Obliviousness

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This is a follow up to “Touching Innocence,” below. A blogger named Russell Roberts writes,

Proponents of single-payer health care reform in the United States have long pointed toward Canada as a model for the US to emulate.

The New York Times reports that the Canadian system is imploding. …

You already know where this is going … the Times report discusses problems with the Canadian system, and says some private health care is rushing in to pick up the slack. Whereupon blogger Russell gloats a bit about how superior the U.S. health care system is, and how fortunate Canadians will be when their public system breaks down entirely and they can have a health care system just like ours.

Russell goes off track with the first sentence — “Proponents of single-payer health care reform in the United States have long pointed toward Canada as a model for the US to emulate.” Although I’ve met such people, in fact the Canadian Model is a bugaboo of the Right. Try to discuss national health care with a rightie, and the first sentence out of his mouth will be, “You mean like in Canada?” Then he will go off on a tirade about the problems with the Canadian system. (Unless you remind them of the underfunded British system, which is the other good “bad” example of a system with problems.)

And, I’m sorry to say, I also run into uninformed lefties who seem to think our only choices are a Canadian-style single-payer or the overblown mess that is the U.S. “system.”

As I wrote earlier today, just about every nation on earth affluent enough for most citizens to own a microwave has some kind of national health care system, with the exception of the United States. And every nation has worked out its own system; it is not true, as the uninformed would have it, that there is only the Canadian Model or ours. People who have looked at the myriad systems on the planet say that Canada’s is not necessarily the model we should be emulating. Other countries (notably France, whose system is ranked #1 in overall performance by the World Health Organization) have mixed public and private systems, with public “universal coverage” supplemented by private insurers and hospitals for those who want to pay for them. This may be where Canada is heading now.

Ezra Klein wrote a series of posts on the health care systems of various other countries. France’s system, he says, is not only more cost-effective than ours, it also provides better care for most people.

France’s health care system bodyslams us on most every metric. Beyond the beds per 1,000 stat mentioned above, France has more doctors per 1,000 people (3.3 vs. 2.4), spends way less, has 3.2 more physician visits per capita (6 in France vs. 2.8 in America, which probably accounts for the better preventive care in France), has a much higher hospital admission rate, and beats us handily on the most important measure: potential years of life lost. American women lose 3,836 years per 100,000, while American men give up 6,648 in the same sample size (yes, we get screwed). In France, the comparable numbers are 2,588 years for the women and 5,610 for the men. Still not great, but quite a bit better.

So France spends less, gets more, and does so through a public-private hybrid that’s heavily, heavily public.

Also,

The hospitals offer about 8.4 beds per 1,000 people (America, btw, offers 3.6. Ouch.) The public sector provides 65% of the beds, private hospitals — which operate on a fee-for-service basis — make up the rest, and primarily concentrate on surgeries. French citizens choose which one to go to and get the same reimbursement at either. How’s that for choice? Not good enough? The French also get to choose their physicians, their physicians get to choose where they practice, and there’s patient-client confidentiality.

Everyone I’ve ever met who’s lived in France even a short time sings the praises of the French health-care system. This is not to say that Americans with lots of money or top-notch insurance don’t get as good, or better, care. But, I’m told, if you don’t have lots of money or insurance, try to arrange to have your health problems in France.

The Canadian health care system is slowly breaking down, The New York Times says. The U.S. system, by contrast, is not slowly breaking down. Parts of it are already broken, and what’s left of it is hurtling toward disaster at breakneck speed.

Once again, Jane Bryant Quinn:

America’s health-care “system” looks more like a lottery every year. The winners: the healthy and well insured, with good corporate coverage or Medicare. When they’re ill, they get—as the cliche goes—”the best health care in the world.” The losers: those who rely on shrinking public insurance, such as Medicaid (nearly 45 million of us), or go uninsured (46 million and rising).

To slip from the winners’ circle into the losers’ ranks is a cultural, emotional and financial shock. You discover a world of patchy, minimal health care that feels almost Third World. The uninsured get less primary or preventive care, find it hard to see cardiologists, surgeons and other specialists (waiting times can run up to a year), receive treatment in emergencies, but are more apt to die from chronic or other illnesses than people who pay. That’s your lot if you lose your corporate job and can’t afford a health policy of your own.


Here Sebastian Mallaby explains why Bush’s health savings accounts will make our system even worse. In another column, Mallaby concludes,

Beyond the imperative of restraining prices, the biggest challenges in health care are to get insurance to everyone and to create incentives for preventive treatment — even though prevention may pay off 30 years later, by which time the patient will have gone through multiple switches in health plans. The most plausible subsidizer of universal insurance is government, and the only entity with a stake in lifelong wellness is the government. Is the administration ready to see that?

See also “Single-Payer Health Would Increase US Competitiveness” by Hale Stewart at BOP News.

This is a huge topic, and this evening I don’t have the time to go into the detail the topic requires. But whenever I see a rightie snicker about the problems of other health care systems, I wonder what it’s going to take to get them to see that our system is a disaster in progress. Corpses in the streets? Oh, wait, we’ve been there already. I’m afraid it’s what Quinn says — the shock of being dumped out of the “winners” rank. Until then, it’ll take major surgery to get their heads out of their butts.

Touching Innocence

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This is a sorta kinda followup to the last post, which discussed matters of life and death, space and time, religion, law, morality, and what it is to be human. Which was a tad ambitious now that I think about it. But I request that people not add comments disagreeing with this post until you’ve read that one. This will save us both a lot of time.

Anyway, I see that some righties are upset about a British court ruling that will allow physicians to impose a “do not resuscitate” order for Baby Charlotte, a desperately ill two-year-old, against the wishes of her parents.

The rightie blogger of Stop the ACLU asks,

Is this the direction America is headed? Is this where the ACLU, and the “right to die” folks will take us?

