Praktike had a really good post about Robert Kaplan's new Atlantic cover story, on the coming war with China. In the grand style of bloggers everywhere, I'll offer the "money quote" while still exhorting you to "read the whole thing":

But the main question begged by and not answered in the piece is: Why We Would Fight China, a question that is above PACOM's collective paygrade and therefore not asked by Kaplan. I have to say that it would be deeply unfortunate and downright foolish if America and China backed themselves both into a "second Cold War," as Kaplan puts it. It could only be the result of a mutual miscalculation. There's no doubt that we should be prepared militarily, and we shouldn't be naive in scrutinizing Chinese intentions.... [But] U.S. policy ought to be about finding ways to create a win-win situation in Asia rather than on blundering into a pointless new Cold War that can only make everyone poorer and stupider. We shouldn't be afraid of China, but rather we should be afraid that U.S. China policy will be determined by people who think in zero-sum terms.

Indeed, Kaplan's main problem seems to be that he thinks all our relationships with other countries need to be zero-sum. More on that some other time. But praktike's post reminded me of a National Interest essay by David Lampton of CSIS from two years ago (sorry, Nexis-only) where he noted that, in the past, Chinese intellectuals used to crank out very Kaplan-esque books that touted the coming conflict with America, such as China Can Say No (1996) and Unrestricted Warfare (1997). Or, I should say, John Mearsheimer-esque books, since he's the big proponent of the "inevitable war with China" thesis here in America. But lately, Lampton says, "[t]he fashion among Chinese intellectuals is to talk about 'win-win,' rather than 'zero-sum' thinking." So one of the factors that may well prove crucial on both sides of the Pacific is what sorts of intellectuals and strategic thinkers actually end up influencing government policy.

Unfortunately, this is always a tricky thing to figure out. Clearly some intellectuals do end up shaping government policy—most histories of the neo-cons will attest to that—but from a distance, it's often impossible to tell where the real centers of influence actually are. For instance, I read lots of essays about France that quote all sorts of French political tracts to make a point about this or that new French ideology emerging, but obviously the only books that matter are those that actually affect the way the Paris government thinks about stuff. And no one can say which ones do. Likewise, I have no way of telling, and Lampton doesn't say, whether Unrestricted Warfare actually had any influence beyond a small circle of Chinese academics, or whether these new 'win-win' intellectuals have Hu Jintao's ear. Nor, for that matter, do I know whether the White House and Pentagon are more likely to be thinking along the lines of John Mearsheimer or, say, Tom Barnett (who is extremely dovish on China), or whether they even care about what any of these thinkers are saying. But that seems awfully important to figure out.

...the worst possibility, of course, is that rising military hawkishness towards China is being driven by the Pentagon's need to justify buying a bunch of high-tech new equipment. i.e. "We really want these new nuclear subs, but Congress will never go for it. But they might if we start talking about the coming war with Beijing..." Obviously it's not quite as flagrant as that, but at least subconsciously that might be what's happening.

MORE: fascinating stuff on China from praktike, who happens to know everything about everything, apparently.

Apropos of nothing, really, comes this fun passage from Cass Sunstein's The Second Bill of Rights:

It is interesting to ask here whether there is a connection between social and economic rights [i.e. enshrined in a country's constitution] and government policy. An extensive study gives some partial answers, indicating that such rights can have real effects. Many constitutions promise help for those who are unemployed, disabled, or simply poor, and a constitutional right of this kind is strongly connected with larger transfer payments for such people, even if we control for other variables that might confound the analysis.

On the other hand, a constitutional right to education is associated with lower expenditures for public education. The right to health services has a positive association with public health expenditures, but the association is weak and not statistically significant.

He's right, that is interesting. Sunstein also makes a good point about constitutions abroad. With our hallowed Constitution, and whenever Americans consider amendments and such, we tend to think of them solely in terms of their real-world effects. "What will this amendment do, how will it translate into concrete law?" But Sunstein points out that many other countries think constitutions ought to include principles that aren't necessarily supposed to be applied rigorously and strictly enforced by the courts, but merely express national aspirations.

So, for instance, when Sunstein was advising Ukraine on drawing up a new constitution in the '80s, several drafters wanted to include a provision requiring that the press be objective. Obviously, from an American point of view, this seems insane: How the fuck are the courts going to define "objective"? What will be considered "opinionated"? But no, the Ukrainians just wanted to express an aspiration of sorts: that Ukraine would be the sort of country where journalists try their hardest to be objective and truthful.

To veer off sharply on yet another tangent, this might be a good way of thinking about Arab constitutions, where there's often a lot of wrangling over whether there should be a provision saying "Islam is the sole source of legislation," or "Islam is a source of legislation." To me, this debate seems somewhat meaningless, because the extent to which sharia does, in fact, end up dictating law depends largely on how the courts are set up, how legislatures choose to interpret the provision, etc. Devil's all in the implementation. But going off Sunstein, the constitutional culture also seems important to consider—whether people view their constitution as a strict "law of the land" or a document that includes, among other things, an expression of national aspirations and identity.

Didn't bother watching the big press conference tonight, but reading over the transcript, what is this all about?: "There will be no price gouging at gas pumps in America." Is this something that's thought to be a problem? And when did our president turn into such a consumer-rights champion? Heck, even I'm in favor of "price-gouging," for reasons more or less outlined here. But back to the issue at hand: Is Bush now thinking about price controls on gasoline? Egad, maybe everyone should stop giving the prez a hard time about his man date with Abdullah before he does something truly rash.

Pam Spaulding has a gruesome post on the history of forced sterilization in America that's very much worth reading. Though it might be a little unfair for her to imply that the "American Taliban," i.e. the pro-life right was behind this movement. After all, the infamously pro-eugenics Buck v. Bell decision that Pam quotes was written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, a lifelong atheist. And as the wingnuts never tire of pointing out, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was one of the biggest proponents of forced sterilization, arguing in the 1920s that "the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective."

Like it or not, it was the secular elites of that era who were largely touting sterilization, worried as they were that the educated class wasn't self-reproducing enough. On the other side of the ledger was Theodore Roosevelt, who promoted "positive eugenics," i.e. exhorting educated women to start cranking out more babies. (He even included this his 1906 SOTU address.) The David Brooks of his time, you could say.

Now in The Empty Cradle, Phillip Longman worried that subreplacement fertility rates among the educated classes could mean "the social seeds for eugenics are still alive" (presumably through genetic engineering). Fortunately, though, I don't think the modern political climate is at all favorable to this sort of thing. Conservatives are so committed to the "culture of life" that it would be nigh-unthinkable for them to promote any sort of eugenics program. Right-wing intellectuals worried about either cultural decline or falling birthrates (the two main rationales for eugenics) tend to fall into two camps: the Sam Huntington-types who want to limit immigration to preserve Anglo-Saxon Protestant purity here in America; and the David Brooks-set, who just want women to return to the hearth and pump out lots and lots of babies. On the left, there's the Longman camp, which thinks the answer is to craft policies that allow women to work and have as many kids as they want; along with a growing liberal disability-rights movement, whose aims, I think, were nicely summarized in this wonderful essay by Michael Berube:

I criticized the high abortion rate for fetuses with Down syndrome, but unlike those who rely on various invocations of divine authority to dictate the terms of life to others, I would rather decrease the abortion rate by means of persuasion than by means of state coercion.

At any rate, this is all by way of saying that eugenics movements are on much weaker grounds today than ever before, and not just because they were so thoroughly discredited after the horrors of Nazi population programs, but because there simply aren't any major political movements thinking even remotely along those lines. The proposed solutions to cultural decline or falling birthrates or defective births have mostly been staked out elsewhere.

Suzanne Nossel has some great posts on UN reform and John Bolton. I think it's time to lay out the hard-headed Republican case against Bolton, or better yet, what we can call the "Norm Coleman" case, even though Norm Coleman doesn't think this way. But he should.

The other day Dan Bartlett told reporters, "A vote for John Bolton will be a vote for change at the United Nations." That's plainly ludicrous; just ask, what sort of change? John Bolton has absolutely no ideas at this score, and neither do his backers. For all the screaming and table-pounding over the very serious flaws and abuses at the UN—from its ass-backwards Commission on Human Rights to raping children in the Congo—not one prominent conservative has put forward any actual ideas for shaking up the UN. Instead they send Bolton. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Look, folks, I hate baseball—hate it, think it's a stupid sport with faux athletes who go on the IR for minor scratches, and it has silly rules. I had to pretend to like it for two years while dating my last girlfriend; basically, it pisses me off. Nevertheless, no sensible person would appoint me MLB Commissioner to enact "reform." I may know what I loathe about the game, but I wouldn't have the first goddamn clue about how to make it better. So it goes with Bolton and UN.

Now when Republicans like Norm Coleman talk about "reforming" the UN, I suspect that what they really want is to reduce the UN into nothing more than an instrument for legitimizing U.S. policy. (All this talk about Oil-for-Food is, I think, a red herring.) In other words, giving American unilateralism the blessed shroud of international approval. Fair enough; that's certainly not what I think the UN is merely for, but if you truly believe American hard power is the primary force for good in the world, and one of our main weaknesses is obstructionism by a slew of other ragtag countries around the globe, then this is a reasonable (if wrong-headed) view. In that case, however, I think Suzanne showed, in her essay "Retail Diplomacy," that the U.S. really can coerce other countries into following its unilateral lead, but it takes just a little patience, effort, and ego-stroking. The whole essay is marvelous, but take a look at this section on how we could be using a bit of bilateral strong-arming to further our multilateral goals:

In A Dangerous Place, an account of his experience as U.S. Ambassador to the UN in the mid-1970s, Daniel Patrick Moynihan suggested that the United States use its bilateral ties to advance multilateral priorities. Absent other compelling bilateral goals, Moynihan argued, the U.S. Ambassador to Togo, for example, should make it his or her number one objective to secure that country's backing on key matters in the UN and other forums. By mobilizing support in this way, he suggested, the United States might have headed off the “Zionism Is Racism” resolution that sent U.S.-UN relations into a decades-long downward spiral.

Unfortunately, Moynihan's proposal went nowhere. Multilateral issues remain a sidebar at best to bilateral relationships. Ambassadors have no incentive to push remote and contentious multilateral issues that have little direct bearing on their day-to-day jobs. …Though the United States has unparalleled capacity to wage effective campaigns on the global stage via its network of diplomats, this machinery rarely kicks into gear….

During the UN dues negotiations, the U.S. delegation repeatedly learned after the fact of loans, debt forgiveness and other concessions made to countries that actively opposed the reform process. At the end of a long and contentious meeting with the Singaporean delegation, one of their diplomats pulled from his briefcase a press report announcing a U.S.-Singapore free trade agreement. “This is what matters”, he said, dismissing the importance of the dues issue while stead-fastly maintaining his country's refusal to pay more. Without a ledger, Singapore's recalcitrance at the UN had no impact on their favorable treatment at the hands of the U.S. Trade Representative. Had the matters simply been raised together, the free trade cooperation would have provided leverage on the dues issue even without an explicit quid pro quo. Allies and enemies alike know that the United States does not keep track of its bilateral relationships in this way, however, and thus rest assured that opposing the United States in multilateral forums will rarely trigger repercussions in the bilateral relationship.

Notice that what Moynihan's proposing is basically an advanced form of bullying. But it's bullying all the same. The United States doesn't give up anything, nor is it fundamentally constrained by, for instance, having our Singapore ambassador say to his counterpart, "Nice free trade deal you want there. Be a real shame if anything happened to it. Oh hey, by the way, let's talk about UN dues." This is the Norm Coleman dream, is it not?

But it's clear that John Bolton has neither the patience nor the temperament nor the people skills to conduct this sort of smooth diplomatic arm-cranking. It's not just because he's opposed to multilateralism and diplomacy; it's more because he's ill-mannered and lazy. Indeed, the White House has always been appallingly lazy on this front. The hawk party likes to bitch about how Turkey's opposition to the war in Iraq may have cost us the peace, since we never had Marine divisions sweep in through the north and pacify the Sunni cities in al-Anbar. Fine, but note that we "lost" Turkey mainly through sheer laziness and ineptitude. As Glenn Kessler and Mike Allen have reported, during the run-up to the first Gulf War Sec. State James Baker made five personal visits to Turkey, and George H.W. Bush called Turkey's leader 55 to 60 times. By contrast, in 2003 Colin Powell didn't visit Ankara once, and Bush the younger made all of three calls to Erdogan. Not surprisingly, we lost Turkey.

So yes, the bottom line: John Bolton will hurt America's ability to be a global bully. In other words, he likely won't even be good at the one thing he's supposed to be good at.

I tend to rank the Slate columnists as follows: Daniel Gross, Dahlia Lithwick, Tim Noah, Fred Kaplan, and then a pretty big gap down to the rest. And then another long, long gap down to Christopher Hitchens. Which is just my way of saying two things: 1) I'm confident I'll never be hired by Slate, and 2) I'm very, very excited that Dan Gross has started up his own blog.

The usual complaint about the Republican "free market" approach to economic policy is that, in practice, it doesn't tend to be all that free. And more to the point, it doesn't seem like most corporations even want a truly "free" market. When companies like United are being bailed out to the tune of billions of dollars by the federal government, it's safe to say that corporations need government just as much as the reverse. So when I hear that the Chamber of Commerce wants to do things like pare down the Family Medical Leave Act, on account of it costing too much and being too much government intervention and hampering all that economic potential just ready to explode in an unfettered marketplace, well, excuse me while I roll my eyes and snort a bit.

So the "free market" is not always what it seems, and if we can be honest about how dependent companies already are on government support, it will lead to less freaking out about certain proposed government interventions. Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research outlines one such proposal today. As we know, health care costs are chugging on upwards. And much of that upward-chug is driven by obscenely high drug prices. But, as Baker points out: "It is not difficult to find ways to reduce drug prices, since the reason that prescription drugs are expensive is that the government grants pharmaceutical companies patent monopolies." A few reforms, Baker argues, could solve a lot of our cost problems: We simply junk those patent monopolies and instead expand public funding for biomedical research:

The potential savings to the country and the government from having drugs sold at free market prices are enormous. The CMS estimates that the country will spend $521 billion on drugs in 2014. This figure could fall to approximately $160 billion, if drugs were sold in a competitive market. The savings accruing to the federal government alone would be approximately $140 billion a year by 2014, several times more than the additional research spending needed to replace the patent supported research by the pharmaceutical industry.

Now it's true that relying on public spending for research isn't "free market" in the ideal sense of the word, but neither are government-supported patent monopolies! The relevant question here is: which particular method of government meddling will keep costs down and lead to more innovation? Frankly, patent-protected pharmaceutical companies don't appear to be doing all that much innovating on their own; as Marcia Angell once pointed out: "Of the seventy-eight drugs approved by the FDA in 2002, only seventeen contained new active ingredients, and only seven of these were classified by the FDA as improvements over older drugs." If the Baker approach really can yield serious savings, there's certainly no ideological reason not to do it—it's simply swapping one form of government intervention for another, more efficient one.

(Note: Yeah, this post first appeared at MoJo; usually I never cross-post, but I tend to get really smart comments on health care here and wanted to see what you all had to say. So... fire at will.)

Even if Iraq turns out okay—by which I mean, we forget about the hundreds of thousands dead and content ourselves with the fact that Zarqawi gets killed and people can vote and 99.7% of Iraqi lawmakers don't get assassinated in their homes—even if all that happens, I think it's safe to say that very few people in the U.S. would have the appetite for more full-on empire. Apart from a few delusional warbloggers, no one sane could think that victory in Iraq, if it comes, will be anything other than a snatched-from-the-jaws-of-defeat affair. So I'm not sure why Vivek Chibber writes, in the last issue of Boston Review, that Niall Ferguson's empire-advocacy work "reflects a widening current of opinion among American intellectuals, including its liberal wing."

Nevertheless, his takedown of Colossus is very, very good, and deflates a lot of delusions about Britain's grand colonial experiment in India and elsewhere, including the notion that the market and economic reforms in the various colonies were unequivocally a good thing. (And especially Ferguson's appalling contention that the famines in late 19th century India, which left at least 23 million dead, were due to "environmental" rather than egregious mismanagement.)

The rejoinder here might be, "Well, look, yes, Britain caused a lot of famines back in the day, and yes, Britain mismanaged its colonies by turning them into subjugated markets for its exports and yes, Britain wasn't very good at channeling investment and development money to the Third World, but hey, we know so much more about economics nowadays. We'd never make those mistakes." But, of course, even today we as human beings still don't seem to know a whole lot about how to make developing countries grow, and it's very likely that economists still have key pieces of macroeconomics wrong, just as they seemed to have things fairly wrong prior to the Great Depression, and just as they seemed to prior to the great stagflation under Carter. Certainly, as Robert Looney has written over and over again, the consensus neoliberal prescriptions for Iraq turned out to be disastrous in the short-term. And that's just the most obvious example. Our technocrats today are pretty good, certainly better than colonial Britain's did, but they don't seem to be perfect quite yet—if they'll ever be.

And one for the annals of "awesome but useless crap." Lately I've become a terrible, nigh-incompetent typist, unable to spell anything, and the only thing that saves me from writing complete jibberish fulltime is Microsoft Word's blessed AutoCorrect function. Sadly, Firefox's URL field doesn't have anything comparable. But Google does! And I don't mean the actual search engine (i.e. "Did you mean: Pitbulls wearing panties" Ah yes, yes I did...). No, I mean that you can type all sorts of appalling variations of "www.google.com" into your browser and still get to where you want to be. Greatest hits include:

http://www.goolge.com
http://www.gogole.com
http://www.googel.com
http://www.ogogle.com

All work, and no doubt there are more. But what I'd really like to see them add to the roster are http://www.googl.ecom and http://www.googlec.om, since those are the two that trip me up the most. On the other hand, they're taking away any incentive for me to learn to type better! Though from what I understand of the various theories of phonics out there, learning how to spell correctly is far more important for learning how to read than for writing well. Phew.

Why no posts lately? Ah, life has been busy, work hectic, trying to do a bunch of research on family and sick leave, which will probably be good for a post or five later on. But now I'm going off to see Kung Fu Hustle, so no time to write. Instead, I'll kick things over quickly to three of my favorite conservative bloggers:

Victor of Dead Parrots summons up a bunch of statistics to argue that the U.S. medical system isn't as horrible as all that. Interesting stuff. To be honest, I agree with the brunt of what he's saying—the fact that we have lower life expectancies and whatnot doesn't say anything all that useful about our health care system, though it does help call into question the (common) notion that the U.S. is getting something extra-super-special for a system that has outlandishly high costs and leaves 45 million people uninsured. Which, I guess, is only my bitchy way of saying that if the situation was reversed, and U.S. life expectancies were top o' the OECD, we'd certainly be hearing about all the premature deaths socialized medicine was "causing" abroad.

Meanwhile, Steve Verdon has a conservative health care proposal worth discussing. Of particular interest, though, is that graph he puts up, showing that per capita health care spending has increased in proportion to the decline of out-of-pocket spending. It seems awfully important to try to figure out which factor is causing which here. (I mean, it could be the case that spending is going up because people have to pay less out-of-pocket and hence have less restraint, going to the doctor's for the slightest sniffle and whatnot. Or the reverse could be true, and people can't afford to pay as much out-of-pocket simply because costs are going up for other reasons.)

Finally, John Kalb picks apart my proposal for a party-oriented politics here in America. Oddly, John suggests that stronger parties wouldn't necessarily increase turnout by noting that "voter turnout's been steadily dropping all over the world, even in places like France, where party bosses are extremely important." Well, okay, but in France's 2002 presidential election, turnout was still nearly 80 percent. I'd love to see that sort of "decline" here in America!

It's also true, as John points out, that stronger, more centralized political parties would open the door for Tom DeLay-style abuse by party bosses. But my hope is that, if parties rather than individuals become the dominant unit in American politics, then scandals or corruption by any one politician, especially party leaders, would have repercussions for the party as a whole. That seems to be what's going on in Canada with the Liberals, though correct me if I'm wrong there. By contrast, here in the United States, Tom DeLay answers only to his small district in Texas, despite the fact that what he does very much affects the entire country. He is House Majority Leader, after all. Now yes, in the coming months the DeLay scandals may well bog down the whole party, but that's the way it should always be.

You have to flip all the way to the back of the latest Time issue for it, past Ann Coulter and everything, but this short piece on why Montana is turning Democratic, or at least vaguely blue-ish, is worth the flip:

The outlaw Montana that I moved to 15 years ago and that my Eastern friends had apprehensions about--many of them quickly dismissed once they visited and fired a few rounds from the target pistols I own or took a pickup down to a local bar with a poker table in its back room--is setting like the evening sun. Ragged former cow towns like Bozeman are turning into suburbanized high-tech meccas for Ph.D.s who like to go rafting and snowboarding. These immigrants have brought with them an exotic culture of dining spots that feature formal wine lists, bookstores that sell titles besides the Bible, sports that don't center on the killing of animals and taverns whose air is as clean and clear as the expensive vodka in their martinis.

But the old-timers are turning bluer too--perhaps as a result of choking on the polluted air that issues from the state's assorted smelters, refineries, pulp mills, oil and gas wells and non-emission-controlled exhaust pipes. The inevitable legacy of almost everyone doing pretty much anything he wished is a huge environmental mess, from the copper mines of Butte, where the water table is thick with heavy metals, to the asbestos mines of Libby, where laborers are dying in large numbers from chronic respiratory ailments. No wonder Montanans legalized medical marijuana last fall. The stuff is said to ease the pain of battling cancer, and up in Libby at least, that pain is great.

That all seems to jibe with what David Sirota wrote in his retrospective on Brian Schweitzer's kickass gubenatorial campaign. Now what I'd be curious to know is if these trends are unfolding in any other Upper-Midwestern states. Are environmental issues cropping up in North Dakota or Wyoming? Are any other towns up there turning into "high-tech meccas for Ph.D.s who like to go rafting and snowboarding"? Could Boise turn into the next Bozeman? I'm not sure why it's just Montana of all places that seems to be turning more liberal.

MORE: Is it... the Mormon factor? So says Matt Singer.

Very good article from USA Today about how DeLay's little lobbyist-paid trips are only the coughs and hacks of a much, much larger disease:

The new analysis of 5,410 trips in the past five years by about 600 members of the House and Senate was conducted by PoliticalMoneyLine, an online service that provides campaign-finance and lobbying data.

It found that $8.8 million of the travel expenses were paid for by tax-exempt and other groups whose funding sources aren't public. DeLay is under fire in part because one such group, the National Center for Public Policy Research, paid for a trip to Britain in 2000 that may have been at least partly paid for by a lobbyist, which is against House rules.

While ethics rules require lawmakers to try to find out and disclose who is paying for their trips, they often fail to do so, said Larry Noble of the Center for Responsive Politics, an ethics watchdog group. "It has become a 'don't ask, don't tell' system," Noble said.

He said it is curious that the rules don't allow lobbyists to pay for trips but permit their employers to do so. "The fiction is that the same conflict doesn't exist when the lobbyist's employer, a corporation or a trade association, pays for the travel and the lobbyist goes along," Noble said.

Yes, why are the rules structured like that? Look, if DeLay in fact let Abramoff pay for his junkets and trips abroad, then he's guilty of some clear violations here. Case closed. But imagine if some corporation or trade group that employed Abramoff had paid for the junkets instead—technically, that would've been "legal," but that still would've been wrong, and corrupt, and—oh here it comes—bad for America.

So here's the larger point: Yes, I'd like to see DeLay's ethics violations translate into trouble for Tom DeLay. More than that, I'd like to see DeLay's ethics violations translate into trouble for the GOP as a whole, tangled as the party in K Street's long and slithery tentacles. Hey, what can I say, I'm a vicious partisan and I think the Republican majority is doing this country a lot of harm. So shoot me. But even more than that, and perhaps most important of all, I'd like to see a larger conversation take place about the role of money in politics, period.

If all that comes of these DeLay scandals is that the Majority Leader gets ousted, and the Republicans suffer a serious election-day defeat, that will be cool, but won't change much, fundamentally speaking. Democrats certainly aren't above cozying up to lobbyists and trade associations, or voting for corporate whore bills, or basking in the day-to-day corruption that beams down like black light on Congress. (In fact, according to PML, they've taken more privately-financed trips than Republicans since 2000.) So the new motto should be: Better ethics all around, please. And not just that, but better rules, tighter restrictions, real finance reform. Let's have a wider separation of K Street and state. Realistically, it looks like that the GOP will have to be ousted before any of that can ever happen, given that DeLay seems hell-bent on turning the ethics committee into a bunch of impotent partisan lackeys. But even after that's accomplished, let's not lose sight of the ultimate goal here.

UPDATE: Haha, yes, more like this. Watch the little rats scurry away!

Steve Verdon has an interesting post on the problems with using life expectancy as a measure of the "goodness" of any given health care system. I agree, it's somewhat problematic. Lots of things affect life expectancy, and just because the numbers are low isn't proof that the health care system sucks. That reminds me of an interesting study once mentioned by Phillip Longman:

In a recent issue of Health Affairs, three researchers from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation examined scores of studies dating back to the 1970s on what factors cause people to die prematurely. They reported that genetic predispositions account for 30 percent of premature deaths; social circumstances, 15 percent; environmental exposures, 5 percent; behavioral patterns, 40 percent; and shortfalls in medical care, 10 percent. As they note, these proportions are easily misinterpreted. Ultimately, nearly everyone's health is determined by a combination of factors. For example, while only about 2 percent of human diseases are caused by inherited genetic mutations alone, nearly everyone carries various genetic dispositions that, when combined with a hazardous environment or unhealthy lifestyle, can contribute to ill health. But this only underscores the relatively small role medicine plays in preventing premature death.

So yes, if we really wanted to boost life expectancy here in the U.S., we probably ought to focus more on those "social circumstances"—especially reducing poverty—along with getting people to exercise more and eat healthier stuff. (We might also want to try a bit of genetic engineering, though I won't wade into that right now.) Meanwhile, improving health care access for the poor and otherwise uninsured would certainly be a grand thing, and would probably save lives, but in the grand scheme of things probably wouldn't boost our life expectancy numbers up to the level of our OECD competitors.

So put a grain of salt on those life expectancy graphs. But do notice: It's still extremely hard to find statistics that cast the U.S. health care system in a favorable light. My favorite metric is the one used by the WHO, which tries to measure three goals: good health, responsiveness to health expectations, and fairness of financial contribution. For good health, the WHO looks at disability-adjusted life years (i.e. years without disability) rather than life expectancy. The surveys on responsiveness, meanwhile, try to control for different cultural interpretations of what constitutes "good health" and "quality care". And even here, the United States regularly does dismally among developed nations—32nd in good health, 15th in responsiveness, 54th in fairness, and 37th in overall performance. Now you could say, "Hey, that's not fair, the U.S. would be doing pretty well were it not for the fairness part," but that's an awfully odd thing to bracket off like that.

