however, economic conditions are not likely to warrant tighter monetary policy for an extended period. We will calibrate the timing and pace of any future tightening, together with the mix of tools to best foster our dual objectives of maximum employment and price stability.
—Mr. Bernanke is chairman of the Federal Reserve.
WSJ, Jul 21, 2009
The depth and breadth of the global recession has required a highly accommodative monetary policy. Since the onset of the financial crisis nearly two years ago, the Federal Reserve has reduced the interest-rate target for overnight lending between banks (the federal-funds rate) nearly to zero. We have also greatly expanded the size of the Fed’s balance sheet through purchases of longer-term securities and through targeted lending programs aimed at restarting the flow of credit.
These actions have softened the economic impact of the financial crisis. They have also improved the functioning of key credit markets, including the markets for interbank lending, commercial paper, consumer and small-business credit, and residential mortgages.
My colleagues and I believe that accommodative policies will likely be warranted for an extended period. At some point, however, as economic recovery takes hold, we will need to tighten monetary policy to prevent the emergence of an inflation problem down the road. The Federal Open Market Committee, which is responsible for setting U.S. monetary policy, has devoted considerable time to issues relating to an exit strategy. We are confident we have the necessary tools to withdraw policy accommodation, when that becomes appropriate, in a smooth and timely manner.
The exit strategy is closely tied to the management of the Federal Reserve balance sheet. When the Fed makes loans or acquires securities, the funds enter the banking system and ultimately appear in the reserve accounts held at the Fed by banks and other depository institutions. These reserve balances now total about $800 billion, much more than normal. And given the current economic conditions, banks have generally held their reserves as balances at the Fed.
But as the economy recovers, banks should find more opportunities to lend out their reserves. That would produce faster growth in broad money (for example, M1 or M2) and easier credit conditions, which could ultimately result in inflationary pressures—unless we adopt countervailing policy measures. When the time comes to tighten monetary policy, we must either eliminate these large reserve balances or, if they remain, neutralize any potential undesired effects on the economy.
To some extent, reserves held by banks at the Fed will contract automatically, as improving financial conditions lead to reduced use of our short-term lending facilities, and ultimately to their wind down. Indeed, short-term credit extended by the Fed to financial institutions and other market participants has already fallen to less than $600 billion as of mid-July from about $1.5 trillion at the end of 2008. In addition, reserves could be reduced by about $100 billion to $200 billion each year over the next few years as securities held by the Fed mature or are prepaid. However, reserves likely would remain quite high for several years unless additional policies are undertaken.
Even if our balance sheet stays large for a while, we have two broad means of tightening monetary policy at the appropriate time: paying interest on reserve balances and taking various actions that reduce the stock of reserves. We could use either of these approaches alone; however, to ensure effectiveness, we likely would use both in combination.
Congress granted us authority last fall to pay interest on balances held by banks at the Fed. Currently, we pay banks an interest rate of 0.25%. When the time comes to tighten policy, we can raise the rate paid on reserve balances as we increase our target for the federal funds rate.
Banks generally will not lend funds in the money market at an interest rate lower than the rate they can earn risk-free at the Federal Reserve. Moreover, they should compete to borrow any funds that are offered in private markets at rates below the interest rate on reserve balances because, by so doing, they can earn a spread without risk.
Thus the interest rate that the Fed pays should tend to put a floor under short-term market rates, including our policy target, the federal-funds rate. Raising the rate paid on reserve balances also discourages excessive growth in money or credit, because banks will not want to lend out their reserves at rates below what they can earn at the Fed.
Considerable international experience suggests that paying interest on reserves effectively manages short-term market rates. For example, the European Central Bank allows banks to place excess reserves in an interest-paying deposit facility. Even as that central bank’s liquidity-operations substantially increased its balance sheet, the overnight interbank rate remained at or above its deposit rate. In addition, the Bank of Japan and the Bank of Canada have also used their ability to pay interest on reserves to maintain a floor under short-term market rates.
Despite this logic and experience, the federal-funds rate has dipped somewhat below the rate paid by the Fed, especially in October and November 2008, when the Fed first began to pay interest on reserves. This pattern partly reflected temporary factors, such as banks’ inexperience with the new system.
However, this pattern appears also to have resulted from the fact that some large lenders in the federal-funds market, notably government-sponsored enterprises such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are ineligible to receive interest on balances held at the Fed, and thus they have an incentive to lend in that market at rates below what the Fed pays banks.
Under more normal financial conditions, the willingness of banks to engage in the simple arbitrage noted above will tend to limit the gap between the federal-funds rate and the rate the Fed pays on reserves. If that gap persists, the problem can be addressed by supplementing payment of interest on reserves with steps to reduce reserves and drain excess liquidity from markets—the second means of tightening monetary policy. Here are four options for doing this.
First, the Federal Reserve could drain bank reserves and reduce the excess liquidity at other institutions by arranging large-scale reverse repurchase agreements with financial market participants, including banks, government-sponsored enterprises and other institutions. Reverse repurchase agreements involve the sale by the Fed of securities from its portfolio with an agreement to buy the securities back at a slightly higher price at a later date.
Second, the Treasury could sell bills and deposit the proceeds with the Federal Reserve. When purchasers pay for the securities, the Treasury’s account at the Federal Reserve rises and reserve balances decline.
The Treasury has been conducting such operations since last fall under its Supplementary Financing Program. Although the Treasury’s operations are helpful, to protect the independence of monetary policy, we must take care to ensure that we can achieve our policy objectives without reliance on the Treasury.
Third, using the authority Congress gave us to pay interest on banks’ balances at the Fed, we can offer term deposits to banks—analogous to the certificates of deposit that banks offer their customers. Bank funds held in term deposits at the Fed would not be available for the federal funds market.
Fourth, if necessary, the Fed could reduce reserves by selling a portion of its holdings of long-term securities into the open market.
Each of these policies would help to raise short-term interest rates and limit the growth of broad measures of money and credit, thereby tightening monetary policy.
