Category: Politics

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Barack Obama Conservativism Criticism Financial Crisis Latin America Politics

In Case You Missed It: Best Reads of the Week on Whining Conservatives, Internet Battles, Peru, The Single Life, and the Unborn

1. Whiny Conservatives. David Frum scolds conservatives for  quite whining and points out how silly they look doing so given how far the conservative movement has moved America since it gained power:

In 1975, the federal government set the price of every airline ticket, every ton of rail freight, every cubic foot of natural gas and every barrel of oil. It controlled the interest rates paid on checking accounts and the commission charged by stockbrokers. If you wanted to ship a crate of lettuce from one state to another, you first had to file a routemap with a federal agency. It was a crime for a private citizen to own a gold coin. The draft had ended only two years before, but not until 1975 itself did Congress formally end the state of emergency (and the special grant of presidential powers) declared at US entry into the First World War.

2. The Battle for the Internets. Fred Vogelstein writes in Wired about the brewing battle between Facebook and Google for the internet.

3. Peru’s Moment. Most of the world has lost ground in the financial crisis and recession. Daniel Gross in Newsweek tells the story of one country that has managed the financial crisis perfectly (Peru), and their secret ingredient: leadership in the years leading up to the crisis:

In the latter half of 2008, being a poor, export-dependent, commodity-producing country set you up for a vicious downturn. But Peru has weathered the storm, in large part because President Alan García, an old leftist turned center-leftist, and the Peruvian central bank have proved adept at a set of capabilities notably lacking in the United States in recent years: sound fiscal and financial management. Fearful of a return of hyperinflation amid rapid growth, Peru’s central bank raised interest rates throughout 2008. Instead of spending the foreign currency that piled up on its books ($32 billion at the end of 2008), the government saved it. In 2008, Peru ran a $3.3 billion budget surplus.
And so, when troubles came, it was able to respond in textbook fashion. In December 2008, García announced a stimulus program, promising to boost government spending by $3.2 billion, and to take up to $10 billion in further measures. The total of $13 billion in promised stimulus doesn’t sound like much, but that’s equal to about 10 percent of Peru’s GDP.

4. New York Wins Again. Forbes has released a list of the top cities for singles. New York is – as in everything else – number one.

5. This strong, invisible and unacknowledged force. David Brooks (in a piece that Yglesias ridiculed, justly on some grounds) – manages to write an interesting meditation on the importance of the unborn to our society:

People live in a compact between the dead, the living and the unborn, and the value of the thought experiment is that it reminds us of the power posterity holds over our lives.

Bonus: This song came out months ago, but I just starting enjoying it recently, so here’s to sharing:

[Image by me.]

Categories
Politics The Opinionsphere

Glenn Greenwald’s Ideological Wind Tunnel

Michael Massing for the New York Review of Books has quite an interesting piece on blogging – specifically focusing on left-leaning political bloggers. This obviously involve discussing Glenn Greenwald – and Massing seems to have a similar reaction to his work. Though I cite Greenwald favorably quite often – I also ridicule him probably more than any other writer – especially when I read him too often.  (See for example, my piece entitled “Glenn Greenwald uses hyperbole the way other writers use punctuation;” or ” Greenwald’s rhetorical tics;” or “Psychoanalyzing Glenn Greenwald.”)  Here’s Massing’s mixed review:

In so vigilantly watching over the press, Greenwald has performed an invaluable service. But his posts have a downside. Absorbing the full force of his arguments and dutifully following his corroborating links, I felt myself drawn into an ideological wind tunnel, with the relentless gusts of opinion and analysis gradually wearing me down. After reading his harsh denunciations of Obama’s decision not to release the latest batch of torture photos, I began to lose sight of the persuasive arguments that other commentators have made in support of the President’s position. As well-argued and provocative as I found many of Greenwald’s postings, they often seem oblivious to the practical considerations policymakers must contend with.

[Image by Cushing Memorial Library Archives, Texas A&M licensed under Creative Commons.]

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Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

Best Line of the Week

Goes to Ezra Klein describing Peter Orszag’s response to the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of IMAC:

That paragraph reads a bit like a very angry Data trying to hurt Spock’s feelings.

Categories
Barack Obama Criticism Green Energy Health care Politics

Is Obama Leading Us To A Technocratic Dystopia?

[digg-reddit-me]Implicit in many of Obama’s policy proposals and programs is an assumption shared by many reformers (from here to here to here): that America’s political system is broken and that our traditional democratic institutions just aren’t up to the job of managing serious and difficult areas and making rational, long-term decisions when the payoff only comes after policy-makers are out of office. I’m not sure that they’re wrong – but I’m wary of the decision made by the Obama administration to focus on creating a technocracy to manage these areas.