Kim Priestap of Wizbang blames socialized medicine:

Baby Charlotte’s health is fragile normally, so she will go through health scares like this again. This will cost Britain a lot of money. Since Britain has a nationalized healthcare system, funded by taxpayer money, it’s in the state’s best interest to let her die.

What’s going on here? As a mother myself I’m very uncomfortable when government interferes with family decisions like this. I tend to think that when the family is agreed the patient should be resuscitated, the doctors should respect the decision and not involve courts. I don’t know enough about Baby Charlotte to be able to judge whether there is a compelling reason to make an exception in her case. I infer from news stories that the doctors consider her case to be hopeless and that keeping her alive is just making her suffer. And her parents see things very differently.

I argued in the last post that humans need to struggle with hard choices. When governments or other institutions swoop into our lives and make our choices for us, it makes us less human. And this is true even when we make “bad” choices (within the law, of course). Our decisions may be less important than the process we go through to make them. So in that respect I’m sympathetic to the rightie point of view.

However … the title of this post doesn’t refer to Baby Charlotte. It refers to the righties who are oh, so innocent of the facts of life and death these days.

Nearly a year ago us “culture of death” liberals took up the cause of Sun Hudson, a Texas baby whose life support was terminated against family wishes. Although their diagnoses may differ, the legal situations of Baby Sun and Baby Charlotte seem to me to be nearly identical. If anything, Sun’s case was more extreme than Charlotte’s. His mother (father unknown) wanted aggressive medical care to continue, but the law sided with physicians who decided enough had been enough. Baby Sun’s breathing tube was removed on March 15, 2005, and he died of asphyxiation within minutes.

My understanding is that Sun Hudson’s prognosis really was hopeless. But then, so was Terri Schiavo’s.

Sun Hudson died three days before Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube was removed for the last time. Some of you might recall that righties got a tad excited about the Schiavo case. However, they were mostly silent about Sun Hudson — slipped their attention, I guess. Were it not for liberal blogs I wouldn’t have heard about Sun Hudson either.

Why were righties so oblivious to the Sun Hudson case? One explanation is that the law that allowed his life to be terminated had been signed by then-Governor George W. Bush.

The federal law that President Bush signed early yesterday in an effort to prolong Terri Schiavo’s life appears to contradict a right-to-die law that he signed as Texas governor, prompting cries of hypocrisy from congressional Democrats and some bioethicists.

In 1999, then-Gov. Bush signed the Advance Directives Act, which lets a patient’s surrogate make life-ending decisions on his or her behalf. The measure also allows Texas hospitals to disconnect patients from life-sustaining systems if a physician, in consultation with a hospital bioethics committee, concludes that the patient’s condition is hopeless.

Bioethicists familiar with the Texas law said yesterday that if the Schiavo case had occurred in Texas, her husband would be the legal decision-maker and, because he and her doctors agreed that she had no hope of recovery, her feeding tube would be disconnected. [Knight Ridder]

The Sun Hudson story came out just as the VRWC media echo chamber was working overtime to promote George W. Bush as a champion of life. Faux News’s Bill O’Reilly first commented on the Sun Hudson story before he discovered the Bush angle, forcing him to flip-flop harder than a trout on a hot pier. While Terri Schiavo’s parents were depicted as noble and pure of heart, Sun Hudson’s mother became a deranged black woman who couldn’t face reality. Never fear; O’Reilly had flip-flopped back by April when he attacked the ACLU for (perhaps) being behind “infanticide for impaired babies.”

Let’s go back to the Texas Advance Directives Act of 1999, which is the law under which Sun Hudson’s life was terminated. Put very simply, the law allows a health care facility to discontinue life support against the wishes of the patient’s family. The law requires the facility to jump through a number of hoops before it can do this, which ensures there is an overwhelming medical consensus that the patient’s condition is hopeless before the plug is pulled. The family has the option of finding another medical facility willing to continue life support. But other medical facilities are unlikely to take such a patient, especially if the patient will be a drain on the budget.

In other words, if the family is wealthy enough to pay the costs of Grandma’s care and make a generous contribution to the hospital building fund, Grandma lives. If the family’s insurance is capped and they’ve already spent the second mortgage to pay her medical bills, she dies. To paraphrase (well, OK, mock) Kim Priestap of Wizbang (see above), Grandma’s care will cost hospitals a lot of money, so it’s in their best interest to let her die.

There are two issues to be addressed here, both involving rightie inability to face reality. The first is regarding health care and how it is paid for. Just about every nation on earth affluent enough for most citizens to own a microwave has some kind of national health care system. The exception is the United States. In a recent Newsweek column, Jane Bryant Quinn (hardly a socialist) said that America’s health-care system is turning into a lottery.

The winners: the healthy and well insured, with good corporate coverage or Medicare. When they’re ill, they get—as the cliche goes—”the best health care in the world.” The losers: those who rely on shrinking public insurance, such as Medicaid (nearly 45 million of us), or go uninsured (46 million and rising).

To slip from the winners’ circle into the losers’ ranks is a cultural, emotional and financial shock. You discover a world of patchy, minimal health care that feels almost Third World. The uninsured get less primary or preventive care, find it hard to see cardiologists, surgeons and other specialists (waiting times can run up to a year), receive treatment in emergencies, but are more apt to die from chronic or other illnesses than people who pay. That’s your lot if you lose your corporate job and can’t afford a health policy of your own.

Years ago there was a joke in circulation that said a conservative is a liberal who got mugged. The new joke is that a liberal is a conservative who’s lost his health insurance.

The point is that all the evil, inhumane things going on in Other Countries That Have Socialized Medicine are happening here, too. Righties just refuse to acknowledge them. Among those Other Countries, Britain is a good “bad example” because they’ve underfunded their system for years. Meanwhile, we in the U.S. spend far more per capita than other nations (see this report in PDF format; note especially Figure 1 on page 3) but we’re getting worse results (see Table 1, page 4). By some measures we’re getting even worse results than those cheapskate Brits.

And the moral is, people whose health care system is a broken down mess shouldn’t be pointing fingers at other peoples’ health care systems.

