News Roundup

• Japan has elections? - Japan is a one-party state with elections.  Until today.  For only the second time since World War II, the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan lost in an election against the opposition, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ).  A former LDPer, Ichiro Ozawa aka “The Destroyer“, will be the man behind the curtain in the opaque world of Japanese politics.
• Who killed primary care?  - Slate.com has an interesting article about Medicare’s Relative Value Scale Update Committee (RUC), a panel run by the American Medical Association that decides what a physician’s services are worth.  Somehow only subspecialists ended up on the committee!  Gasp!
• Did Madonna take them all?  - In a very surprising feature, the Economist talks about the falling birthrates in Sub-Saharan Africa despite few improvements in socioeconomic status.  Urbanization of a very rural continent is part of the explanation.  It’s interesting to note that there used to be two Europeans for every African, now there is a one-to-one ratio.  Soon there will be twice as many Africans as Europeans.  And all of Africa only adds up to a billion people… less than India.
• As if you hadn’t heard – Ted Kennedy died.  The liberal lion of the conservative era, he pretty much lost all the time.  An article from his bitter admirer.
• Third World sold out for Crummy promise from Big Pharma  – Hopefully you have heard that Obama outrageously agreed to veto price controls against pharmaceutical companies if they “voluntarily” decide to reduce costs by $80 billion over TEN years.  The deal was struck with the quite sleazy head of pharmaceutical lobbying, ex-Congressman Billy Tauzin (R-LA).  Less played on the news, is the fact that Obama administration is adopting their talking points in fighting against the developing world’s struggle for affordable access to essential medicines.  Activists consider the Obama Administration no different or better than the Bush administration on this issue.  Apparently, getting an African in the White House doesn’t help Africans.  Barack Obama’s pathetic attempts for an inoffensive healthcare deal leaves us with a health care plan that doesn’t help Americans or the rest of the world either.    

 

Parasitology: Is America Capable of Real Growth?

From the savings-and-loan meltdown to the dot-com boom and bust to the housing boom and bust, Americans have been floating up or down based on the gambling of fat cats since 1980 started the era of financial deregulation.

One of my favorite writers, Matt Taibbi, has written about how investment banks (especially Goldman Sachs) have been ripping off Americans since the Great Depression in his article “The Great American Bubble Machine.”  They profit by peddling shit (IPOs, houses, crap mortgages), and then short-sell the American Dream.  Then they buy off members of both parties (especially Democrats).  The yuppie Democrats of the Clinton years have all prospered handsomely like Lawrence Summers, Robert Rubin, and Rahm Emmanuel.  Even Tim Geithner, who didn’t work in the private sector, is deeply conflicted given who he worked with at the New York Federal Reserve.

The article has attracted criticism, but people accuse him of conspiracy theories when what he is saying is no different from what an IMF economist has said.

This follows his excellent expose of how the London division of American International Group destroyed the world economy with collateralized debt obligations.  It starts like so:

It’s over — we’re officially, royally fucked. No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country’s heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.

If the economy of post-Reagan America has been a sandcastle built on a foundation of debt and speculation, is it possible that America can have actual economic growth (as opposed to wild bubbles and crashes)?  We should ask Dr. Doom first.

Welcome to the Fourth Republic

With the signing of the federal stimulus bill, Barack Obama now has his first major legislative accomplishment of his term.  A $787 billion stimulus package is not as big as he wanted, but it is a step in the right direction.  And the stimulus shows the dawning of a new era far different from the post-Reagan/Nixon conservative course of American history.  For instance, Bill Clinton in his first year in office tried to get a $16 billion stimulus bill through a Democratic Congress and it failed.

A group of historians have divided American history into three phases that begin with a strong president that creates a lasting political order but then end with a very bad president after decades of decline.  Then a new president arrives to re-found American government.

There are three ”republics” as they call them (echoing French history).  The First Republic (1788-1860) was started by George Washington and ended with President Buchanan who sat on his hands as the South began to secede from the Union.  The Second Republic (1860-1932) began with Abraham Lincoln saving the Union and ended with a bewildered Herbert Hoover sitting on his hands during the Depression.  Franklin Roosevelt birthed the Third Republic (1932-2004) while George Bush ended it around the time he sat on his hands while New Orleans drowned.