Overall, the Federal Reserve has many effective tools to tighten monetary policy when the economic outlook requires us to do so. As my colleagues and I have stated, however, economic conditions are not likely to warrant tighter monetary policy for an extended period. We will calibrate the timing and pace of any future tightening, together with the mix of tools to best foster our dual objectives of maximum employment and price stability.
—Mr. Bernanke is chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Why Toxic Assets Are So Hard to Clean Up
Why Toxic Assets Are So Hard to Clean Up. By KENNETH E. SCOTT and JOHN B. TAYLOR
Securitization was maddeningly complex. Mandated transparency is the only solution.
WSJ, Jul 20, 2009
Despite trillions of dollars of new government programs, one of the original causes of the financial crisis -- the toxic assets on bank balance sheets -- still persists and remains a serious impediment to economic recovery. Why are these toxic assets so difficult to deal with? We believe their sheer complexity is the core problem and that only increased transparency will unleash the market mechanisms needed to clean them up.
The bulk of toxic assets are based on residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS), in which thousands of mortgages were gathered into mortgage pools. The returns on these pools were then sliced into a hierarchy of "tranches" that were sold to investors as separate classes of securities. The most senior tranches, rated AAA, received the lowest returns, and then they went down the line to lower ratings and finally to the unrated "equity" tranches at the bottom.
But the process didn't stop there. Some of the tranches from one mortgage pool were combined with tranches from other mortgage pools, resulting in Collateralized Mortgage Obligations (CMO). Other tranches were combined with tranches from completely different types of pools, based on commercial mortgages, auto loans, student loans, credit card receivables, small business loans, and even corporate loans that had been combined into Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLO). The result was a highly heterogeneous mixture of debt securities called Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO). The tranches of the CDOs could then be combined with other CDOs, resulting in CDO2.
Each time these tranches were mixed together with other tranches in a new pool, the securities became more complex. Assume a hypothetical CDO2 held 100 CLOs, each holding 250 corporate loans -- then we would need information on 25,000 underlying loans to determine the value of the security. But assume the CDO2 held 100 CDOs each holding 100 RMBS comprising a mere 2,000 mortgages -- the number now rises to 20 million!
Complexity is not the only problem. Many of the underlying mortgages were highly risky, involving little or no down payments and initial rates so low they could never amortize the loan. About 80% of the $2.5 trillion subprime mortgages made since 2000 went into securitization pools. When the housing bubble burst and house prices started declining, borrowers began to default, the lower tranches were hit with losses, and higher tranches became more risky and declined in value.
To better understand the magnitude of the problem and to find solutions, we examined the details of several CDOs using data obtained from SecondMarket, a firm specializing in illiquid assets. One example is a $1 billion CDO2 created by a large bank in 2005. It had 173 investments in tranches issued by other pools: 130 CDOs, and also 43 CLOs each composed of hundreds of corporate loans. It issued $975 million of four AAA tranches, and three subordinate tranches of $55 million. The AAA tranches were bought by banks and the subordinate tranches mostly by hedge funds.
Two of the 173 investments held by this CDO2 were in tranches from another billion-dollar CDO -- created by another bank earlier in 2005 -- which was composed mainly of 155 MBS tranches and 40 CDOs. Two of these 155 MBS tranches were from a $1 billion RMBS pool created in 2004 by a large investment bank, composed of almost 7,000 mortgage loans (90% subprime). That RMBS issued $865 million of AAA notes, about half of which were purchased by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the rest by a variety of banks, insurance companies, pension funds and money managers. About 1,800 of the 7,000 mortgages still remain in the pool, with a current delinquency rate of about 20%.
With so much complexity, and uncertainty about future performance, it is not surprising that the securities are difficult to price and that trading dried up. Without market prices, valuation on the books of banks is suspect and counterparties are reluctant to deal with each other.
The policy response to this problem has been circuitous. The Federal Reserve originally saw the problem as a lack of liquidity in the banking system, and beginning in late 2007 flooded the market with liquidity through new lending facilities. It had very limited success, as banks were still disinclined to buy or trade such securities or take them as collateral. Credit spreads remained higher than normal. In September 2008 credit spreads skyrocketed and credit markets froze. By then it was clear that the problem was not liquidity, but rather the insolvency risks of counterparties with large holdings of toxic assets on their books.
The federal government then decided to buy the toxic assets. The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) was enacted in October 2008 with $700 billion in funding. But that was not how the TARP funds were used. The Treasury concluded that the valuation problem seemed insurmountable, so it attacked the risk issue by bolstering bank capital, buying preferred stock.
But those toxic assets are still there. The latest disposal scheme is the Public-Private Investment Program (PPIP). The concept is that private asset managers would create investment funds of half private and half Treasury (TARP) capital, which would bid on packages of toxic assets that banks offered for sale. The responsibility for valuation is thus shifted to the private sector. But the pricing difficulty remains and this program too may amount to little.
The fundamental problem has remained untouched: insufficient information to permit estimated prices that both buyers and sellers find credible. Why is the information so hard to obtain? While the original MBS pools were often Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) registered public offerings with considerable detail, CDOs were sold in private placements with confidentiality agreements. Moreover, the nature of the securitization process has made it extremely difficult to determine and follow losses and increasing risk from one tranche and pool to another, and to reach the information about the original borrowers that is needed to estimate future cash flows and price.
This account makes it clear why transparency is so important. To deal with the problem, issuers of asset-backed securities should provide extensive detail in a uniform format about the composition of the original pools and their subsequent structure and performance, whether they were sold as SEC-registered offerings or private placements. By creating a centralized database with this information, the pricing process for the toxic assets becomes possible. Making such a database a reality will restart private securitization markets and will do more for the recovery of the economy than yet another redesign of administrative agency structures. If issuers are not forthcoming, then they should be required to file the information publicly with the SEC.
Mr. Scott is a professor of securities and corporate law at Stanford University and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. Mr. Taylor, an economics professor at Stanford and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the author of "Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged and Worsened the Financial Crisis" (Hoover Press, 2009).
Securitization was maddeningly complex. Mandated transparency is the only solution.