The other issue I see here is the touching innocence of righties regarding hopelessly terminal patients. Physicians have made decisions not to aggressively treat hopeless patients, especially suffering hopeless patients, since Hippocrates. Generally they’ve done it quietly and without drawing attention to themselves, but they’ve done it. For example, since the 19th century physicians have prescribed larger and larger doses of opiates to ease the pain of dying patients, knowing that eventually the dosage will be fatal. And as far as the family ever knew, it was the cancer that killed Grandpa, not that last dose of morphine.

Just about any health care professional will confirm this. I’m sure such decisions are being made all over America even as you read this.

The reason we’re hearing about such cases these days is, IMO, multifold. First, in the past medicine wasn’t all that effective. It was easy for doctors to make a show of “doing all we can” because in truth there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot they could do. But now we can do so much more. We have medical technology that will retain life in a body even when the person that body once sustained has long since dissipated, as in Terri Schiavo’s case. The line between life and death itself has blurred.

Second, because of the technology, more and more families refuse to accept a hopeless prognosis. I understand even anencephalic babies are sometimes put on life support these days, even though those babies have no hope of survival. In earlier times, the only choice offered parents would have been whether they wanted to hold the baby while it died, or not.

And third, mass media and our “reality TV” culture make sure the more controversial decisions get global publicity. In earlier times, these matters wouldn’t have been been discussed outside the family. Today, people with less than a half-assed idea of the facts can plaster their uninformed opinions all over the Web.

As individuals, as a nation, as a society, as a species, we’ve got hard choices to make. These choices involve ourselves and our loved ones. We need to make some mature, non-politicized judgments about how to pay for health care. We must think rationally about how much of our health-care resources should be spent on futile care. We need non-hysterical discussion about if, or when, governments should intervene in family decisions. These are all complex issues. Reasonable people will disagree on many points. But we’re going to get nowhere until we’re able to face some hard realities.

Which means we’re going to get nowhere as long as righties dominate the discussion.

When Life Begins, or Not (Formerly Chao-chou’s Dog Has Puppies)

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I see that Lance Mannion has taken up the question of when “life” begins. I see that Shakespeare’s Sister mostly agrees with Lance; Jedmunds of Pandagon mostly doesn’t.

Now I want to confuse everyone by arguing that “when life begins” is the wrong question. It’s the wrong question because life doesn’t begin. Or, at least, it hasn’t begun on this planet in a very long time. However life got to Earth — between 3 and 4 billion years ago, I believe — once it established it hasn’t been observed to “begin” again. It just continues, expressing itself in countless forms. The forms come and go — in a sense — but not life itself.

It will be argued that fertilization marks the beginning of a unique individual and is, therefore, a significant moment in the life process — the point when a life begins. But let’s say a couple of weeks later the egg divides into twins or triplets. Did those individuals’ lives begin with the conception? Or, since they didn’t exist as individuals at conception, is the cell division something like an existential reboot?

Further, in the grand scheme of things, is any one moment really separable from all the other moments, the couplings, the countless episodes of cell mitosis going back to the first stromatolites and microbes and macromolecules to the beginning, which is beginningless as far as I know, considering that a stray enzyme at any point over billions of years would have resulted in you being a lungfish?

I don’t have an answer to that. I’m just sayin’ “beginnings” are way overrated.

The real question, seems to me, is when does an individual begin? Is there a clear, bright moment at which we can all agree, “yep, that’s Fred,” and be done with it?

Some argue that the product of pregnancy is a unique individual from conception because its DNA is different from its mother’s. But if unique DNA combinations are what make a unique individual, you’d have to conclude that the twins from the third paragraph are the same person, divided. And if we give you a transplanted heart, lung, and kidney, each with unique DNA combinations from their respective donors, does that make you four different people?

I don’t think science can help us with this one, people. Indeed, if you step back and look at human civilization throughout space and time, you might notice that “person” is a social construct that has been constructed in very different ways by different societies. At various times only men, or only people of a certain skin color, or only people from our tribe, or only people of a particular caste or class, were considered “persons.” We may think we have reached maximum enlightenment by considering all human beings “persons” (assuming we all do, which I question), but it’s possible our distant descendants will expand “person” to include, say, other primates, whales, dolphins, and border collies. You never know.

The argument made by many opponents to legal abortion is that the product of pregnancy is human life, and human life is sacred; therefore, it must be protected. There’s no question that a living human embryo is both alive and human, but when you call it “sacred” you’re throwing a religious concept into the mix. And the great religions of the world do not at all agree on the question of when (or even whether) “human life” becomes “sacred.” Some say at conception, some say at “quickening,” some say at viability, some say at birth. And some will tell you that everything and nothing are equally sacred, so stop asking stupid questions.

The reason we’re even having this discussion is to settle the question of abortion as a matter of law. But as a legal matter, the question of when humans are allowed to take the lives of other humans rarely has absolutist answers. Some kind of regulation about who can kill whom is necessary for civilization, since we can’t very comfortably live together in communities without some assurance our neighbors won’t throttle us in our sleep. But there are always loopholes. Through history, in many societies (even Christian ones), a noble could kill a peasant or slave without penalty. Today governments can order wars or impose a death penalty, and legally that’s not murder.

I tend to get impatient with people who argue that laws are based on morality, and abortion is immoral, therefore it ought to be illegal. As I said in the last paragraph, there are some laws essential to human civilization. These laws regulate who can kill whom and who can own what. They make commerce possible by imposing penalties for fraud. They make complex human enterprises possible by enforcing contracts. Exactly how law has regulated these matters has changed considerably over time; the important point is that, within a given society, there are basic rules everyone is supposed to agree to so that society can function.