Is Barack Obama the first president of the Fourth Republic?  Historian Michael Lind believes so, and I don’t dispute the idea that the age of American conservatism died in 2006 when the Democrats swept Congress.  We are at a unique juncture in time and history, perhaps only comparable to 1932.  But will we make anything of it?  Here are three proposals for what American needs in the new era by this same historian.

Links

• Salon.com – “The Next American System“
• Salon.com – “An economic Bill of Rights for Americans“
• Salon.com - “No more ‘wars of choice’“

In the capital city

Working at the state capitol in Austin for the health policy elective.  I’ll be dropping updates occasionally.

Bye-bye Bush. HELLO Obama!

After eight years of know-nothingism and do less-ism of the current administration, it is refreshing to see how far we have come from the Bush era of torture, lies, and illegal wars.  Guantanamo Bay prison will close, waterboarding is declared torture, and the Iraq withdrawal will begin on day one.

Obama has subversively misused America’s celebrity culture to make politics, history, and public service cool.  He’s returned eloquence in speech to American politics and speaks like all those speeches we read in high school textbooks.  Intelligence is now an asset, and big words are not something to be afraid of.  And by God, he looks and acts like a president…. something we haven’t seen in the post-Nixon era.

Here is someone with a sense of history and a sense of Ameica that perhaps a blueblood Ivy Leaguer like Bush could never understand.

It’s almost like you can see America’s greatness coming back before he swears in.

Obama’s Lincolnmania is a bit overdone, but I’d like to link everyone to Lincoln’s towering Second Inaugural Address to see what Obama’s been reading before his speech.  It gives you goosebumps.

Waltz down Memory Lane

1000 dead Palestinians and 13 dead Israelis.

A bombed school and UN headquarters in Gaza City.

One may ask, “Can Israel succeed at what it is doing?”  The stated goal is to destroy Hamas and end rocket fire attacks. The answer is no, because Israel has been there and done that.  In the Fifth Arab-Israeli War, Israel invaded Lebanon to destroy the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the umbrella group that represented the Palestinian movement for independence.  The PLO included an army, a political party (Fatah), and an assembly and was the undisputed representative of the Palestinian people in those days.  To this day, the PLO represents Palestinians at the United Nations.  And unknown or unsaid by hotheads saying they do not want to negotiate with Hamas, the fact is that the negotiating partner is and has always been the PLO by the international community.

But Hamas did not exist in 1982.  Israel, in fact, promoted Hamas in the late 1980s as an opponent to the PLO (which was Arab nationalist instead of religious).  In the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Israel intervened in Lebanon’s civil war on behalf of the conservative Christians and against the left, the Palestinians, and the Muslims.  It was a bloody and terrible invasion, killing thousands.  It is even said that the bombing of Beirut skyscrapers so shocked Osama bin Laden that he vowed to become a terrorist after hearing that news.

Israel’s invasion was a disaster for the political elite and electorate addicted to war and military means after their almost-divine victory in the Six Day War of 1967.  A major urban area (Beirut) was ruined, but the Palestinians have still not stopped their demands for self-determination or disbanded the PLO.

The following links will help understand this background.  One explains what is not often said about the fighting in Gaza.  The second is a review and backgrounder of the Israeli movie “Waltz with Bashir” made by an Israeli soldier who participated in the invasion of Lebanon and witnessed the infamous Sabra and Shatila massacres of Palestinians by the Lebanese Christians.  For those wanting daily news on Gaza, I recommend the prestigious Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz.

Salon.com – “What ‘Waltz with Bashir’ can teach us about Gaza“
New York Times – “What you Don’t know about Gaza“

The Invasion of Gaza

Someone asked for me to update people about the crisis going on in the Gaza Strip.  I can’t definitively state what is going on right now, but if people would like a background to the recent history of the Gaza Strip, one can read my article and interview last year with the Red Cross’s Director for the Middle East about the humanitarian and medical crisis caused by Israel’s blockade of Gaza.
 