Again, you can poke holes in just about any statistic used. There are all sorts of contortions and mitigating factors and things not considered. Tech Central Station runs clever articles like this all the time ("Well perhaps this number can be explained by this, or perhaps this, or perhaps, or perhaps...") But at some point the pro-U.S. health care faction really ought to make at least some statistical case that our health care system, as a whole, does pretty well for itself. Because from what I can tell, in ranking after ranking and chart after chart, it falters.

A few days ago, during Condoleeza Rice's visit to Moscow, the news reports all gave the impression that the relationship between the U.S. and Russia was more or less sound, except for a few relatively minor concerns (securing loose nuclear material, Putin's creeping authoritarianism). In other words, here are two natural allies with a few, shall we say, differences of opinion.

Fair enough, though not much attention seems to be paid to the thumb wrestling going on over oil and natural gas down in the Caucasus areas. Could this region turn into the source of greater disputes between Russia and the United States, especially as oil continues to grow scarcer and the great powers are forced to jockey for waning resources? Maybe. I don't know. But it sure seems like an important region to understand, so after a bit of googling and reading up, I'm going to try to put together a little primer on the Great Game being played out in the Caucasus region between our two favorite Cold War adversaries. Feel free to point out any mistakes, and I'll patch it up.

First, a map will come in handy here:



Yeah, that's the ticket. Now as we would expect, Russia under Vladimir Putin is surely trying to ascend to great power status once again. And the road back involves oil. Lots of it. Oil and gas account for about two-thirds of Russia's export revenue and a quarter of its GDP. And most importantly, Russia's trying to dominate the oil-transport game, fighting to make sure that any oil or gas that comes out of the resource-rich Caspian area goes through Russia first. And when I say "resource-rich", I mean resource-fucking-rich: the Soviet republics surrounding the Caspian are all told sitting on up to 200 billion barrels of oil—nearly as much as Saudi Arabia's 250 billion. So the Russian pipelines will do two things in the coming years: a) provide Moscow with a nice chunk of revenue, and b) maintain Russia's influence over the oil producing republics down south.

Naturally, the U.S. feels a bit uneasy about Russia having a monopoly on oil transport—ideally we'd like to construct pipelines that go from the Caucus oil and gas producers directly to the Black Sea and Turkey. As you can see in the map above, that means going through Azerbaijan and Georgia. Hence, the multi-billion dollar BTC pipeline, which runs from Baku, Azerbaijan, to Tblisi, Georgia, to Ceyhan, Turkey, as follows:



Not surprisingly, the U.S. has lavished aid on Georgia for the past ten years—about $800 million—and has been involved in training the Georgian military forces. Russia, meanwhile, has tried to maintain its influence over the region by keeping its forces in the northern autonomous regions of Georgia, including Adzharia, and has shelled out a good deal of aid to two of Georgia's more rebellious provinces, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. (When Georgia tried to invade Abkhazia in 1993, for instance, Russia helped repulse the Georgian force.) The U.S., understandably, is worried that the rebel provinces will stage attacks on the BTC pipeline, or sabotage it, and has prepared the Georgian army for this possibility.

I haven't said anything about the much-lauded "rose revolution" that toppled Eduard Shevardnadze in December of 2003. It's no secret that the rise of Mikhail Saakashvili was perfect for the United States—here was a leader who would keep Georgia stable, oppose Russian influence in the region, and call for Russia to withdraw its troops from Abkhazia. A leader who would keep the BTC pipeline safe. Of course the U.S. backed him; they'd be stupid not to. But in the grand scheme of things, I don't think Saakashvili will change the larger dynamic much.

Then there's Azerbaijan. If you don't want to pipe Caspian oil and gas through Russia or Iran, it has to flow through Azerbaijan. The BTC pipeline starts in Baku. So the U.S. doesn't try to rock the boat here; the ruling Aliyev dynasty is brutal, having stolen election after election, including most recently the younger Aliyev's sham ascendancy to power in 2003, where security forces beat protestors, and over 300 were hospitalized. But that doesn't matter: what truly matters is that the elder Aliyev signed a $7.4 billion contract with 10 oil companies back in 1994, including BP, Unocal, and Pennzoil. Needless to say, after the 2003 election, Richard Armitage in the State Department quickly made the call to congratulate Aliyev. Warmly. Okay, map-time again!



Again, Russia is none too pleased with U.S. influence in Azerbaijan, and has sought to aid and arm the country's longstanding neighbor and enemy, Armenia, as well as the disputed province of Nagorno-Karabakh (that little inset region), which was the source of a five-year war between the two countries. (The U.S., for its part, has been warming towards Armenia in recent years, offering greater economic and military aid.) Is it possible that Russia is hoping to stir up trouble in the region, of the sort that will make the BTC pipeline too unstable to use, forcing the oil to flow back through Russia? Maybe. Maybe not.

Recently, it seems that Russia has resigned itself to the BTC pipeline's existence, and may even start investing in it. (More of a concern to oil investors is Iran, which could very well use its terrorist network to sabotage the pipeline. Who knows? Rumors spread like avian flu. Certainly Russia and Iran wouldn't shed too many tears if the BTC were sabotaged and an alternative pipeline, going through Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and then down through Iran to the Persian Gulf became the main outlet for Caspian oil and gas.) But it's awfully remarkable how one need only follow the pipelines to figure out how and why the great powers are acting in the way they are.

Anyway, this is only a rough overview of what's going on west of the Caspian. There's also a whole horde of interesting stuff about pipelines east of the Caspian, involving Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Russia, the U.S., and—dum, dum—China. But I'll save all that for another post.

These Angry Bear charts are cool in their own right—bottom line, the U.S. doesn't get much in the way of health outcomes for all its health care spending—but what's going on with Japan? According to the graphs, they smoke far and away the most of any developed country, but nevertheless they still have the longest life expectancy at birth. (And I'd add here that non-smoking Japanese people are far more likely to be exposed to secondhand smoke than those in many other countries—I'm not even sure that they've entirely banned it on airplanes yet.)

One clue is that Japan's also the least obese of developed nations, though that seems like something that could be caused by high smoking rates. Certainly I'm not aware of any mass exercise craze that's caught on in Japan. I'm also not convinced they have the, uh, soundest health care practices around. (Fun horror anecdote: When one of my younger brothers was about, oh, ten or so, he got a schoolmate's tooth lodged in his head, and the Japanese doctor ended up putting a massive metal clamp on the wound for a few weeks, before realizing oops, that wasn't really what he wanted to do at all.)

So what's their secret? Genetics, I guess. Still bizarre.

Ezra's post on third parties brings to mind, tangentially, a topic I've wanted to discuss for awhile but never got around to: namely, the pros and cons of having a "party-based" system of politics versus a "candidate-based" one. Here in the United States, of course, we tend to elect candidates rather than parties, as opposed to many proportional representation systems where you basically vote for a party, which in turn chooses the candidates. Obviously there's some overlap, but the basic distinction holds.

Now one of the interesting things about the candidate-system is that "emotional" or "values-based" issues acquire, I think, more saliency during elections. I've discussed this before in the course of wondering why Europe and Canada don't have the death penalty, despite overwhelming support for the measure among their populations. A rough explanation goes like this: Here in the U.S., a candidate running for higher office can use support or opposition to issues like the death penalty to say something about him or herself as a candidate. It's something of a personal statement, as both Michael Dukakis and Bill Clinton more or less proved. In Europe, the death penalty is merely one of any number of issues to consider when voting, so if party elites want to put it aside, they won't necessarily suffer at the polls—in the way that an American politician might by looking "weak on crime," or personally soft, or any of those other intangible character traits that can sink a candidacy.

Now I'd love to see us move to a system of proportional representation here in the United States, or at least a partial one. But that won't happen anytime soon. An alternative, then, would be to strengthen the two political parties here, either by rejiggering campaign finance (i.e. decreasing the limit you can give to individual candidates and raising the amount on you can give parties) or some other method. Give parties free airtime to allocate as they choose, perhaps. We can discuss that later. But the advantages of party-based politics are well worth considering.

For starters, political parties are in theory less susceptible to the demands of special interest money. If candidates receive most of their funding from on high, in the form of, say, some Democratic or Republican election committee money, then they're obviously less likely to seek out local sources of funding that could carry certain strings attached. Funneling money through the party somewhat shields candidates from any undue influence—basically, it's much harder for a large party, raking in money from all sorts of sources, to be corrupted than it is for any one individual candidate.

Second, I think a stronger party-oriented system would allow the two parties to pick and choose the best candidates for office, rather than those who can raise the most money on their own. Whenever we talk about "money in politics," campaign contributions matter to some extent, but I think even more pernicious is the fact that most political candidates need to be, ex ante, very wealthy people. Quite naturally, that leads to legislation—like the bankruptcy bill or estate tax repeal—that's biased towards the wealthy. Many members of Congress no doubt genuinely think the estate tax is horrible because they all have wealthy friends who complain about how horrible it is. Again, if individual candidates were limited as to how much money they could raise, but parties weren't, then this effect would be somewhat reduced.

Third, and this one's the most important, a party-based mode of politics would be more likely to increase voter turn-out, I think. Theoretically, this makes sense. If elections were about voting "Republican" or "Democrat," voters need less information on which to base their choice, and it's easier to decide. You don't have to think, "Well, I like Nancy Pelosi, but I'm not sure what Barbara Boxer stands for, and oh, crumbs, now I also have to have an opinion on the president. What's he all about?" No, instead voting is like picking teams, and party loyalty would rise. Obviously some people will continue to vote split-tickets or independently, and that's fine, but for the bulk of undecideds or non-voters, it becomes easier. You know what the parties stand for and you have a strong reason to go vote.

Seems silly? Well, I have in mind something like the lay of the land back in the 19th century, when powerful party machines would work to organize voters, get people to the polls, employ thousands of election-day workers, and turn-out was far, far higher (among those eligible male voters) than it is today. There were downsides to the machine system, sure, but I think those kinks can be worked out.

Again, I'm not sure exactly how you'd bring back those party machines—this is just sort of a rough sketch—but a whole bunch of other advantages fall from it. I'd rather that elections were about organization rather than marketing. The demise of the new breed of political consultants whose sole aim is to "sell" their candidate is surely something to be welcomed. Read this American Prospect article: "In a 1989 survey, 44 percent of political consultants interviewed re ported that their candidates were uninvolved in setting the issue priorities in their own campaigns, and 66 percent reported candidates to be uninvolved in determining the tactics." Yes, I'd rather have candidates set their priorities based on dictates from on high than on the demands of a glossy personal advertising campaign set by Joe Consultant.

So that's a rough outline of what I'd like to see. The downsides should also be noted. Strong party loyalties could well increase partisanship. Maybe. Also, we'd be less likely to see "maverick" Senators and Congresspersons, since parties would have a greater ability to punish rogue elements by denying re-election funds. Then again, it might force parties to become more pragmatic, embracing their roles as large coalitions of diverse elements—especially since each party would be responsible for its own political image, and would need to win in different regions of the country. So, for instance, in Rhode Island Lincoln Chaffee would need to answer for the Republican Party as a whole, he couldn't just say, "Well, yes, they're a bit crazy, but me, I'm Lincoln Chaffee, I'm personally a moderate." That constraint could end up moderating both parties. I don't know, I'm still trying to work this out, but that's the basic idea.

Echidne catches the entire Supreme Court in an act of mortal, mortal sin. I always knew they were the sort...

Tom Maguire has some perceptive comments about that recent CDC study showing that "overweight" people live longer than "those of normal weight." Weight, it seems, doesn't necessarily correlate with how much you exercise, and many "overweight" people are quite, quite fit—like our jog-happy president. That could explain the odd results. So put down that Cinnabon, David Brooks!

So as we know, the secular Shiites and Kurds in Baghdad are probably conspiring to hold up the formation of a new government, so as to run down the clock on Ibrahim Jaaferi—who's too much of an Islamist for their liking. Well, fair enough. But now the U.S. is sending in the big guns to hurry things up: "Rice and Cheney Are Said to Push Iraqi Politicians on Stalemate."

Uh, okay. And the Iraqis are supposed to care why, exactly? Are we going to withhold aid if they don't get their act together? Tell them they're an embarrassment to democracy in the Middle East? Threaten to withdraw our troops? No, no, and uh, no. Prez. Jalal Talabani probably got on the phone with Rice, nodded a bit, "uh-huh, uh-huh," and hung up. Sorry lady, I'm making the most important decisions of my life here, and I'll take my sweet goddamn time if I have to. Thanks! Surely the White House knows all this? Unless the Rice/Cheney plea was for our domestic consumption here in the U.S.A.—to make it look like the White House is "doing something" about the uptick in insurgent attacks of late. Maybe.

UPDATE: Also, as Swopa noted a few days back, you would think the White House would be happy that Jaaferi's candidacy going down in flames thanks to the cabinet gridlock. That seems plausible. So perhaps Rice's "hurry up" was more of an explicit *wink wink* at Talabani. Or, conversely, the White House thinks the Allawi/Talabani stalemate gambit will just enrage the religious Shiites in the UIA to the point where they secede from government altogether. Ah, Iraqi politics...

There's been a lot of talk of late about whether or not the unwieldy Republican alliance—between social conservatives and lib. free marketeers—is ever going to crack up. Business groups, it seems, are none too happy right now with Kim Jong Bill's maniacal drive forward on the "nuclear option," which, if enacted, would help the GOP stock the federal benches with a few more gay-bashers and uterus-confiscators, but the ensuing nuclear fall-out would essentially kill Big Business's grand hope of ramming through any more favorable legislation through Congress. Or at least that's the story. (In truth, I wonder what exactly Big Biz is still hoping to get passed. The energy bill? More tax cuts?)

Anyway, it's hard to tell if a crack-up is truly imminent or not, but for fun—and maybe even a side of edification—it's worth revisiting the concluding chapter from Lewis Coser's classic, The Functions of Social Conflict, to try to figure out when intra-group conflict does and does not rip groups apart at the seams. Some grand passages:

Internal social conflicts which concern goals, values or interests that do not contradict the basic assumptions upon which the relationship is founded tend to be positively functional for the social structure. Such conflicts tend to make possible the readjustment of norms and power relations within groups in accordance with the felt needs of its individual members or subgroups.

Internal conflicts in which the contending parties no longer share the basic values upon which the legitimacy of the social system rests threaten to disrupt the structure.

To be honest, I think the first paragraph better describes the tension within the GOP—they're fighting over "goals, values, or interests," and not fundamental assumptions (whatever that might mean). So down goes the Crack-Up Thermometer. But this next passage is worthy of a few contemplative strokes of the chin:

Closely knit groups in which there exists a high frequency of interaction and high personality involvement of the members have a tendency to suppress conflict. While they provide frequent occasions for hostility... the acting out of such feelings is sensed as a danger to such intimate relationships...

If conflict breaks out in a group that has consistently tried to prevent expression of hostile feelings, it will be particularly intense for two reasons: First, because the conflict does not merely aim at resolving the immediate issue which led to its outbreak; all accumulated grievances which were denied expression previously are apt to emerge at this occasion. Second, because the total personality involvement of the group members makes for mobilization of all sentiments in the conduct of the struggle.

Does that describe the current GOP coalition? Without a doubt it has been very personality driven, somewhat unified around the cult of Bush and Rove—recall, for instance, back in early 2001 when the coalition of estate-tax repealers were willing to back the president no matter what he did or decided. This is Mark Schmitt's thesis: that the GOP has become so centralized, such a command-and-control operation, that collapse will come swift and severe.

On the other hand! We've seen no sign that the current tensions between the libertarian and social conservative wings of the party are escalating their conflict beyond "resolving the immediate issue which led to its outbreak," which Coser thinks is crucial for a serious rift to occur. Nor do these Republican battles seem particularly more emotional than usual intra-party conflicts. Down goes the thermometer. And onwards:

Groups which are engaged in continued struggle tend to lay claim on the total personality involvement of their members so that internal conflict would tend to mobilize all energies and affects of the members. Hence such groups are unlikely to tolerate more than limited departures from the group unity. In such groups there is a tendency to suppress conflict; where it occurs, it leads the group to break up through splits or through forced withdrawal of dissenters.

Hmmmmm, now this could be a problem for the Republican Party, which has so thoroughly mobilized itself against the "liberal movement"—see Tom DeLay's recent "Wah wah, I'm an embattled figure" remarks—no one would pretend this is a party that's not in "continued struggle." So perhaps this is where the pressure for a crack-up will come. If Coser's right, then so long as the GOP defines itself as a majority opposition party, rather than a governing party, it will run the danger of a nasty split or "forced withdrawal of dissenters." (Which has started to happen to a small degree.) Of course, the Democrats run the exact same risk, as they've definitely "mobilize[d] all energies and affects of the members" towards a single purpose—defeating their enemies.

So, amateur social science tells us that the Republican Party is probably safe for now. What else you got?

I must've missed this when it came out, but take a look at Sam Jaffe's year-old piece in the Washington Monthly, "Independence Way." Is it possible that we're closer to alternative energy than we think?

Two new technologies, however, have the potential to make ethanol fuels much more practical. The first is a method for producing ethanol not from corn kernels, but from the plant's stalk, roots and leaves, known as cellulosic material... [A] second technology could make cellulosic ethanol the basis for a viable hydrogen transportation system...

Very interesting. The hope is that cellulosic ethanol can become energy efficient—i.e., it doesn't take more energy to make than it gives out, as traditional ethanol does—and cheaper than gasoline, so it wouldn't require lavish subsidies. Both seem possible. (Also promising: it seems that the cellulosic ethanol could be made from switchgrass, which could be harvested in areas unsuitable for food farming, so we wouldn't have to burn all our edible corn.) Meanwhile, last week Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel unveiled the world's first ethanol-hydrogen fueling-station in Illinois, which probably didn't work along the lines of what Jaffe describes above, but promising all the same...

Max Sawicky's paper on "The Crisis in U.S. Tax Enforcement" is very good and well worth reading. Three points especially seem worth a highlight. First, according to the latest estimates, about $353 billion in taxes went unpaid in 2001. If all of these taxes could be recovered, we essentially wouldn't have a deficit problem over the next ten years.

Second, the IRS, as many know, is woefully underfunded, but Max really highlights just how underfunded the agency really is, and how both population growth and the development of ever-more-sophisticated financial instruments are only going to compound the problem in the future:

There is little dispute that the workload of the IRS has been increasing more rapidly than its organizational capacity. The number of tax returns has increased steadily, partially due to a growing population and economy. There is also evidence, however, that returns have increased faster than population growth, in the form of more returns for unmarried persons and for children. Another dimension adding to the increased IRS workload involves high-income persons and the growth of pass-through entities (as noted above). Still another factor straining IRS capacity is the multiplication of highly complex and specialized financial instruments. The estimated overall increase in workload between 1992 and 2002 is 16%.

Third, poor people putting in bogus claims for the Earned Income Tax Credit are simply not the problem here, even though they're the ones that garner much of the attention whenever this subject comes up. EITC overclaims only account for around $9 billion of the tax gap—peanuts in the grand scheme of things. Moreover, many of these faulty claims are likely the result of honest mistakes rather than cheating: 40 percent of all low-income taxpayers have never even heard of the EITC, and it's possible that a good number of folks are missing out on the tax credit or claiming too little. So by all means, clean this mess up, but let's not lose sight of the bigger picture: Contrast EITC shenanigans with corporate tax evasion, which is both bigger and much, much less likely to be the result of an honest mistake or confusion.

Okay, actually there were four points. The crucial one: Many enforcement measures that could be put in place—cross-checking tax information, sending out Tax Delinquency Investigation notices by mail, correspondence audits (i.e., the less-fearsome sort of audit), criminal prosecution, tax preparation assistance, better withholding—all of these things would recover far more in unpaid taxes than they cost to implement. Sometimes ludicrously so: Sending out Tax Delinquency Investigation notices by mail, for instance, costs 31 cents apiece, while the average return is over $12,000.

Sadly, the IRS has been tarred and feathered over the years, so people resist these sorts of enforcement moves. So here's one way to think about it: when it comes time to close the deficit, there's going to be a tradeoff between bulking up the IRS to nab delinquents and tax cheats, or levying even heavier tax increases than would otherwise be necessary. You choose.

In the course of reviewing Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, John Updike wonders why so many novelists are seeing the world through the eyes of children:

This reader’s heart slightly sank when he realized that he was going to spend more than three hundred pages in the company of an unhappy, partially wised-up nine-year-old.

The novel, traditionally a mirror held up to the Western bourgeoisie, to teach its members how to shave, dress, and behave, has focused on adult moral choices and their consequences. With some brilliant exceptions like Dickens and Mark Twain and Henry James, novelists have not taken children seriously enough to make them protagonists. However sensitive and observant, the ordinary child lacks property and the capacity for sexual engagement; he exists, therefore, on the margins of the social contract—a rider, as it were, on the imperatives and compromises of others.

Yet in recent years a number of young novelists—Stephen Millhauser and Jonathan Lethem, for two—have devoted their most ambitious and energetic efforts to detailing the fervent hobbies and the intoxicating overdoses on popular culture, the estrangement and the dependence that characterize contemporary American childhood.

Childhood’s new viability as novelistic ground may signal a shift in the very nature of being a human being, considered anthropologically as a recipient and continuer of tribal myths, beliefs, and strictures. Older novelists up through Joyce, Proust, and Hemingway portrayed the pained shedding of this traditional baggage; the newer novelists, having inherited almost no set beliefs from their liberal, distracted middle-class parents, see childhood as the place where one invents the baggage—totems, rituals, lessons to live by—of a solitary one-person tribe.

Seems plausible enough. And yeah, I'm browsing through reviews of Foer's new book, so that I can arm myself with sound opinions on the offchance I get invited to a cocktail party. (As for reviews: The Slate folks are good, the New York Press is hackish.) The one minor, nitpicky thing that bothered me about EL&IC was that, sometime in late 2002 (in novel time), the protagonist logs on the internet and randomly finds a picture of an American soldier getting beheaded in Iraq. Which, obviously, is impossible. I wouldn't mind so much, but at that point in the novel, this is the only clue you have as to how much time has elapsed since 9/11. So a news junkie would say, "Ah! a clue!" and assume it's 2004. But no, later on you're told it's not. Annoying.

One of the more depressing aspects of federalism here in the United States is that states tend to compete with each other in a "race to the bottom" on offering various welfare benefits, so as to avoid attracting all sorts of immigrants and other low-income folks who flock to the more generous states. (As I discussed here, research shows that this effect is both real and pretty strong.) Among other things, that explains why converting programs like Medicaid into block grants can be so pernicious, at least if you think health care is a good thing. (If you don't, block-grant to your heart's content!)

Anyway, this is sort of random for 2 am, but I've sometimes wondered if the same thing could start to happen in the EU, as various countries become more and more integrated, and immigration flows become easier and easier. Chistopher Caldwell suggests this might be going on already:

Swedes have lately grown attentive to their neighbors' policies on immigration. They note that Finland's tight immigration policies have resulted in lower social burdens. But ever since the Öresund bridge brought Malmö within commuting distance of Copenhagen, it is to Denmark that Swedes have looked with most anxiety. There, the rise of the anti-immigration Danish People's party--which has never entered government but has thoroughly spooked the other parties of left and right--has succeeded in winning passage of Europe's most stringent laws on immigration. Denmark now restricts asylum admissions, welfare payments, and citizenship and residency permits for reasons of family unification. Danes under 25 who marry foreigners no longer have the right to bring their spouses into the country. Many such half-Danish couples now live in Malmö.

Denmark's crackdown has left Swedes wondering what is to stop everyone in the E.U. from coming to the most generous welfare state, even if such worries are couched in human-rights language. Shortly after Denmark passed these laws in 2002, Sweden's Social Democratic integration minister complained that the policies were inhumane. The Danish People's party leader, Pia Kj rsgaard, replied to the Swedes in a newsletter: "If they want to turn Stockholm, Göteborg, and Malmö into Scandinavian versions of Beirut . . . then that is up to them."

Huh. This paper, meanwhile, which sadly I can't read in full, argues that EU states are definitely acting as if there's a "race to the bottom," because they're all worried about attracting immigrants (especially, ahem, swarthy immigrants) to their generous welfare states, but that there's little empirical evidence that they really need to be doing so. And another Danish economist, Torben Andersen, maintains that "there is nothing... which supports the view that it is impossible to maintain the welfare state when economies integrate," though some rejiggering of the way benefits are financed might be in order. Very interesting!

Sasha Abramsky has an interesting article in The Nation asking whether the Democrats should give up their gun control stance in order to make gains in the West and Southwest. Well, yes, probably. Gun crime is a problem here in America, but not so big a problem that it's worth losing election after election over and failing to make any gains on, say, health care or declining wages or whatnot.

Looking at the FBI statistics, there were 1.4 million reported violent crimes in 2000—30 percent of which were robberies, 62 percent aggravated assaults, 7 percent rape, 1 percent willful killings. Assume this is probably underreported (the Uniform Crime Reports are usually awful), especially the rapes, but still. Of these, about one-quarter (27 percent) of all violent crimes involved a firearm used by the criminal. So whipping out the old calculator, it would appear that something like 99.8 percent of all Americans did not face a violent crime involving a gun that year. Further, it seems that gun crime has been declining as a percentage of total violent crime over the past decade.

Again, I don't want to downplay gun crime, and no doubt I'd be less glib if someone I knew or loved had been shot to death, but it's hard to say that this is a worse problem than long-term Republican dominance. It's also pretty easy to see why an excessive gun control stance is a net electoral loser for Democrats. Especially when you factor in, as Abramsky does, all those Westerners who would vote liberal were it not for the gun issue.

Also: my admittedly-not-very-good understand of all this is that gun regulation doesn't do a whole lot of good, but the smartest regulations—background checks at gun shows, safety locks on all new handguns, registration of firearms—are pretty widely backed by the public (i.e. 80 percent or more). But the only way Democrats are ever going to get away with proposing such a thing is if they can convince the public that these measures aren't just the first step on the way to total gun confiscation. This might involve picking the right presidential candidate—and John Kerry wasn't it; let's face it, for all his nifty hunting photo-ops, no one believed this was a man who would be terribly upset if the ATF came and took away everyone's rifle here in America—or maybe it involves something else. But yeah, it's a trust issue.

Thomas Frank asks, "What's the Matter with Liberals?" He probably thinks he's prescribing that Democrats do more economic populism stuff, as usual, but his essay suggests something more interesting: Democrats should use policy proposals, etc., not for the sake of proposing policies, but as a way of positioning themselves. Oftentimes that entails saying something you don't quite mean. Oftentimes it means not worrying too much about the substance of a proposal, or its gritty details, but what sort of message the act of proposing actually sends. As Mark Schmitt likes to say: "It's not what you say about the issues, it's what the issues say about you."