The realm of morality, however, is separate from the realm of legality. There are all manner of things that we might consider immoral that are not, in fact, illegal; adultery is a good example. Such acts may have harmful personal consequences, but regulating them isn’t necessary to civilization. And I don’t see what’s immoral about, say, misjudging how many coins you should put in the parking meter. That’s why I tend to see the legal versus moral question on a Venn diagram. The diagram here isn’t entirely accurate since the blue area should be bigger — law and morality intersect more often than they don’t. I’m just saying that answering the moral question of abortion (assuming we ever will) does not tell us whether an act should be legal or not. In fact, since abortion is legal (with varying restrictions) in most democratic nations today with no discernible damage to civilization itself, I’d say the abortion question falls outside the blue area of the diagram.

On the question of morality I disagree a lot with Ezra Klein when he says “confused polling on abortion is evidence that Americans have confused views on abortion.” I think people are not so much confused as limited. Our conceptions of life or humanity or individuality or the self are to a large extent conditioned into us by our culture. It’s very hard to step outside of our conditioning and take a broader view. We’re all blind men feeling an elephant — our ideas about what an elephant is depend on what particular part we happen to be feeling (an elephant is like a a tree trunk? a wall? a fan?). Following this metaphor, there are all manner of people in America today who do not feel confused at all about that elephant. They’ve got hold of its trunk, and they are certain it’s just like a snake. End of argument.

If anything, most people aren’t confused enough.

Our notions of where a fetus fits on the morality scale depend very much on the angle from which we view the question. A fetus is human. But humans are sentient, and a fetus is (so science tells us) insentient. A fetus is like a parasite, or a lower life form. A fetus is God. A fetus is a baby. A fetus is not a baby. A fetus is a potential baby. A fetus is sacred. Nothing is sacred. Everything is sacred.

How about, All of the above?

In case you’re wondering, from a Buddhist perspective it might be argued that since a “person” is an aggregate of the five skandhas (form, sensation, perception, discrimination, consciousness) and an embryo or fetus has only form, it’s not a person. On the other hand, Buddhism teaches that each of us is all of us, throughout space and time. The cells of whatever is conceived contain all life forms, from the beginningless beginning to the endless end, perfect and complete. Interfering with life’s attempts to express itself is a serious matter.

So where does that leave us? It leaves us with individuals who have to make hard choices. Struggling with hard choices is a distinctively human activity. I think it’s something we need to do to be fully human. It helps us wake up. The decisions we make may be less important than the fact that we can make decisions.

I have written in the past (such as here) why I think abortion should be legal, at least until the fetus is viable. My opinion is based mostly on the effects of abortion law in the lives of women. You might notice I don’t spin my wheels much over the question of morality, since I’ve come to see that morality depends on the state of mind in which one acts as much as the act itself. People do “good” things for selfish reasons, and “bad” things for altruistic reasons. Judge not, lest ye be judged.

So, I say, ambiguity is good for you; don’t be afraid of it. Go forth and be human and work it out for yourselves.

[Note: The title of the post refers to the first koan of The Mumonkon. If it doesn’t make any sense to you, that’s OK.]

The Snapping Point II

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Via Crooks and Liars, we see that CNN’s Lou Dobbs reported on Bush family business connections with the UAE. As I wrote in the last post, this is just more of the same stuff the Bush Regime has been engaged in all these weary years since January 2001. Righties, are you finally waking up?

Um, not Charles Krauthammer, who blames the UAE mess on the fall of the British Empire:

If only Churchill were alive today … The United Arab Emirates would still be a disunited bunch of subsistence Arab tribes grateful for the protection of the British navy in the Persian Gulf. And we hapless Americans — already desperately trying to mediate, pacify and baby-sit the ruins of Churchill’s Empire: Iraq, Palestine, India/Pakistan, Yemen, even (Anglo-Egyptian) Sudan — would not be in the midst of a mini-firestorm over the sale of the venerable P&O, which manages six American ports, to the UAE.

Krauthammer’s denial of reality is so vast it’s almost majestic. I can hear the ghost of Rudyard Kipling whispering “The White Man’s Burden.” Somebody send ol’ Charles a monocle and a pith helmet, quick.

Other righties are struggling to justify the UAE deal against years of Bushie conditioning. Some columnists at FrontPage note that the UAE has close ties to Hamas. And Rich Moran of Right Wing Nut House complains,

I don’t like waking up in the morning and discovering that I’m an “Islamaphobe” or “Un-American” for calling the Administration a bunch of rabbit heads for the way they’ve managed the unveiling of this idiocy. To tell you the truth, I resent it. It bespeaks a certain kind of intellectual laziness when the best one can do to counter an argument is to indulge in an orgy of name calling and finger pointing. Better to have the facts at one’s disposal and try and counter an opponent’s argument in a logical and rational manner.

I’ll pause here so that lefties reading this can howl and roll about on the floor for a while. Come back whenever you’ve stopped laughing and/or crying. Take your time.

At Newsweek, Michael Hirsh argues that the UAE episode reveals just how out-of-control the alleged “war on terror” really is.

The way the war was supposed to have been fought—a way that would really have distressed bin Laden and Zawahiri—was that Al Qaeda was supposed to be so isolated by now that we had most of the Arab world on our side. Deals like Dubai Ports World ‘s takeover of the London company that administers some U.S. ports were supposed to be pretty much routine. After all, as one commentator said to me during an appearance on al Jazeera the other day, isn’t this the way globalization is intended to work: you co-opt everyone, even your rivals, into the international system? Instead, so mistrusted is the Bush administration—and so out of control has the war on terror become—that even leading Republican politicians this week sought to cancel the Dubai contract (Bush, to his credit, did manage a presidential response, vowing to veto).

The Hirsh article is excellent; I highly recommend that you read all of it.

If righties have been slow to catch on, so has Congresss (which, after all, is dominated by righties these days). From an editorial in today’s New York Times:

It’s easy to imagine how the Bush administration might have defused much of the uproar over a deal to allow a company owned by the Dubai royal family in the United Arab Emirates to run six American ports. Members of Congress asked for consultation and reassurance that the deal would not compromise already iffy security at one of the most vulnerable parts of the nation’s homeland defense system. What they got was a veto threat and a presidential suggestion that they were all anti-Arab.