WSJ, Jul 20, 2009
Despite trillions of dollars of new government programs, one of the original causes of the financial crisis -- the toxic assets on bank balance sheets -- still persists and remains a serious impediment to economic recovery. Why are these toxic assets so difficult to deal with? We believe their sheer complexity is the core problem and that only increased transparency will unleash the market mechanisms needed to clean them up.
The bulk of toxic assets are based on residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS), in which thousands of mortgages were gathered into mortgage pools. The returns on these pools were then sliced into a hierarchy of "tranches" that were sold to investors as separate classes of securities. The most senior tranches, rated AAA, received the lowest returns, and then they went down the line to lower ratings and finally to the unrated "equity" tranches at the bottom.
But the process didn't stop there. Some of the tranches from one mortgage pool were combined with tranches from other mortgage pools, resulting in Collateralized Mortgage Obligations (CMO). Other tranches were combined with tranches from completely different types of pools, based on commercial mortgages, auto loans, student loans, credit card receivables, small business loans, and even corporate loans that had been combined into Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLO). The result was a highly heterogeneous mixture of debt securities called Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO). The tranches of the CDOs could then be combined with other CDOs, resulting in CDO2.
Each time these tranches were mixed together with other tranches in a new pool, the securities became more complex. Assume a hypothetical CDO2 held 100 CLOs, each holding 250 corporate loans -- then we would need information on 25,000 underlying loans to determine the value of the security. But assume the CDO2 held 100 CDOs each holding 100 RMBS comprising a mere 2,000 mortgages -- the number now rises to 20 million!
Complexity is not the only problem. Many of the underlying mortgages were highly risky, involving little or no down payments and initial rates so low they could never amortize the loan. About 80% of the $2.5 trillion subprime mortgages made since 2000 went into securitization pools. When the housing bubble burst and house prices started declining, borrowers began to default, the lower tranches were hit with losses, and higher tranches became more risky and declined in value.
To better understand the magnitude of the problem and to find solutions, we examined the details of several CDOs using data obtained from SecondMarket, a firm specializing in illiquid assets. One example is a $1 billion CDO2 created by a large bank in 2005. It had 173 investments in tranches issued by other pools: 130 CDOs, and also 43 CLOs each composed of hundreds of corporate loans. It issued $975 million of four AAA tranches, and three subordinate tranches of $55 million. The AAA tranches were bought by banks and the subordinate tranches mostly by hedge funds.
Two of the 173 investments held by this CDO2 were in tranches from another billion-dollar CDO -- created by another bank earlier in 2005 -- which was composed mainly of 155 MBS tranches and 40 CDOs. Two of these 155 MBS tranches were from a $1 billion RMBS pool created in 2004 by a large investment bank, composed of almost 7,000 mortgage loans (90% subprime). That RMBS issued $865 million of AAA notes, about half of which were purchased by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the rest by a variety of banks, insurance companies, pension funds and money managers. About 1,800 of the 7,000 mortgages still remain in the pool, with a current delinquency rate of about 20%.
With so much complexity, and uncertainty about future performance, it is not surprising that the securities are difficult to price and that trading dried up. Without market prices, valuation on the books of banks is suspect and counterparties are reluctant to deal with each other.
The policy response to this problem has been circuitous. The Federal Reserve originally saw the problem as a lack of liquidity in the banking system, and beginning in late 2007 flooded the market with liquidity through new lending facilities. It had very limited success, as banks were still disinclined to buy or trade such securities or take them as collateral. Credit spreads remained higher than normal. In September 2008 credit spreads skyrocketed and credit markets froze. By then it was clear that the problem was not liquidity, but rather the insolvency risks of counterparties with large holdings of toxic assets on their books.
The federal government then decided to buy the toxic assets. The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) was enacted in October 2008 with $700 billion in funding. But that was not how the TARP funds were used. The Treasury concluded that the valuation problem seemed insurmountable, so it attacked the risk issue by bolstering bank capital, buying preferred stock.
But those toxic assets are still there. The latest disposal scheme is the Public-Private Investment Program (PPIP). The concept is that private asset managers would create investment funds of half private and half Treasury (TARP) capital, which would bid on packages of toxic assets that banks offered for sale. The responsibility for valuation is thus shifted to the private sector. But the pricing difficulty remains and this program too may amount to little.
The fundamental problem has remained untouched: insufficient information to permit estimated prices that both buyers and sellers find credible. Why is the information so hard to obtain? While the original MBS pools were often Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) registered public offerings with considerable detail, CDOs were sold in private placements with confidentiality agreements. Moreover, the nature of the securitization process has made it extremely difficult to determine and follow losses and increasing risk from one tranche and pool to another, and to reach the information about the original borrowers that is needed to estimate future cash flows and price.
This account makes it clear why transparency is so important. To deal with the problem, issuers of asset-backed securities should provide extensive detail in a uniform format about the composition of the original pools and their subsequent structure and performance, whether they were sold as SEC-registered offerings or private placements. By creating a centralized database with this information, the pricing process for the toxic assets becomes possible. Making such a database a reality will restart private securitization markets and will do more for the recovery of the economy than yet another redesign of administrative agency structures. If issuers are not forthcoming, then they should be required to file the information publicly with the SEC.
Mr. Scott is a professor of securities and corporate law at Stanford University and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. Mr. Taylor, an economics professor at Stanford and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the author of "Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged and Worsened the Financial Crisis" (Hoover Press, 2009).
Germany's Spies Refuted the 2007 NIE Report
Germany's Spies Refuted the 2007 NIE Report. By BRUNO SCHIRRA
'Work on nuclear weapons can be observed in Iran even after 2003'
WSJ, Jul 20, 2009
President Obama has committed to trying diplomacy to stop the Iranian bomb. Time, though, is on the mullahs' side, not least because so much of it was wasted after the 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate made the improbable case that Iran had suspended its nuclear weapons program in 2003. This assessment not only contradicted previous U.S. intelligence consensus but -- as recent court documents show -- also the conclusions of a key U.S. ally with excellent sources in Iran -- Germany.