Anyway, that line of thinking is pretty standard by now. But I want to point out that this seems like something Eliot Spitzer has done extremely well in New York. As Irwin Stelzer points out in the Weekly Standard, Spitzer's crusade against Wall Street, despite doing quite a bit of good, has still been somewhat weasel-y and hypocritical. He never actually takes the companies he's attacking to court -- never actually brings them down. No, that would cause too much chaos and economic instability. Instead, he merely threatens them with prosecution, and then accepts a settlement. Collects his scalp, and moves on. In a sense, Spitzer's AG career hasn't truly been about reforming Wall Street, it's been a non-stop election campaign in which Spitzer positions himself as a Wall Street reformer. Now the danger here is that when Spitzer actually gets to office, he'll be all politics and no policy, ala George W. Bush. (Or, god help us, Bill Frist.) But it's hard to deny that that's how the game is played.

UPDATE: Okay, okay. This post was somewhat unfair to Spitzer, who's obviously done a lot to bloody the financial industry's nose (and before that, noses of gun manufacturers, lenders, tobacco companies, etc). I don't want to begrudge that. And even his halfway tactics and settlements have forced Wall Street to clean itself up to some extent. But still, it's a valid question: why does Spitzer always offer such generous settlements? Why doesn't he try to slap criminal charges on some of these mutual fund hucksters? Why didn't he go after Sanford Weill in 2002? (Because Weill was a big player in New York Democratic circles? Because it would've upset the multi-million dollar settlement that brought Spitzer such fame and acclaim in late 2002? Because the AG wanted to be able to proclaim that there were big reforms underway at Wall Street, even if there weren't, necessarily?)

Daniel Gross wrote an essay on this subject a year ago, focusing on the fact that Spitzer passed up a prime opportunity to set a precedent for prosecuting market-timing, with Richard Strong of Strong Capital Management. Gross' explanation, I think, is right on:

So, why isn't Spitzer driving tougher bargains? Cases involving capital markets and securities trading are complex. Trying to persuade a jury that market-timing is criminal and not merely sleazy would be particularly difficult. As we've seen with Dennis Kozlowski and Frank Quattrone, prosecutors run the risk of an acquittal or a hung jury. Easier to declare victory, cash the settlement check, and move on. What's more, the wheels of white-collar justice turn remarkably slowly. The trial of the executives accused of perpetrating a massive fraud against HFS (now Cendant) in 1997 is just getting under way. Spitzer, who's on the fast track for the 2006 governor's race, doesn't want to be filing discovery motions when he could be shaking hands in Utica.

Yep. Spitzer's done some seriously good work, and I should've made that clearer. No one was taking on the financial industry until he showed up. No one. But I don't think it's unfair to say that he's had his eye primarily on the governor's mansion in Albany, rather than on cleaning up Wall Street. I still have yet to hear an "honest" explanation for why he didn't go after Carl McCall, prominent New York Democrat and head of the NYSE Compensation Committee who signed off on Richard Grasso's fat bonanza. Surely not for political reasons, right? Oh no, surely not. Hey, if I still lived in New York I'd vote for Spitzer in a heartbeat, but from what I can tell, he's not half the crusader people say he is.

In this month's Policy Review, Peter Berkowitz goes through the pros and cons of international law. It's a bit of a pox-on-both-houses approach, but I think that's the right one here. "Liberal internationalists exaggerate the power of universal principles and forget or suppress the limitations on the ability of individuals and states to set aside self-interest." Yep. But also: "Meanwhile, liberal nationalists exaggerate the role of self-interest and forget or suppress the universalizing pressure of liberalism's internal logic."

So I finally got to read Time Magazine's big cover story on Ann Coulter. It's true, the story glosses over many of her faults—a courtesy they would have not afforded, say, Michael Moore. But unlike many liberal bloggers, I'm only slightly concerned that the story fails to depict Coulter as a hate-filled blond fascist. In fact, no, I'm not concerned at all. For one, how many people are going to slog through a 5,000 word story on Coulter unless they already know who Coulter is and have a strong opinion about her? I don't think there are a lot of minds out there to be changed, so the story's effect on the poor defenseless "masses" doesn't seem to be all that pressing an issue to me. [EDIT: Okay, okay, as pointed out in comments, my "I'm not concerned at all" remark is probably much too flippant and there are good reasons to fear that the Time cover will give Coulter the sort of credibility among "undecideds" that she so richly does not deserve. With that out of the way, onto what's below...]

Second, though, I don't consider myself part of the poor defenseless masses, so I found the story interesting, mainly because, already knowing about Coulter's vicious hackishness, I could actually learn something new from the article: namely, that Ann Coulter probably isn't a hate-filled fascist. Really.

So let's try to figure out Ann Coulter.

First, a story. When I was in third grade (living in Japan at the time), the Denver Broncos got crushed by the 49ers in the Superbowl 55-10. Since our teacher was a football fan, we listened to the game in class, and many people cheered when the Broncos got mauled except for one kid who was originally from Denver, Chris Chamberlain. Chris had been hyping the Broncos all week, so at recess, naturally, kids started to taunt him. 55-10! Ha ha! I didn't really understand football, so at first I stayed out of it, but after awhile, it was kind of fun to see him get riled up over the whole thing. So I started in. "John Elway throws like a girl!" I didn't even know who John Elway was, but that was the way the taunts went, so I played along. After awhile, I came up with even more clever and vicious ways to insult the Broncos, pushing it further and further, not because I understood what I was doing, not because I hated the Broncos, but because that was the playground game, and it was a way to join in.

This, I think, is essentially what Ann Coulter has done with her life. She saw that there was a game of insulting liberals to be played, a way to take sides, and she took it and ran with it. There were already talking points in this little war between two ideologies, and she took them and pushed further, making them even more vicious, not because she entirely understood what she was doing, but because it was a way of joining in. "John Elway throws like a girl!" And the more reaction she got, the more fun she was having, and the more vicious and bitter her insults would become. Having so much fun, in fact, that she doesn't even notice when she crosses the bounds of decency. "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity."

One should note that there's a massive difference between Michael Moore and Ann Coulter, and it's not just that the latter has wished for the mass murder of journalists. (Though that part's important, and Digby explained why.) Moore has many faults, but at bottom, he's striving for at least some understanding of the way the world works. There's some shred of intellectual curiosity there. The most interesting thing about Bowling For Columbine was that Moore couldn't quite settle on a conclusion—the movie noted, somewhat uncomfortably, that other countries without strict gun laws don't have nearly as much violence as the United States, so maybe gun control isn't the answer. Now granted, Moore is too blinded by certain liberal dogmas, too in love with clever images and bloviating, and too full of himself, ever to do anything intellectually valuable. (From what I've heard about his brief stint at my magazine, Mother Jones, his ego really is off the wall.) But there's at least a small part of him that's concerned with being right rather than merely winning.

With Coulter, there's no such constraint. Read Slander and it quickly becomes obvious that she has zero curiosity about the way the world works. No, she sees a game being played, thinks she understands the rules of attack, and simply wants to be better at it than anyone else. I believe John Cloud when he writes that Coulter is a very loyal and dedicated friend, and that some of her best friends are liberals. Why shouldn't they be? She knows when she's off-camera and no longer has to play the game. And yes, at times she finds the whole thing very funny, just as I once found vicious Bronco attacks very funny. She can't hate liberals, because frankly, she's too dumb and lacks too much understanding to understand what hatred really entails.

At the end of the Time piece, she talks about being unable to convert her Muslim ex-boyfriend, and then laughs loudly and says, "I was just happy he wasn't killing anyone." This isn't hate. This is grubbing for acceptance. It's genuinely pitiful. What we have, folks, is a clown. A clown who desperately just wants the kids to laugh and like her.

Moreover, I think the lesson of Coulter is a lesson more widely applicable. There are all sorts of partisan hacks writing and talking about politics these days. Why, I myself am one of them! And no one is free from dogma and ideology and a subservience to mindless talking points. No one. But even among the most wretched of hacks, you can generally distinguish between the people who are at least nominally interested in understanding how the world works, and what is actually true, and the people who just don't care, and just want to play a game—whether because it's fun in some odd way, or because it helps them "belong," or because they're too dumb to understand the difference. The latter group is dangerous to civil discourse, period, irrespective of how bloodthirsty its rhetoric really is.

My (female, lesbian) housemate often likes to trumpet the latest advances in in vitro fertilization, by way of noting that soon the day will come when men aren't needed anymore. (Supposedly there's now a way of taking 23 chromosomes from one mother, 23 chromosomes from the other mother, doing a little splicing, and making a baby! Or a proto-baby...) "Ha, ha," say I, rather nervously. In truth, it would kind of suck. In the future, there will be all sorts of cool gadgets, like flying cars. Men have been dreaming about flying cars since the Stone Age, and it would be awfully cruel to kill us off before we get to test drive the thing.

Anyway, a future without men is still fun to contemplate. Recently, the big worry seems to be that the Y chromosome is slowly degenerating, and soon—in 125,000 years or so—all men will be sterile mutant freaks. Yikes! Except that in the New York Review of Books, H. Allen Orr, scientist and gladiator, argues that this could never happen:

I'm afraid that this is all just silly. There are several related theories of why most genes on the Y chromosome degenerate and none of them predicts that men will become extinct. To see why not, we need to understand why Y chromosomes degenerate in the first place. All theories of Y degeneration… hinge on an unusual feature of the Y: it doesn't "recombine." … [snipped-out explanation of how chromosomes work.]

This is important because recombination, it turns out, makes it easy for natural selection to get rid of bad mutations. Put conversely, natural selection is somewhat compromised when dealing with chromosomes that don't recombine. All our theories of population genetics thus predict that the Y will slowly but surely accumulate mutations that have slightly bad effects. But the key point is this: the process I have described will not spiral out of control, yielding sterile or absent men, for two reasons. The first is that the evolutionary forces that cause genes on the Y chromosome to degenerate turn out to be very weak; that's why it's taken hundreds of millions of years for our Y to fall into its current state of disrepair. In contrast, the evolutionary forces that maintain male fertility—and that even maintain a 50:50 ratio of males to females in populations—are very strong. The latter, strong forces, overcome the former, weak ones, and males neither become sterile nor disappear.

Second, not all genes on the Y chromosome are created equal. Some, indeed the great majority, originally resided on both the Y and X chromosomes. Natural selection will often tolerate loss of this kind of gene from the Y since there's a "backup" copy on the X that can still perform the gene's functions. Other genes, though, now exist only on the Y. Natural selection will most assuredly not tolerate the loss of this kind of gene since no backup copy sits on the X. The critical point is that most of the male fertility genes now residing on the human Y exist only on that chromosome and there's no way that selection will allow their loss.

So evolution is going to save masculinity! Yay evolution! Also, speaking of which, one thing I've found vaguely interesting is that most of the diseases and disorders that are increasingly afflicting humankind simply aren't the sort of thing that can ever be weeded out by evolution. Alzheimer's obviously sets in only long after a person has reproduced. Same with any number of other genetic diseases that hit the elderly. Dunno how this all ties in—evolution can save the male sex but not rising health care costs? Yeah, that's it.

Paul Krugman's column today, on the "cost-shifting" in U.S. health care, is very thought-provoking, but let's highlight just one part:

Yet the cost of providing medical care to those denied private insurance doesn't go away. If individuals are poor, or if medical expenses impoverish them, they are covered by Medicaid. Otherwise, they pay out of pocket or rely on the charity of public hospitals.

Indeed, I've often wanted to make a clever case for covering the uninsured by arguing that society ends up paying for these costs anyway. Surely all that charity and uncompensated care going on right now is coming out of everyone else's pocketbooks eventually, either through increased government spending or hikes in premiums. And surely the fact that the uninsured can't get preventive care when they need it means that they (or someone else) ends up paying far, far more later on for diseases that could've been headed off early.

Sadly, though, after rooting around for numbers on this, neither of these arguments seems particularly compelling.

First, the uncompensated care issue. This interesting paper by Jack Hadley and John Holohan show that the uninsured receive about $34.5 billion per year in "uncompensated care," i.e. care that they receive but do not pay full price for. Of this amount, the federal and state governments eventually ended up paying for about $30.6 billion. So there's not a huge cost-shift onto those with private insurance policies. "Ah, you say, but if the government pays for the vast majority of uncompensated care anyway, through various subsidies and other weirdness, doesn't it make sense just to spend that money on coverage for the uninsured instead?

Well, not quite. It would cost a good deal more than just shifting that $34.5 billion to cover the uninsured. First of all, Hadley and Holohan have noted elsewhere that the uninsured currently receive about $98.9 billion in health care per year, which includes uncompensated care, out-of-pocket costs, and private or public insurance sources. If all of those uninsured people were to be brought in to existing public insurance programs (Medicaid, etc.), then total health care spending would rise by $34 billion. However, total government health care spending would increase by about $100 billion when all is said and done (even after subtracting the drop in subsidies for "uncompensated care")—in part because many people currently with private insurance would drop what they have and then sneak into the newly expanded government program. So most taxpayers would be paying far, far more for the uninsured than they currently do.

Here's another way to look at it: in 2001 the full-year uninsured received $1,253 in care, about half what privately insured people received ($2484). So from all appearances, and as cynical as this sounds, it's much cheaper to keep fifty million Americans uninsured than to spend a little extra and draw them into the program.

Okay, now the other economic argument for covering the uninsured is that, without insurance and hence, without preventive care, these poor folks—and they mostly are poor—are more likely to develop chronic diseases and whatnot that lead to expensive problems later on. So in the end, we as a society pay more by not insuring these folks early on. This sounds good—intuitively, it seems that it's cheaper to treat hypertension or diabetes earlier, rather than pay for hospitalization costs later. But there are a couple of reasons why this argument may not tell the whole story. One, as Phillip Longman has reported, only about 10 percent of all premature deaths in the last 30 years can be attributed to shortfalls in medical care. This doesn't exactly address my question, but it suggests that medicine plays a very small role in preventing serious illness. (Far more effective would be changes in behavior, like more exercise.)

The other possibility is that more preventive care may catch more "pseudo-diseases," i.e. "disease that would never become apparent to patients during their lifetime without testing." In other words, more care can increase costs by catching, say, benign tumors that would otherwise not be a problem. Finally, some hard research: Studies by RAND and economist Louise Russell showing that preventive care doesn't really lower overall health care costs in the aggregate, and may even increase them.

Okay, so this is a long post, but the brunt of it is: there probably isn't a good economic case to be made for covering the uninsured, although I'm obviously open to hearing one. Certainly there's a moral case to be made, and I think a overridingly powerful one, though I'm not sure how effective that's going to actually bringing change about. As Uwe Reinhardt once noted, the last time we had a budget surplus to spend, Americans chose tax cuts over helping the uninsured; no matter what the polls might say, our actual priorities seem pretty clear.

Since writing, thinking, or even talking about politics is getting to be a bit of a downer these days, and since I haven't watched any movies or read any novels for awhile, I decided last night to rent and watch The Hidden Fortress and then read Jonathan Safran Foer's new book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Both highly recommended. The Hidden Fortress was particularly well done, though from what I understand Kurosawa needed to turn this into a "popular" film in order to bankroll some of his riskier stuff, like Rashomon. Much like Melville and all his popular travelogues. Also, for some odd reason everyone in the movie had to be shouting all the time—Princess Yukihime couldn't just say any of her lines, she had to scream them. None of Kurosawa's other films have this sort of hysteria about them, so perhaps this is what passed for popular in 1950s Japan? Or the sound system wasn't very good? Oh well. Interesting note: the two goofy robot-dudes in the Star Wars series are based on the two greedy and giggly peasants in this movie.

As for Foer's book, don't really want to talk about it—suffice to say it's good, and this from someone who found Everything Is Illuminated tediously "clever," much like sitting around at a dinner party where everyone's wearing a funny hat and you're obliged to smile and laugh through the whole thing lest they find out that you really don't know when and when not to laugh. Ahem. But no, the new book's better. And it gives me an opportunity to link to my favorite blog ever, "Attacking the Demi-Puppets." Yes, Foer is one of the demi-puppets here (an "establishment-backed flunkie," a "bubble-boy".) But you really have to read it for awhile—along with the commenters trying desperately to reason with this gang of aspiring writers—to understand its genius.

Over at TAPPED, Matt Y. makes a pretty good point about privatization, irrational investors, and the stock markets:

[W]hen the market is up, people think to themselves "I wish I owned some stocks" and are inclined to support it. But market peaks are, in reality, the worst possible time to buy stocks. After a crash is when you want to buy. But as the privatization polling shows, large segments of the population don't see it that way.

What this psychological reality means is that even with investment options restricted to just a handful of relatively safe funds, many people are still likely to do a very bad job managing their money by "churning" from one fund to another: Selling low and buying high, in other words, in an endless effort to own whatever's up in any given month even though this is the reverse of a sound investment strategy.

I said "pretty good" only because this sounds like a problem that can be patched up somewhat easily, either through regulation of investments or better financial education. In theory. In practice, though, it's true that many of the whacked-out privatization proposals simmering in the House wouldn't safeguard against this sort of investor irrationalism, and lots of people would, in fact, probably screw themselves over. On the other hand, I doubt Democrats would dare make hay out of the fact that people are morons and likely to do moronic things when given control over their own money. (Note, I'm really contradicting my efficient market musings below. Bear with me, I promise to get all these confusions straightened out by... next week. Promise.)

Anyway, set aside stupidity for now; there's another concern with privatization that I have, roughly along similar lines. It's this: During times of high unemployment—say, a recession—lots of people won't be able to purchase stocks for their private accounts on account of, y'know, not having jobs. But times of high unemployment are also often times when, in theory, the stock market is sluggish, and hence, the best time to buy stocks. Meanwhile, folks who do stay employed during these downturns get deuced too, since wage growth is likely to be slowest when stocks are down. (Hence, they can buy fewer stocks at precisely the best time to buy stocks.) Needless to say, women, minorities, and the poor are usually hit hardest by the ravages of the employment cycle, and hence would get the biggest gut-punch from this effect.

Now, in truth, I don't know how severe this "labor cycle" effect would be—if any economist has talked about this, by all means, link to it in comments. Perhaps there's enough of a lag between downturns in the employment cycle and downturns in the stock cycle that what I'm describing wouldn't come to pass. Or perhaps the effect simply isn't large enough to worry about. But it seems like a problem all the same.

Michael Levine of the DLC has a modest proposal: let's teach elementary and high school kids more facts about the outside world. Well done! It's hard to imagine that American democracy wouldn't benefit if everyone knew a little bit more about what goes on beyond our borders. Can't imagine that it would lead to any particular policies down the road—increased support for mutilateralism, for instance, or an aversion to war—but hey, knowledge is good. One quibble, though. Levine unearths this shocking fact:

The surveys find that 25 percent of our college-bound high school students cannot name the ocean between California and Asia. Eighty percent do not know that India is the world's largest democracy.

Now it goes without saying that everyone should know what the Pacific Ocean is called. But when I read the second sentence, I realized that in a sense, I didn't "know" India was the world's largest democracy. Oh sure, I knew India was a democracy. And I knew it was the second-largest country. And I knew the largest country wasn't a democracy. But if you had asked me, "Quick, what's the largest democracy in the world?" I would've said the United States without batting an eye. Now that's very embarrassing, but nothing bad would've come of it. I didn't have any wrong ideas about India, or about democracy, or about the world. But I'd be in Levine's 80 percent!

Not that it matters much, though it reminds me I learned a lot of useless composite facts like these in school (Canada and the United States share the world's longest undefended border! Martin van Buren was the 9th president!) that substituted for learning more important, basic things about the way the world is and works.

Before we Republicans speak too ill of Jim Jeffords—no, wait, before we Democrats speak too highly of Jim Jeffords—let's all remember the time he saved the Bush presidency from complete and utter failure. The man could've truly torched the White House in 2001 if he so chose, but sadly, he didn't.

Also, reading over the comments in this Daily Kos thread, it's amazing what an unstoppable force Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has become. I don't know nearly enough about Vermont politics, despite having lived right on its border for four years, but it doesn't seem like Vermont itself is so liberal that it's the only state in the union that could possibly support an at-large socialist, one who crosses party lines and wins support from hippies and conservative veterans alike. Surely someone like Sanders could win statewide in New Hampshire or Maine, no?

Over at Reason Online: "Deconstructing Chomsky." Grrr. I guess it's fruitless to ask people to use the term "deconstruction" correctly, since by now it's more or less widely taken to mean "exploring and dismantling," but still, it's awfully obnoxious. (And the author's an English professor to boot. Hmph!) Likewise, I hear the word "topology" misused quite a bit, to mean either "landscape" or "topography." I guess I wouldn't mind so much if these weren't, basically, the only two things I ever learned in college, so now it's just harder to show off at cocktail parties. Not that I get invited to many cocktail parties. But if I did...

UPDATE: Oh, what the hell, a word about Chomsky too. The Chomsky-bashing, especially among those who write for the internet-world, has really gotten out of control over the past four years. Yes, the man paints a very one-sided view of history. Very. Nevertheless, it's a side that just doesn't get painted very often, and a side that ought to be painted more often. Granted, American history isn't simply, as Chomsky has it, "one bloody aggression after another, each whitewashed by compliant news media and fed to a gullible public." But it would take a very strong dullard indeed to think that American history hasn't had lots of bloody aggression, or often been harmed by a compliant news media, or gullible publics. Chomsky sometimes puts an intolerable slant on his facts, but his books still have facts, carefully researched, lots of them truly unsettling, and they can't all be wished away just because the arrangement or backdrop is misleading.

Now it would be a dangerous shame if all one ever read were Chomsky, but if a person's not reading Chomsky, what other popular political writers are going to bring, say, U.S. misdeeds in Latin America (and the business interests connecting them) into such sharp focus? I'm only a little ways through Thomas Friedman's soon-to-be-bestselling book on globalization, The World Is Flat, but already I can see it's vintage Tom: a willful obtuseness towards any part of the seamy underbelly of globalization, as if power doesn't exist, and corruption is just an inconvenience soon to be scorched away by the white light of global connectivity. A dose of Chomsky-ism could do Friedman some good.

Last point. People often try to separate Chomsky's linguistic work from his politics, praising the former and abhorring the latter. That's misguided; the two are very much inter-connected. His linguistic worldview, to a large extent, depends on several assumptions: that all thought essentially is language, that all reason is formal, that human beings share a universal rationality, and that we can come to understand the mind by introspection alone. Now it's not a huge leap from here to Chomsky's brand of anarcho-syndicalism (though this part isn't very well-developed) and his anti-materialism (who needs i-Pods when rationality is the real essence of humanity?), not to mention his views that power structures and greed always and intolerably pervert human nature. What's remarkable is that he's taken his well-developed theories on the human mind and stretched them to their utmost political conclusions. What other writer even tries to do that? (Yes, as always, I mean "apart from David Brooks"...)

By the by, Chomsky once had a very clever retort to the argument that "the masses" are too stupid and unfit to govern, when he pointed out that even the most boorish of beer-guzzling American slobs have a preternatural ability to, for example, rattle off baseball statistics. Name the Cy Young winner in 1963, bam, Sandy Koufax, that sort of thing. Surely these boors could put their encyclopedic minds to good use in the political sphere, if only they weren't so distracted by baseball and other opiates of the masses. Well, that doesn't seem quite right to me, but if you're Chomsky, it's at least internally consistent.

Turns out, the Self-Correcting Blogosphere is as swift and severe as it is fascinating. In response to my post below about no other country having "un-X-ian" as a concept, a commenter notes that in fact, "un-Australian" has acquired a wide currency in the land down under. Who knew? A bit of googling turns up this nifty story in the Herald:

The term "un-Australian" has become so widely used that the Macquarie Dictionary is revising its definition, writes Judith Ireland. It's not easy being Australian. Men who like cats, bosses who block internet access to footy tipping websites and anyone who refuses to eat lamb or support Lleyton Hewitt are un-Australian, say recent media reports…

Used as far back as the 1850s, the term has undergone a revival in the past decade. While its use in the 1990s was largely on the political stage - notably in reference to asylum seekers, Asian immigrants, protesters and monarchists - today the term has wider application.

"My sense is that out of the culture wars of the 1990s we can see the emergence of an entirely new kind of usage of un-Australian," says Tim Phillips, a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Tasmania, who has conducted research into popular understandings of the word. "[It] is becoming part of the popular vernacular, rather than having the serious overtones of its usage in political life…

Joseph Pugliese, an associate professor at Macquarie University who teaches a unit on un-Australian cultural studies, says the term is often intended to exclude people from the nation. "What's at stake is that sense of belonging," he says. "I see it as a term used to discriminate between individuals and groups that refuse to conform to the dominant culture. I see it as a divisive term, one that's predicated on an 'us and them' mentality."

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the varieties of "unAmerican"-isms are fun to study. It's rarely used in cultural contexts: people say lots of nasty things about gays and metrosexuals and immigrants and whatnot, but no one ever accuses these folks of being "un-American" nowadays. (Despite the fact McCarthy spent a lot of time in the 1950s harassing "subversive" homosexuals.) But of course, it still comes up in politics a lot, with revealing distinctions. Conservatives like Ann Coulter use it more or less in its McCarthyist context, denoting an opposition to the state itself, something akin to treason. (Though this is used less frequently by conservatives than thought: interestingly, a Google search for "John Walker Lindh" and "unAmerican" reveals more people calling the Walker trials "un-American" than Walker himself.)

Liberals meanwhile, as the cover of the American Prospect does with Tom DeLay, seem to use it to tar people who they think contravene various American ideals; in DeLay's case, honesty and transparency and whatnot. These distinctions aren't hard and fast, of course (what is), but probably more or less accurate. (My informal impression is that, around internet-land, liberals appear to use the phrase a lot more frequently, and usually in the context mentioned.)

The liberal use, of course, is something I can somewhat stomach—what's so bad about defining American ideals negatively, by implicitly contrasting them with people who are clearly repugnant?—but it blends pretty clearly with the Coulter-style use, and we don't want to get to the point where we're equating "being American" with "loyalty to the state." So best to just scrap the word altogether. Unless, mind you, it's better to do what Australia did and bandy the word about so frequently that it becomes a cheap and frivolous part of the popular vernacular. This might seem unlikely given the term's sordid history, but it seemed to have an even more sordid history over in Australia, and look what happened there.

"Survivors of militia attacks in Darfur have accused African Union forces of doing nothing to stop the bloodshed." That's from Reuters yesterday. To be clear, I don't want to denigrate the AU soldiers—honestly, they're doing far braver work than I will ever do, and they simply don't have the mandate to protect civilians. Battling the janjawid would be a heroic move, but unlawful and possibly dangerous. All the same, this stuff needs to be highlighted because governments all around the world are still clinging on to the fiction that the genocide can be stopped with a few more AU divisions here and there. So once more: peacekeepers, no-fly zones. Post-haste.

MORE: NRO has a fantastic article about Harvard divesting from Chinese oil companies to protest the genocide. I'm usually skeptical of these sorts of moves, but this could possibly—possibly—do something. As I've noted before, China is the one country that can really lean on Khartoum to stop the killing. But diplomatic pressure alone is unlikely to spur China into action, given the country's massive oil interests in Sudan, but a pocketbook appeal could do the trick. If I have anyone readers who are in college right now, this could be a good campaign to start organizing. SinoPec and PetroChina are the two main offenders, though you can find a full list here.