If the administration is in trouble with Congress, it’s long overdue. For years now, the White House has stonewalled Congressional committees attempting to carry out their oversight duties. Administration officials appearing before Senate and House committees have given testimony that was, to put it generously, knowingly misleading. Requests for information have been simply waved away with an invocation of national security. Just recently, the Senate Intelligence Committee attempted to get information on the administration’s extralegal wiretapping, but was told that it would compromise national security to tell the senators how the program works, how it is reviewed, how much information is collected and how that information is used.

The chickens are coming home to roost. A White House that routinely brands anyone who disagrees with its positions as soft on terrorism is now complaining that election-bound lawmakers are callously using the ports deal to frighten voters. A White House that invaded Iraq as a substitute for defeating Al Qaeda is frustrated because Congress is using the company, Dubai Ports World, as a stand-in for all the intractable perils of the Middle East.

Today in the Washington Post, E.J. Dionne writes,

Americans owe a debt to Dubai Ports World for the storm the company has created with its pending takeover of operations at six U.S. seaports. Let us count the hypocrisies and the inconsistencies, the blind spots and the oversights that this controversy has revealed.

Until this fight broke out about a week ago, it was impossible to get anyone but the experts to pay attention to the huge holes in the security of our ports. Suddenly, everyone cares.

Dionne writes that the Bush Administration is too secretive for its own good.

Most Americans had no idea that our government’s process of approving foreign takeovers of American companies through the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States was entirely secret. When Rep. John Sweeney (R-N.Y.) asked Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff about the Dubai Ports deal at a hearing on Feb. 15, Chertoff declined to answer because the committee’s work was “classified.” Treasury Secretary John Snow told another congressional committee that he was not permitted to discuss specific transactions considered by the foreign investment panel.

Why shouldn’t the public have a right to know about the deliberations of this interagency committee? Hasn’t the secrecy surrounding this decision aggravated the uproar it has caused?

The way this administration keeps secrets strikes me as pathological. Time and time again, we’re told just to trust them. Yet they don’t seem to trust us or our elected representatives in Congress. They don’t want to have honest public discussions about policy; instead we get sales jobs. And manipulation. And fear-mongering.

After Dick’s shooting incident a New York Times editorial said “The vice president appears to have behaved like a teenager who thinks that if he keeps quiet about the wreck, no one will notice that the family car is missing its right door.” But that’s how the Bushies strike me all the time. There’s a furtive guiltiness about them, a whistling nonchalance that’s just a little too practiced.

Finally, David Ignatius, who catches a clue now and then, said something else that needs to be said.

The real absurdity here is that Congress doesn’t seem to realize that an Arab-owned company’s management of America’s ports is just a taste of what is coming. Greater foreign ownership of U.S. assets is an inevitable consequence of the reckless tax-cutting, deficit-ballooning fiscal policies that Congress and the White House have pursued. By encouraging the United States to consume more than it produces, these fiscal policies have sucked in imports so fast that the nation is nearing a trillion-dollar annual trade deficit. Those are IOUs on America’s future, issued by a spendthrift Congress.

The best quick analysis I’ve seen of the fiscal squeeze comes from New York University professor Nouriel Roubini, in his useful online survey of economic information, rgemonitor.com. He notes that with the U.S. current account deficit running at about $900 billion in 2006, “in a matter of a few years foreigners may end up owning most of the U.S. capital stocks: ports, factories, corporations, land, real estate and even our national parks.” Until recently, he writes, the United States has been financing its trade deficit through debt — namely, by selling U.S. Treasury securities to foreign central banks. That’s scary enough — as it has given big T-bill holders such as China and Saudi Arabia the ability to punish the U.S. dollar if they decide to unload their reserves.

But as Roubini says, foreigners may decide they would rather hold their dollars in equity investments than in U.S. Treasury debt. “If we continue with our current patterns of spending above our incomes, by 2013 the U.S. foreign liabilities could be as high as 75 percent of GDP and an increasing fraction of such liabilities will be in the form of equity,” he explains. “So, let us stop whining about the dangers of unfriendly foreigners owning our firms and assets and get used to it.”

Tell the righties and the Bush White House they support to get used to it. It’s their game, and they won’t let anyone else have the ball.

The Snapping Point

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I’ve been saying for some time that cognitive dissonance can only be stretched so far. Eventually it either snaps or surrenders to pure delusion.

This week I ‘spect a whole lot of Americans finally reached a snapping point.

The UAE-port deal is being attacked from both the Left and the Right, and lefties and righties are voicing many of the same objections. But on a more fundamental level, Left and Right are seeing two entirely different “Portgates.” Many on the Right are befuddled; like this fellow, Portgate is an inexplicable anomaly. Suddenly Muslims who boycott Danish goods and practice female genital mutilation are “moderate” Muslims who can be trusted, arch-foe Jimmy Carter is a Bush ally, and Presidential Brother Neil Bush is auditioning for the next Michael Moore film. The world has turned upside down.

But on the Left, we’re not surprised at all. This is the same old Bush we’ve disliked all along. And if righties still don’t get it, I suggest they rent “Fahrenheit 911” and watch it carefully for clues.

But our alarm at Bush is about more than selling out our security to Bush’s Arab business cronies. It’s true that the Bushies began to compromise our security as soon as they took office — for example, by interfering with FBI investigation of the U.S.S. Cole bombing because justice for the Cole was less important to the Bush White House than good relations with Yemen. But we lefties have been objecting to many other practices and characteristics of Bushism. We are alarmed because our national resources are being sold off at bargain-basement prices to big GOP donors; our children’s future is mortgaged to foreign bankers, the federal government cloaks itself in unprecedented secrecy even as it threatens citizens’ constitutional rights to keep their personal lives private. Among other things.

Yet these past five + years, every time we on the Left bring up these issues, the Right hoots us down and calls us “looney” and “unhinged.”