In many of Obama’s programs and proposals, there is a bureaucratic independent or quasi-independent agency that is designed to manage whatever process is relevant to the program and that receives from the Congress authority to make decisions on its own. To the technocrats’ credit, in most cases, although the decision-making is outsourced to these agencies, Congress has some sort of limited veto over them. The appeal of outsourcing authority to these institutions comes from the fact that they are theoretically insulated from politics and are capable of making minor decisions over a long period of time which – if managed properly – can effect significant changes. The idea is that – rather than forcing through a controversial and wholesale change – you set up an independent agency that will gradually manage things in order to achieve the changes needed. This makes a great deal of sense politically – as the agency can be tasked with some anodyne goal that everyone can agree on – and as it makes controversial decisions,  politicians can distance themselves from each individual decision while still supporting the independence of the organization (as you often see with the Federal Reserve). They can say they didn’t vote for this or that specific proposal – and that they oppose it – but that given the authority of this independent agency, there’s little they can do. On a policy level, this also makes sense – as any attempt to push through wholesale reform is limited by one’s knowledge at the time the legislation is drafted. Better to experiment and try various small steps and set up different incentives to accomplish the same thing than to attempt to impose some pre-made solution. It’s also worth noting that these technocratic institutions are often supported on a bipartisan basis – while specific reforms are generally opposed by one side or the other. The appeal is obvious – yet the anti-democratic impulse is disturbing.

One example of these organizations is the IMAC (or Independent Medical Advisory Committee) which would be a technocratic institution that would set the pay rates for reimbursement of various Medicare programs and eventually perhaps for all government-sponsored insurance (as MedPAC does now) and also compare and evaluate what treatments work best to treat different conditions and make recommendations. Unlike MedPAC which simply advises Congress, IMAC would make annual recommendations which would take effect if accepted by the president and not vetoed by the Congress. The White House has been selling this plan as a way to take the politics out of Medicare reimbursements and restrain costs. A similar approach helps explain why Obama is pushing for the Federal Reserve (the organization to which the IMAC is most often compared) to be the regulator of those institutions that are “too big to fail” as well as tracking and regulating various other systematic risks – despite their role in the collapse that just occurred. What the Federal Reserve is known for is its independence from political pressure and its technocratic bent, thus making it the perfect vehicle for Obama’s efforts to reform the financial industry even though it clearly failed so recently. There is the proposal for a National Infrastructure Bank which would direct federal transportation money – again, independent of political concerns. The cap-and-trade program would likewise gradually institute dramatic reforms by giving authority over to a technocratic institution that would manage carbon emissions – distancing these actions from politically accountable leaders.

On each individual proposal, the solution seems compelling, but as an overall trend, it is disturbing. When Obama was elected, many claimed that there was a similar feeling of hope and progress to when John F. Kennedy was elected – and as then, when Kennedy gathered “the best and the brightest,” Obama has reinvigorated the idea of public service. But the downfall of these Kennedy men was their belief that they could “control events, in an intelligent, rational way.” Obama’s technocrats do not seem to have this same hubris. Their hubris is of a different variety: they believe that they can best manage complex areas and achieve needed reforms not through political action but by creating bureaucracies onto which they put the difficult political decisions.

But what kind of system do we end up with then? As rules and regulations are created by technocrats and then merely accepted or rejected by the elected officials. This system seems to resemble an oligarchy with democratic checks. With the Federal Reserve along with other less independent agencies already deputized to take care of most government responsibilities, we have already started down this road – but it doesn’t seem wise to double down on this approach. Unfortunately, I do not offer a solution – only a concern.

[Image not subject to copyright.]

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Health care Humor Politics Videos

Bill Maher Explains Why Profits Don’t Need To Be Part of Our Health Care System

[digg-reddit-me]

Bill Maher – as is his wont – perfectly parries the conservative arguments defending our “capitalist” health care system by linking it to capitalism in general:

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “But Bill, the profit motive is what sustains capitalism.”

Yes, and our sex drive is what sustains the human species, but we don’t try to fuck everything!

There are exceptions, rule, and regulations to everything. Maher – by bringing the matter back to sex – demonstrates that the radical capitalist ideology that seeks to impose itself on every facet of life is in fact just that – an unpragmatic and radical ideology. And he makes the case that liberals and the others in the majority who are opponents of this radical capitalism that the profit motive is a good thing – just like sex drive – but like sex, it needs to be constrained in order to be productive and not destroy our society.