I wanted to say something really, amazingly clever about the new pope, but I've got nothing. Here, though, from Ed Morrissey, is a bit of philosophy from then-Cardinal Ratzinger: "[Relativism] is letting oneself be 'swept along by every wind of teaching.' [It] looks like the only attitude [acceptable] to today's standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism, which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires." Okay, come on. None of those things are relativism. Likewise, it's not at all the case that people are being "swept along by every wind of teaching." Who? Where? Believe me, I know some fourth-grade teachers who would love to have this little problem.

Ugh, no, please stop. I love the American Prospect, it's a wonderful magazine, but for Christ's sake, there's no reason to call Tom DeLay "un-American" on the cover of their latest issue. There are the creepy McCarthyist overtones, yes, but leave that aside for a second. The very concept of calling someone "un-American" is sheer nonsense. Is there any other country on earth that bandies about un-"X"ian as an insult? Not that I know of; it would probably sound odd for people abroad to hear "Putin is un-Russian" or "Koizumi is un-Japanese." No one else does it. Now obviously there are perceived differences here—the conceit being that Russia and Japan are mere nations while America is a concept, a way of life, an ideal—but come on.

So I'm reading a new Justice Department's report entitled, "Illicit Sexual Activity in Public Places" (pdf), and you should be too. Because nothing makes the afternoon fly like a bit of middle school-style snickering. Ha ha, just kidding, this is a serious issue. Also, there's some fascinating info in the report, like this tidbit:

Why people sunbathe nude or teenagers park at "lovers' lanes" has not been well researched. (p. 21)

Uh, really? Not well researched? This is one of the great mysteries of social science? Okay, whatever, here's some more uncharted territory:

Certain patterns (e.g., opposite-sex coupling at a "lovers' lane") have not been studied empirically, while others (e.g., same-sex contact in public restrooms) have been studied much more extensively. (p. 4)

Actually, that's genuinely interesting. I wonder why the disparity. No, never mind, I think I know why. Honestly, though, seems like this field is just ripe for some major breakthroughs; get thee to lover's lane, grad students. But hey, it's not like criminologists don't know anything about illicit sex in public places. Far from it! Take the following passage, which includes a footnote citing three scholarly sources for reference:

As with those who engage in sexual activity in public restrooms, those who do so at truck stops or rest areas generally don't want to be detected. (p. 6)

Three sources can't be wrong. Folks, this is about as certain as we in the field can get. Far more certain, it seems, than hypotheses like the following:

The climate likely has an influence on outdoor public sexual activity. (p. 7)

Indeed. I love that qualifier more than I can really say.

Peter Gosselin and Edwin Chen have a fun article in the Los Angeles Times on Bamboozlepalooza:

President Bush came to Ohio on Friday to highlight a state retirement savings system that he said showed that Americans would be better off handling their own old-age investments through personal accounts than relying on traditional Social Security.

But that state's version of personal accounts has attracted few takers among the people eligible — Ohio's 750,000 public employees. And records show that the most widely chosen version of the state-offered accounts has racked up a five-year earning record of 1.86%, about the same return that the president says Social Security produces.

Hee hee, sucker. But on a somewhat related note, here's something I honestly don't get. Some privatization advocates have advanced the line of argument taht we should be able to shift our payroll taxes into equities because they would get a better return there than they do under Social Security. Well, this argument has always been a bit disingenuous—the point of the program is the insurance aspect, not the return—but it also strikes me as conceptually misguided to boot. That is, even if you ignore transition costs, clawbacks, wealth transfer from poor to rich, ignore all of that, there's no logical reason to think perfectly rational people would get better total returns on their money under privatization than they do now.

Consider every man, woman, and child in America. No, wait, leave the children out of this. Okay, so currently every working man and woman puts his or her savings in some combination of Social Security/the bank/the stock market/etc. These investments have total risk X and expected return Y. Now anyone who thinks Y is too low, and is willing to assume a risk greater than X can do so right this very instant. Just take, say, the money you've invested in T-Bills and put them in some riskier stock. Or sell of your risky stocks and buy even more riskier stocks. Or take money out of the bank and buy some junk bonds.

The point is that almost anyone in America right now, it seems to me, could easily rearrange their current investments to assume an even greater risk and thus hope for an even greater return than they currently expect. If they so chose. The only thing they can't invest somewhere else are their payroll taxes. Under privatization, people could do that. But if everyone is currently at their optimal level of risk X and return Y (as all perfectly rational people should be, otherwise one ought to take money out of the bank and buy junk bonds, etc.), if that's true, then reinvesting payroll taxes in a riskier place with higher return shouldn't make any difference. People will just shift other investments around until they're back at X and Y.

No? Perhaps economists have already dealt with this argument, though I haven't seen it anywhere. Certainly the argument doesn't seem entirely correct. Perhaps it's wrong on account of people not being perfectly rational. Or the fact that for some (low-income) people, all of their savings are "invested" in Social Security so it's not possible to readjust and shift around. Or some other mysterious reason.

Ezra Klein recounts a famous story about some elderly woman telling John Breaux, "Senator, don't you dare let the government get its hands on my Medicare!" Heh. In light of the fact that, you know, seniors love Medicare, the tale highlights just how conditioned Americans have become to demonize public health care. ("How could anything so good possibly be government-run?") So it's easy to come away from the story feeling dejected and hopeless about the prospects for a national health care program in America.

Except... except... perhaps this is actually an opportunity in disguise! If people a) love Medicare and b) don't actually think of it as a government program, then maybe the solution to quality universal health care is simply to expand Medicare. No use fighting the vast propaganda machine that's been dragging single-payer's name through the mud all these years. Just go around the machine! No one will see it coming! Heck, even George W. Bush likes expanding Medicare, so how could you possibly call it socialism?

Now as it happens, Yale Professor Jacob Hacker has outlined a pretty good proposal for expanding Medicare to cover the uninsured. A small incremental step, yes, but we can all see where this leads down the road. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. As it also happens, I think Hacker's mostly onto something, and his plan is probably the best "baby step" to get from the bizarre hybrid health system we have now to a system of universal coverage. The only downside is that this idea was also more or less known as "Dennis Kucinich's campaign proposal," which means that "moderate" liberals will flip out. (Another blow: Teddy Kennedy likes it. Quelle horreur!) Nevertheless, it's realistic and doable, it's better than the Center for American Progress' plan, and as Ezra's lovable granny points out, Medicare is basically the one public health-care system that no one actually believes is a national health-care system. And that, friends, is half the battle.

More: Nyuk nyuk.

A few more facts and figures about child care, culled from the Morgan paper mentioned below (only because I want to jot these stats down somewhere, for future reference; plus, some readers might find them interesting).

In the U.S., only six percent of one- and two-year-olds are in public child care, and 53 percent of three-to-five-year olds. The private sector is growing, thanks to growing paid employment among mothers, but total child-care coverage is less than in Sweden or France.

Parents pay 60 percent of all costs for child-care, as opposed to, on average, 25 percent of the costs of higher education.

Only 21 percent of parents with under-13 children who are below 200 percent of the poverty line receive help with child care costs, from the government or elsewhere.

Social conservatives have often argued against subsidized child care on grounds that it discriminates against stay-at-home mothers.

Between 1973 and 1999, as mothers entered the workforce, government spending on child care increased from $2.8 billion to $12 billion, and the private child care market grew 250 (!!) percent.

The wages for child care and preschool workers are worth between 53 and 66 percent of the wages of all employed women. (In Sweden, it's 1.02 percent for both, in France it's 1.87 percent for preschool teachers.) Less than a third of child care centers offer fully-paid health insurance. Only one-third of workers earned the minimum wage.

Continue reading "Child Care By the Numbers"

Just read an interesting paper (PDF) by Kimberly Morgan, a poli. sci. prof who did a guest stint at Crooked Timber a few weeks back, on the always-fascinating subject of child care. Well, on that and "how labor markets shape social policy, and vice-versa."

A few numbers first. As we know, child care is very, very, very expensive here in America. Non-poor parents pay, on average, 6.6 percent of their income to get someone to look after the kid(s), and families below the poverty line shell out a whopping 28 percent. Tax subsidies for care are piddling and cover, at most, 12 percent of parents with children under the age of 13. Nevertheless, the U.S. child care system is about as cheap as it gets around the world. Its workers make peanuts, turnover is very high, the industry is less than 5 percent unionized, there are few educational requirements, and the rise of family day-care centers (stay-at-home parents running informal centers) has pushed down wages. Most day care resides in the private sector, which does what private sectors are very good at doing: pushes prices down. And since there are few productivity gains to be made in the industry, those low prices must mean low wages. Complain about the cost of a good day-care center if you must, but it's hard to see how prices could possibly drop any further.

So what happens in countries with higher rates of unionization, better wages, more educational requirements, etc.? Well, as you'd expect, there's virtually no private child care market—parents absolutely can't afford the higher prices. So the supply of child care is driven not by market factors, as it is in the U.S., but by largely political decisions. In both France and Sweden, the public child-care sectors are nearly all-encompassing, while countries without public care (Netherlands, Germany), other policies (flexible working hours for women) have become necessary.

Meanwhile, in recent years, the French government has tried to spur the creation of a subsidized private "family care" sector, in order to rein in public spending, but it's had to struggle to do this over the protests of organized labor. Sweden has had less luck on this front, owing to the power of the municipal and teachers unions, Kommunal and Lärarförbundet.

So… it's an interesting way to look at how the structure of labor markets in a given country can affect social policy. The United States, essentially, can get away with refusing to subsidize child care in part because the private market has kept costs so low. Without a vast low-wage workforce available to take care of kids for pennies—and immigration contributes to this state of affairs quite a bit—policymakers would have to make tougher choices about child care. But they don't. Of course, the downside to this is that child-care workers tend to be less-skilled and less-educated than in, say, Sweden. Plus the workers (mostly women) looking over the little tykes earn shit for wages. But hey, at least it's not socialism!

The Washington Post also reports that our "renewed" efforts at public diplomacy in the Middle East are stumbling out of the gate. Karen Hughes, the new point-person on Islamic outreach... won't start until the fall. Dina Powell... won't start for another two months (though I'm still posting a picture of her, for, uh, national security reasons). Oh, and there are very, very few Muslims in the State Department. It's too early to call the whole thing a clown show, but when you see a bunch of red rubber noses lying around, you start to wonder.

Well, okay. Frankly, I don't much care, because I'm deeply skeptical of this whole "we need better public diplomacy" approach. Certainly, there's room to improve around the margins—for instance, it would be great if more State Department officials could get on Al-Jazeerah and debate and defend (in Arabic) U.S. policies. But that's hard to do so long as many U.S. policies are all but indefensible in the Muslim world. American support for Israel, for instance, is going to piss people in the Middle East off, and there's no way to sugarcoat this. Likewise, if the U.S. really is building long-term bases in Iraq, then it's going to be awfully hard to get State Department folks on TV and convince everyone that no, no, we have no long-term designs on Iraq. And no one's going to believe that the U.S. is sincere about democracy-promotion unless the Bush administration actually does stuff, like speaking out about King Abdullah's crackdowns in Jordan.

Arabs aren't dumb. Thanks to the miracles of satellite TV they can see through the sugarcoating. I think it was Daniel Byman who recently recalled the time, a few years back, when Dick Cheney defended Israel's assassination of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin on "Meet the Press" or some such thing. Obviously the statement was intended for an American audience, but it spread far and wide 'round the Middle East pretty quickly, something that never would have happened a decade ago. Of course, that said, there's more to life than Israel. If the U.S. were to intervene in Sudan, for instance, a bit of quality diplomacy could

I still don't understand the new Republican strategy on Social Security privatization:

The emerging Bush-Senate Republican strategy is to entice Democrats into the debate by first focusing on shoring up the system and then selling the private accounts as the smartest way to ease the pain of benefit cuts. All of this relies on Grassley's ability -- and willingness -- to push ahead on an issue some Republicans would rather avoid.

No, okay, I understand a strategy in which Republicans pretend to focus solely on solvency issues in order to lure the Democrats 'round the negotiating table, and then, once the Dems take the bait and commit to reform, then springing private accounts on them. Surprise! That makes perfect sense, and it's a tricky, devious, diabolical idea. What I don't understand is publishing this strategy in the Washington Post for all to see.

Are daily attacks in Iraq going down, as has been widely reported? Maybe not. Patrick Cockburn points out the numbers behind the numbers:

Most violent incidents in Iraq go unreported. We saw one suicide bomb explosion, clouds of smoke and dust erupting into the air, and heard another in the space of an hour. Neither was mentioned in official reports. Last year US soldiers told the IoS that they do not tell their superiors about attacks on them unless they suffer casualties. This avoids bureaucratic hassle and "our generals want to hear about the number of attacks going down not up". This makes the official Pentagon claim that the number of insurgent attacks is down from 140 a day in January to 40 a day this month dubious.

Oh. The fall in U.S. casualties, meanwhile, seems to have stemmed mostly from the military scaling back its offensive operations, not necessarily a collapse in the insurgency. But on the bright side: "With US networks largely confined to their hotels in Baghdad by fear of kidnapping, it is possible to sell the American public the idea that no news is good news."

Time advances the Tom DeLay-Jack Abramoff story a little further, and it's all good stuff, though the writers say something a bit odd midway through:

Having seen how a succession of Democratic leaders fell a decade ago, DeLay should know better than anyone how it tends to happen. Again and again, it was not big violations of the law or congressional rules that landed Washington power brokers in trouble as much as smaller lapses in judgment.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the tone seems to be suggesting, "Yeah, these allegations are kind of bullshit—it's not like he murdered anyone, ha ha ha!—but oh well, that's the way politics goes." Okay, but why shouldn't politics go this way? Ask Abramoff, but I believe the phrase is: "build a wall around the Torah," no? Stomp on the spine of any Congressperson who does even the slightest, itty-bitty thing wrong, and pretty soon you have only squeaky-clean politicians. Yeah, so maybe DeLay's office just "sort of" asked Abramoff to set up his lavish little London trip. Boot him anyway! Zero-tolerance, baby, it's an idea every conservative can get behind. Because if we appease DeLay on this front, who knows what sort of lawlessness he might get up to?

(Hm, this post is just begging for a retort that includes the words "Clinton" and, uh, "minorsexualtransgressions"... Well, fire away.)

There's also a critical oil angle to Sudan that's worth sketching out. As has been noted often before, one of the reasons the UN Security Council can't agree to slap down crippling oil sanctions on Khartoum is China. China imports roughly 6 percent of its oil from Sudan, which doesn't sound like much, but in an era of tight global supply and surging Chinese demand, 6 percent is a lot. The flipside here is that China gobbles up 60 percent of Sudan's oil exports, putting Beijing in a rather unique position to influence Khartoum. Sadly, though, China hasn't shown any interest in using its leverage for good, although Chinese leaders do care about their international image and are loath to block any anti-genocide actions by the UN. Just don't take away their oil. Not the oil.

Now the U.S. could try to circumvent the UN and put down sanctions against Chinese companies that do business with Khartoum (China National Petroleum Corp., one of the three major Chinese oil companies, has a nearly 40 percent share in Sudan's biggest oil consortium), or blockade Sudan, or deny port access to ships carrying Sudanese oil. But that, of course, risks inflaming tensions with Beijing, which is already convinced that U.S. action in Sudan is nothing more than an excuse to constrain China's growing influence. As an alternate suggestion, the White House could, with a deft touch, reassure China that its interests in Sudan won't be harmed, while convincing Beijing to put increasing pressure on Khartoum to comply with a ceasefire over Darfur. But the key phrase here is "deft touch." Probably best not to leave it to this guy.

Ah, finally I got my grubby mitts on a Congressional Research Service issue brief (PDF) on Sudan. (Why oh why aren't these things made public? They're funded with taxpayer money…) Always good to see what sort of information Congress is getting about a given issue, and in this case, the brief is very, very, very well-done. Print it out and leaf through it if you want to learn more about the ongoing crisis.

Anyway, there was one particularly pathos-filled passage (really!) midway though the piece that's worth quoting:

President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, who came to power after the 1994 Rwandan genocide, had stated that his country would respond if called to end genocide in Sudan during a speech in April 2004 at the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. Rwanda was the first to deploy troops as part of the AU mission. Senior Rwandan officials have also asserted that despite the limited mandate, Rwandan troops would defend civilians, if they are attacked.

Rwanda has not yet followed through on its threat, however, although in late 2004 Rwandan troops blocked Janjaweed militia intending to attack a civilian village. Rwandan troops took up positions to prevent the Janjaweed from their planned attack on the village and refused the Janjaweed’s demand to disarm. Rwandan government officials argue that it is better to have a small force present in Darfur than to have nothing at all. However, Kigali [i.e., capital of Rwanda] has made its views clear that the proposed expanded force should have a mandate to protect civilians.

It's a sad day indeed when the only country willing to send in the cavalry is the one that lost nearly a million people to its own genocide a decade ago. (The casualties in Darfur, by the way, have now reached one-half of the final body count in Rwanda. "Never again"?) But honestly, mass butchering really isn't one of those things you need to experience for yourself before you understand how serious it is. So why is Rwanda so alone here?:

Many members of the African Union do not share the view that a genocide is occurring in Darfur and still consider the government of Sudan as the central player in the resolution of the conflict and protector of civilians, while U.S. and U.N. officials hold the government of Sudan responsible for the atrocities in Darfur.

Yep, that's the problem I noted in the post below: most of the ceasefire agreements drawn up so far have assumed that the Khartoum government can mediate a truce between the janjawid horseback militias and the Darfur rebel groups. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It's the central government itself that has been arming and supporting janjawid fighters (often with air support) and violating the ceasefires. Now the AU has its own reasons for supporting Khartoum, just as it has reasons for supporting Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe: namely, to preserve the notion of state sovereignty in Africa. But that's the wrong way to look at things here.

Ed Kilgore points out an odd paradox: the international community is pouring $4.5 billion into Sudan over the next three years to help the southern regions recover from their twenty-year civil war against the central government in Khartoum. Officially, State Department officials have said that the aid is contingent on the ruling National Islamic Front halting its ongoing genocide campaign against Darfur. In practice, though, the U.S. isn't likely to follow through on this threat, mainly because they don't want to jeopardize the hard-won Navaisha peace agreement between Khartoum and the Sudan People's Liberation Army in the south. Both Kilgore and Marshall Wittman think this shows spinelessness on the part of the White House.

Well, it does. But things... aren't quite as simple as all that.

Right now, it's true, the most urgent, urgent, urgent issue is to stop the disaster in Darfur. It's not possible to scream this point home loud enough. Sanctions and international pressure either won't deter the genocidaires or will take much too long. The UN is useless at this point. Meanwhile, the African Union force currently in Sudan is much too small and lacks a mandate to protect civilians, and I doubt that the AU has the political will to get serious about helping in Darfur (most of its members deny that genocide is even going on, and the Nigerian leadership's caviling has been deeply despicable).

So that likely means a NATO force needs to storm in and a) establish a no-fly zone to prevent Khartoum from strafing Darfuri villages with its fighter jets; b) secure humanitarian corridors, c) provide safe passage home for refugees and, perhaps, d) forcibly disarm the janjawid militias responsible for the slaughter. As I've said before, Khartoum would probably resist, and bloody struggle would ensue, and all the brave little clerics 'round the Middle East would paint a Western intervention into Sudan as an "attack on Islam," but that's probably all worth it. 400,000 people, mind you, have died in Darfur and that number will certainly stretch into the millions—millions—unless the West acts now.

But what happens after the cavalry comes charging in? Well, here's where things get tricky. A peace treaty between the Darfur rebels and Khartoum is going to be very difficult to broker. The ceasefire signed last April had serious flaws, mainly because it essentially focused on disarming "non-government entities"—meaning both the janjawid horseback militias and the two main Darfur rebel groups—which basically would have allowed the central government free rein to police the area. Over and over again, these UN- and AU-brokered settlement proposals have been biased in favor of Khartoum. But that's ridiculous, considering that Khartoum is behind much of the violence, even as the government pretends that it's really the Arab horseback militias responsible for all the killing. Nor can the central government be trusted to police Darfur. Last December, after the ceasefire was signed, Khartoum's police forces attacked SLA (i.e. one of the Darfur rebel groups) positions in South Darfur, disrupting the peace process.

In all likelihood, a solid and lasting settlement will need to accept the two Darfur rebel groups, the SLA and JEM, as legitimate political actors who can negotiate with the Sudan over power-sharing with the central government, religious freedom, and now it looks like wealth-sharing (just yesterday, oil was discovered in South Darfur). In other words, longstanding peace will require the same sort of political framework being shaped in the Navaisha Agreement between Khartoum and the Christian/animist southern regions of Sudan. Indeed, it's very possible that Navaisha could someday be expanded into, say, a broader constitutional convention for the entire country. But at this point, it's absolutely critical that the north-south talks continue to succeed. Meanwhile, it's equally important that aid continues to flow to southern Sudan, which faces one of the worst humanitarian crises on earth.

So that's the double-bind the West faces on Sudan. At this point the north-south treaty offers the best opportunity to create a broader political framework to ensure lasting peace across the country. And even if it can't achieve that, the treaty still ought to be maintained for its own sake—clearly no one wants war between north and south again. But on the flip side, any effective intervention to stop genocide in Darfur is likely to destabilize the Navaisha framework. (For instance, if a NATO force ended up disabling Khartoum's Air Force in order to secure no-fly zones, that could embolden the southern Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) to make a move for independence. Perhaps not. But perhaps.)

So basically, Sudan is extremely complicated (I haven't even touched on Khartoum's ties to Islamic terrorism, or the Chad factor, or oil politics, or the Darfuri rebels own possible ties to Islamic terrorism). Kilgore, by contrast, seems to think the problem lies mostly with Bush administration cowardice. And yes, there's certainly a great deal of cowardice (Exhibit A: Robert Zoellick), but in the White House's defense, the U.S. has been one of the least cowardly countries on this issue—though it could be doing much, much more—and it's also genuinely tough to figure out how exactly to fix Sudan.

As most everyone who reads this blog knows, that hideous new bankruptcy bill passed through the House and will soon become law. Reading Elizabeth Warren's thoughts on the matter, however, I realized that I really, really don't understand how money works in Congress. Warren says "the financial services industry was giving big money" so that's why the bill passed. But what does that mean, really?

For instance, take Melissa Bean (D-IL, right), the first person on Steve Soto's "wall of shame". Bean voted for the bankruptcy bill. Was it because she was in the lending industry's back-pocket? Well, let's see: in 2004 she managed to oust incumbent Phil Crane, in part by raising a bit more money than he did; in fact, it was one of the most expensive House races in Illinois that year. But only a scant 5.1 percent of her PAC cash came from business, and most came from labor or single-issue PACs. If you break her fundraising down by industry, banks are very, very low on the list—far below labor unions and lawyers, both of whom might be expected to oppose the bankruptcy bill, no? Also curiously, it seems that the financial service poured far more money into trying to defeat her than elect her.

So why did Bean reward the financial industry by voting for the bankruptcy bill? Adding on to that, why did she vote for estate tax repeal? Campaign contributions seem to under-explain things here. One alternate possibility: Looking at Bean's profile here, it seems our little freshmen Representative got herself assigned to the Financial Services and Small Business Committee earlier this year. It's possible that the price of a plum committee assignment was a vote for both the bankruptcy bill (which financial services favor) and estate tax repeal (which small businesses favor). But that theory seems quite dubious, and depends on who's handing out committee slots.

I'm not going to do this sort of thing for every representative, but intuitively it seems that when we're talking about "money in politics," it's a mistake to focus on campaign contributions per se. Usually, the amount contributed by X industry to Y candidate ends up being surprisingly tiny, a relatively small percentage of total funds raised. Certainly not enough to induce that candidate to vote for an objectively bad bill that just happens to favor X industry.

No, I imagine the real "money in politics" problems lie elsewhere. For instance, looking over Melissa Bean's biography, she was a businesswoman and consultant for 20 years. Presumably she became fairly wealthy in that time. Presumably she knew a lot of wealthy people, or had a lot of wealthy clients, or hung around the sort of people who complained about, for instance, the estate tax. And after awhile, the estate tax starts to sound unfair! Perhaps she also didn't know too many people affected by bankruptcy. Hence her personal sympathies may well have been with the arguments of estate tax repealers and bankruptcy bill proponents. The problem here, then, is that the sort of people getting elected to Congress and the Senate are disproportionately people with a goodly horde of pre-existing wealth. That certainly affects the way they think about issues and the way they vote.

Then, of course, there's the lobbying, and the industry and think-tank reports that convince Congress to vote this or that way. That all costs money, money, money. Obviously the forces of good usually tend to be underfunded here, so the big business interests can usually get their way. (For instance, as I've noted before, labor unions do shockingly little in the way of lobbying.) The other upshot here is that campaign finance reform, ala McCain-Feingold, may do very little to get this sort of grubby money out of politics. But I'll have more on that later.

The "Shave John Bolton" movement gets a big media boost with Robin Givhan's piece on the front page of the Washington Post's style section. About time! The man's mustache is completely uncalled for.

But Givhan seems to think Bolton's rug + droopy soupcatcher combo indicates some sort of casual disregard for the Senate and UN, making him inappropriate for the finely-groomed world of ambassadors and diplomats. But that seems exactly the point! As with George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the rest, the idea here is to give off the appearance of not caring for tiny little details and propriety: these men, after all, are thinking weighty thoughts, no time for haircuts! Much like, uh, Albert Einsten.

Yeah, that's it, call it the "eccentric professor principle"—no one ever thinks much of the prof with cropped hair and slick suits; the real brains around town are all lumbering about in sweatpants and oversized beards. Karl Rove's surely behind all this, ordering Bolton to break out the clippers no more than every fifth day. I mean, come on now, this is an administration that takes stage-managing and glossy appearances to soaring new heights; if they thought the 'stache really had to go, they'd pin him down and forcibly liberate that upper lip.

Paul Roberts' The End of Oil gets really fascinating when he starts talking about the geopolitics of oil: i.e. the gritty power plays made by OPEC, the political ramifications of oil price swings, that sort of thing. One point he hints at very, very briefly, but never states outright, is the possible role of oil in the decline of the Soviet Union. So perhaps a bit of follow-through on Roberts' little hint is in order.

The usual explanation for the decline and fall of Communist Russia involve economic reasons. The basic story as I've learned it sounds like this: At some point in the '80s the Soviet bloc hit a "post-industrialization" phase of economic development, wherein further growth depended on a good deal technological innovation. (Up until that point, communist countries were perfectly well-suited to industrialization, since they could always just steal the necessary technology from abroad.) Sadly, the Soviet system was particularly bad at stocking up capital for investment towards this sort of thing, and a planned economy is never good for entrepreneurship, and thus no innovation was forthcoming. The resulting economic stall-out led to anger, anger led to glasnost, that led to more grumbling, and the dark side came in 1991 when the whole system finally collapsed.