The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany's foreign intelligence agency, has amassed evidence of a sophisticated Iranian nuclear weapons program that continued beyond 2003. This usually classified information comes courtesy of Germany's highest state-security court. In a 30-page legal opinion on March 26 and a May 27 press release in a case about possible illegal trading with Iran, a special national security panel of the Federal Supreme Court in Karlsruhe cites from a May 2008 BND report, saying the agency "showed comprehensively" that "development work on nuclear weapons can be observed in Iran even after 2003."
According to the judges, the BND supplemented its findings on August 28, 2008, showing "the development of a new missile launcher and the similarities between Iran's acquisition efforts and those of countries with already known nuclear weapons programs, such as Pakistan and North Korea."
It's important to point out that this was no ordinary agency report, the kind that often consists just of open source material, hearsay and speculation. Rather, the BND submitted an "office testimony," which consists of factual statements about the Iranian program that can be proved in a court of law. This is why, in their March 26 opinion, the judges wrote that "a preliminary assessment of the available evidence suggests that at the time of the crime [April to November 2007] nuclear weapons were being developed in Iran." In their May press release, the judges come out even more clear, stating unequivocally that "Iran in 2007 worked on the development of nuclear weapons."
The judges had been asked to consider an appeal in the case of a German-Iranian businessman accused of brokering supplies for Iran's nuclear weapons program. The Federal Prosecutor had charged the defendant, identified by the authorities only as "Mohsen V.," with violating Germany's War Weapons Control Law and the Foreign Trade Act. A lower court in Frankfurt refused to try the case on the grounds that it was unlikely that Iran had a nuclear program at the time of the defendant's activities in 2007, citing the NIE report as evidence.
That's why the Supreme Court judges had to rule first on the question of whether that program exists at all. Having answered that question in the affirmative, the court had to rule next on the likelihood of the defendant to be found guilty in a trial. The supreme court's conclusions are unusually strong.
"The results of the investigation do in fact provide sufficient indications that the accused aided the development of nuclear weapons in Iran through business dealings."
The supreme court thus annulled the lower court's decision to throw out the case, demanding that the Frankfurt-based judges try the defendant on the original charges.
The case itself sheds light on how these networks function. According to the supreme court judges, the businessman has brokered "industrial machines, equipment and raw materials primarily to Iranian customers," for Iran's nuclear weapons program.
According to the same decision, the defendant's business partners in Tehran "dealt with acquiring military and nuclear-related goods for Iran and used various front companies, headquartered for example in Dubai and the United Arab Emirates, to circumvent existing trade restrictions." According to the judges, Mohsen V. also tried to supply to Tehran via front companies in Dubai "Geiger counters for radiation-resistant detectors constructed especially for protection against the effects of nuclear detonations."
Defendant Mohsen V.'s various business contacts in Iran, Russia, Germany, and the Near and Middle East are listed in the prosecutor's files and in the judges' decision. So is information related to the secret supply of "two high-speed cameras needed to develop nuclear warheads. The delivery of the cameras to the final customers in Iran occurred on November 1, 2007 at the latest." The Karlsruhe judges wrote that, by his own admission, Mohsen V. was "aware of the cameras' possible use in the military arena."
The court's decision and the BND's reports raise the question of how, or why, U.S. intelligence officials could have come to the conclusion that Iran suspended its program in 2003. German intelligence officials wonder themselves. BND sources have told me that they have shared their findings and documentation with their U.S. colleagues ahead of the 2007 NIE report -- as is customary between these two allies. It appears the Americans have simply ignored this evidence despite repeated warnings from the BND. This suggests not so much a failure of U.S. intelligence but its sabotage.
The politicized 2007 NIE report undermined the Bush Administration's efforts to rally international support for tough action against Iran. The world's best hope is that the Obama Administration is not being fed the same false sense of security.
Mr. Schirra is an investigative reporter in Berlin and author of "Iran -- Sprengstoff für Europe," Iran -- Explosives for Europe (Econ, 2006). Belinda Coopers translated this article from the German.
'Work on nuclear weapons can be observed in Iran even after 2003'
WSJ, Jul 20, 2009
President Obama has committed to trying diplomacy to stop the Iranian bomb. Time, though, is on the mullahs' side, not least because so much of it was wasted after the 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate made the improbable case that Iran had suspended its nuclear weapons program in 2003. This assessment not only contradicted previous U.S. intelligence consensus but -- as recent court documents show -- also the conclusions of a key U.S. ally with excellent sources in Iran -- Germany.
The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany's foreign intelligence agency, has amassed evidence of a sophisticated Iranian nuclear weapons program that continued beyond 2003. This usually classified information comes courtesy of Germany's highest state-security court. In a 30-page legal opinion on March 26 and a May 27 press release in a case about possible illegal trading with Iran, a special national security panel of the Federal Supreme Court in Karlsruhe cites from a May 2008 BND report, saying the agency "showed comprehensively" that "development work on nuclear weapons can be observed in Iran even after 2003."
According to the judges, the BND supplemented its findings on August 28, 2008, showing "the development of a new missile launcher and the similarities between Iran's acquisition efforts and those of countries with already known nuclear weapons programs, such as Pakistan and North Korea."
It's important to point out that this was no ordinary agency report, the kind that often consists just of open source material, hearsay and speculation. Rather, the BND submitted an "office testimony," which consists of factual statements about the Iranian program that can be proved in a court of law. This is why, in their March 26 opinion, the judges wrote that "a preliminary assessment of the available evidence suggests that at the time of the crime [April to November 2007] nuclear weapons were being developed in Iran." In their May press release, the judges come out even more clear, stating unequivocally that "Iran in 2007 worked on the development of nuclear weapons."
The judges had been asked to consider an appeal in the case of a German-Iranian businessman accused of brokering supplies for Iran's nuclear weapons program. The Federal Prosecutor had charged the defendant, identified by the authorities only as "Mohsen V.," with violating Germany's War Weapons Control Law and the Foreign Trade Act. A lower court in Frankfurt refused to try the case on the grounds that it was unlikely that Iran had a nuclear program at the time of the defendant's activities in 2007, citing the NIE report as evidence.