Categories
Barack Obama Liberalism Libertarianism Political Philosophy Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere

The Libertarian-Democratic Alliance Will Survive

[digg-reddit-me]Jon Henke over at The Next Right scoffs now at Markos Moulitsas’s prediction – a few years back – of “an emerging brand of ‘libertarian Democrats.'” Henke makes two mistakes in his scoff: first, he equates the tea bagging movement with libertarianism; and second, he is extrapolating from the immediate post-election dynamics to more general party dynamics in the future.

In the first, he is certainly right that the Tea Bagging movement has adopted libertarian themes and rhetoric – and there are certainly libertarians among this group. But there are also many right-wingers of other sorts. And if the Tea Baggers truly were outraged by government spending, they had eight years to get excited before Obama took office. The Tea Bagging movement is an odd combination of right-wingers angry with Obama using libertarian rhetoric and libertarians who are fed up with everyone in American politics except Ron Paul. But I’d be pretty certain that the majority of people at these rallies decrying socialism and government interference also join in the right-wing’s attempts to demonize Obama for his modest steps in reining in the national security state.  Henke – in equating the Tea Bagging movement and libertarianism does libertarians a rather severe disservice.

Second, it was inevitable that the libertarians that were part of the anti-Bush coalition would not fit so well into the pro-Obama coalition, despite their support for Obama over McCain in 2008. It was always clear that Obama would not move fast enough on national security matters – and would not even attempt to go far enough for libertarians – and that Obama’s domestic agenda, especially health care, goes against libertarian principles. That said, there are significant areas of agreement between libertarians, progressives, and liberals – and these are considerably stronger than those between right-wingers, Republicans and libertarians. On economic matters, the Republican Party has done very little to embrace free market reforms – instead, embracing a form of crony capitalism; on national security issues, the party has embraced every accoutrement of a police state; on spending, Republicans have been far more fiscally irresponsible; on social issues, the Republican Party has abandoned libertarian principles and embraced a christianist platform. The Democratic Party – on the other hand – is for reigning in the police state (though not enough); and on social issues, it often sides with libertarians; on economics and spending, this gets more complicated. Obama’s positions do seem at first glance to be exactly what libertarianism stands against – but if I’m right about what Obama is doing – that he is adapting the Democratic Party and liberalism to a market-state in which the state seeks to provide the maximum opportunity to its citizens rather than providing for them (as socialist, Communist, and post-New Deal American capitalist states did), then the Democratic Party’s economic platform will be less of a threat to libertarian values and the party will be more or less aligned with the libertarians on every issue.

These first years of Obama’s presidency were always going to strain the libertarian-Democratic alliance. But it seems the long term trends favor this alliance.

[Image by Brian Buchanan licensed under Creative Commons.]

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Barack Obama Criticism Politics The Opinionsphere

Stop ObamaCare Before Obama Murders Your Comatose Wife and Infant Daughter!

[digg-reddit-me]I received an email this morning from Townhall.com entitled, “ObamaCare Equals Government Funded Euthanasia” with the above image. I’m sort of curious why they couldn’t have just shown a picture of Obama with a gun to the baby’s head. It would have been more effective at getting their message across. But then again, they might be concerned about losing the white male gun owner vote – ’cause after all, its hard to maintain that Obama is both a liberal pansy (who’s the next Hitler and therefore is going to take away your guns) and that he carries a Glock around so he can take out any infants he sees.

But I take this email to demonstrate that the right is now stepping up its blizzard of lies about the Democratic health care reform bill over the August recess. Here’s some context for the photo:

Everyone knows that nationalized healthcare is a terrible idea but everyday we unearth even more awful details in what is in the proposed government-run plan.

A nation of Terri Schiavos with a National Euthanasia Bill?

In 2005, a COURT ordered the removal of a feeding Tube from Terri Schiavo. It outraged a nation. If the Government takes over health care, bureaucrats will decide who lives and dies in America. In the name of “creating efficiencies,” they will delay – or deny – treatment to critically ill patients because it costs too much.

We will have a NATION of Terri Schiavo’s, with a faceless Federal Bureaucracy pulling the plug instead of a Court.!

Sound crazy? It happens every day in Great Britain.

You can STOP what will in effect be government sponsored euthanasia in America if you ACT NOW.

If you care about the Sanctity of Life, the proposed Government Takeover of Health Care is an attack on your values.