But one question I've always wondered: Why did the wipe-out occur exactly when it did? Why not ten years later? Or twenty? The big Republican theory has it that Reagan's military buildup in the 1980s (along with the war in Afghanistan) was the ten-ton weight that crippled the Soviet system, forcing the country into a costly arms race that crowded out much-needed capital for economic growth, and really kicked the already-weak communist economy right in its bright red teeth. As this story goes, that's what induced Gorbachev to undertake market-based reforms, etc. Oh, and Reagan was God, y'know? Okay, now we're getting somewhere, but this still seems weak. (For instance, if this was the jackboot on Russia's throat, then why did Gorbachev go in for glasnost instead of just cutting back on military spending?)

So now oil. As Roberts notes in his book, OPEC ironically shot itself in the foot with its oil embargoes during the 1970s. Oil prices surged, true, and the OPEC countries all got rich, rich, rich, but after awhile the West adapted, both by weaning itself partially off oil and by finding incentive to drill in new and uncharted territories (the northern cliffs of Alaska, for instance). As a result, OPEC got hit hard, and its share of the global oil market plummeted from 50 percent to 29 percent by 1986. At this point, Saudi Arabia tried to shore up prices by demanding that other OPEC countries limit their production and keep under quota. But those other OPEC countries were now panicking and flooded the market with oil in order to reduce prices and recapture their market share.

Finally, in 1985, the House of Saud decided to do a little "capacity cleansing", unleashing their spigots and flooding the market with cheap oil from their reserves. Prices plummeted, and other OPEC countries were devastated. They realized, at last, how powerful Saudi Arabia could be with all its excess capacity, and decided to fall into line with this "quota" business. More importantly, though, with the fall in prices, the West no longer found it profitable to drill in places like the North Sea and Alaska. So they started buying OPEC oil once more.

Unnoticed by many, though, the Saudi flood devastated the Soviet Union. With oil prices tumbling downwards, not only did Russia lose much of its income, but it was also no longer profitable for Russia to operate many of its expensive pumps in Siberia, etc. (Saudi Arabian crude costs around $1.50 a barrel to find, drill, and pump; in Russia it's about $15 a barrel. So if prices fall too low, oil companies will close up shop in Siberia.) As Roberts tells it, Moscow's hard-currency income was cut in half by 1986, and "the Soviet oil industry was knocked out for years." Two long knives to the gut.

Now it seems that this can help explain why both the Soviet Union and the Eastern European satellite states started breaking down exactly when they did. The drop in Soviet oil production, obviously, led to serious shortages. And as bad as that experience was for the West back in the 1970s (global recession!), it was even worse when it hit the Soviet Union in the late '80s. For one, the ability to wean oneself off oil requires very, very clever technological innovation: something that, as pointed out above, the communist states were spectacularly bad at. Western countries could design more fuel-efficient cars, etc. in the '70s and somewhat weather the oil shocks. The Soviet Union simply couldn't, not without the sort of glasnost reforms that Gorbachev was forced to undertake in the late '80s. Which... just happened to be the precise period that Soviet oil production was plummeting. Eerie coincidence? Dunno. Doesn't seem like it. But I think we're latching onto an explanation here.

Obviously this isn't a rigorous analysis by any means; it was just something dumb I started musing over while riding the bus back home tonight. The really interesting corollary, of course, is what future oil shocks could do to China's semi-communist economy...

Well, okay, one post. Read this: "We were able to derive a set of nonlinear difference equations for marital interaction as well as physiology and perception." That's right, the mathematics of love. Sort of interesting—supposedly this Gottman fellow can observe a couple for 15 minutes and predict with pretty astounding accuracy whether the relationship is doomed or not. Nonlinear difference equations and all.

The Washington Post's undercover report yesterday on cock-fighting and avian flu was by turns fascinating and terrifying. And then there was the plain ol' gross:

It is this proximity to the blood and breath of the frenetic fighters that can make cockfighting so hazardous to humans. But the intimacy of the owners and trainers with their birds also poses a profound danger.

Between the 20-minute rounds, the owners scrubbed the blood off their birds with bare hands, wringing out the rags on the ground. Then, with ordinary thread, they stitched the wounds around their eyes and fed them painkillers. Sometimes, Phapart recounted as he watched the hurried surgery, the injuries are so severe that owners relieve the swelling by sucking out the blood by mouth.

And how do they get the roosters to hold still when they're sewing up the eyes? Huh? Meanwhile, I've been reading through the new avian flu blog and it seems that first-world countries are all kicking vaccine production into high gear. Now in the event of a pandemic, I would imagine that the first and most blindingly obvious place to send all those vaccines would be right to ground zero: Vietnam or Thailand or wherever this stuff starts breaking out. Innoculate the nurses and doctors, at least. Realistically, though, are the U.S. and Europe really going to give away their medicine stockpiles to a handful of third world countries, even if it's the most rational course of action? No, probably not.

Jeanne tries to piece together what's going on in Fallujah of late—given that media reports have been nearly non-existent—and finds very, very little to cheer about. Reconstruction is slow, very slow. Sewage dripping through taps, electricity still non-functional, refugees still homeless. Food shortages. And before anyone retorts that at least the place is now the "safest city in Iraq," do note that when Robert Zoellick came to visit, he had to be zoomed through in an armored car.

The worst of it is, it's not at all clear how the U.S. expects to keep the city out of insurgent hands once the "lockdown" gets lifted. The operating theory here seems to be that once upon a time, a bunch of jihadists from outside Fallujah—i.e. foreigners like Zarqawi—took over the city and thugged it up, so now it's just a question of preventing those bad dudes from returning to the city, and everything will be just dandy.

But that's certainly not how it works at all. As at least one military analyst who spent considerable time in the city told me last fall, the bulk of the insurgency was made up of men from the Jumaila, Albuaisa and other local tribes, large and powerful ruling families that altogether comprise around a fourth of the city. Many of those tribesmen were killed during the firefights in April and November. Fine; but they all have brothers, or cousins, or uncles willing to take up arms and fight. Those people all live in Fallujah. And they all know where to get guns. There's literally no way to prevent them from returning and picking up where they left off last November. I just don't see how this ever ends. Saddam Hussein himself could barely bribe these folks into keeping the peace; so why, pray tell, does anyone expect that a cocked-up American reconstruction job will do the trick? And how does the new Iraqi government, whose Speaker of the Assembly condoned the invasion of Fallujah, expect to earn the city's trust?

Okay, I just spent the longest four hours of my life reaching deep into the bowels of CSS and trying to fix the sidebar. The solution involved positioning everything "absolutely" (?) and measuring everything out pixel by pixel. Or something. But it finally seems to be staying put. More fiddling over the weekend, maybe, but for now, it's high time I finished up those tax returns...

On Ezra Klein's sage advice, I'm reading through Paul Robert's The End of Oil in order to make sense of the trends of our times. Apparently we're running out of oil or something? Apparently. One thing I've always wondered, though, is why the price of oil now doesn't reflect what we supposedly know about the future. That is, if this "oil peak" was in fact real and imminent, and people knew about it, then oil traders would go grab up all the barrels of the good stuff they could fine and tuck it under their t-shirts, all in the hopes of making a killing later on when supplies were scarce. And that little frenzy would drive up prices.

So, uh, why hasn't that happened? Why aren't we already seeing $100 barrels of oil? In other words, as Ezra so polysyllabically put it, why haven't the markets "priced oil commensurately with its finiteness"? Silly markets!

Several reasons, from what I can tell halfway through Roberts' (excellent) book. First, there's a lot of slack in the oil markets, which makes it impossible to tell whether or not we've actually hit a peak. For a long while, countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Venezuela have been squirreling some of that goo away, so that if production ever does start to sag, they can just unleash some of the oil tucked under their t-shirts onto the market, making it look like everything's just fine production-wise. In other words, these countries can "mask" a peak in production. In fact, maybe they've already hit that peak and are now disguising their dirty little secret. Sadly, we'll only be able to tell long, long after the fact.

Next, the oil market isn't actually a well-functioning machine. (Yes, yes, we all know what I wanted to say just then.) Roberts argues that in a perfectly free market, companies would drill up and sell all the cheap and easy oil first, for cheap. Only when that all ran out would they move on to the stuff that's hard to grub, like those supposed reserves deep under the Caspian Sea, and when they started doing that, they'd raise prices (because they'd have higher production costs). So the cost of a barrel would increase monotonically and tell us when we're running out of oil.

Sadly, that's not how it works. A goodly portion of the easy oil is controlled by OPEC, and they like to limit their output for various insidious (some might say "smart") reasons. So Western companies have had to get that difficult-to-pump stuff all along, which artificially inflates prices relative to supply, means we—meaning "we with blogs"—can't figure out whether we're hitting a peak, or have hit a peak, or are nowhere near hitting a peak, or whatnot. It's an enigma wrapped in a mystery slathered in oily sludge. And the moral is that we should all start walking to work. Yes, even you.

Alina Stefanescu points to a new psychological study that's quite interesting. People who are excluded, socially, for whatever reason are far more unwilling to exert any sort of self-control over themselves:

These findings make sense, the researchers say, because regulating our behavior is what allows us to fit into society and be accepted in the first place. People who are rejected may feel that their self-regulation efforts were for naught and be less likely to self-regulate in the future. In fact, a follow-up experiment in the study suggests that rejected people are merely unwilling, not unable, to self-regulate.

That's an interesting study for a variety of reasons, but here's just one. Apropos of my post on culture-bashing below, it's worth spelling out just a little bit what I think communitarianism is, or should be. Sadly, I don't have the time to do it now, but one thing to start with is the fact that, as Robert Putnam has outlined rather nicely in Bowling Alone, people are doing fewer social-community type things these days: joining fewer civic groups, socializing with the neighbors less, attending fewer PTA meetings, etc. etc. To put it in his more technical terms, the stock of "social capital" is declining.

Now one of the offshoots here is that churches are generally picking up the slack—there was a New York Times Magazine story about megachurches a few weeks back that drove home the point pretty well: rocketing membership in these places is less about religious fervor, and more just due to the fact that people want some place to belong, especially if they've just moved to a new city or exurb (which, increasingly, people tend to do these days). Now eventually these church communities instill a good dose of that religious fervor, so for those decrying the "theocratification" of the United States, this is something to keep an eye on.

Right. Onto the political philosophy of it all, which isn't really my specialty, but that's never stopped me before. It's reasonable to think that democracy in America is, by and large, understood as the primary means by which we can secure individual rights. Anyone who's ever peeked at the Constitution can see that. Most American liberals, I think, would agree with this general interpretation, though they might have different ideas of what constitutes an "individual right" than, say, a libertarian. (The right to health care, say, or freedom from what tend to be fairly oppressive market forces.) Nonetheless, in the end everyone on both left and right ends up bemoaning the excesses of this sort of political setup: the kids are too libertine!, the CEO's too greedy!, materialism too rampant!, Hollywood stars too haughty!.

The varieties of backlash to these sorts of excesses, meanwhile, tend to move in the direction of actually curtailing these suddenly-too-excessive rights—so you get calls for near-punitive taxation and regulation from the left, or calls to force mothers to go back barefoot to the hearth from the right. What few seem to understand, however, is that many (though, importantly, not all) of these excesses may well result from a breakdown in the democratic community, of the sort that Putnam describes so well. As the study Alina points to suggests—although I'm expanding its conclusions rather untenably here—rips in the social fabric tend to make people unwilling to self-regulate. Whither America's rampant consumerism? Well, perhaps here.

That said, I'm not at all convinced that this is "the" problem facing America today, or that figuring out ways to increase civic and democratic participation will do all that much good. Personally, I prefer to focus on concrete things like health care and bankruptcy. Oh, and oil. Nonetheless, it's interesting to think about.

One more thing. Ezra says that culture-bashing can be the Democrat's "Sister Souljah" moment, where the party defines itself by running against type. Ah yes, I understand the concept completely. And I've always thought it a bit disgusting.

The original Sister Souljah, please remember, was taken utterly out of context and was in fact raising an important issue: namely, that black-on-black violence, if unchecked, could eventually spill over to white communities. But instead of paying even the slightest attention to the relevant issue, Bill Clinton "bashed" her to make upper-class white families feel good about themselves. It was a douchebag move at best. And yes, maybe "that's politics," but you can see the problem with always being willing to excuse this sort of thing. If you can't, ask yourself, how much has been done about black-on-black violence since the 1992 election? Right. There are more important things than politics...

Alright, let's do some actual posts. By now most people have read the big debate over whether Democrats should start denouncing all the violence and sex and gore we see on TV. (If not, Roxanne has a good link roundup, and some relevant thoughts.) I didn't want to write anything on it unless there was something useful to add, but in this case there might be.

Most of the writing I've seen on this subject seems to assume that we can take parents' concerns over the violence and sex and gore in popular culture at face value. But here: most parents, I would wager, simply aren't concerned about the effect of MTV, etc., on their own kids. (Amy Sullivan makes that point here.) The reason's pretty simple: when you spend enough time with someone, even a youngster, you begin to realize that they're not mindless automatons who respond to graphic stimuli by becoming sex-crazed, violence-prone monsters. You develop a certain faith that the kids are alright, at least your own. My own parents were pretty relentlessly puritan in all things, but they certainly let me and my brothers watch R movies from an early age (like, the age of 7 or 8), because they knew us well enough to trust we wouldn't go shoot up a school after watching Robocop.

Now this partly explains the impotence of the so-called "V-Chip option". As Digby points out, all those red-state conservatives complaining about Hollywood could buy V-Chips, or turn off the TV, or stop consuming the pop culture they despise, if they really wanted to. But they obviously don't. They're all watching and enjoying the junk TV. And by and large they're simply not worried about its effect on their own kids. They're worried about its effect on other kids, the kids on the playground—who, for all they know, really are mindless automatons who respond to graphic stimuli by becoming sex-crazed, violence-prone monsters. Sure, parents could buy a V-Chip, but they know that's not going to protect little Timmy from his peers, who are the main influence here.

But the point is that parents are pretty badly mistaken about the role of culture in all of this. The other kids on the playground simply aren't mindless automatons. And if what I'm saying is right and parents are primarily worried about other kids, rather than their own, then I see no reason not to just change the damn subject.

Frankly, every second spent harping on Sin City and Grand Theft Auto is one less second spend talking about giving parents the resources and opportunities to spend more time with their kids. It's also less time figuring out ways to build up local communities, a far worthier goal. What's going to have a more beneficial effect on little Timmy's behavior, banning Sin City from the world or finding ways to get more parents to attend PTA meetings? Right. Then why are we talking about Sin City? It's a cruel diversion and frankly, only reinforces the notion that TV is to blame for all our problems. People will obsess over culture so long as opinion leaders like Amy Sullivan keep declaring that that's what "the people" are worried about.

More generally, I read Noam Scheiber's essay on the libertarian-communitarian divide among Democrats, and I'm happy he raised the issue. I'm something of a communitarian myself. But not in the goddamn cultural sphere. Communitarianism can and should be all about encouraging participation in various democratic affairs—and I'm using the term very loosely here to include everything from PTA meetings to Howard Dean (or Dick Cheney '08) meet-ups—all of which take place primarily in the political realm. In other words, viewing community/democratic participation as an end in itself, rather than as a mere means to securing near-anarchist individual rights. Hillary Clinton, as Noam points out, has been straddling this divide pretty well in her recent speeches.

But Western culture, by contrast, has always benefited from a staunch libertarian flavor—if you don't believe me, go down to the museum and check out how dull all those 17th century French paintings are—and I certainly think it should remain that way. Now as it turns out, I think advertising is an entirely different animal, and something I could certainly stomach regulating; and because there are actual policy prescriptions on this front, Democrats may as well make their stand here. But back away from Sin City, now.

So, uh, new banner in the house, yeah?

Yes, yes, it's not the most imaginative ever, but hey, I think it fits! Dodgeball chicks and marauding clay Vikings—that about sums up my life. Anyway, like a squid trying to use a can-opener, I'm slowly tinkering with the site's design, so fire away if you have any suggestions. Por ejemplo, sometimes I worry that the text is too small, or scrunched together, or hard to read, but no one's ever complained. If you've always wanted to, though, now's your chance. And I may go for the three column format (mini-blog on the right, links on the left, posts down the middle). Golly, this is all so exciting...

UPDATE: Okay, so it would appear that not everyone has my exact same monitor settings. I'll try to fix the sidebar issue when I get a chance later today. For now, I'm just going to tell it to go sit in the bottom corner until it can learn to behave itself. I think I know what the problem is, but my ability to discipline the CSS code is pretty sorely lacking...

The politics of the estate tax repeal are, as Kevin Drum points out, truly fascinating. If you ask me, liberals have already lost this battle, and the thing to do now is to learn our lessons and gear up for the big fight over preserving the income tax. That sounds defeatist, but look: Repeal proponents have been sharpening their "death tax" strategy for a decade, and popular opinion is overwhelmingly in favor of stripping back the tax, even though it affects, at most, 1 percent of the population. It's a lost battle for liberals, and the question is why it got this way. Death By a Thousand Cuts goes into this in-depth, but I'm still not finished with it yet, so I want to offer a few thoughts of my own, building off this post at MoJo.

First, polling suggests that too many voters believe they'll have to pay the estate tax when, in fact, they won't. So it seems that we just need to clear up that misperception and all will be well, right? Well, no. That approach misses the larger point—namely, that many, many Americans actually believe they're in the top 1 percent of the income distribution curve, or that they'll be there soon. (I've seen polls indicating that around 40 percent of voters believe one of those two things.) Now you can try telling Americans that they're sadly mistaken and are, in fact, less successful than they think, but that's hardly a winning political message. Indeed, the point here is that it's very hard to win the estate tax battle on facts alone—not because people get bored with statistics, although that's obviously part of it, but because people don't want to be told that they're never going to be multimillionaires, or that they're not within spitting distance of the upper classes. Delusions of grandeur work against Democrats here.

Another lesson here is that tax battles are always inherently asymmetrical. A small portion of the population cares very, very intensely about taxes—because they're the ones paying the bulk of them—while the rest of us are sort of apathetic. There's just not a large constituency demanding, willy-nilly, that we soak the rich. There is, however, one exception: during those times when it looks like the government is going to have severe funding issues, then calls to soak the rich have a certain resonance. That explains the overwhelming support for lifting the $90,000 cap on wages subject to the payroll tax—something concrete is at stake. Additionally, it seems that from a political standpoint, arguments about the effect of taxes on the economy just don't get much mileage. Nor do arguments that estate tax repeal will cost $1 trillion per decade.

So that leaves the moral arguments. Indeed, there are various moral cases in favor of keeping the estate tax, but they haven't been very well-honed over the years. Certainly not as well-honed as the moral arguments against the tax ("it's unfair to tax dead people!," "it forces people who built up the family business with their cracked, raw, bleeding hands to dismantle everything upon death!," etc).

As a way out of the morass, I think the "Paris Hilton" argument works pretty well here: Namely, that the estate tax prevents the emergence of a small and self-perpetuating class of lavishly wealthy heirs and heiresses who do nothing to earn their money and end up living lives of excess and decadence. Perhaps this could be tied into a grander narrative about how wealth and success should be earned, not inherited. (Though I can see problems with this sort of message.) But liberals have never pushed this case as well as they could have, and it only pops up erratically, when estate tax issues make the headlines. Certainly there's never a constant drum of this message day-in, day-out, as repeal proponents have done on the other side.

Oh, how I'm trying so hard this evening to get work done and not blog, but eh, it's useless to resist. So, time to talk about food aid. Yes, food aid... The counterintuitive take on this topic is that food aid often proves quite harmful to recipient countries. Basically: after a crisis hits, it often takes a while for Western donors to whip up the proper aid package, and when the goodies finally reach a given country, the famine or whatnot is usually over. So the flood of foodstuffs just ends up depressing prices on the local market, thus further impoverishing farmers and hitting the poor (who usually tend to be farmers) quite viciously.

But a new paper by a handful of NBER researchers picks this argument apart with a case study in Ethiopia. Food aid comes in—and since it's Western aid, that usually means wheat—does its thing, and decreases wheat prices. But as it turns out, only 12 percent of rural Ethiopian households report any positive income from wheat (others grow sorghum or barley or coffee or whatever). Meanwhile, many, many more Ethopians are net buyers of wheat, and most of those families are poorer than the producers. So basically... U.S. aid to Ethiopia helps poorer consumers to a tune of some $37 per year on average (no small amount: the poverty line over there is $132 a year), and hurts wealthier producers by $157 per year. 'Tis redistribution at its finest!

And now I wonder if one could make a similar argument with respect to American and EU farm subsidies, which do, it's true, kneecap farmers in developing countries, but also help third-world consumers buy cheap stuff to eat. Is the net effect positive, as in Ethiopia? And, secondly, does that sort of income redistribution help or hinder overall economic growth? Well, we'll just have to wait for the next NBER Digest to find out, won't we...

Ezra Klein points out, quite rightly, that the health care debate in America is never going to get very far so long as the conventional wisdom is that health care alternatives in other countries suck. Good point! But it's also worth asking why this is the conventional wisdom. To some extent, it's because conservatives, spearheaded by the insurance industry, have bamboozled us into thinking it's so. Nevertheless, you'd think that if other systems were indeed better—as I think they are—that the media would eventually pick up on this.

Sadly, no. Media coverage of national health care systems in other countries is dismal. And I can think of three main reasons why:

1. Reporters just don't know all that much. Let's face it, covering health care issues is awfully hard—it's a complex topic!—and not many reporters do it well, even when they're writing about issues here in the United States. You pretty much have to devote yourself full-time to the subject, as, say, Robert Pear of the New York Times has. And that's just to learn the U.S. system... Not surprisingly, reporters have an especially shallow grasp of health care programs in other countries, so the coverage tends to degenerate, more than usual, into "he said, she said" affairs. In fact, I'd have to do a Nexis search, but I'd wager that it's usually not a paper's resident health expert doing stories on single-payer in, say, France or Canada. It's probably an international reporter who has a million other beats and no time to learn all the gritty details of this or that system.
   
   
2. Anecdotes count for more than statistics. This is something of an off-spurt of #1, but also a problem with the media in general, and it's especially detrimental to health care coverage. Reporters lo-o-o-ove covering the poor grandma who waits months for a hip replacement—it's a human interest story! Or those long lines for surgery. Yeesh! But here's the thing: These stories say nothing at all about health care. Everyone has a story: For every grandma waiting for a hip replacement in France, there's an uninsured American who has to pay $95 for a doctor visit to make sure she doesn't have strep throat. Cold, hard, bloodless statistics are all that really matter here, but news coverage of health care in other countries tends either to skimp on statistics or bury them in favor of the attention-grabbing anecdote.
   
   
3. Health care professionals in single-payer systems have reasons for drumming up "crisis" rhetoric. This is something that doesn't get noticed very often. For instance, in a national health care system like Canada's, every year the government has to set a budget for hospitals, limit how much doctors can charge, etc. It's a big debate, and to gain leverage, doctors of course love to talk about how there are shortages and people can't get necessary treatments and so on and so forth. Naturally, their complaints get picked up by the Canadian media and trickle on into American papers. But no one stops to think that these health care professionals are all self-interested actors who have their own reasons for playing up the system's faults.

There are probably other reasons. Nevertheless, it's important to realize that the press isn't merely the victim of a mass disinformation campaign against single-payer, wrought by the insurance and pharmaceutical industry. There's that, but there are also structural explanations for why coverage of foreign health care systems is so horrendous. And, as a result, few Americans have even the vaguest idea of what French health care, or Canadian health care, or Swedish health care, is really like.

Uh... so this New York Times story is all about how the Iraqi police are kicking ass and rounding up insurgents—well, that, or rounding up their dark and sinister kin: innocent-Iraqis-who-look-vaguely-insurgent-ish. So that's cool. But then a little ways down in the piece, we get this little tidbit: "[After meeting with the Iraqi president], the [Association of Muslim Scholars] released a statement from Mr. Dari saying it would not join the government in any capacity." Er, so the biggest Sunni umbrella group in Iraq has decided that cooperation is now off the table? How is that not big news? How is that not the biggest news? Al-Jazeerah has a bit more on this, but not much.

Also, in the Seattle Times today, analyst Ahmed Hashim—who knows his stuff, trust me—believes that the Association of Muslim Scholars may start using the Sunni insurgency as something of a military wing, so as to give themselves leverage in their own political negotiations. Much like the IRA and Sinn Fein work together in Northern Ireland. If true, I assume that's related to what we're seeing above, and I wonder if the AMS's political posturing at any given moment might give us an idea of how strong the insurgency really is. That is, Harith al-Dhari and the AMS might be more conciliatory when they think the insurgency is weak and they have less military leverage. This is all provided that AMS has a clear picture of such things, of course. And there's always bluffing. But you know...

Things I find vaguely amusing. Republicans love to argue that if you set tax rates too high, the rich will find ways to weasel out of paying up. (Why, George Bush himself deployed this little thesis on the campaign trail last fall.) But now those very same Republicans are shocked—shocked!—to discover that when they shift Medicaid costs onto states... those states find ways to weasel out of paying up. Odd, that.

Hm, reports from the field inform me that many people end up at this now-defunct site while trying to type in my own humble blog's URL. That fiend... "Plummer" isn't even the dude's real name! Also, it seems my doppelganger got into (and then got out of) the blogging game back when the genre was still in swaddling diapers: circa May of 2002. Too bad he never stayed with it, he could've been a contender!

Here's something I've been trying to write about in a forthcoming review of the new Galbraith biography, but it's not coming out quite right, so I'll put up a rough draft here in the hopes of clearing some things up. A while back Jon Henke of QandO and I had a brief exchange that started when he suggested that liberals just want to raise taxes willy-nilly. (Okay, he was more thoughtful than that, as he usually is, but bear with the slight strawman here.) In response, I said, "No, no. What happens is that first liberals think of the policies they want—like universal health care—and then figure out what level of taxation would be appropriate to fund them."

Now in a sense, that's exactly what today's liberal wonk-types do. It's more or less what John Kerry did on the campaign trail, even if his proposed tax increases weren't quite enough to fund all his proposed programs. But c'est la... The main point is that Democrats tend to have a decently-developed policy vision—in terms of the sort of programs they'd like to see enacted—as well as a budgetary vision. On the latter, some Democrats endorse the Clinton approach (or rather, the approach forced on Clinton) and call for a balanced budget and paying down the debt. Personally, I prefer the Max Sawicky approach—keeping the debt-to-GDP ratio stable and running moderate deficits. But eh, whatever floats your budgetary boat. Note too, that most of the current debate over the aging society is essentially a fiscal debate: i.e. "Do we cut benefits, or raise taxes, or borrow..."

But here's the problem. What Democrats don't have, quite notably, is an economic vision, and that seems to me a critical lapse. On this point, then, I think John Kenneth Galbraith can teach us quite a bit, since he was laying out grand economic strategies all the time.