That's why the Supreme Court judges had to rule first on the question of whether that program exists at all. Having answered that question in the affirmative, the court had to rule next on the likelihood of the defendant to be found guilty in a trial. The supreme court's conclusions are unusually strong.
"The results of the investigation do in fact provide sufficient indications that the accused aided the development of nuclear weapons in Iran through business dealings."
The supreme court thus annulled the lower court's decision to throw out the case, demanding that the Frankfurt-based judges try the defendant on the original charges.
The case itself sheds light on how these networks function. According to the supreme court judges, the businessman has brokered "industrial machines, equipment and raw materials primarily to Iranian customers," for Iran's nuclear weapons program.
According to the same decision, the defendant's business partners in Tehran "dealt with acquiring military and nuclear-related goods for Iran and used various front companies, headquartered for example in Dubai and the United Arab Emirates, to circumvent existing trade restrictions." According to the judges, Mohsen V. also tried to supply to Tehran via front companies in Dubai "Geiger counters for radiation-resistant detectors constructed especially for protection against the effects of nuclear detonations."
Defendant Mohsen V.'s various business contacts in Iran, Russia, Germany, and the Near and Middle East are listed in the prosecutor's files and in the judges' decision. So is information related to the secret supply of "two high-speed cameras needed to develop nuclear warheads. The delivery of the cameras to the final customers in Iran occurred on November 1, 2007 at the latest." The Karlsruhe judges wrote that, by his own admission, Mohsen V. was "aware of the cameras' possible use in the military arena."
The court's decision and the BND's reports raise the question of how, or why, U.S. intelligence officials could have come to the conclusion that Iran suspended its program in 2003. German intelligence officials wonder themselves. BND sources have told me that they have shared their findings and documentation with their U.S. colleagues ahead of the 2007 NIE report -- as is customary between these two allies. It appears the Americans have simply ignored this evidence despite repeated warnings from the BND. This suggests not so much a failure of U.S. intelligence but its sabotage.
The politicized 2007 NIE report undermined the Bush Administration's efforts to rally international support for tough action against Iran. The world's best hope is that the Obama Administration is not being fed the same false sense of security.
Mr. Schirra is an investigative reporter in Berlin and author of "Iran -- Sprengstoff für Europe," Iran -- Explosives for Europe (Econ, 2006). Belinda Coopers translated this article from the German.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
The Post and Abu Zubaydah Part II: Ali Soufan Exposed
The Post and Abu Zubaydah Part II: Ali Soufan Exposed. By Marc Thiessen
NRO, Sunday, July 19, 2009
On March 29, the Washington Post published a front-page story called “Detainee’s Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots,” in which staff reporters Joby Warrick and Peter Finn declared that “not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions.”
Although they don’t call it that, Warrick and Finn have published what amounts to a full retraction on the front page of the Post this morning.
They write: “Although Abu Zubaydah was not a member of al Qaeda and had limited relations with bin Laden, he was a font of information on the membership of the terrorist group because of his long standing ties with [Khalid Sheikh] Mohammed and North African jihadists” (emphasis added). He became this “font of information” after the use of enhanced interrogation techniques.Moreover, they acknowledge that Zubaydah provided information that led to the capture of al-Qaeda terrorist Jose Padilla only after enhanced interrogation techniques were employed. (Padilla was captured as he arrived in Chicago on a mission from Khalid Shiekh Mohammed, or KSM, to carry out terrorist attacks in the U.S.)
This contradicts the assertions of FBI agent Ali Soufan, who claims that he got the information about Padilla from Zubaydah before enhanced interrogation techniques were applied by the CIA. Writing in the New York Times in April of this year, Soufan wrote: “Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned [Zubaydah] from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August. Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence. We discovered, for example, that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Abu Zubaydah also told us about Jose Padilla, the so-called dirty bomber.”
This last statement, it turns out, is a flat lie. According to today’s Post, Zubaydah did give up the information about KSM before enhanced interrogations began. Then a CIA team took over and began implementing enhanced interrogation techniques, including forced nudity and sleep deprivation. After this, the Post reports today: “Agency officials decided to let the FBI back into the interrogations, but on the condition that forced nudity and sleep deprivation be allowed to continue. . . . Under FBI questioning, Abu Zubaydah indentified an operative he knew as Abdullah al-Mujahir, the alias, he said, of an American citizen with a Latino name. An investigation involving multiple agencies identified the suspect as Jose Padilla, the al Qaeda operative later convicted of providing material support for terrorism. ‘In two different bits, after sleep deprivation, is when Abu Zubaydah gave clues about who Padilla might be.’”
In other words, contrary to Soufan’s assertion in the Times, he only got the information that led to Padilla after the CIA began to implement enhanced interrogation techniques.
Padilla is often dismissed as the man behind a fanciful “dirty bomb” plot, and the Post notes today that he was convicted of “material support for terrorism.” In fact Padilla was a protégé of al-Qaeda’s third in command, Mohammed Atef, who had been sent to America by KSM to carry out a much more sinister and realistic attack on America — a plot to simultaneously blow up apartment buildings using natural gas. He trained for this mission in al-Qaeda camps, and was given $10,000 by KSM and his right-hand man, Ammar al-Baluchi, to carry it out. The night before his departure for America, KSM, Ammar, and KSM’s nephew and 9/11 plotter Ramzi bin al Shibh hosted a farewell dinner for Padilla and his accomplice.
The reason he was convicted of “material support for terrorism” is because the Justice Department could not prosecute him for the full panoply of his crimes without allowing Padilla to call KSM, Ammar, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh as witnesses — thus risking the exposure of highly classified information. They chose to pursue lesser charges rather than expose sources and methods. But the full extent of Padilla’s activities was laid out in a speech by Deputy Attorney General James Comey in June 2004.
The bottom line is that today’s story in the Post proves that: 1) the original Post assertion that “not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions” is flat wrong — the Padilla plot was broken up because of the CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques; and 2) Ali Soufan’s assertion that he got this information before the implementation of enhanced interrogation techniques is false.