Well, my dears, who’s unhinged now?

If history is our guide, most righties will eventually find a way to rationalize the UAE deal and come back to the Bush cultie fold. But at least this episode reveals that years of carefully cultivated fear can’t be erased overnight. And make no mistake, the Bush Administration has spent nearly every waking moment since 9/11 carefully cultivating fear. And until now the fear-mongers have not been, shall we say, overly discriminating about who it is we’re supposed to be fearing.

Paul Krugman writes,

When terrorists attacked the United States, the Bush administration immediately looked for ways it could exploit the atrocity to pursue unrelated goals especially, but not exclusively, a war with Iraq.

But to exploit the atrocity, President Bush had to do two things. First, he had to create a climate of fear: Al Qaeda, a real but limited threat, metamorphosed into a vast, imaginary axis of evil threatening America. Second, he had to blur the distinctions between nasty people who actually attacked us and nasty people who didn’t.

The administration successfully linked Iraq and 9/11 in public perceptions through a campaign of constant insinuation and occasional outright lies. In the process, it also created a state of mind in which all Arabs were lumped together in the camp of evildoers. Osama, Saddam — what’s the difference?

To be fair, President Bush himself has not spoken about the “clash of civilizations,” I don’t believe. He has plenty of proxies to do it for him. But if you know anything at all about the hard-core Right, you know most of ’em are looking at the “war on terror” and seeing a war against Islam — just as their counterparts in the Muslim world see themselves engaged as a war against the West. And the White House hasn’t worked real hard at discouraging that point of view. As Krugman writes, “After years of systematically suggesting that Arabs who didn’t attack us are the same as Arabs who did, the administration can’t suddenly turn around and say, ‘But these are good Arabs.'”

At The Nation, William Greider gloats at bit at David Brooks, who called Portgate an instance of political hysteria.

A conservative blaming hysteria is hysterical, when you think about it, and a bit late. Hysteria launched Bush’s invasion of Iraq. It created that monstrosity called Homeland Security and pumped up defense spending by more than 40 percent. Hysteria has been used to realign US foreign policy for permanent imperial war-making, whenever and wherever we find something frightening afoot in the world. Hysteria will justify the “long war” now fondly embraced by Field Marshal Rumsfeld. It has also slaughtered a number of Democrats who were not sufficiently hysterical. It saved George Bush’s butt in 2004.

I do hope that someone digs up one of Bush’s 2004 campaign speeches in which he derides John Kerry for his “global test” remark. As Digby reminded us,

Bush has been playing politics with this complicated situation for years now, saying things like “you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists.” He spent the entire presidential campaign taunting John Kerry for allegedly requiring a “global test” and using his applause lines like a bludgeon:

    I will never hand over America’s security decisions to foreign leaders and international bodies that do not have America’s interests at heart.

If you’ve forgotten the “global test” spin, you can find an explanation of what Kerry actually said and how the Bushies twisted it at Media Matters. Bush actually said that Kerry “would give foreign governments veto power over our national security decisions.” Oh, please, please, somebody find a video of that and plaster it about the Blogosphere, please. And email the link to Keith Olbermann.

But this is 2006. And now, bless us, the Bush Administration is telling us that turning six American ports over to the government of the United Arab Emirates is a perfectly normal and reasonable thing to do, and anyone who says otherwise is just a racist. Ellen Terich writes,

The Bush administration is aggressively fighting this objection to their cozy deal with the UAE on two fronts. First, it is insisting that the business deal has been thoroughly and legally vetted and thus should be of no concern. In other words, King George is saying “Trust me. I’ll tell you when to be afraid.” Secondly he is sending out the message, through surrogates, that the objection is racist. We shouldn’t object to this company running some of our ports, in other words, if we haven’t objected to companies from other countries running our ports, countries like Britain, Denmark and Singapore.

Is he serious? The monarch who called a “crusade” against Islamic terrorists, who made sure there was an Islamic terrorist alert every month before the 2004 election (and none since), who rounded up countless Muslims, imprisoned them without due process and tortured them, who lied to the people so he could go to war and expand American empire in the Islamic Middle East, and exploited the people’s fear of “Islamo-Fascists” to ensure his re-election, is now chastising the people for being concerned about an Islamic country running U.S. ports? What you reap, you will sow, your majesty! You succeeded beyond your wildest dreams in exploiting the fears, the prejudices, and lack of sophistication of many of your supporters, and now it is possible (although no sure thing considering how the Congress always ends up bowing to your commands) that this little tactic will backfire and cause you to lose what you and your cronies have really been all about: the acquisition of corporate wealth and power.

As Mahablog reader k commented earlier this week, “We are being dismantled brick by brick and sold on the international market. We will be enslaved one way or another because we have lost our economic independence.” Yes, this is how Bush handles national security; by selling us all out.

Are you paying attention, righties?

While We Were Distracted

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Just thought I’d mention that in the past few days, while we’ve been distracted by Dick Cheney’s hunting accident and the UAE port imbroglio, civil war broke out in Iraq

Granted, it’s not an official civil war yet. As with the insurgency, it will take the talking heads awhile to figure out that it’s actually happening. Expect our Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, to be the last to know — other than Bush himself, of course, who never will know. But that’s another rant.

Update: As always, read Juan Cole.

Update update: And Riverbend, too.

Follow the Money

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The Associated Press reports that

Under a secretive agreement with the Bush administration, a company in the United Arab Emirates promised to cooperate with U.S. investigations as a condition of its takeover of operations at six major American ports, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

The VRWC echo chamber is dutifully putting out the word that security concerns about the United Arab Emirates managing major American ports was just so much scare-mongering.

As I noted at the end of this post, some smart people have been saying this deal wouldn’t really compromise port security. But even if we take security issues off the table, there are other reasons to be alarmed about the UAE ports deal.

For example, note the second and third grafs in the AP story:

The U.S. government chose not to impose other, routine restrictions.