In short: Israel proclaimed Independence in 1948 from the former British Mandate of Palestine.  The 50-50 split of the Mandate by the United Nations became more of a 2/3 to 1/3 split in favor of Israel.  Egypt occupied Gaza while Jordan controlled the West Bank.  In 1967, Israel simulatenously defeated five Arab nations in the Six Day War and occupying (illegally) East Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza.  The illegal occupation and building of settlements on this land continues to this day. 
 
The Palestinian Authority was formed in the 1990s as part of the Oslo Peace Process.  After the death of Palestinian Liberation Organization founder, Yasser Arafat, in the early 2000s Mahmood Abbas was elected president of the Palestinian Authority.  Arafat unified the Palestinian movement for independence, and his death opened the chance for a split between Palestinians.  That happened in the 2006 parliamentary election, when Hamas (an offshoot of the Egyptian fundamentalist group the Muslim Brotherhood) fairly won an internationally observed election against the non-religious Fatah Party of Abbas and Arafat.  In response, the West cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority starving it of salaries to pay its government workers.  Economic chaos ensued.  And Hamas, idiotically, chose to shoot comically inaccurate missiles into Israel.
 
Israel (which pledged to end the occupation) had “withdrawn” from the Gaza Strip before 2006.  In reality, it meant that the settlements were shutdown, but there was an aerial and naval blockade…. there was no real independence for the Strip.  Egypt, which controls Gaza’s other border, also closed its gates because it felt that Hamas would encourage the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.  This makes Egypt the most despised Arab nation in the Middle East as hundreds of thousands of Gazans are cut off from food and supplies by their own “Arab brothers.”     
 
This invasion began after a Hamas ceasefire with Israel ended last month, and hundreds of Gazans have died due to the misrule of Hamas and Isareli bombings.  Hamas is deluded in thinking it can prevail in a conflict with Israel like Hezbollah did.  Hezbollah is far better run, and while Hamas is kind of a joke militarily.   
 
To be fair, Hamas did fairly win elections against Fatah which had grown corrupt.  Putting sanctions on a country for electing someone you don’t like is not a way to encourage democracy in the Middle East.  Hamas had a reputation for being quite clean and running efficient social welfare programs like Hezbollah.  My understanding is that it became corrupt as well after winning elections.  

I would encourage readers to check out Robert Fisk’s work for the Independent.  He is a British Middle East correspondent who has covered the region for decades including Lebanon’s civil war, the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, and even interviewed Osama bin Laden in the 1990s.  He is based in Beirut, Lebanon. 
 
The Independent – Robert Fisk’s Columns

Odds and Ends

Here is a very random news roundup of articles I thought were informative but not sufficient enough to make an issue of their own.

International

• Sukhetu Mehta, author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, has an op-ed called “Why they Hate Mumbai.“  Between the tolerance and the Bollywood dreams, he sees something for fanatics of all stripes to hate.
• Many of you liked the “New Russia” issue I put out a few months ago.  The Economist had a special report on Russia covering all of Mother Russia’s problems.  The most fascinating ones I read include the depopulation of Russia (annual population decrease: 700,000) from moonshine vodka, among other things, and an article about the current economy of Russia which is neither communist or capitalist but every company seems to have a KGB officer on their board.  Call it the corporatist state.

National

• Hillary Clinton has been nominated as Secretary of State, and loutish war criminal Henry Kissinger is pleased.  If I wanted her running our foreign policy, I’d have voted for her in March.  Salon compares Obama’s Cabinet picks of sweaty-palmed wonks and Brookings Institute centrists to FDR’s genuinely left to right-wing circle of advisers.
• The other “Dr. Rice.”  A look into former Clinton foreign policy adviser and Brooking Instituter Susan Rice, who sat on her hands during Rwanda, but now wants military action in Darfur against Sudan.  Do we forgive or do we forget?
• Former governor and prostitute frequenter, Eliot Spitzer, has returned to the media as a columnist for Slate.com.  He argues against the existence of companies “too large to fail” as a failure of true capitalism and antitrust protections.  Giant financial institutions like Citigroup, which manages $2 trillion in assets, should not exist.  Too bad Clintonite and DLC Democrats helped make and run it are still thought of as economic geniuses.