It’s quite interesting that Town Hall would bring up Terri Schiavo – the pinnacle of right-wing overreach that helped alienate libertarians from the Republican camp – and that led the public to near unprecedented levels of agreement over the matter. 62% of Americans favored removing the feeding tube – and 82% of Americans believed that Congress and the President should have stayed out of the matter. Yet Town Hall – speaking only to its base – sees Schiavo as a rallying cry. And not just to their base – they claim that the removal of the feeding tube, “outraged a nation.” I wonder what it accomplishes to lie to your base and tell them that they are the real majority, aside from radicalizing them and alienating them from the American system.

But getting back to the substance of what they are claiming, they bring up a repeated right-wing canard – that:

If the Government takes over health care, bureaucrats will decide who lives and dies in America. In the name of “creating efficiencies,” they will delay – or deny – treatment to critically ill patients because it costs too much.

So many inaccuracies – as, to start, the Democratic health care reform doesn’t lead the government to take over health care. At worst, it would lead to a government-provided health insurance. And any health insurance – private or public – will deny treatment on occasion due to expense. The problem with our status quo is that rationing occurs both by cost – depending on what insurance plan you have and by health insurance company bureacrats whose job it is to deny as many treatments as possible and/or to rescind your policy if they can’t deny the treatments. That sounds a lot less like rationing and more like a war that health insurance companies are waging against the sick of America – a war in which their goal is to maximize their profits regardless of the cost to society or their paying customers.

As to the Democratic health care reforms endorsing government-funded abortion and euthanasia, I truly wonder who actually buys this load of crap. Clearly, it is an attempt by Town Hall to manufacture outrage – but who is stupid enough to believe this? Too many people, I’m sure.

Edit: On reddit, criswell improves the image, writing:

Man, look at his eyes! Obama sure hates that baby!

That pic is all kinds of win…. But it could be better… It may be too subtle for your average American… It needs… something….. Hmmmm….

Continue reading “Stop ObamaCare Before Obama Murders Your Comatose Wife and Infant Daughter!”
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Politics

Instead of a Fairness Doctine, a Fair Shake

[digg-reddit-me]Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m no fan of the Fairness Doctrine. (See this, this, and this.)

I believe – as do many other liberals whom I respect from Bill Moyers to Lawrence Lessig – that in a media environment such as we have today with blogs, Twitter, cable TV, the network news, talk radio, books, newspapers, magazines, blogs, online communities, Facebook, and the other half-dozen types of media, it does not make sense for to have a law impinging on free speech as much as the Fairness Doctrine did.

But I do think it is worthwhile – as a society – to stand for fairness, including in the coverage of controversial matters in the media. We don’t need government regulation to express our own opinion and to direct our behavior as a consumer. Rather than seeking to boycott Glenn Beck because he says something outrageous, we should demand that he include alternate points of view in his show and threaten to boycott him if he does not comply with this. Rather than attacking Keith Olbermann for his rants, we should demand that he give over some minutes to a conservative and have a real debate – without using the O’Reillian trick of cutting off his opponent’s mic.

The fact is – as this Bill Moyers piece catalogues, there is a real cost to our society that comes from the one-sided extremism that dominates so much of our media. Coupled with this, we have less and less contact with people of other opinions, as Americans are increasingly clustering geographically by political views. This creates and encourages the cycle of hatred and eventually violence that we can see operating in various extremists groups around the world; it creates a dynamic of escalating moral outrage.

The government should not be the solution to all of our problems. And this is not a matter of essential security. It is about the type of society that we are, whether or not we will be a well-informed citizenry. I’m still thinking on the issue – but I would think a set of basic standards would be helpful – that can be equally applied to the right and left – with gradually escalating steps of opposition to those who refuse to honor them.

In the end, if the principles were articulated clearly, and it was not used for merely partisan ends, I could see such an initiative affecting the national debate. The fine line that would need to be drawn would be between allowing commentators to address controversial issues while giving their opinion – and determining how the other side could be treated fairly. In the end, no matter what standards were suggested, it would have to be a matter of judgment rather than of formula.

[Image by Rich Lewis licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Barack Obama Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

Health Care Reform: Choice and Security

[digg-reddit-me]There’s been a lot of commentary and puzzlement in the opinionsphere about exactly how Obama is trying to sell his health care reform. Part of the problem is that our system is messy – and Obama does not feel it is feasible to try to start anew. So, instead, Obama is seeking to accomplish two goals with his reform: to “bend the curve” of overall spending on health care; and to provide some form of health insurance to those Americans without it. The problem is that each of these problems seem to be inherent parts of our status quo – as the health insurance industry has sought to drive down medical costs not by incentivizing cheaper effective treatments as in most industries, but by purging the sick from its coverage. Ezra Klein describes this business model most vividly:

Private insurance is a bit like a fire department that turns a profit by letting buildings burn down.