In approving the $6.8 billion purchase, the administration chose not to require state-owned Dubai Ports World to keep copies of its business records on U.S. soil, where they would be subject to orders by American courts. It also did not require the company to designate an American citizen to accommodate requests by the government.

Josh Marshall writes,

But even if the fears are more nativist than real, it seems like the White House will still not leave critics hanging — if nothing else, on old-fashioned and true-to-form insider and cronyism grounds. …

… The failure to require the company to keep business records on US soil sounds like a pretty open invitation to flout US law as near as I can tell. Forget terrorism. This is the sort of innovative business arrangement I would think a number of Bush-affiliated American companies might want to get in on. Perhaps Halliburton could be domiciled in Houston, pay its taxes in Bermuda, do its business in Iraq and keep its business records in Jordan.

Digby writes,

What a tangled web. It certainly appears that the UAE has us wrapped around their little fingers, doesn’t it? And it’s not just that they are “both a valued counterterrorism ally of the United States and a persistent counterterrorism problem.” They are holding something else over our heads as well (again via Atrios):

    But he said he would withhold judgment on the deal’s national security implications until after today’s briefing. The United Arab Emirates provides docking rights for more U.S. Navy ships than any other nation in the region, Warner noted. He added: “If they say they have not been treated fairly in this, we run the risk of them pulling back some of that support at a critical time of the war.”

This is obviously a very complicated relationship, which explains why Bush was singing kumbaaya around the drum circle yesterday asking everyone to give peace a chance.

See also Jane Hamsher at firedoglake. And if you missed David Sirota on Countdown last night, you can find a link to the video on his blog. David discusses other quid-pro-quo business arrangements the White House has going on with the UAE. There should be a transcript of this program available later today at the MSNBC site.

Further, I’ve yet to see significant follow up to the fact that two administration officials, Treasury Secretary John Snow in particular, who helped put this deal together have a vested interest in the outcome. Nor have I seen a satisfactory answer to the charge that the deal was shoved through without observing a legally mandated review period. Once again, it seems the Bush White House thinks those pesky little legal details don’t apply to them.

It also seems to me this episode relates to what I wrote last night about a column by David Ignatius in the Washington Post. Trying to explain why so many in the Middle East are turning toward Islamic nationalism, Ignatius writes,

… as elites around the world become more connected with the global economy, they become more disconnected from their own cultures and political systems. The local elites “lose touch with what’s going on around them,” opening up a vacuum that is filled by religious parties and sectarian groups, Sidawi contends. The modernizers think they are plugging their nations into the global economy, but what’s also happening is that they are unplugging themselves politically at home.

Sidawi’s theory — that connectedness produces a political disconnect — helps explain some of what we see in the Middle East. Take the case of Iran: A visitor to Tehran in 1975 would have thought the country was rushing toward the First World. The Iranian elite looked and talked just like the Western bankers, business executives and political leaders who were embracing the shah’s modernizing regime. And yet a few years later, that image of connectedness had been shattered by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution, whose aftershocks still rumble across the region. The Iranian modernizers had lost touch with the masses. That process has been repeated in Iraq, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority — where the secular elites who talked the West’s line have proved to be politically weak.

I think there’s a variation of this same dynamic going on here. We have, on the one hand, the corporate rush toward globalization to maximize profits, enabled by Washington politicians from both parties. But we also have, on the other hand, politicians who play on our concerns about this process to get themselves elected. Democrats have to mollify the old hard-hat, Union base as their manufacturing jobs are outsourced. And many Republicans are walking a policy tightrope — exploiting nationalism and xenophobia to get themselves re-elected even as, behind closed doors, they work on behalf of global corporate power.

Digby brings up a good example of the latter:

Bush has been playing politics with this complicated situation for years now, saying things like “you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists.” He spent the entire presidential campaign taunting John Kerry for allegedly requiring a “global test” and using his applause lines like a bludgeon:

    I will never hand over America’s security decisions to foreign leaders and international bodies that do not have America’s interests at heart.

    … the senator would have America bend over backwards to satisfy a handful of governments with agendas different from our own.

    This is my opponent’s alliance-building strategy: brush off your best friends, fawn over your critics. And that is no way to gain the respect of the world.

More examples where that came from.

Now, the question is, will the nationalistic, xenophobic Bush base be able to rewire themselves and think “War With Oceana — So Yesterday“? Or will other politicians, seeing an opportunity, attempt to attack Bush from the right to siphon off some of his supporters?

Unrelated: This is a hoot.

Update: See Claudia Long: ‘When assholes collide: Bush, Dubai, corporatists and the right-wing noise machine‘

It’s Us, Too

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Roger Ailes’s objections notwithstanding — I’ll come back to them in a minute — David Ignatius’s column in today’s Washington Post comes close to saying the same thing I said in the “Patriotism v. Paranoia” post below. I wrote,

In the past century or so our species, worldwide, has undergone some seismic social shifts. People no longer remain neatly sorted by skin color, language, and cultural history. All over the globe people of diverse ethnic and social backgrounds are having to learn to live together. Once upon a time “foreign” places were far, far away. But air travel has brought them closer in terms of travel time; now every foreign place on the globe is just over the horizon. Soon foreigners will be sitting in our laps.

I think nationalism arose and became dominant in the 20th century largely because of these seismic social shifts. People who can’t handle the shifts retreat into nationalism as a defense.

Ignatius describes what he calls the “connectedness to conflict” paradox, which says that more “connected” people become, the more conflicts seem to arise.

… as elites around the world become more connected with the global economy, they become more disconnected from their own cultures and political systems. The local elites “lose touch with what’s going on around them,” opening up a vacuum that is filled by religious parties and sectarian groups, Sidawi contends. The modernizers think they are plugging their nations into the global economy, but what’s also happening is that they are unplugging themselves politically at home.