To see what I mean by "grand vision," just look at the Republicans. If you read and believe Daniel Altman's Neoconomy, as I do, it's clear that key conservative economists have a basic idea of what they want the economy to do. They think that high economic growth and price stability are more important than anything else, that they should be pursued at any cost, and that the key to doing both is to boost savings and investment. The way hence is to cut taxes on wealth, slash corporate taxes, keep government small, and nominate Fed chairman who will focus more on reining in inflation than boosting employment. (The latter, mind you, follows from the theory of monetarism, which implies that the Fed can control inflation but not employment or output.) Hand in hand with this grand vision is the idea that markets work marvelously well, that growth is best achieved when corporations can do their business unfettered, and that Americans are rational actors who make the wisest of all possible economic decisions when left alone.

(P.S. It's important to note that Bush's "ownership society" is neatly overlaid on this macroeconomic vision, both as a political message and as a guide to appropriate policy-making. But the economic vision, to some extent, is logically prior.)

In practice, of course, the Republican "neoconomist" vision is an abject and utter failure for all sorts of reasons. Conservatives, as it happens, are in the grips of a supply-side theory claiming that cutting taxes won't produce massive deficits. But of course, that's false. Thus, the buckets of red ink Republicans do end up creating put upward pressure on interest rates by crowding out national savings. If conservatives had any success in shrinking government, perhaps they could fix this problem, but they don't. Hence, deficits. Moreover, most conservatives simply fail to understand that massive defense expenditures create big government. Duh, right, but for some reason they don't get it. So more deficits and spending. And finally, the modern Republican Party has been wholly subjugated by corporate America, which wants not free markets but patronage and protectionism. And what big business wants, it gets. Strike three for the grand vision.

Nevertheless, the vision is there. And Democrats don't quite have anything comparable. Basically, we tend to believe that all we have to do is enact our preferred policies (health care coverage, education spending, labor regulations, etc.), increase taxes to tame the resulting deficit, and everything will then take care of itself. Usually we end up pointing gleefully to the Clinton years, in which a balanced budget supposedly led to low interest rates and high productivity, and hence, super-charged growth. But of course we don't know that that's what happened. Lots of things may have been responsible for the boom in the '90s: Low oil prices, a strong dollar, a surge in R&D spending surrounding Y2K fears, certain ICT technologies coming into their own, the "peacetime" decline in defense spending. It was the perfect storm, in many ways. But tax increases in the future may not be so benign.

More to the point, the Clinton economy was very, very far from cozy and posh. Yes, full employment in the late '90s helped boost wages for all income groups, but inequality also rose to gag-worthy levels, and exuberant speculation in the stock market eventually led to a very severe bust and recession. Lest we forget. Meanwhile, levels of personal debt surged. The ever-churning "creative destruction" in the economy that led to 30-some million jobs destroyed (and another 30-some million jobs gained) was very painful for many families. And, taking our nationalist-colored glasses off, do remember that countries across the globe suffered one financial wedgie after another throughout the decade. The "Bretton Woods II" international currency system may or may not be catastrophically unstable, but it's certainly had a number of chest-bruising hiccups. [EDIT: Oops. As Brad Setser points out, BWII wasn't Clinton's creation.] Now maybe some people still think we ought to try to replicate the roaring Clinton years, maybe that's their idea of economic utopia, but even if that's possible, let's not pretend it didn't have real costs, or was some progressive paradise.

So an alternative macroeconomic vision, I think, is needed. Not because it will automatically help Democrats win elections, but because it will form the basis for a comprehensive worldview that will dictate what policies to pursue, what sort of budgets to set, and ultimately, what sort of political message to craft. Eventually, that will lead to winning elections, but more importantly—because, please remember, winning elections is easy and a relatively trivial problem in the grand scheme of things—it will help liberals make the country (and world) a better place.

So what kind of topics would this vision encompass? Well, first, we ought to recognize that there may well be important trade-offs here. There are probably no "free lunch" policies, and many liberal ideas may well conflict with the sort of growth and productivity growth we've seen in the past (or think we can expect in the future). For instance, Dean Baker and Jared Bernstein argue that we should pursue a policy of full employment in this country. Presumably, doing so may come at the cost of some growth, or stock market growth, or productivity growth. But that's exactly the sort of question one ought to ask. Is the tradeoff worth it? Is it worth reining in long-term growth a bit in order to compress inequality levels, or to allow workers to work fewer hours, or what have you? Are higher taxes worth the potential drag on the economy? Do we think job security is important, or is the basic churn of jobs the way to go, and the best response is to stay out of its way, offering basic safety nets—universal health care, wage insurance, mobile pensions—to cushion the shocks?

It goes on: Should the government spend large amounts of money to create jobs by, say, infrastructure spending? (Assuming, as is probably true, that infrastructure spending doesn't boost international competitiveness as much as sometimes claimed, and the main reason to pursue it is mainly job-creation.) And what about monetary policy? Do we think, as Baker and Bernstein do, that the NAIRU is basically bullshit, and there's no reason the Fed can't step on the gas until we get to full employment (say, under 4 percent)? Should we manage aggregate demand through other means—say, perhaps, a tax on excess profits—that don't affect employment as much? Should we prefer that the Fed sets long-term interest rates below the long-term real growth rate, so that we have a redistribution of wealth away from lenders and towards debtors? Should we tax speculation in the stock market? What role should corporations play in this nifty capitalist system we've got going on?

Now clearly I can't answer all of these questions. In all likelihood, I won't always like the answer to many of these questions. They're exceedingly difficult, this post is getting way too long, and I'm not an economist, though I have some, uh, "ideas". Luckily, though, the blogosphere is filling up quite nicely with incredibly smart liberal economists who are, like Galbraith once did, writing for a popular audience, and they can certainly play a role in developing this vision. Perhaps. Nevertheless, it seems awfully important. Maybe it's just me, but I'm not satisfied with saying, "Well, the structure of American capitalism is basically fine, so let's just add health care and more education spending and all will be cool." At the very least, that ought to be argued, not assumed.

Hm... looking over the posts below, they're all unseasonably long. As it happens, I've been out and about today, without much time to read or write, and when that's the case I sort of forego the editing process and just type out gobs and gobs very quickly. So time for shorter Plumer, a quick recap of various items written today:

3:03 PM - It's all fun and games in Afghanistan 'til someone loses a head.

5:25 PM - We're about to see some serious trade war action over the next few years. The only hope is that, uh, Japan will keep honoring its war criminals.

8:19 PM - Invade Sudan now.

8:34 PM - If businesses knew what was good for them they'd all wage self-destructive lobbying wars against each other. Oh, and Republicans really do have a coherent economic vision, you're just not allowed to see it.

9:00 PM - Students like cheap beer. That's pretty much it. And I'm amazed some people can tie one-handed bowlines behind their back.

Yeah, baby. If I could just maintain that sort of brevity day in, day out, this blog would really start going places!

Steven Roy Goodman's Washington Post column is mostly the usual blather about liberal universities, not worth reading really (even if there are a few good points trying to get out), but one paragraph struck me as truly odd:

As a [college-admissions] consultant, I feel the need to advise my clients [i.e., prospective college applicants] to cover all their political bases. Recently, I was advising an Eagle Scout who was justifiably proud of his accomplishment and wanted to highlight it on his college applications. But I worried that the national Boy Scouts' stand against homosexuals as scout leaders might somehow count against him in the admissions process at some schools. So I suggested that he get involved in an AIDS hotline to show his sensitivity to an issue often linked to the gay community.

Leave aside the rather ridiculous phenomenon of college-admissions consultants. (Jesus, what have we come to in this country?) This scenario doesn't even seem remotely plausible. As a former Boy Scout who joined mainly for the camping, booze, and vaguely homoerotic fireside chats, and as a scout who earned maybe one merit badge ever (basket-weaving, I think), I can say this: attaining Eagle Scout rank is damn impressive. Just look at the requirements! Admissions officers across the country know this. It's a great and well-earned way to pad your resume, period.

Now, okay, might there be admissions folks who would discriminate against an Eagle Scout because of the program's views on gays? Sure. But here's the thing: There's no way to know this. Maybe that's why this kid gets rejected. Or maybe he gets rejected because he's the sort of tool who hires college-admissions consultants. Who can tell! Unless we have evidence of an unreasonably large number of qualified Eagle Scouts who get rejected from top-flight universities—along with a large number of similarly-qualified Eagle Scouts who also work for AIDS hotlines and overwhelmingly get accepted—then pretending the admissions process is plagued by this sort of political bias is just projection.

And that's just it, most of these "liberal academy" columns are projection. People who are obsessed with politics—which tends to include the sort of people who end up writing columns for the Washington Post—naturally see politics everywhere. (Surprise, the author of this column is a "Washington-based educational consultant." Hmmm...) So these pundits gather a few anecdotes about university professors with outspoken views on the war on Iraq, and assume that's all there is to a university. But as anyone with eyes can see, that's horribly wrong. Most of college has nothing whatsoever to do with politics. Most college kids are fundamentally apathetic. There's more to college than one's views on who controls the means of production. In truth, the college "political controversies" Goodman mentions are mainly of interest to people who follow political controversies in general, and less of interest to people in college. That doesn't mean we can't have real debates over "what universities should be," but it helps to have a clear view of what's going on.

Sometimes it's fun to revisit recent history. Looking back at George W. Bush's 2001 tax-cut package, it was clear that this particular piece of legislation was an unabashedly ideological victory. What does that mean? This: The Bush wing of the Republican party, it should be clear, has a very distinct macroeconomic vision, that can be summarized roughly: cut taxes on savings to stimulate investment, pursue higher growth at all costs, maintain price stability, keep government small, etc. Sadly for Republicans, this vision usually runs into all sorts of real-world problems: Tax cuts create deficits; Republicans can't reduce the size of government; it seems to be lost on most conservatives that "lots of military spending" makes for "big government; it's doubtful that Greenspan can keep monetary policy fairly loose and maintain price stability given the current budget situation, and so on.

But probably the biggest obstacle to the "neoconomist" vision—as Daniel Altman calls it—are the hordes of corporations all demanding their due. As Matt Yglesias and others have pointed out, in practice Bush economic policy has been less about promoting free markets and more, much more, about special favors for the GOP's business allies. It's a tremendous distortion of the free market all around. And that makes it so startling that, back in 2001, the original Bush tax cut passed in nearly pure form: there were no serious handouts to corporations, no subsidies, no distortions of markets. For the pure "neoconomists" in the Bush administration—Glenn Hubbard, Larry Lindsay, Richard Clarida—this was quite the victory. So how did they hold their corporate allies at bay?

Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro's new book, Death By a Thousand Cuts, describes quite nicely the process leading up to passage of the 2001 tax cuts. Shortly after Bush's election, the Business Roundtable (BRT)—an association of CEOs from 150 of the largest corporations in the country—met at the White House to start clamoring for tax cuts and special favors for their own companies. But Bush and his aides held the BRT at bay, mainly because they knew that if the tax cut package became a free-for-all of competing corporate subsidies, it could very well get derailed in Congress. (In light of the 2004 package—a festival of pork!—this seems like a faulty assumption, but that's what they thought.) More importantly, if Bush's first major domestic initiative got sunk, the unpopular president would essentially be a lame duck only a few months into his first term.

Hence, the president "hinted, but never promised" that businesses might get a second tax cut if the economy actually did take a little downturn (which still wasn't known for sure at the time), and convinced the BRT that they should all have a strong interest in giving Bush's business-friendly presidency some early momentum. Plus, the individual CEO's obviously all had a lot to gain from the 2001 income tax cuts, even if their businesses wouldn't get any goodies or subsidies per se.

After that little chat, it was light breezes and tailwinds all the way. Dirk Van Dongen (right), president of the National Association of Wholesale Distributors (NAW), created the Tax Relief Coalition that maneuvered to bring various business organizations and K Street into the fold. Even the National Association of Manufacturers, which is one of the least free-market oriented Republican constituencies—favoring tax subsidies for writeoffs and R&D, and a semi-protectionist trade policy abroad—eventually swallowed its own corporate demands and lent its support to the tax package.

The importance of this business-coalition unity really can't be understated. For starters, it convinced House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas not to reshape the tax cut bill according to his own, usually mercurial, whims. On a broader level, the coalition was an unstoppable lobbying force. One of the interesting things about the Tax Relief Coalition (TRC) was that, as Graetz and Shapiro put it, "it was unambiguously the Bush White House's coalition." Unlike most business alliances, the TRC had no other goal than to support the White House, no matter what the White House actually decided on doing. Needless to say, the 2001 tax cut bill passed through Congress in May: it turned out smaller than the White House wanted, but still far bigger and far more radical than anyone really expected. And most amazingly of all, the tax bill was almost entirely free of the sorts of corporate handouts that dominated the 2002, 2003, and—oh dear lord—the 2004 tax cut bills. So yes, business unity obviously makes quite a difference.

Now the key question is whether or not the TRC will stick together long enough to get the Bush tax cuts—which expire over the next decade—made permanent. Since the 2001 tax cuts, subsequent tax packages have contained many more corporate goodies, and were much more favorable to the GOP's business allies, so we can expect a pretty fierce struggle to keep those provisions intact. (Note: Even though subsequent tax cuts were "business-friendly," they still to a large extent furthered the "neoconomist" vision described above.)

The problem here is that the current unsustainable budget deficits mean that Congress—even this Republican-dominated Congress—will in all likelihood have to pick and choose which of the cuts should be made permanent and which should be allowed to expire. When that happens, businesses may start competing with each other for their own favored cuts. The alliance between, say, the large corporation-dominated Business Round Table and the small-business NFIB may soon start to unravel. That lack of unity could make it much, much harder for the Bush administration to get further tax cuts passed, and could force the White House to rely far, far more on corporate handouts to draw support and loyalty from the business community.

Eric Reeves has the latest on genocide in Sudan, including evidence that the National Islamic Front in Khartoum hasn't been scared in the slightest by the recent ICC referral. Shocking, I know. Meanwhile, guest-blogger Joseph Britt thinks that Egypt should start taking the lead in intervening in Sudan. Um, ha. Good luck waiting for that. Just the other day Egypt's foreign minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, told reporters that Sudan's war criminals need not face trial in the Hague. Sounds like a lot of willpower there.

Britt also argues the U.S. would have a very hard time establishing a no-fly zone over Sudan, as many have recommended. To an extent, that's true: the Sudanese air force is really quite advanced, complete with Chinese F-7s and Russian gunships. Not to be trifled with. The intervention air force, meanwhile, would have to work out of French air bases in Chad, Djibouti, and probably an American aircraft carrier in the Red Sea. (Sen. Joe Biden recently claimed that NATO could do this immediately out of Chad, though he may be underestimating the difficulty here.) All in all, it could turn into a fairly fierce and difficult air battle, and in that case, would realistically involve an air attack on Sudan's airfields, control towers, etc. Combined with a more robust ground force securing humanitarian corridors and (if necessary) fighting the janjawid militias, we're essentially talking about an act of war here.

The U.S. doesn't do this because the administration is afraid of torpedoing the peace treaty between Khartoum and the Sudanese Christian South—a treaty that ended the country's other, 20-year, civil war, and a treaty largely popular with America's evangelical right. An intervention would also likely mean some American casualties in what would be essentially a purely humanitarian operation. There are also indications that Western intervention could push some of the janjawid commanders into the arms of al-Qaeda (See Reeves for this). Nevertheless, the price of not intervening is going to be very, very high—hundreds of thousands more Darfuris raped, murdered, dislocated, starving to death, and so on. It's too bad we don't have the sort of leaders that can make these tough choices; read this Condoleeza Rice interview for a some truly stomach-churning evasive action on the Sudan question.

Last week I outlined what was basically a humanitarian argument against CAFTA, the new and still-pending free trade agreement with Central America. The fact that the agreement passes up an opportunity to raise labor standards in Central America—or at least to give native workers that opportunity, if they so choose—is terrible, and wholly unnecessary. But there's also a strategic argument against CAFTA, part of a larger strategic argument against regional "free trade areas" in general—namely, that these things are aiding a resurgence in global mercantilism.

Free trade areas, of course, promote free trade and lower tariffs within the bloc. But they also tend to compete with each other, becoming more protectionist against rival blocs. Not via tariffs, of course, but through internally consistent rules, regulations and subsidies. We're already starting to see this in the EU—it's massive farm subsidies, it's regulation of biotechnology, trying to hamper the U.S. by exporting its regulations, etc.

Meanwhile, East Asian countries, led by China, are talking about creating their own regional trading bloc. Finance ministers abroad are understandably quite worried that an expansion of NAFTA will give Latin American countries preferential access to U.S. markets. Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir has proposed the East Asian Economic Caucus to counter the threat from opposing trade blocs, and the "ASEAN plus three" (i.e. plus China, Japan, South Korea) framework is slowly gaining acceptance. Now obviously, this plan might well be scuttled by Japan's emerging hawkishness and nationalist rhetoric, along with growing tensions between Japan and both China and South Korea. Nevertheless, key former ministers, like Kazuo Ogura, who is currently president of the Japan Foundation, have called for a "united Asia" that can check America. If Japan feels that it is being excluded from markets in both Europe and the Americas, it could very conceivably embrace the Chinese/ASEAN vision of a regional Asian trading bloc.

Looking south of the border, leftist governments in South America have fairly clearly been drifting towards inter-continental cooperation at the expense of merging with the United States under an expanded NAFTA framework. It wouldn't be entirely surprising to see MERCOSUR emerge as a counterweight to the free trade area up north.

In itself, the rise of trade regionalism doesn't seem like such a bad thing, although it certainly appears that the United States would enjoy worse terms of trade than it does now. Looking at the statistics, yes, it's true that neighbors Canada and Mexico are our largest trading partners (taking in about 30 percent of all exports), but about half of all U.S. exports still go to Europe and East Asia. The rise of "blocs" in both regions would not bode well at all. Further down the road, the rise of competing trade and economic blocs could well lead to military rivalries, and threaten world peace or stability.

Is there a way out of this mercantilist "bloc" race? I have no idea. Some days it seems inevitable, though the Japanese bull in the, uh, China shop seems to be sinking any hopes of an integrated East Asian trade area. The alternative, it seems to me, would be for the U.S. to push for a genuinely global reduction of tariffs via the WTO. Of course, that re-raises the issue posed at the beginning of this post: are labor standards, environmental protections, sensible patent agreements, etc. best achieved through the WTO, or through regional and bilateral agreements? The other question is whether regional trade agreements are valuable enough as a foreign policy tool—as they might be in the Middle East—to overcome any larger and somewhat abstract worries about the rise of mercantilism. I don't know. But they're questions worth asking.

Never thought I'd say this about any Weekly Standard article, but last week's cover story on Afghanistan, by Thomas Donnelly and Vance Serchuk, is easily the best reporting I've read on the subject. It's not at all easy to summarize, so read it through. One point it brings up that I certainly haven't quite grasped is that sometime in early 2003 the United States shifted from a strict counterterrorism campaign in Afghanistan to a broader counterinsurgency project that dovetails a bit more neatly with nation-building. There are still a lot—a lot—of hurdles to clear, and Donnelly is very emphatic about this, but the general project seems more promising than it once did.

A few quibbles though. Donnelly seems to think that many of the warlords are in the process of disarming so as to prepare for the upcoming parliamentary elections (in which candidates are not allowed to have "military or quasi-military aims and organizations.") But other reports have indicated that the warlords will largely pretend to disarm—it's pretty easy to fork over a few thousand AK-47s and still keep the bulk of your arsenal—and then use parliamentary victory to legitimize their rule. The key, I guess, is how well they can hide it. On another ominous note, too, Syeed Saleem Shahzad reports in the Asia Times today that the Taliban insurgents may have been intentionally laying low over the past few months, getting ready to kick start an Iraqi-style insurgency, conceived after several Taliban commanders went to Iraq to train with Ansar al-Islam.

So we'll see. Also… one of these days some enterprising PhD student somewhere will compare the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and wonder why the latter went so much more smoothly (relatively). My own pet theory is the power of the loya jirgas, where a truly broad swath of Afghan society was allowed to meet, discuss, and engage in all sorts of political horse-trading long before a new government was elected. (The pre-election Iraqi National Conference was a farce by comparison.) The consensus surrounding Karzai's presidency was another convenient factor. And Donnelly brings up a third possibility: Afghanis are exhausted after decades of civil war and anarchy. Now they just want peace. Many Iraqis, by contrast, seem to still have a good deal of fight left in them.

The Wall Street Journal goes front-page with a report on how many of the classic comic strips are "updating" themselves for the 21st century. Here, for instance—and this isn't a joke—is the new, bolder, "Family Circus":



Now that's creepy. Also, speaking as a former kid who often, often, often invented games like this for the neighborhood rat pack to play, I can attest: Marines vs. Insurgents wouldn't be fun at all. The insurgents, remember, are supposed to blend in with the regular population, that's the point, and maybe they'd throw some mudballs every now and again and beat up that little redheaded kid (strike the enemy where they are weak!). But in real life, we all know the game wouldn't unfold like that, because it's not exciting. Instead the FC kids will just run around chasing each other. Or have a mud battle. Or kick each other in the shins. But then they're clearly playing either "Cops and Robbers" or "Cowboys and Indians" or some other timeless classic. Whatever, it's a pedantic point, sure, but I needed something to say instead of "Family Circus sucks!"

Oh, and Family Circus sucks. And the strip above is still creeping me out. However, I ought to stick up for "Garfield," which deserves barely half of the disturbing amount of abuse I've seen heaped upon it by friends and colleagues. A year ago, Chris Suellentrop explained the genius behind Garfield's mediocrity, and I think he nailed it.

So I was just reading Nathan Newman's attack on the filibuster, scrolling, scrolling, nodding, thinking, "Damn this guy's good," but then came to this passage and jerked awake:

Yes, the absence of the filibuster might allow the GOP to pass noxious laws that would have been filibustered by Democrats. But if the GOP actually had a free hand to vote their whole agenda, their coalition would blow up. In fact, the GOP leadership depends on the filibuster and the courts to block their cultural agenda, a point that Thomas Frank outlined in his book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, since conservative leaders depend on manipulating a sense of cultural powerless by supporters to keep them on the political reservation.

Well, in a sense this is true. If Republicans ever passed, say, a nation-wide abortion ban they'd start losing elections real quick. (And no, you can't believe the polls here—lots of ordinary people say they're for restricting abortion, but would get quite, quite pissed if it actually affected them.) If they ever criminalized gay sex, or abolished Social Security, bye-bye majority! You can find the rest of the "core" GOP agenda here, and yes, it's all a massive election-loser.

But that's only one way of looking at it. The seamy underbelly here is that much of the GOP agenda is pretty sharply focused on dismantling the Democratic coalition. Get tort "reform" passed so that the trial lawyer donor base dries up. Erode labor laws so that unions are diminished as a political force—something Grover Norquist has openly bragged about trying to do. Privatize schools and decimate the teachers' unions. Close the immigration spigots so that you don't have a bunch of new Hispanic Democrats entering the country. And let's not get into the varieties of gerrymandering experience. So rephrase Nathan's sentence above: "If the GOP actually had a free hand to vote their whole agenda, they would cripple the Democratic coalition."

The dichotomy between "progressive" and "conservative" agendas may be the wrong one to focus on here. It's true that simple majoritarian rule would make it much easier to pass large, expansive progressive programs, and it's true that the filibuster is far more useful to conservatives. Also, thanks to the bizarre and undemocratic structure of the Senate, progressives simply won't enjoy a supermajority anytime soon, not so long as they remain less popular in the tiny statelets that wield disproportionate influence in the upper house. So that's the progressive case against the filibuster.

On the other hand, though, simple majoritarian rule stacks the decks in favor of whichever party aims simply to maintain and perpetuate its own power, just for the hell of it. This, alas, is exactly what the modern Republican party is playing at these days. It could also, some day, describe the Democratic party, which would be no less dangerous and anti-progressive. Sadly, the power of incumbency is ridiculously strong here in America, and it's hard to vote out a party that's metastasized into a corrupt, power-hungry cancer. So the Senate, absent a filibuster, could well turn into what the House has become, structurally, and probably will be for the foreseeable future -- namely, a place where absolutely power corrupts absolutely. Nothing about the Democratic party makes it immune from this corruption, quite frankly. Hence, I think, the rationale behind Mark Schmitt's "veil of ignorance" argument.

But all that said, on the long view I think Nathan's more or less correct when he says: "I don't think conservatives have majority support for their policies and in a fair and democratic fight, progressives would win most policy fights and win elections." That's been the experience of nearly every other developed country on earth, after all, so there's good reason to think he's onto something.

UPDATE: Wow, dyslexia strikes again. Nathan was obviously attacking, not defending the filibuster, as I wrote in the original post. Oy...

David Broder's column today is by turns dull, dumb, and disingenuous. Best of all, I like how he met Dean Baker of CEPR, listened to Baker rebut all of the stale and tired arguments about Social Security being in a crisis, and then says, "But I'm not convinced, because of [X, Y, Z stale and tired arguments about Social Security being in a crisis.]" Dude, retire already, please.

But anyway, Broder then throws out the "safe" pundit argument these days—that we should fix health care before Social Security. Long, long ago I peddled a very similar argument. It goes like this: Medicare "Part B" premiums are increasing much faster than wages or inflation, and hence gobbling up more and more of those Social Security checks with each passing month. If we were to cut Social Security benefits now in order to bring the program into balance, without fixing Medicare, then the real value of the Social Security safety net will erode over time. Simple math. Conversely, if we knew how to control Medicare costs, Social Security would be safe, and we could then determine how best to cut benefits in the future without doing real harm to seniors.

But the more I think about it, the more that's sort of wrong. Sure, if we were to just slash health benefits willy-nilly, we could "control" health costs very firmly, and then we'd know exactly how much Medicare premiums of the future would eat into Social Security checks. But realistically, health care reform just doesn't work that way. The clever ideas, like premium support for Medicare, are more or less a "wait and see" endeavor. We do things that we think will control health care costs now, and then see if it pans out. But odds are we can't predict what health care costs will do, or what effect these changes will have. It's never a matter of saying "Do X reform and we'll reduce the long-term Medicare deficit by Y percent," as it is with Social Security. Health care costs are truly impossible to foresee, even over the very short term.

Anyway, no "knockout" argument here, just saying that the health care debate will be on weirdly confused grounds if we keep on focusing excessively on the numbers surrounding future deficits for health care spending. We can do smart things that in theory might control future costs—get people exercising more, or import more foreign doctors—but who knows how it will all pan out. In other words, there's no chance that we're going to "fix" the long-term deficits right this minute, unless we implement truly draconian benefit cuts. So it helps to be a little flexible on the subject.

Okay, now one extra point that somewhat goes against what I said above. I'm usually sympathetic with the "wait and see" argument on Social Security (and, to some extent, Medicare), on the grounds that it's ludicrous to try to take drastic action on long-term deficits today when a) projections into the future are wholly uncertain, and b) it's silly to try to bind Congresses of the future. Nevertheless, there's one other factor here. In the future, we can say with some certainty that seniors will grow as a percent of the total population, and thus wield vastly more political power. That's something to keep in mind. It may be politically easier to cut benefits today than it will be, say, 30 or 40 or 50 years hence. Indeed, part of me would rather that we hacked benefits today and then raised them in the future—which will be easy because seniors of the future will be powerful—than try to do the reverse. Clever, huh? Still, there's a political reality at play, and obviously this isn't the sort of thing we're going to discuss today, not so long as the president insists on stealing payroll taxes from the American worker and questioning the full faith and credit of the United States government.