NRO, Sunday, July 19, 2009
On March 29, the Washington Post published a front-page story called “Detainee’s Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots,” in which staff reporters Joby Warrick and Peter Finn declared that “not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions.”
Although they don’t call it that, Warrick and Finn have published what amounts to a full retraction on the front page of the Post this morning.
They write: “Although Abu Zubaydah was not a member of al Qaeda and had limited relations with bin Laden, he was a font of information on the membership of the terrorist group because of his long standing ties with [Khalid Sheikh] Mohammed and North African jihadists” (emphasis added). He became this “font of information” after the use of enhanced interrogation techniques.Moreover, they acknowledge that Zubaydah provided information that led to the capture of al-Qaeda terrorist Jose Padilla only after enhanced interrogation techniques were employed. (Padilla was captured as he arrived in Chicago on a mission from Khalid Shiekh Mohammed, or KSM, to carry out terrorist attacks in the U.S.)
This contradicts the assertions of FBI agent Ali Soufan, who claims that he got the information about Padilla from Zubaydah before enhanced interrogation techniques were applied by the CIA. Writing in the New York Times in April of this year, Soufan wrote: “Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned [Zubaydah] from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August. Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence. We discovered, for example, that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Abu Zubaydah also told us about Jose Padilla, the so-called dirty bomber.”
This last statement, it turns out, is a flat lie. According to today’s Post, Zubaydah did give up the information about KSM before enhanced interrogations began. Then a CIA team took over and began implementing enhanced interrogation techniques, including forced nudity and sleep deprivation. After this, the Post reports today: “Agency officials decided to let the FBI back into the interrogations, but on the condition that forced nudity and sleep deprivation be allowed to continue. . . . Under FBI questioning, Abu Zubaydah indentified an operative he knew as Abdullah al-Mujahir, the alias, he said, of an American citizen with a Latino name. An investigation involving multiple agencies identified the suspect as Jose Padilla, the al Qaeda operative later convicted of providing material support for terrorism. ‘In two different bits, after sleep deprivation, is when Abu Zubaydah gave clues about who Padilla might be.’”
In other words, contrary to Soufan’s assertion in the Times, he only got the information that led to Padilla after the CIA began to implement enhanced interrogation techniques.
Padilla is often dismissed as the man behind a fanciful “dirty bomb” plot, and the Post notes today that he was convicted of “material support for terrorism.” In fact Padilla was a protégé of al-Qaeda’s third in command, Mohammed Atef, who had been sent to America by KSM to carry out a much more sinister and realistic attack on America — a plot to simultaneously blow up apartment buildings using natural gas. He trained for this mission in al-Qaeda camps, and was given $10,000 by KSM and his right-hand man, Ammar al-Baluchi, to carry it out. The night before his departure for America, KSM, Ammar, and KSM’s nephew and 9/11 plotter Ramzi bin al Shibh hosted a farewell dinner for Padilla and his accomplice.
The reason he was convicted of “material support for terrorism” is because the Justice Department could not prosecute him for the full panoply of his crimes without allowing Padilla to call KSM, Ammar, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh as witnesses — thus risking the exposure of highly classified information. They chose to pursue lesser charges rather than expose sources and methods. But the full extent of Padilla’s activities was laid out in a speech by Deputy Attorney General James Comey in June 2004.
The bottom line is that today’s story in the Post proves that: 1) the original Post assertion that “not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions” is flat wrong — the Padilla plot was broken up because of the CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques; and 2) Ali Soufan’s assertion that he got this information before the implementation of enhanced interrogation techniques is false.
Friday, July 17, 2009
The Assassins Debate - Why Seymour Hersh is still wrong about Cheney's hit squad
The Assassins Debate. By Michael C. Moynihan
Why Seymour Hersh is still wrong about Cheney's hit squad
Reason, July 17, 2009
A few months ago on this website, I cast doubt on a claim by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh that former Vice President Dick Cheney was running “an executive assassination ring” out of his West Wing office. Urging caution when repeating such claims—predictably, outside of the conspiracy-friendly websites like Raw Story and Digg, only MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann reported this dubious "scoop"—I argued that because Hersh had previously admitted exaggerating stories in order to “convey a larger truth,” a healthy dose of skepticism was warranted.
The story quickly disappeared, only to be reanimated this week by CIA director Leon Panetta’s revelation that the Bush administration deliberately obscured an unnamed secret CIA program from Congress. A flood of stories from the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, and The New York Times followed, revealing that the CIA plan involved the targeted assassination of al-Qaeda targets. Many observers quickly connected the dots back to Hersh. The Huffington Post’s Sam Stein wondered if the CIA, with whom the Bush administration famously battled, was “hiding Cheney's executive assassination ring." A handful of indignant emailers, claiming vindication on behalf of Hersh, demanded a retraction of my blog post.
Not a chance.
Let's briefly revisit Hersh’s bombshell assassination claims. Last March, during a speech at the University of Minnesota, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist revealed that the CIA "was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state (emphasis added)." He offered the following as evidence: "[T]here was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command—JSOC it's called...They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office...It's an executive assassination ring essentially."
But this is a non-sequitur. Hersh first references a secret, as-yet-unreported CIA program focusing on domestic targets after 9/11—which, as of this writing, hasn't been uncovered by those investigating the Panetta story, though it certainly doesn’t strain credulity—and quickly shifts gears to a discussion of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), a special unit of the United States Special Operations Command known for tracking and assassinating the Jordanian al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
As pointed out by sources familiar with the program, Panetta cancelled the CIA operation before it became "fully operational,” though Hersh claims the Cheney “executive assassination ring” has been “going on and on and on” for years. Here is Newsweek's Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff, describing the lumbering and troubled evolution of the program:
Top CIA officials ultimately concluded the program posed an unacceptable risk of failure or exposure, according to another former official. As a result, the initial plans proposed by officers of the Directorate of Operations—now known as the National Clandestine Service—were put on hold by CIA Director George Tenet before he left office in 2004, former officials said. Tenet's two successors, Porter Goss and Gen. Michael Hayden, kept the plans in the deep freeze. But a former official said that until Panetta killed the program outright last month, the CIA never totally abandoned the plans for kill teams...