Texas

• Kay Bailey Hutchison, our unfathomly popular senator, has started her run for governor against Rick Perry.  Kinky Friedman talks about running for governor again but says, “I sure wouldn’t do it again as an independent and I can’t afford to do it as a Republican, so I’d have to run as a Democrat…. One thing’s for sure. When I die, I want to be cremated and have my ashes thrown in Rick Perry’s hair.”
• And I got quoted by a news organization!  It seems that a Texas-based blogger at the Bhatany Report likened Rick Perry to Sarah Palin and Hutchison to John McCain.  How clever!
• El Paso state Senator Shapleigh lays out the problems facing Texas in an op-ed about a dysfunctional state government with priorities out of control.
• Dick Cheney got indicted, along with a state senator, in South Texas over private prisons on the border by nutcase lameduck DA Juan Angel Guerra (or as he calls himself “Juan Quixote” of the “barrio people”).  Sadly, the case was dismissed by a judge.  Read about previous theatrics here.

Excellent background to Muslims in India

I was considering writing a piece about the history of religion and power in India, but TIME Magazine has finally published an article about India with some actual historical depth.  The poor relations between Hindus and Muslims are an interestingly recent (by Indian standards) development that dates to the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857 against the East India Tea Company which essentially ruled North India in the name of the Persian-descended Muslim sultan in Delhi.

The British entered India as supplicants and traders to Indian kingdoms in the 1700s.  Playing the regional kings and princes against one another, they slowly grew in power becoming the tax-collector and coin engraver to the Emperor in the Red Ford in Delhi.  De facto control of the Emperor (king of kings) receded until the point that all he effectively controlled was his palace, harem, and late-night poetry jam sessions by 1857.  Urdu and Persian were the languages of the educated, and Urdu ghazals reached their peak under the last Emperor who was a notable Sufi poet himself.  With the effective British takeover of India, fundamentalist Protestant missionaries moved in, swearing to save the heathen Muslims and Hindus from damnation.  A spark (involving beef and pig tallow in rifle cartridges) lit the gunpowder of a civilization under threat.  A rebellion and jihad swept the nation, but it was inevitabally crushed due to the Indian habit of disorganization and in-fighting.

British writer William Dalrymple beautifully writes of the downfall of Emperor Zafar along with his era of Hindu-Muslim co-existence in the Last Emperor bringing together for the first time English and Urdu accounts of the mutiny in one book.  The last Mughal died along with the syncretic Indo-Islamic culture he nourished.  The British, not trusting Muslim minority after the Muslim sultan rose against them, ravaged the Red Fort, looted all of Delhi, and banished the enfeebled old king to Burma.  Hindus were promoted into civil service but not Muslims.  Muslim learning and culture were wiped out.

Colonial subjects pick up the habits and vices of their masters, and British mistrust of Muslims spread to their Hindu subjects.  And Muslims themselves split between Deobandi fundamentalism and secular modernists, as TIME so insightfully points out.

And South Asia still grapples with that legacy of 1857.  One bombing and riot at a time.

Bombay burns

As I write this, 7 major tourist destinations have been attacked and bombed in Mumbai, India by the “Deccan Mujahadeen.”  The historic Taj Hotel (the first 5 star hotel in all of India) is burning, and the beachfront Marriott and Ramada hotels across the street from my grandparents’ flat were attacked as well.  Hostages, especially Britons and Americans and Indian executives, have been taken by twenty-somethings with AK-47s and machine guns.  80 are dead and 900 injured.  Follow the updates at the Times of India.

India has been experiencing a major bombing almost every month in almost every major city.  Islamic fundamentalism, aided and abetted during the Cold War by the West, has come back to bite South Asia back.  The slowly imploding and insolvent unaccountable state of Pakistan has become the entire world’s problem in the era of globalization.

Will we ever put out the fire?