In his column Ignatius quotes Francis Fukuyama and a couple of over over-educated ivory-tower types as they try to figure out why it is that the Middle East is in such turmoil because of its contacts with the West. And that’s the problem; these guys are all westerners trying to figure out what’s wrong with Middle Easterners and not noticing that a variation of the same thing is going on right here in the good ol’ U.S. of A., not to mention Europe and other western-type spots.

If by “elites” you substitute “people who aren’t afraid of other cultures and of social and cultural change” I think you get a clearer picture. I don’t think the not-afraid people are necessarily “elites.” Some of the most retrenched nationalists are wealthy, well-educated and well-connected. What they’re not, is modern.

And in a kind of double-paradox, many people who are working hard at “plugging their nations into the global economy” are some of the same people who exploit local nationalistic and xenophobic feelings to stay in political power. Think Republicans Party.

Ignatius, Fukuyama, et al. scratch their heads over democracy and alienation, and of “elites” becoming “disconnected” with their own cultures, and write up a lot of verbose papers expressing highfalutin’ theories. Look, guys, this isn’t difficult. People are afraid of change. They are especially afraid of change that seems to threaten their autonomy and self-identity. And if they think this change is being imported by odd-colored people with exotic accents, don’t expect ’em to roll out the welcome wagon.

This rebellion against change, this retreat into nationalism, is happening all over the globe. It’s happening in Europe, big-time. It’s in the Middle East. And it’s happening here, too, although we’re a bit more subdued about it. So far. But as I noted here, the ongoing Muslim cartoon crisis, for example, amounted to Middle Eastern anti-modernists and western right-wingers whipping each other into a mutual hate frenzy. Granted the western wingnuts haven’t resorted to riots and destruction; they’ve been content with escalating hate speech. But the distinction is merely one of degree, not of kind.

Here’s where Roger Ailes comes in — in the remainder of his column, Ignatius postulates that all these people around the world are going berserk because they have the internets. Ignatius writes,

McLean argues that the Internet is a “rage enabler.” By providing instant, persistent, real-time stimuli, the new technology takes anger to a higher level. “Rage needs to be fed or stimulated continually to build or maintain it,” he explains. The Internet provides that instantaneous, persistent poke in the eye. What’s more, it provides an environment in which enraged people can gather at cause-centered Web sites and make themselves even angrier. The technology, McLean notes, “eliminates the opportunity for filtering or rage-dissipating communications to intrude.” I think McLean is right. And you don’t have to travel to Cairo to see how the Internet fuels rage and poisons reasoned debate. Just take a tour of the American blogosphere.

The connected world is inescapable, like the global economy itself. But if we can begin to understand how it undermines political stability — how it can separate elites from masses, and how it can enhance rage rather than reason — then perhaps we will have a better chance of restabilizing a very disorderly world.

Oh, good. Just cut ’em off from the Web and the natives won’t be so restless. Roger Ailes writes,

Oh, for the good old days — pre-1990s — a time when our sectarian wars and riots and lynchings and genocides were civilized affairs, based on pure, sweet reason. Oh, paradise lost!

I’d like to apologize personally to David Ignatius and Tom Friedman and Francis Fukuyama and Thomas P.M. Barnett and, most of all, to Charles M. McLean, who runs a trend-analysis company called Denver Research Group Inc., for coarsening the discourse. It was wrong of me to think that my opinions might be worth consideration even though I knew I didn’t have a book contract. Clearly, it was my rage that blinded me to the fact that I was poisoning reasoned debate and undermining political stability and separating elites from masses.

And I was such a nice fellow before October 2002; really, I was.

Let the healing begin.

Snark.

Hate Speech and Its Consequences

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James Wolcott provides a good follow up to my “Patriotism v. Hate Speech” post.

The incredible shrinking Dennis the Peasant lets loose with a thumping j’accuse against fellow conservatives who use their blogs as bonfire sites to promote hate speech, demonize Muslims, and cheerlead for the “Clash of Civilizations.” …

    “So… when I see people yucking it up over at Little Green Footballs over the deaths of 300+ religious pilgrims – innocent human beings whose crime was, evidently, that they weren’t Christians and just like us… and whose deaths are therefore something to gloat over – and Charles Johnson [maitre’d of Little Green Footballs and co-founder, with Roger L. Simon, of Pajamas Media] doesn’t think it appropriate or necessary to remove those comments and ban those people from his site, then I’ve got one mother of a problem on my hands. …

    Does anyone want to argue that a collective lack of knowledge of, and a persistent misunderstanding of, of the religion, culture, politics and history of the Middle East didn’t play a huge part in facilitating the success of al-Qaeda on September 11? And if our ignorance of the peoples, religion, history and politics played into the hands of Osama bin Laden and his followers, just how do the actions of ‘thought leading, tipping point’ bloggers like Charles Johnson and columnists like Ann Coulter help to rectify that situation? How does the mocking of the faith of over a billion souls serve our interests in winning the War on Terror? How does the dehumanization of those same billion souls make us stronger – either materially or morally – in the fight against al Qaeda?

    “Answer? They Don’t.

It’s Mahablog policy not to link to Little Green Footballs even when I refer to it, because the site and its followers are so viciously hateful. And also because of an episode a couple of years ago in which LGF faithful tried to shut The Mahablog down with comment spam. Needless to say, I’m not exactly a fan. But there is a link to LGF buried in the “hate speech” post. If you find it, it will take you to a post yukking it up over the death of peace activist Rachel Corrie. Mr. Corrie died when she was crushed by a bulldozer, an episode that inspired a regular festival of humor on the Right. The nice doggie, for example, christened her “St. Pancake” and regailed his readers with song lyric spoofs. (Note that the doggie has removed these items from his web site; thank goodness for google cache.)

Of course, in Rightie World, this doesn’t qualify as hate speech.

A few days ago when Michelle Malkin went on her cartoon jihad I suggested that just maybe goading Muslims into hating us more is not the best way to win hearts and minds in Iraq. Not too many righties put those pieces together, though.

I will have more to say on this later.