One journalist looking into the program—a person, it is worth noting, deeply critical of Bush and Cheney's terrorism policies—suggested a more logical explanation. Hersh, he informed me, might have stumbled across the program exposed this week but perhaps "didn't understand what his sources were telling him." When asked if these revelations vindicated the "executive assassination ring" claim, another journalist working on the story told me that those who connect the Panetta revelations to Hersh's breathless talk in Minneapolis "have no idea what they are talking about."
Simply put, Hersh’s narrative of an operational, domestic cadre of assassins doesn’t fit with what we know about the plan scuttled by Panetta.
Nevertheless, The Daily Beast’s Benjamin Sarlin huffed that Hersh "was mocked in March when he referred to Dick Cheney’s secret squad of CIA assassins" but now it appeared that Hersh was "prescient," the "man who knew Cheney’s secret." Those who distrusted Hersh would soon be forced to eat crow: "Yesterday, the New York Times reported the hidden program in question was a death squad authorized by Dick Cheney without Congressional approval—almost exactly what he described."
But as The Daily Beast editors soon realized, the Times story said nothing about domestic operations, didn't mention JSOC, a group not even under CIA command, and told a very different story than Hersh. An editor’s note was tacked on to the piece, telling readers that the article "was updated to reflect differences between Hersh’s story and The New York Times'." The claim that Hersh’s story was "exactly" what the Times reported vanished (though it can be viewed via Google’s cache), replaced with a more equivocal sentence: "Now, there are key differences between Hersh's reporting and the Times' latest piece."
In an attempt to keep the "executive assassination ring" angle in play, Sarlin’s updated story concluded gamely that "The Times and Hersh could conceivably be reporting two distinct squads." MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann offered a similar conclusion, telling a guest that "Seymour Hersh's hint of the story in Minnesota in the spring was about stuff run out of the Pentagon and specifically not tied to the CIA," though there might be "two secret assassination squads."
The desire to eschew these contradictory facts in pursuit of a political point spread throughout the blogosphere. Soon after Cheney's former national security adviser John Hannah told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that it was “certainly true” that the there was a “well-vetted process, interagency process” targeting “those that have committed acts of war against the United States,” Center for American Progress blogger Satyam Khanna wrote that "a former Cheney aide suggests that Hersh’s account of [an] 'executive assassination ring' is 'certainly true.'" Well, no he didn’t.
My concern here is not with the efficacy, legality, or existance of Dick Cheney’s program to rub out members of al-Qaeda, but with those who warn us that journalism in the run up to the Iraq War failed the American people because its practitioners placed furthering a political agenda over the supremacy of truth. If the mainstream media in 2002 was hamstrung by sloppy and biased reporting, thereby necessitating a counterrevolution in blogging and online reporting, have the Enragés, the young bloggers who demanded higher standards and an upending of the old order, already become Robespierres? Is it now OK to engage in sloppy and lazy journalism, provided that the stakes are smaller and your target is widely considered to be a bastard?
In reporting the Panetta story, it was “old media” print journalists like Siobhan Gorman, Eli Lake, Joby Warrick, and Scott Shane that informed and illuminated, while the partisans of the new media took up the rear, pounding round pegs into square holes.
During the 2008 election, one writer praised the new breed of online journalists while cautioning that in rushing to scoop the mainstream media, Internet upstarts often risk missing “nuance and context,” valuing quantity over quality. Web journalists, he continued, often settle “for a timely article rather than a complete one,” though this is “an avoidable problem.”
Indeed it is. And the author, Huffington Post political reporter Sam Stein, might want to start taking some of his own advice.
Michael C. Moynihan is a senior editor of Reason magazine.
Why Seymour Hersh is still wrong about Cheney's hit squad
Reason, July 17, 2009
A few months ago on this website, I cast doubt on a claim by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh that former Vice President Dick Cheney was running “an executive assassination ring” out of his West Wing office. Urging caution when repeating such claims—predictably, outside of the conspiracy-friendly websites like Raw Story and Digg, only MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann reported this dubious "scoop"—I argued that because Hersh had previously admitted exaggerating stories in order to “convey a larger truth,” a healthy dose of skepticism was warranted.
The story quickly disappeared, only to be reanimated this week by CIA director Leon Panetta’s revelation that the Bush administration deliberately obscured an unnamed secret CIA program from Congress. A flood of stories from the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, and The New York Times followed, revealing that the CIA plan involved the targeted assassination of al-Qaeda targets. Many observers quickly connected the dots back to Hersh. The Huffington Post’s Sam Stein wondered if the CIA, with whom the Bush administration famously battled, was “hiding Cheney's executive assassination ring." A handful of indignant emailers, claiming vindication on behalf of Hersh, demanded a retraction of my blog post.
Not a chance.
Let's briefly revisit Hersh’s bombshell assassination claims. Last March, during a speech at the University of Minnesota, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist revealed that the CIA "was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state (emphasis added)." He offered the following as evidence: "[T]here was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command—JSOC it's called...They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office...It's an executive assassination ring essentially."
But this is a non-sequitur. Hersh first references a secret, as-yet-unreported CIA program focusing on domestic targets after 9/11—which, as of this writing, hasn't been uncovered by those investigating the Panetta story, though it certainly doesn’t strain credulity—and quickly shifts gears to a discussion of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), a special unit of the United States Special Operations Command known for tracking and assassinating the Jordanian al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
As pointed out by sources familiar with the program, Panetta cancelled the CIA operation before it became "fully operational,” though Hersh claims the Cheney “executive assassination ring” has been “going on and on and on” for years. Here is Newsweek's Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff, describing the lumbering and troubled evolution of the program:
Top CIA officials ultimately concluded the program posed an unacceptable risk of failure or exposure, according to another former official. As a result, the initial plans proposed by officers of the Directorate of Operations—now known as the National Clandestine Service—were put on hold by CIA Director George Tenet before he left office in 2004, former officials said. Tenet's two successors, Porter Goss and Gen. Michael Hayden, kept the plans in the deep freeze. But a former official said that until Panetta killed the program outright last month, the CIA never totally abandoned the plans for kill teams...