Okay. Usually I think I'm fairly clear when I write, but then, almost all unclear writers think that. So, since I've heard rumors that my earlier post on trade was unclear, I tried to revise it a bit. I still think the two big points are basically good ones. First, that trade just isn't that big of a deal, and both its downsides and benefits tend to be vastly overrated. So the Democratic infighting over trade doesn't need to be so bitter.

The second point is also important: when many lefties call for higher standards, they're not necessarily arguing in "bad faith". As I like to note, most union workers are employed in high-skill export industries—so there's a genuine interest in promoting trade. The difference between fair trade and protectionism is real and important. Thinking about it more, though, I may have overstated the case in my original post: certainly there are some misguided protectionists who think a) the downsides to free trade are massive, and b) therefore it should be opposed at every turn. And leaders like Howard Dean are badly, badly confused on this issue. But Howard Dean's usually confused! So I think it's perfectly realistic to try to forge a working dialogue with these people. In part, this will take some better faith effort from free traders as well, who do tend to bash protectionists for opposing trade treaties but then stay curiously silent when, say, worker retraining programs get slashed. Distrust on both sides seems to be a bigger issue here than the impossibility of staking out a compromise position.

Anyway, read the original, updated post for these arguments at greater length, and I'll try to have more later.

If you, or anyone you know, is interested in breaking into journalism, and trying to get a good leg up, send me an email. Whoa, did I just write that? Apparently my true calling is, uh, doing late-night personal injury commercials. Splendid. But seriously, we're hiring web interns here at Mother Jones for the summer, and it's a pretty decent opportunity to break into the writing/editing universe. Plus, it's paid, at least enough to pay the rent, and San Francisco's fan-fucking-tastic. Details here, and obviously I can't promise you'll get hired, but send me an email anyway if interested. Or tell a friend. Or link to this post and tell your own blog readers. Or whatever.

Oh, right: E-mail's over on the right sidebar, in case that wasn't clear.

It sucks to always be posting bad news out of Iraq. More to the point, it sucks to post random bad news that may or may not mean anything. For instance, that big insurgent offensive against Abu Ghraib? Who knows what it means. Maybe Zarqawi really is mastering some dangerous new tactics. Or maybe he's desperate for attention. I have no idea.

But this Los Angeles Times story noting that provincial governments around the country are steeped in chaos, well, that really does seem telling. The central Baghdad government, also note, still refuses to devolve power, which could create strong separatist backlashes in some provinces, especially down in the conservative south. And this business down in an-Najaf sounds horrendous: the security forces under the previous U.S.-appointed Gov. Adnan Zurfi, who was recently voted out of power in favor of a SCIRI government, are now attacking local police stations. What the fuck? Again, more signs that the most likely fate for Iraq, sadly, is going to be Afghanistan-style warlordism. The insurgency will dampen down somewhat, and there won't be a civil war, but roving militias and criminal gangs will hold sway, the rule of the RPG will prevail, and most people's lives will be miserable-to-barely-tolerable. Especially women. I hope I'm wrong, but the tea leaves are speaking in big block-cap letters here.

The other day Jane Galt wrote on how the nation is losing the battle of the bulge. Obesity is widespread, and getting, um, wider, and our public health programs and well-meaning exhortations to diet and slim down aren't working. The solution, Jane says, it to shame these people into slimming down, to create the sort of strong social stigma that now surrounds smoking.

Well, perhaps she was kidding, but even so, it won't work. The good thing about creating a collective public frown towards smokers is that smokers can always get away from it. Smoking, after all, is just something people do, and they can always stop temporarily when in the company of carpers and tsk-tskers. Meanwhile, things like banning smoking in bars are relatively low-cost. (I've never understood smokers who complain about this. Yes, it's a pain in the ass to go outside, especially in the winter. But once you're out there, it's a prime opportunity to meet people you wouldn't otherwise meet inside the bar. Girls even! Provided there are girls who smoke. Which there invariably are.)

Being obese, alas, isn't so easy to hide, and for many people it unfortunately ends up becoming something they are, part of their identity, largely due to the already-strong stigma against fat people. Now you might say, "Eh, who cares? They should take better care of themselves, and if shaming them gets results, then shame away!" Nevertheless, there are real costs to making people feel bad about themselves—undue stress and anxiety, for one, which has its own attendant health problems.

That said, something obviously needs to be done about obesity. Libertarians may think that being fat is mostly (not always, but mostly) a choice, and find it offensive that the government would try to control people's lifestyles. But obesity leads to all sorts of health problems, and ends up taking money out of everyone's pockets—the costs run to from $70 to $100 billion a year, and even without public health care, all our premiums would go up thanks to those who are obese. But Jane's right: the conventional public health programs don't work. Getting the president to jog on TV and letting everyone else know how much fun jogging is doesn't work. We've tried it for years. Vladimir Putin's tried it. Nor will widespread dieting or prescribed exercise work: According to the NIH, people who follow strict low-calorie diets do lower their weight, but then gain it back afterwards.

No, the right thing to do is to restructure the whole weight-gaining environment in America. Use taxes and zoning to create economic incentives away from junk food. Regulate the shit out of food advertising. Ban vending machines from schools. Offer, as Phillip Longman once proposed, subsidies for fruits and vegetables. More PE in school. Programs targeted at the poor, who tend to suffer from higher levels of obesity. Heck, something simple like requiring that all elevators have signs letting people know that taking the stairs is better for the heart. One Philadelphia study found that this tripled the number of stair-users. That's six pounds a year, vanquished! It's quite easy. But the government quite obviously needs to focus on holistic environmental factors that affect everyone, rather than simply targeting obese people and trying to get them to change their lifestyle. We could all use healthier lifestyles, I certainly could. No need to discriminate by weight.

Then there's the drug issue. The New York Times reported the other day that companies were vying to cash in on the next wave of weight-loss drugs. Maybe that will work. But it's not optimal, and perhaps destructive. For one, every penny spent researching the genetic basis for obesity is one less penny researching the environmental bases. And the latter should be emphasized. Drugs will cost a lot, and raise health care premiums. Period. Meanwhile, exercise and proper nutrition offer a whole host of benefits, some of which can't be gained via a weight-loss drug. The reduction in stress, for instance. Indeed, I fear that once safe weight-loss drugs become in vogue, we'll lose all motivation to attack the environmental factors behind obesity and sedentary lifestyles, which is where the real progress ought to be made.

Wow, just wow. So about, let's say, three hours ago, your faithful correspondent got mixed up in a little violence and blood. To recap: I was tromping around in our hallway, trying to explain the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions to my housemate Paloma—'twas for her LSATs, you see—and ended up stepping on her poor little pet rat Noelle. Luckily, I only stepped on her tail. Quite unluckily, I stepped rather hard, the rat tried to yank away, and in the confusion managed to strip off most of her tail's outer skin. It came "ungloved," as the doctor put it, leaving only bone, ligaments, and gore. Puddles of gore. Small rat, small tail, but lots and lots of gore!

Well we rushed Noelle to the nearest 24-hour pet emergency clinic, where they're currently gassing the little dear and then amputating the tail. It'll be anti-biotics and painkillers for the poor thing all next week! Needless to say, my face was a bit blanched and I was feeling queasy—pet blood spattering our hallway and all tends to do that. Anyway, good to know: rat surgery is hideously expensive, and we could've bought fifty new rats for the price of this operation. (Or... a quick chop of the kitchen knife would've cost nothing.) So look, like Tyler Cowen, I'm all in favor of animal welfare, it sounds dapper, but not until Congress demonstrates some courage and reins in pet care premiums.

Also, after leaving the ER I stopped by a friend's house in the Inner Sunset and got to see parts of my first-ever Bollywood movie: Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham. Amazing! Much better times had by all. Maybe others are familiar with the Bollywood phenomenon, but for those who aren't (I wasn't), they're all the rage in India—thousands of youths will cram a cinema for the latest three-hour release, just to see what the latest fashions, the latest beats, the latest dance moves are. Perhaps I even picked up a few of my own. And the lacy shawl, I take it, is the latest craze among young Brahmin men, for those wondering.

Ahem, it's time to get off my little neoliberal fence and join the far left on a trade issue. Really, though, this stuff is important. Nathan Newman has a post noting the growing opposition to CAFTA—the Central American Free Trade Deal—and I, for one, am hopping aboard. Pile on all the platitudes you want about the benefits of free trade and comparative advantage and blah and blah, but CAFTA just plain sucks. The brunt of the matter is that the agreement would allow Central American countries to maintain (or even weaken!) their current labor standards—the exact same standards, mind you, that the State Department has already criticized for being nigh inhuman.

At any rate, it's time to repeat my basic and somewhat contrarian line on trade issues: This stuff really just isn't all that important on a macroeconomic level. Indeed, rifle through the statistics if you please, but it's extremely hard to find clear benefits or downsides to free trade; usually the effects are swamped by other factors. (Can anyone tell me what effects NAFTA has had on U.S. labor markets, prices, or wages in the late '90s? No, not really.) Certainly as far as the U.S. is concerned, I tend to agree with economists like Richard Freeman that immigration has far bigger economic effects, for fairly intuitive reasons (e.g. immigrants compete with workers in all sectors, not just tradable ones). Abroad, meanwhile, the important economic factors tend to be immigration, technology transfers, and (usually destructively) capital flows. Historically, the current rank of developed nations (even, no, especially Britain) mostly used protectionism to get a leg up, and various measures of openness are weakly related to growth. Or just listen to someone who's run the regressions, like Robert Feenstra: "[T]he hard evidence supporting such gains from trade, either in a dynamic or static sense, is suprisingly thin." (pdf)

So trade. Who gives a crap? Well, that's not exactly true. One thing we have legitimately seen throughout the latter half of the century is that increased trade usually leads to an increase in labor standards in a given country. Multinationals entering developing countries, after all, usually offer better wages and labor rights than what preceded them. Likewise, David Kucera of the International Labor Organization (ILO) has found that higher rates of unionization usually accompany higher investment inflows. And so on. Nevertheless, even ardent free-traders like Jagdish Bhagwati admit that there needs to be some sort of extant pressure on companies and developing countries to improve labor standards. Improvement can happen, and it usually does happen alongside expansions of free trade, but there needs to be pressure from either activists abroad or organizing native workers or what have you. CAFTA, as we can see, removes some of that pressure from Central American countries in question. In fact, it allows a good deal of backsliding, which obviously makes a huge difference to the individual workers being chained to their sewing machines, for instance.

Now the pro-CAFTA argument here, much-loved by free-traders, would be that developing countries need crappy labor laws, because if they had higher standards, all of the sudden they wouldn't be able to compete with countries that repress their workers, like China. But that argument has always sounded dubious to me. Very, very dubious. Again, citing David Kucera, there's no evidence that multinationals or foreign investors favor countries with lower labor standards.

And, at any rate, who are we kidding with this "competitive disadvantage" line? Nowadays, please remember, the world enjoys free-floating exchange rates in the currency market. So say Guatemala wants better rights for its workers, better health and safety regulations, less child labor, etc. than China. Fine. Initially, firms in Guatemala will have higher costs and be at a disadvantage to firms in China. But then—like magic!—the Guatemalan peso declines relative to the remnibi, and the costs shift onto… ordinary Guatemalan workers, in the form of more expensive imports. In other words, if Guatemalan citizens want higher standards for themselves, they can choose to do so and pay for it out of their own pockets. There's no fear that multinationals will flee the country and leave everyone destitute. So the solution is to just give Guatemalans the right to unionize, and speak out in the workplace, and let them choose for themselves. CAFTA wouldn't allow that—indeed, it allows employers to "harass, intimidate, fire and blacklist workers who try to organize unions." Ergo, it's no good, and ought to be renegotiated.

So that's the view on trade from my little corner of blogland, and I'm sticking with it. By the way, I've heard lots of liberals claim that the real split in the Democratic party is between free-traders and protectionists. Perhaps, though I think the view I outlined above is a perfectly sound compromise position that would appeal to most liberals. That is: Lower barriers, sure, but make sure workers can organize and speak out in the workplace. In fact, I think the main reason the "divide" seems so acrimonious is that "free-traders" imagine that whenever labor unions or other activists call for higher labor standards or environmental protections, it's really just a Trojan Horse for outright heavy tariff action. In other words, that they're arguing "in bad faith". But seriously, why would protectionists bother with the Trojan Horse? When unions want real tariffs, they usually just ask for real tariffs, as steelworkers did in 2002. But most union workers don't even work in low-wage import industries—I certainly don't—so you may as well believe us when we say we're sincere about finding a workable middle ground.

Obviously I'm not going to endorse everything the Heritage Foundation writes about the Social Security Trust Fund. All the same, they've got an actual picture of the thing that's worth checking out. It's just a couple of white, locked filing cabinets stored in someone's office. Kind of funny.

By the by, I still wish some economist would release a study showing what a "default" on the Trust Fund would mean in terms of cold hard benefit cuts. By which I mean, how much would Congress need to slash benefits in 2021 or whenever so as not to have to pay back the Trust Fund bonds. Dean Baker has showed (pdf) what it would all mean in terms of transferring wealth from poor to rich, but class warfare isn't going to do liberals much good here. Basically, no one cares. So I want charts and graphs revealing the raw, brutal pain of it all. What age groups get burned? How big would the reductions need to be? Who gets left out on the street? Who eats garbage? Who moves in to the top bunk in little Timmy's room? That sort of thing.

Reading over the various DeLay scandals being exposed today, I don't have much to add except this: "God, the House of Representatives is a fucked up way of doing things!" The whole thing is set up so that the brightest and best qualified people are, from the get-go, excluded from running. Instead, we have a place filled with DeLays.

For instance, I could almost certainly never be elected to the House. But why not? After all, I'm reasonably well-educated, know a bit about politics, care about people, am decently outgoing, etc. etc. Nonetheless, facts are facts: I was born in upstate New York, moved to Tokyo when I was three, came back to attend college in backwoods New Hampshire for four years, and have since bounced around between Boston and San Francisco, and will probably bounce around some more. Where's my local constituency? Oh, that's right, I have none. No district would take me; no district would take more than three seconds before running me out of town as an upscale carpetbagger. And yet, many of the country's best and brightest have done what I've done—went off to far, far away to get educated, bounced around many a locale to find jobs, and have no "local roots." You don't see many academics, or think tank stars, or intellectuals in the House. Why? Because they're all a bunch of roving wild-eyed leftists? No.

So how can any of these folks get into politics? They could run for the Senate, but jobs are pretty limited, and even the Senate is somewhat bound by location, and you mostly have to have a lot of money, which isn't necessarily an indication of brains and talent. As a result, the best and brightest have all become political staffers, while the actual leaders of our country are picked from a pool of well-meaning but basically lesser-qualified people who happen to have nifty local connections. (The statistic about 60 percent of Congress not owning a passport is no accident!) So the political "handlers" have become political "minders," and the politicians mainly become, well, faces. Obviously there are exceptions to the rule, and certainly Congresspeople aren't stupid, but too many are.

It's a real problem, I think. My preferred solution would be to tack on 100 extra "at-large" seats to the House, which would be elected via proportional representation. Then intellectuals and visionaries and policy technocrats or whatever else you could think of could all run for office.

If this sounds elitist, it is. Sorry! Nevertheless, it's not as if the current House is a marvelous little throng of working-class populism. Meanwhile, there's another far more serious problem with the single-voter district structure of the House that has nothing at all to do with elitism. Namely, minorities who are geographically dispersed have no way of pooling their votes together to elect a representative. Gay Americans, for instance, can't combine their collective power all across the country, ala Captain Planet, and select someone to carry water for them. By rights, this bloc should be able to elect some 7-10 percent of Congress if they so chose. But obviously, under the current system, they can't. Nor can Hispanics, or African-Americans, or other dispersed minorities. So 100 extra "at-large" seats is what we need, at minimum.

UPDATE: Also, to be clear, since the above sounds like a bit of unudue whining, I'm not thinking about running for Congress, ever. (Believe me, I'd have no chance, even with "at-large" seats.) And I agree, there's a time and place for politicians who rise through the ranks by working closely with their local communities, connecting with the neighbors and the mailman and the guy who runs FamilyMart and whatnot. It's beautiful. In practice, though, "building local contacts" usually means "building business contacts" which tends to degenerate into "lining up favors redeemable in pork." The main point is that there's no prima facie reason why folks who travel around a lot or go off to work abroad or in the big city or in D.C. or whatnot can't run for Congress. But in practice, many of these folks can't, it seems. Actually, no, that was the secondary point. The main point's the one about minorities. But still.

So for a long time I've had a dilemma. As most readers know, I don't usually do short posts; no block quotes with "heh" or "indeed" or even a more genial "ayup." No explanation for this, really, it's just habit. Nevertheless, I do come across a good number of stories, papers, studies, essays, etc. that are worth reading, linking, and sharing, and maybe even adding a quick add-on sentence or quip.

To that end, I've now added a "mini-blog" over on the right-hand sidebar. Well, I stole the idea from nadezhda and praktike, but that's okay. So you can get a running feed of lots of nifty links and things, updated frequently throughout the day. And, uh, my mini-comments will become less dumb ("Wow, cool essay!") as time goes on and I get into the habit of doing this. Cheers.

The New Republic critic James Wood once wrote, "Reading Bellow is a special way of being alive; his prose is germinal." That seems exactly right, and it's sad to hear that Saul Bellow passed away yesterday—sadder, for me at least, than hearing about the death of the pope or Terry Schiavo or anyone else of late. So rest in peace. I'm not planning on offering wall-to-wall coverage here, but the New York Times obituary is very good.

UPDATE: Well, okay, just one short passage from Bellow's Herzog, which was probably the first "serious" novel I ever read. Maybe not, but it might as well be:

At the corner [Moses Herzog] paused to watch the work of the wrecking crew. The great metal ball swung at the walls, passed easily through brick, and entered the rooms, the lazy weight browsing on kitchens and parlors. Everything it touched wavered and burst, spilled down. There rose a white tranquil cloud of plaster dust. The afternoon was ending, and in the widening area of demolition was a fire, fed by the wreckage.

Moses heard the air, softly pulled toward the flames, felt the heat. The workmen, heaping the bonfire with wood, threw strips of molding like javelins. Paint and varnish smoked like incense. The old flooring burned gratefully--the funeral of exhausted objects. Scaffolds walled with pink, white, green doors quivered as the six-wheeled trucks carried off fallen brick. The sun, now leaving for New Jersey and the west, was surrounded by a dazzling broth of atmospheric gases.

Fantastic! That passage, by the way, is taken from the Wood essay mentioned above, which I found here.

Via praktike, Marina Ottaway has a few things to say about the UN's new Arab Human Development Report:

Despite its hostility to U.S. policy, the report admits that pressure from the outside, particularly from Washington, may help the cause of political change in the Middle East. The authors do not believe that the United States shares the Arab goal of a true political, cultural and economic renaissance leading to human development in its fullest meaning -- epanouissement is the curious term used in the report. They believe that the Bush administration has narrow goals: getting rid of particularly offensive and hostile regimes and cajoling old authoritarian allies such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia to introduce some reforms to make themselves more presentable. But even such limited goals, the authors grudgingly admit, could help the process of change in the Middle East

It is important that the Bush administration recognize this reluctant admission that something good could come from U.S. policy as a real change on the part of Arab reformers, and that it not jeopardize chances for cooperation by attacking the report and punishing the U.N. Development Program for allowing its publication. The United States has been able to get rid of Saddam Hussein on its own, and it may be able to intimidate Syria to withdraw from Lebanon. But to build democracy, it must work with Arab reformers, even if they remain hostile and suspicious. Political reform pushed by Washington is second best for these Arab reformers; working with Arab reformers who criticize the United States as harshly as their own government is second best for the Bush administration. It is probably as good as it is going to get for both sides in the foreseeable future.

Hm, there's a lot to agree with here—the U.S. should hear Arab complaints, undoubtedly—but much to quibble over, especially that dour last sentence. My own view is that there's a lot the United States can do, and should be doing, to push for reform in the Middle East.

As Ottaway says, though, it's obvious that American credibility is a major problem. The correct way to resolve this, I think, is to push actively and visibly for democratic reform especially when it works against our other interests in the region. For instance, it's ludicrous to me that any U.S. policymaker would privilege Arab peace treaties with Israel over Arab democratic reform. Nevertheless, that's the reality, and we might as well acknowledge it. But given that it's the reality, there's still a lot of leeway here. Egypt's Husni Mubarak, for example, has his own reasons for pursuing peace between Israel and Palestine; and it defies belief that he would scuttle these plans merely to tweak us for, say, pushing for open and fair presidential elections later this year. So we really ought to do that, forcefully. There's a real perception in the region that we're soft on Mubarak because he's our ally on Israel, and the U.S. ought to run against that type at every turn, especially where and when it can.

The important thing to note here—and I'm hardly the first one to point this out—is that establishing our credibility on this front really has nothing to do with better public diplomacy, or winning "hearts and minds," or any of that gooey PR stuff we're trying to roll out in full blast. (And, according to the GAO today, having a hell of a time coordinating, but I digress.) The two ought to be thought of as separate things. "Sister Souljah" is a fun game in American politics (especially when you get to execute the weak and powerless!), but building credibility in the Arab world is a far, far more serious matter.

Meanwhile, yes, it's very hard for the U.S. to work with liberal reformers in the Middle East because of the specter of being an "American stooge." But that's okay. Most American assistance to liberal reformers will come indirectly, in the form of pressure on friendly Arab governments to undertake certain reforms that, in the long term, strengthen moderates at the expense of, say, radical Islamists—the short list here includes legalization of political parties, expansion of civic education, fewer restrictions on the media, etc.

But on the other hand, the U.S. has a fairly free hand to work directly with Islamist groups, like certain branches of the Muslim Brotherhood, since they can much less plausibly be called American stooges. Right now many Islamist groups in the region, rightly or wrongly, believe they've been shunned by Washington, but there's no reason why Condoleeza Rice can't just promise loud and clear to establish contacts with those Islamic groups that commit to certain democratic principles (the rule of law, elections, independent judiciary, etc. etc. etc.). That's not too high a bar to set, I think, and the upside is that it could fence in those Islamist groups down the road if they ever do come to power. Perhaps it wouldn't work. But perhaps it would. The White House should try. And if they don't, or refuse to, then the party of Pelosi and Reid ought to push for this stuff every single day.

Go check out Google Maps today. Type in an address in the United States. Click on the "satellite" button in the upper right hand corner. Enjoy!

The DLC has some, uh, "advice" for their fellow Democrats:

In an attack on the party's dominant left wing, anti-war base, and a warning for new Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean "to do no harm," the centrist-leaning Democratic Leadership Council said it is "a delusion to think that if we just turned out our voters, we could win national elections."

Instead, the DLC called on the party to dramatically change its message to "recapture the muscular progressive internationalism of Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy and convince voters that national security is our first priority."

Awesome. But guess what? That "muscular progressive internationalism" wasn't always quite what it now seems, and certainly not as simple as the DLC wants to pretend it was. Roosevelt, for starters, certainly wanted peaceful cooperation rather than conflict with Stalin after WWII. Sadly, his vision died with him, and though nowadays virtually no one questions the immense costs of the containment strategy during Cold War, or even wonders whether there were actually other alternatives, Roosevelt certainly did. So did many in Truman's administration, including men like Eisenhower, Gen. Lucius Clay in Germany, and especially Secretary of State James Byrnes. (It's easy to forget how vast the "engagement" crowd was; Churchill's Iron Curtain speech originally drew vast condemnation from a variety of outlets, from the Wall Street Journal to the Nation, all of whom were wary of provoking Russia unduly.)

In fact, the Truman administration was more or less charting this middle course up until Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace came out at Madison Square Garden and blasted Truman's policies, advocating a full withdrawal from Europe. Truman fired Wallace and in the process, weakened the hand of engagement advocates like Byrnes (below, center), and ended up inadvertently pushing the administration towards the more "muscular" stance that sends Al From into such giggles today.

It was hardly a foregone conclusion, though, and in retrospect, it's not at all clear that Truman's hawkishness towards the Soviet Union led to the best of all possible worlds. Military spending surged to ungodly levels by 1949, and the focus on foreign policy certainly weakened Truman's ability to expand the New Deal at home (though, in fairness, he was also hampered by a conservative Congress). In fact, thanks to military spending, Truman's budgets were over twice of what Roosevelt's were during the height of the New Deal, and there were real opportunity costs to these sort of lopsided "muscular" expenditures. (Source: PDF) Meanwhile, the Korean War was a disaster, and Truman's own little hunts for subversives at home were despicable. And that was the problem: Truman never quite offered a national security alternative to Republican red-baiting and bloodlust abroad, and the irony was that his "muscular" stance didn't exempt him from being tarred as being "soft on communism". So he either tried to co-opt the Republicans or take even more pugnacious stances on foreign policy. Neither always worked all that well.

As for Kennedy, again, things not always what they seem. JFK certainly flogged the "missile gap" with Russia during the 1960 campaign, even when his own campaign had doubts about the veracity of it all. But at any rate, Kennedy probably won the election (only barely!) on the strength of a sagging economy and the fact that Fed Chairman Arthur Burns pursued a tight monetary policy. JFK's biggest campaign plank, by the way, was his touting the Rockefeller Commission report promising 5 percent growth over the ensuing decade. Obviously opinions divide here, but I'd argue it was probably JFK's growth-equals-security arguments that carried the race, rather than his missiles-equals-security arguments.

Of course, Kennedy did have the hawkish military stance, though that didn't actually exempt him from red-baiting attacks by Nixon and other Republicans. What that hawkish stance did do, however, was hem Kennedy in during his presidency, during which he ended up boosting defense spending by a further obscene amount—much of it unnecessary, since there wasn't, in fact, a "missile gap"—again at the expense of a real progressive domestic agenda. And then there was Vietnam, which was certainly not unconnected to muscularity.

At any rate, there's a lot to learn from these historical cases, and people who know me know I'm not averse to "international progressivism," even one with a hefty pair of biceps. Nevertheless, Democratic hawkishness has always carried real costs, and dubious electoral benefit, and I'm not quite as ready as some DLC folks to look back at the "glory days" with uncritical fondness.

ALSO: Go read Digby.

With the (important!) caveat that liberal groups actually do argue, quite a bit, this David Brooks column is worth a read.

On another, somewhat cryptic note, all young progressives ought to read Richard Parker's new biography of John Kenneth Galbraith. It relates to what Brooks is saying, somehow, and one of these days I'll finish the book and take a clumsy stab at explaining why. Until then, I'm still stuck on p. 577, where JKG summarizes Ronald Reagan's economic philosophy: "[T]he rich have not been working because they have had too little money, and the poor have not been working because they have had too much." Un hm...