But, as medical professionals swear an oath to provide aid to those who need it, hospital emergency rooms and the government then are forced to pick up the slack. Thus, the health insurance model does not reduce the cost of health care but merely pushes these costs onto the rest of us. This is at least part of the reason America pays about $6,500 more for health care per person – as David Leonhardt writes:

We may not be aware of this stealth $6,500 health care tax, but if you take a moment to think, it makes sense. Over the last 20 years, health costs have soared, and incomes have grown painfully slowly. The two trends are directly connected: employers had to spend more money on benefits, leaving less for raises.

In exchange for the $6,500 tax, we receive many things. We get cutting-edge research and heroic surgeries. But we also get fabulous amounts of waste — bureaucratic and medical.

One thing we don’t get is better health than other rich countries…

This isn’t the only thing causing health care costs to rise so quickly – but it is the most obviously flawed compenent of our system and one of the drivers of the escalating costs and declining level of care. And it is very unclear what benefits – if any – our health insurance model provides. It is an industry which seems designed purely to create profits for a select few and disburse costs to the population at large.

Obama has done rather well in making this case – in attacking the status quo. But the question is: What is he offering? Matt Yglesias suggested, “Health care security” and I think that’s about right. Obama expressed the same idea:

Reform is about every American who has ever feared that they may lose their coverage…

At the same time, as Ezra Klein points out, most people are currently satisfied with their health care – and want more choices rather than less. Klein suggests:

The answer, put simply, is that you don’t institute rapid change. You don’t take what people have. But you give them the option to trade up to something better. As the theory goes, if the current system really is so inefficient, and your alternative really is so much better, then the lure of lower costs and better quality will persuade Americans to switch to the new system of their own accord.

The policies to address these issues are there – in some form in the plans being discussed. The measures that deal with these should be strengthened. And the positive case for health care reform should be simple, always repeated the words choice and security:

Health Care Reform: Delivering Security and Choice to the Middle Class

[Image by dmason licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Barack Obama Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

A Leap of Faith on Health Care

[digg-reddit-me]Last week, Matt Yglesias explained how the relationship between Congress, the media, and the public doesn’t often lead to positive policy results. His these is that a policy idea do not become popular and then receive bipartisan support and those presidents who support such ideas then succeed; instead, the observing affects the observed: if an idea is promoted by the president at the head of one party and is supported by at least some of his opposition party then the media conveys this in such a way that the idea becomes popular; if instead his opponents remain solidly opposed, the idea is seen as overreach. It was this insight that allowed Bill Clinton to bounce back after his defeat on health care in 1993/1994. The plan was solid enough – but failed, among other reasons, because the Republicans solidly opposed it and were able to peel off a few Democrats. The public thus assumed that the health care plan was a bad thing, that it was a result of Clinton’s liberal overreach. Clinton, to his credit learned from this defeat and subsequently exploited this dynamic by consistently peeling off a few Republicans for the rest of his initiatives – or sometimes siding with them more substantially – and thus accomplished things as he needed to in order to save his presidency. The problem is that Clinton’s approach often hurt the Democratic party – and resulted in many small initiatives at a time when there were festering problems that needed to be dealt with.

Obama has tried to be the un-Clinton on this and other issues. Clinton was often seen to be insincere in reaching out to the Republicans – but he helped the class of 1994 pass a significant part of their agenda. Obama has taken pains to appear sincere, but has been more interested in ideas of his own – including incorporating Republican ideas into his proposals. While Bill Clinton had started out happy with partisan victories, but then gradually came to see how the above dynamic could be used to protect himself, and became a proponent of bipartisanship, Obama started out trying to reach out to Republicans, but has become disillusioned with bipartisanship as he saw how the necessity of it gave inordinate power to a few Republicans to derail his agenda.

All of this creates a situation which Jonathan Chait over at The New Republic‘s Plank describes:

Democrats simply have to accept that health care reform is going to be polling badly when they vote on it. There’s no mechanism in the current media configuration that would allow them to convey the details of the plan in a positive way without getting overrun by negative process stories. It’s just not possible. What they have to focus on is which alternative is likely to make them better off: reform passing or reform failing. It’s an easy call, which is why I think reform will pass.

But it’s a bit depressing that the actual merit of a policy has little to nothing to do with whether or not it will pass. I agree with Chait that health care reform will pass – and it will be substantial – because the Democrats know they must just take that leap of faith and trust the president (or whoever the architect of this health care bill ends up being). It’s an easy choice between whether each representative wants to survive together, or hang separately.

[Image by ClickFlashPhotos licensed under Creative Commons.]