One journalist looking into the program—a person, it is worth noting, deeply critical of Bush and Cheney's terrorism policies—suggested a more logical explanation. Hersh, he informed me, might have stumbled across the program exposed this week but perhaps "didn't understand what his sources were telling him." When asked if these revelations vindicated the "executive assassination ring" claim, another journalist working on the story told me that those who connect the Panetta revelations to Hersh's breathless talk in Minneapolis "have no idea what they are talking about."
Simply put, Hersh’s narrative of an operational, domestic cadre of assassins doesn’t fit with what we know about the plan scuttled by Panetta.
Nevertheless, The Daily Beast’s Benjamin Sarlin huffed that Hersh "was mocked in March when he referred to Dick Cheney’s secret squad of CIA assassins" but now it appeared that Hersh was "prescient," the "man who knew Cheney’s secret." Those who distrusted Hersh would soon be forced to eat crow: "Yesterday, the New York Times reported the hidden program in question was a death squad authorized by Dick Cheney without Congressional approval—almost exactly what he described."
But as The Daily Beast editors soon realized, the Times story said nothing about domestic operations, didn't mention JSOC, a group not even under CIA command, and told a very different story than Hersh. An editor’s note was tacked on to the piece, telling readers that the article "was updated to reflect differences between Hersh’s story and The New York Times'." The claim that Hersh’s story was "exactly" what the Times reported vanished (though it can be viewed via Google’s cache), replaced with a more equivocal sentence: "Now, there are key differences between Hersh's reporting and the Times' latest piece."
In an attempt to keep the "executive assassination ring" angle in play, Sarlin’s updated story concluded gamely that "The Times and Hersh could conceivably be reporting two distinct squads." MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann offered a similar conclusion, telling a guest that "Seymour Hersh's hint of the story in Minnesota in the spring was about stuff run out of the Pentagon and specifically not tied to the CIA," though there might be "two secret assassination squads."
The desire to eschew these contradictory facts in pursuit of a political point spread throughout the blogosphere. Soon after Cheney's former national security adviser John Hannah told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that it was “certainly true” that the there was a “well-vetted process, interagency process” targeting “those that have committed acts of war against the United States,” Center for American Progress blogger Satyam Khanna wrote that "a former Cheney aide suggests that Hersh’s account of [an] 'executive assassination ring' is 'certainly true.'" Well, no he didn’t.
My concern here is not with the efficacy, legality, or existance of Dick Cheney’s program to rub out members of al-Qaeda, but with those who warn us that journalism in the run up to the Iraq War failed the American people because its practitioners placed furthering a political agenda over the supremacy of truth. If the mainstream media in 2002 was hamstrung by sloppy and biased reporting, thereby necessitating a counterrevolution in blogging and online reporting, have the Enragés, the young bloggers who demanded higher standards and an upending of the old order, already become Robespierres? Is it now OK to engage in sloppy and lazy journalism, provided that the stakes are smaller and your target is widely considered to be a bastard?
In reporting the Panetta story, it was “old media” print journalists like Siobhan Gorman, Eli Lake, Joby Warrick, and Scott Shane that informed and illuminated, while the partisans of the new media took up the rear, pounding round pegs into square holes.
During the 2008 election, one writer praised the new breed of online journalists while cautioning that in rushing to scoop the mainstream media, Internet upstarts often risk missing “nuance and context,” valuing quantity over quality. Web journalists, he continued, often settle “for a timely article rather than a complete one,” though this is “an avoidable problem.”
Indeed it is. And the author, Huffington Post political reporter Sam Stein, might want to start taking some of his own advice.
Michael C. Moynihan is a senior editor of Reason magazine.
Is Food Aid for Africa Working?
Is Food Aid for Africa Working?: A Wall Street Journal reporter asks if western food aid policies are truly providing aid. By Brian Doherty
Reason Magazine, Jul 17, 2009
Although billions have been spent on foreign development and food aid to Africa in the decades since World War II, over half a billion people remain undernourished in Africa today according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture—a number that's 53 percent higher than it was in 1992 when the government first began accumulating such figures.
While the reasons for continuing poverty are manifold, Western government programs such as food aid and agriculture and ethanol subsidies deserve their share of the blame. So argues the new book Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty (PublicAffairs), written by Wall Street Journal reporters Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman, each of whom have years of experience writing page-one stories for the Journal on African matters, particularly African famine.
Unlike anti-aid anaylsts such as William Easterly and Dambisa Moyo, Thurow and Kilman see plenty of room for more (intelligent) action on the part of Western governments. In fact, Kilman argues that genuine agricultural development aid has yet to be sufficiently and intelligently attempted.
But their reporting in the Journal and in Enough provides vivid examples of the ways both aid policy and U.S. farm policy hurts, not helps, the long-term well-being of Africans as they struggle for self-sufficiency.
Senior Editor Brian Doherty spoke with Scott Kilman in July.
See interview in the link above.
Reason Magazine, Jul 17, 2009
Although billions have been spent on foreign development and food aid to Africa in the decades since World War II, over half a billion people remain undernourished in Africa today according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture—a number that's 53 percent higher than it was in 1992 when the government first began accumulating such figures.
While the reasons for continuing poverty are manifold, Western government programs such as food aid and agriculture and ethanol subsidies deserve their share of the blame. So argues the new book Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty (PublicAffairs), written by Wall Street Journal reporters Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman, each of whom have years of experience writing page-one stories for the Journal on African matters, particularly African famine.
Unlike anti-aid anaylsts such as William Easterly and Dambisa Moyo, Thurow and Kilman see plenty of room for more (intelligent) action on the part of Western governments. In fact, Kilman argues that genuine agricultural development aid has yet to be sufficiently and intelligently attempted.
But their reporting in the Journal and in Enough provides vivid examples of the ways both aid policy and U.S. farm policy hurts, not helps, the long-term well-being of Africans as they struggle for self-sufficiency.
Senior Editor Brian Doherty spoke with Scott Kilman in July.
See interview in the link above.
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