There are a couple of nifty corollaries from this New York Times report on Social Security and illegal immigration. The article's premise, by the way, is that about 75 percent of America's 7 million or so illegal immigrant workers pay about $7 billion a year in payroll taxes, and will never receive any benefits. So-o-o-o…

1. Granting amnesty to all these illegal immigrants would put the other 25 percent of illegals on payroll, adding roughly $2.3 billion a year to the system. Tant mieux! But then you'd have to subtract the amount that these workers would take back when they retire. Tant pis! If those folks retired here in America, they'd take a lot back in benefits. On the other hand, immigrants from Central America and Mexico who returned home before retiring, as many tend to do, would receive nothing, since we haven't signed totalization agreements with any of those countries. On net, amnesty seems like it would slightly worsen Social Security's long-term actuarial balance.
   
   
2. A system of private accounts would potentially allow some illegal immigrants shelling out payroll taxes to keep the money they divert into those accounts. There might be ways of getting around this—the Social Security Administration could try deny private accounts to anyone in the "earnings suspense file," i.e. workers with incorrect SS#'s—but in practice this seems quite hard to do, since no one really knows how many people in the "suspense file" are actually illegal immigrants.
   
   
3. However! Amnesty plus privatization, which is essentially what President Bush has proposed, would be the worst of all worlds, financially. Illegal immigrants-cum-"guest workers" would now be able to keep their private account deposits, presumably—which is fine by me, though some of those red-state "Minutemen" loons might not be too thrilled here—and end up worsening the system's finances by some indeterminate amount. (The SSA actuary says that without "suspense file" contributions, the system's 75-year "deficit" would be 10 percent larger.)

The best of all possible worlds, I think, would be to keep the current system, grant amnesty to all current illegal immigrants, allow them some sort of path to citizenship, and then boost immigration levels to 1.3 million a year. But, this sort of thing—besides having the unfortunate flaw of being totally unrealistic and unpalatable to our nation's frothy xenophobes—would probably worsen Social Security's finances overall. (Perhaps not, but hard numbers needed.) Perhaps a better approach, then, might be to sell green cards and put the proceeds in the Trust Fund, no? Well, probably not.

Oh sure, sure Republicans all say they're dead-set against using international models for our courts, but after one of their standing Senators all but endorsed killing judges earlier today, coupled with Tom DeLay's own little threats against the judiciary, it really does seem like we'll have to start looking abroad to see what's in store for the American legal system. Let's see, so many fine examples to choose from...

There's Zimbabwe:

Several of Zimbabwe's most senior judges have been forced to step down because their decisions have not pleased the authorities.

Not bad! Though for a more holistic approach, Pakistan has a pretty sweet set-up:

All judges who refused to take the new oath, including Chief Justice Saiduzzaman Siddiqui and 13 Supreme Court judges, have been dismissed. The oath appears to require judges to obey the edicts of the military government at the expense of Pakistan’s constitution. General Musharraf seized power on October 12, 1999, citing widespread corruption in government.

Or there's always the elegant Algerian method:

The judiciary in Algeria is not independent. Since judges are appointed to ten-year terms by the Ministry of Justice and can be removed at will, in practice the judiciary is squarely dependent on the executive branch.

Hm. Which model does John Cornyn think best? Personally I think Pakistan's is just swell—they have to take an "allegiance oath" and everything! Never trust a judge who doesn't take an oath of allegiance to the ruling party, that's what I always say...

I'm only about 100 pages into Death By a Thousand Cuts, but it's already a must-read book, and if I knew the first thing about HTML, I'd put its picture up on the side with a cool banner. Must read! Must read! Ahem. Right…

Anyway, Graetz and Shapiro do the usual riff on how liberals have no organizational heft and conservatives have plenty. Compounding that problem is the fact that one of the few organizational heavyweights that liberals actually have, labor unions, don't do much in the way of political lobbying. Organized labor relies mostly on soft money, PAC contributions, and its ability to turn out millions of voters on election day. But in 2000, unions ranked eleventh out of thirteen sectors in lobbying spending. Agribusiness outspends them, defense contractors outspend them, health, energy, transportation outspend them, etc. etc. etc.

That much is well known. Further compounding the problem, though, is the fact that organized labor really doesn't get involved in tax battles. Now tax issues need to be fought primarily on the lobbying front—it's hard to get workers motivated one way or the other about, say, a capital-gains tax cut—so unions have in effect written this issue off. Graetz and Shapiro note that the AFL-CIO has only one lobbyist responsible for tax issues, David Medina, but he also works on health care, labor law, pension reform, trade, appropriations, education, civil rights, etc. None of this is very likely to change in the near future. The big debate going on right now within the ranks of organized labor is whether to spend more time and money on political activities or more time and money on organizing. And even if the AFL-CIO did decide to devote more money to lobbying, it would still be vastly out-powered by business: "miscellaneous business" spent ten times as much on lobbying as organized labor did in 2000.

Perhaps relying on labor to handle tax legislation is the wrong approach, since they've got plenty else on their plate, and understandably so. Still, there's a glaring asymmetry here and something of a collective action problem. For most tax cuts, the winners are relatively concentrated and can easily mobilize, while the losers are largely diffuse. But it doesn't seem like there will be any fiscal sanity in Washington anytime soon until liberals can figure out how to mobilize over tax issues...

Terrific essay by Fred Bridgland in the Sunday Herald about Zimbabwe, the failure of the AU, and what, if anything, can be done.

Roxanne reminds me that April is National Poetry Month. Well, very good. This blog, oddly enough, started out as a literary blog, with a bunch of fiction reviews and some jotted-down notes on contemporary authors. But since I started working at Mother Jones last June, I figured I needed to learn, uh, a bit about actual politics and world affairs and such, and so I began using this site pretty much exclusively towards that end. And now that it's developed at least a modest readership for the political focus, I suppose it would be awfully churlish of me to change course and start doing literary stuff again.

But all the same, poetry month is poetry month, and since I do have more than a few of these things bouncing around inside my head, I'll post one of my favorites today—"Praise for an Urn" by Hart Crane—and then call it an April, barring some popular clamor for more.

"Praise for an Urn"

It was a kind and northern face
That mingled in such exile guise
The everlasting eyes of Pierrot
And, of Gargantua the laughter.

His thoughts, delivered to me
From the wite coverlet and pillow,
I see now, were inheritances—
Delicate riders of the storm.

The slant moon on the slanting hill
Once moved us toward presentiments
Of what the dead keep, living still,
And such assessments of the soul

As, perched in the crematory lobby,
The insistent clock commented on,
Touching as well upon our praise
Of glories proper to the time.

Still, having in mid gold hair,
I cannot see that broken brow
And miss the dry sound of bees
Stretching across a lucid space.

Scatter these well-meant idioms
Into the smoky spring that fills,
The suburbs, where they will be lost.
They are no trophies of the sun.

Continue reading "Poetry Month!"...

Ah, there seems to have been a bit of progress made in the always-exciting game of trying to form a new Iraqi government. Quite obviously the newly selected Sunni speaker of the Assembly, Hajim al-Hassani, won't win over any Sunnis still unwilling to support the new government. Al-Hassani, after all, supported the invasion of al-Fallujah and stayed behind in Allawi's cabinet even after his own party decided to boycott the interim government. One Sunni told the AP, "How could we just trust such a traitor?"

Nevertheless, the choice here seems to be less about reaching out to Sunnis and more about pacifying the Shiites, who are getting mighty antsy about all this gridlock. Anthony Shadid's report in the Washington Post today is pretty chilling in this regard. Some Shiite clerics, it seems, think the U.S. intentionally rigged the interim constitution to make it hard for Iraqis to form a new government—all so that the Shiites would be denied power. Now that's probably true, but if the Shiites start blaming the United States for their failure to form a new government, things will get ugly.

How ugly? A spokesman for Grand Ayatollah Ishaq Fayadh told the Post, "In the event [the Iraqis] cannot form a leadership for the assembly and a government, the marjaiya [i.e. senior clergy] will not remain with its hands shackled." Another senior ayatollah, Mohammed Taqi Mudrassi, in Kerbala: "The political crisis will continue, and the result will perhaps be that Shiites will use the weapon of millions protesting." Meanwhile, Mudrassi goes on to suggest the Shiites discard the interim constitution and form their own government. Um, right. Civil war anyone? At least for the time being, the biggest marja of them all, Ali Sistani, can keep these folks on a short leash, but Sistani's not the pope—his vast support among Iraq's Shiite population isn't absolute, and depends to a large extent on his ability to deliver a new Iraqi government. If he can't do that, ayatollahs like Fayadh and Mudrassi may find their own support swell, which is not a good sign at all.

UPDATE: One other thing. The Shiites no doubt knew that al-Hassani would be unpopular among the Sunnis, yet they nominated him anyway. Why? Because the only alternative was a Sunni Mishaan al-Juburi, who was accused of being an ex-Baathist "whose hands were drenched in the blood of Iraqis." So the Shiites said no. But as Ayad Rahim reports, thousands of Sunnis in Saddam's hometown of Tikrit rallied for Juburi's nomination. He seems to have a good deal of popular support in the relevant areas, then. So that means, perhaps, the Shiites are willing to put their (understandable) anti-Baath principles ahead of their Sunni outreach program; another ominous sign.

MORE UPDATE: Oh, right. I thought al-Juburi's name sounded familiar. He was the self-appointed governor of Mosul during this ugly little incident in 2003. Seems Juburi was none too popular among the legions of pro-Saddam Iraqis in Mosul for backing the United States. And the al-Juburi tribe itself—one of the biggest in Iraq—practically disowned Mishaan. So maybe he's not all that popular outside Tikrit. Hard to tell...

It would be a daunting task to top all the countless prose elegies now being written for Pope John Paul II, and it's fairly late right now, so no sense trying. Josh Marshall's short post, I thought, was particularly elegant. So here's just a brief reminisce instead. Back when I was very young and attending a Catholic elementary school, our much-feared principal, Brother Lawrence, had a framed picture outside his office of himself and the pope standing within inches of shaking hands. Apparently the general bustle of crowds swept them both away before they ever made actual contact, but Brother Lawrence, who was usually quite dour and severe, nonetheless quite enjoyed telling the story over and over again.

At the time, being both young and not at all Catholic, I never quite understood the point of his little tale. ("But it's just some guy—and they didn't even shake hands!") But over the years the story and the framed photo have made more and more sense, and it's still the first thing I think about when trying to come to terms with the hold the Church has on over a billion people across the world. Earlier today I took a tour around the Mission San Francisco de Asis and came across a few display photos of the pope's visit to this city back in 1987. One of the pictures was particularly striking: a young boy with AIDS unexpectedly leaping out of his father's hold to throw his arms around the pope's neck as he passed by.

It's a truly heartbreaking moment, not at all bathetic, but the first thing that came to my mind, at least, was revulsion and anger—anger that for years the Chuch has helped expose thousands, if not millions, to the risk of HIV infection with its horrific stance on condom use. It's tough, perhaps impossible, for me ever, ever to forgive that. And it's hard not to see anything other than the most vicious and cheap sort of hypocrisy in an institution that can shrug off an epidemic of this sort so callously, and yet still, still manage to command such love and respect from its victims. Nevertheless, there it was, the 9-year-old boy flinging his arms around the pope's neck, a reminder that there's so much more to the faith that's impossible to sum up, or assess, or forget.

Jet [i.e. the son of a guy named "Mal"] turned away. The styled hair, the gold earring. For a second the backs of his ears gleamed orange and transparent. Now Jet turned again and looked at him with that shy leer in the raised upper lip. Jesus: his teeth were blue. But that was okay. It was just the trace of a lolly he'd managed to get down him, not some new way of deliberately looking horrible. The law of fashion said that every child had to offend its parents aesthetically. Mal had offended his parents aesthetically: the drainpipes and brothel creepers, the hair like a riptide of black grease. Jet had contrived to offend Mal aesthetically. And Jet's kids, when they came, would face the arduous task of aesthetically offending Jet.

—Martin Amis, "State of England"

Fantastic story, that one. And it does bring up a good question, at least for me and a good number of my peers: How on earth are our kids ever going to offend us? Certainly not with louder music, or with somehow more offensive music, or with a multiplicity of piercings and tattoos. Boring, all of that! Nor with sex or drugs or freethinking thoughts on homosexuality and birth control. Yawn. So, since shocking one's parents will still be an ironclad law of nature, they'll probably have to go the other direction—becoming breathtakingly tame. I suppose we're already starting to see this with the generation slightly younger than mine: kids are becoming less violent, having less sex in high school, listening to wimpier music, becoming more conservative. Their children, of course, will have no trouble offending. But my kids, well, pity them. I suppose they'll have to listen to elevator muzak by way of rebellion...

I've never felt all that strongly one way or the other about Howard Dean. Disliked him as a presidential candidate, but voted for him in the New Hampshire primaries anyway. That sort of thing. Same with his bid for DNC chair: nothing but tepid shrugs here. Nevertheless, it's a bit frustrating to read in this month's Atlantic Monthly that Howard Dean is planning the wholesale destruction and marginalization of the Democratic party:

In a private meeting of officials the new party chairman, Howard Dean, vowed that he would "make George Lakoff the Democrats' Frank Luntz."

Ha ha! April Fool's? Actually, no, apparently Dean's serious. And seriously, horribly, galactically wrong. Look, Lakoff is a wonderful man—during college I did a year-long research project in cognitive linguistics and ended up reading nearly everything Lakoff wrote, and it's all quite brilliant—but this obsession with "framing" needs to end. Right. Now.

Let's take one example. Liberals love to talk about how conservatives scored a major victory when they took the estate tax and started calling it the "death tax." In fact, Josh Green wrote just such an article a few years ago for TAP. Nevertheless, the slogan itself was overrated. It wasn't just a turn of phrase that shifted popular opinion against the estate tax. The repeal movement also managed to build a vast coalition of political allies. They managed to drum up scare story after scare story about hard-working men and women who built up the small family business with their bare, grubby, cracked hands and then had to dissolve the whole thing upon death. They managed to prey off the fact that some 20 percent of Americans believe that they're in the top 1 percent of the income distribution (and another 20 percent think they'll be there soon). They lied, lied, lied, about the effect of the tax on women and minorities. They talked endlessly about how, with the coming Baby Boomer retirement, millions upon millions of Americans stood to benefit from inherited wealth. It was hard work!

The phrase "death tax" didn't actively frame anything, and it didn't cause millions of Americans to think, mistakenly, that they too would benefit from the tax' repeal. (And it was mistakenly: in the end, 80 percent of Americans supported junking a tax that affected only 2 percent of them.) No, the heavy lifting here was done by a mass barrage of facts and arguments and statistics and horror stories that predisposed Americans against the tax. Only then was the ground ripe for a snappy slogan to come along and nudge public opinion in the right direction. But first you need to make the ground ripe. Otherwise, you're just coming up with a goofy new name for something—which is why, notice, the phrase "personal accounts" have never caught on.

So please, no Lakoff. Not yet. Figure out how to do all that other stuff first. But depending on framing and framing alone will condemn the Democrats to irrelevance for decades to come.

UPDATE: Hm, been away from the internet for the past 30 hours or so (yes, I got shakes and cold sweats), but reading through the comments below, it seems I've misunderstood Lakoff. Well, that, or I've conflated "frames" and "slogans" somewhat. My post was railing against the latter, but Lakoff seems to be genuinely advocating the former, even though, from what I can tell, his actual examples (and the examples I've seen at DailyKos and elsewhere) veer towards flimsy and rather politically un-astute slogans. So okay, sorry for the confusion.

Still, the estate tax example is rather interesting -- from what I can tell the Republicans didn't really "reframe" the issue per se; they just barraged people with facts, sob stories, and lies, and won the public over by confusing them, not by changing the way they think about the world. Still, I could be very wrong about this, so I went out and got Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro's Death By a Thousand Cuts today, which should be a good case study in how the great bamboozle machine works.

No, no April Fool's joke. I meant to discuss this earlier, in the context of David Ignatius' bizarre column the other day. His conclusion: "[A] Joint Chiefs chairman who can stand up to [Rumsfeld] is the right military leader post-Rumsfeld." That's sort of right, but mostly wrong in an interesting way. Lord knows I'm not the biggest fan of Rumsfeld, but one truly invaluable thing he's done over the last four years is reassert civilian control over the Pentagon. This, I think, is a good thing, or at least has the potential to be a good thing down the road...

During the Clinton years, civilian-military relations were mostly a disaster, with the Joint Chiefs more or less allowed to do whatever they felt like doing. Some of this was due to the contempt that military leaders had for Clinton himself (draft-dodger, gay-booster, couldn't salute properly, etc. etc.). Some of it was structural: the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 obviously made the military more powerful by making the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff "principal military advisor to the president, the NSC, and the secretary of Defense". And some of it was due to ineffective and largely aloof Secretaries of Defense, like Les Aspin and William Perry (Cohen was fantastic, though).

Anyway, we tend to forget it now, but American foreign policy during the 1990s was pretty flagrantly unilateral, and pissed off a lot of our allies. To draw up a short list, there was: levying sanctions on Cuba and Iran, withholding funding from the IMF and World Bank, thwarting another term for Boutros Boutros-Ghali at the UN because we thought Kofi Annan would be more pliant (heh), the criminal attacks on Sudan's pharmaceutical plants, the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia. Granted, Bush took unilateralism to a whole new level, but the '90s were pretty bad too.

But what often goes unnoticed is why much of this happened, and a large part had to do with the fact that the Joint Chiefs had so much sway over foreign policy. The Commanders-in-Chief (CinCs) opposed the land-mine treaty (because it would hurt our readiness against North Korea), opposed the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, pushed for Star Wars and missile defense systems over the objections of the world (even though Clinton wasn't very serious about funding these things), opposed the International Criminal Court because they wrongly thought U.S. soldiers could be prosecuted, opposed the ban on child soldiers. And the White House fell meekly into line on all of these issues. It was out of control. Meanwhile, retired generals popped up on TV daily to criticize Clinton, and a large subset the officers corp became extremely politicized, a relatively new developement.

Now to a large extent, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and friends have changed all that, which was largely their intention. As James Mann tells it in Rise of the Vulcans, Cheney and Wolfowitz grew hostile towards the Joint Chiefs after their experience during the first Persian Gulf War, when then-Chairman Colin Powell dragged his feet on attacking Iraq and seemed to have too much influence over national security policy in the White House. So the hawk party said "never again." Hence, Rumsfeld marginalized the current JCS Chairman, Hugh Shelton, from day one. Neocons in the Pentagon like Stephen Cambone and Paul Wolfowitz went out of their way to antagonize military leaders, sometimes (it seemed) purely out of spite.

In many respects, of course, this was disastrous, as when Wolfowitz laughed off Army Gen. Eric Shinseki's (probably correct) estimate of the number of troops the U.S. needed to invade Iraq. And in other respects, the Rumsfeld gang didn't go far enough. They haven't really managed to break the military services' stranglehold on various budgetary matters. The "revolution in military affairs" hasn't come to any sort of fruition. And, as Dana Priest shows in her excellent book, The Mission, Rumsfeld hasn't really diluted the influence of the regional CinCs, who still rule over their little fiefdoms in lieu of more traditional diplomatic channels. (Indeed, State Department funding has gone monotonically down since the 1970s, and regional military commanders carry out most of our diplomacy in the back corners of the earth these days.) So the military is still doing things abroad it perhaps shouldn't be doing—rebuilding civil societies, doing de-mining work, combating drug-trafficking, humanitarian disaster relief, etc.

Nevertheless, the stage has now been set for a Democrat (or at least a competent Republican) to come into office, assert civilian control over the military and revamp the place. A Democrat could rein in, for example, the regional CinCs who are doing diplomacy abroad and replace them with more flexible State Department operations. Or that president could finally pick and choose among various international treaties without being bullied by the whims and demands of the Joint Chiefs. But before any of these things could happen, a power struggle really needed to play out in the Pentagon, and Rumsfeld delivered on that front.

Continue reading "The Liberal Case for Rumsfeld"

People occasionally ask me why, if I spent all that time studying math in college, I don't put my skills to good use and actually figure out ways to get filthy, stinking, uproariously rich. So, during my lunch break today, I came up with a foolproof scheme to get a whopping 66 percent return on the dollar. No joke! Details and nifty graphical display (thanks to the magic of Microsoft Paint) below the fold...

The basic scheme involves turning $3 into $5. How? Well, first we need to believe the (totally unverified) rumor that stores will accept a dollar bill if over 51 percent of it is intact and topologically continuous. In fact, let's assume that you need a little bit more than 51 percent—say, 60 percent—to pass muster. So you lay out your three dollar bills on the table, and cut them up along the black lines showed in figure 1 below:



Now, take all those green triangles you cut out of the dollar bill up on top, and with a little bit of scotch tape, attach them on to the other pieces as shown in figure 2:



Et voila! You now have 5 viable dollar bills, each one continuous and with 60 percent the area of a full bill. Obviously you'd need to get the geometry just right so that the triangles all fit and each have an area equal to 10 percent of a full bill, but that's not too hard to finagle. The flipside here is that you probably couldn't do this with $20 or $100 bills, since cashiers would likely give those bills a bit more scrutiny and be loath to accept something that looked like Dracula fangs or an "X". But when the stakes are low—and the stakes are low with a $1 bill—the local convenience stores should accept your odd shapes so long as you appear supremely confident when you slap them down. At any rate, clearly this isn't actually a scheme to get filthy rich, but it should lower the price of my beloved 7/11 Hot Pockets dramatically...

UPDATE: Just to address an objection raised in the comments, the new bills seem perfectly continuous to me. Topologically speaking, all I'm doing is mapping from one space to another by creating a bunch of equivalence classes. All surjective identification maps—which is what this boils down to—are continuous. In fact, my newly minted set of $5 even has its own unique quotient topology, which is cool though largely useless in this context. And yes, granted, this argument might not fly with the storeowner across the street when I hand him a bunch of jagged dollar bills swaddled in tape, but it would if he were perfectly rational...

Continue reading "Get Rich Quick!"

Via Tyler Cowen, Arnold Kling has written a genuinely thoughtful essay on health care spending that's worth a look. Do Americans pay so much for health care because the system is wasteful and inefficient, or are we actually getting better care for our money? I tend to think the former, Kling thinks the latter, and at the very least, he raises some good reasons to think twice about using infant mortality and longevity statistics to measure the actual quality of care we're getting. Point taken, though he doesn't have anything conclusive on that front.

My main bone to pick here, though, has to do with this passage:

Switching from a fee-for-service system [i.e., what the United States has] to a straight-salary system would reduce measured administrative costs. However, it produces a different kind of economic inefficiency. It breaks the connection between work effort and pay for health care providers. Doctors will be paid for showing up, not necessarily for putting in a full day's work.

In a way, that's true. The classic example is the Matthew Thornton Health Plan, described in this week's New Yorker, in which a group of doctors decided to run a mini single-payer health clinic up in New Hampshire. They bypassed insurance companies altogether, offered fixed fees to all their patients, and paid themselves flat salaries. At first, everyone loved it—patients signed up by the droves, doctors didn't have to hassle over billing and reimbursement, and even some specialists came aboard (the clinic paid specialists a fixed fee too). Costs were controlled brilliantly. Moreover, all doctors involved became more concerned with preventive care, since they didn't get any extra money for doing extra operations. It was perfect. Single-payer paradise! Soon, however, the problems started:

After a few years, the Matthew Thornton Health Plan started to be cheaper than other insurers. Employers caught on and enrollment soared. Berman had to bring in more doctors. That’s when things got more complicated. “In the beginning, we were all committed,” he said.

“We worked hard—long hours, a lot of dedication, young and hungry. Then, as we started to get bigger and bring in more staff, we found that others joined for other reasons. They liked the salaried life style—the idea that being a doc could be a job, rather than a day-and-night commitment. Some were part-timers. We began to see people looking at their watches as five o’clock approached. It became clear that we had a productivity problem.”

Over the course of thirty years, Berman told me, he’d tried paying physicians almost every conceivable way. He’d paid low salaries and high salaries and still watched them go home at three in the afternoon. He’d paid fee-for-service and watched the paperwork accumulate and the doctors run up the bills to make more money. He’d come up with complicated bonus schemes for productivity and given doctors budgets to oversee. He’d given patients cash accounts to pay their doctors themselves. But no system was able to provide both simplicity and the right balance of thriftiness and reward for good patient care.

Exactly as Kling predicted! So that's a real problem with single-payer. On the other hand, though, it's not clear that the current "fee-for-service" system is any more economically efficient. By which I mean, it's not clear that there's a direct economic link between the work doctors perform and their salary. For starters, insurance fee schedules, even in the private market, are largely driven by Medicare prices set by Congress, and these prices change relatively slowly—so they don't always reflect doctor effort at that point in time. (If, for instance, Congress decides that removing an appendix costs $X, based on how much work goes into the operation (they actually do try to measure this), but then new technology arrives that makes appendectomies even easier and quicker, then that operation instantly becomes overpriced compared to others.) Obviously there are some perverted incentives here.

Furthermore, many doctors have to do fierce, fierce battle with their insurance companies before they can actually get paid. Insurers can always refuse to pay for operations and treatments already completed. This seems in fact to happen around 32 percent of the time. Here in the real world, a doctor's salary correlates pretty well with how ruthlessly she can manage her billing system and squeeze every last possible penny out of her patient's insurers (who, in turn, have profit margins to worry about and spend all their time thinking up ways not to hand over that last possible penny). So to answer Kling's question, that's a likely reason why administrative costs are so much higher here in the United States.

Ugh. The new Democracy Arsenal blog was kind enough to link to me, so I'm hesitant to start wailing away just yet, but this post by Suzanne Nossel, on the recent UN vote to approve International Criminal Court jurisdiction over Sudan, misses the point in a fairly depressing way:

Relatedly, we need to take credit for our successes. I am looking forward to seeing how the Administration will spin this - likely as a courageous stand on behalf of American servicemembers. But the truth is that conservatives have resisted mightily calls to refer Darfur to the ICC. They made a convoluted argument that, notwithstanding the US's longstanding position that international tribunals cost too much and are inefficient, rather than relying on the ICC a new, separate, ad hoc Court ought to be created for Sudan.

So the internationalists won, and get to score some partisan points. Fantastic! We're going to prosecute us some war criminals eventually. Wonderful! But how does this stop the massacres and the starvation and the genocide right now? Oh, right, it doesn't. Khartoum's war criminals aren't going to be deterred by the threat of the ICC—considering that most of them are already guilty of genocide and destined to harsh sentencing if (and when??) they ever get caught, so a bit more genocide obviously isn't going to make their punishment any worse. No reason to stop, then.

Meanwhile, the ruling National Islamic Front has opposed kicking any and all Sudanese war criminals out of the country. Frankly, the NIF isn't going to care that the UN just voted to freeze their financial assets and ban them from traveling. (Or that they strengthened the arms ban. Whoo! No doubt Russia's planning to follow those sanctions down to the letter, huh?) No, at this point, it seems the only way prosecution will ever happen is if we kick down Sudan's doors and physically haul out the people responsible for the rape, pillage, murder, death.