Taking Note

Frozen Out: The Brewing Perfect Storm

Labor Day marks the end of summer and the start of Congress’s fall term, and once again, the issue of increasing funding for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) is awaiting action. This year, a bill that would have provided $2.5 billion in additional funding for the program stalled in the face of a promised veto from President Bush, who claimed that its passage would increase the deficit.

This stand by President Bush, who the White House predicted in late July would leave a record $482 billion deficit to his successor, should not come as a surprise. After all, those who will be affected by this minute addition to the out-of-control deficit are the 35 million households who are poor enough to meet the stringent eligibility requirements for LIHEAP assistance, not the wealthy whose tax cuts have contributed to the deficit—and the voices of the poor simply do not ring as loudly as the voices of the rich.

The Downside of Generous Moguls

Today, philanthropy has become a rich man's game, with millionaires and billionaires sinking money into high-profile projects such as the Gates Foundation, which has seen millions from Gates and Warren Buffet.

It's easy to admire the generosity of the world's richest people--they're contributing truckloads of cash to worthy causes and building capital for compelling, new service-oriented ventures. But is there a downside to this model of social change,  derived as it is from the pockets of rich individuals rather than collective social movements? After all, as Michael Edwards, director of the Governance and Civil Society Program at the Ford Foundation, notes, the civil rights movement was just that--a movement. It wasn't structured like a business. It wasn't built around "metrics" and "project plans." It wasn't a managerial undertaking, driven by a businessman with a softer side.

Conventional Wisdom

Starting in 1948, our national political conventions began their long evolution into televised spectaculars. For a couple of decades, coverage expanded to engulf prime time on almost all the television stations then available to Americans. Conventions mattered because they were a major part of the shared experience of voters during the presidential campaign season. That doesn’t mean convention success translated into Election Day outcomes. For example, one of the most effective conventions of the past forty years – the Democratic assembly in San Francisco in 1984 – occurred as the nominee was headed to a landslide defeat by Ronald Reagan. Still, that national experience affected voters in the short run, with Walter Mondale briefly holding his only lead over the incumbent president in post-convention national polling.

Opening School Choice to the Suburbs

One of the big problems with the No Child Left Behind Act is its failure to deliver on the promise to allow kids in low-performing schools to transfer to better performing institutions.  Only about 1% of students transfer under the Act’s provisions, in part because in many urban districts, there are very few good schools to transfer into.  To fix this problem, conservatives propose private school vouchers while some progressive education reformers (see here and here) are looking at the possibility of inter-district public school choice: allowing reasonable numbers of students in failing urban schools to transfer to high performing public schools in the suburbs.  We need better information on how many students would benefit from cross-district public school choice.  Unfortunately, a deeply flawed report just published by the Education Sector think tank, may mislead policymakers into underestimating the potential of inter-district public school choice.

Lessons from Massachusetts

The Massachusetts experiment in health care reform is all about expanding access.  But it doesn’t try to control costs.  This, in a nutshell, is why it’s running into trouble.

The plan didn’t reform health care delivery, just coverage. Granted, in terms of bringing more people in under the tent, it’s been a success: Since the plan went into effect in 2006, 439,000 people have signed up for insurance—a number that represents more than two-thirds of the estimated 600,000 people uninsured in the state two years ago. This surge in coverage has reduced use of emergency rooms for routine care by 37 percent, which has saved the state about $68 million. (Going to the ER for routine care drives up health care costs by creating longer wait times and tying up resources that can be used to help patients who are critically ill).

Hot Books

As summer winds down, books have been making cheesy news. Here is a take on three controversies, unrelated but sharing this characteristic: positions on all sides have been notably self-righteous and/or disingenuous, overwhelming the principles at stake—and they are real—with explanations that fall well short of impressive. Chelsea Green, a respected independent publisher in Vermont that has had success with books of progressive argument, announced that it was releasing a book by an admirable liberal journalist, Robert Kuttner, called Obama’s Challenge, to coincide with the Democratic Convention. The wrinkle was that Chelsea Green made an exclusive arrangement with Amazon to feature the book in a print-on-demand version for three weeks before it was put on sale elsewhere. Other booksellers, from Barnes and Noble to independents, expressed indignation and Barnes and Noble said it would sell the book only on its Web site. Margo Baldwin, Chelsea Green’s publisher, was quoted as saying, “this election is too important to wait around for traditional publishing lead times,” and in an open letter to retailers, she called for “perspective” and said the cancellation of orders meant a “really good and important book on Obama will be effectively boycotted.”

I very much share Ms. Baldwin’s belief in speed to market for newsy books. But the reality is that Amazon—a great asset to authors and publishers alike—is also a very aggressive business, using its clout to extract concessions from publishers that are sharply reducing benefits of sales on the site. Chelsea Green had an alternative option: to make an e-book and print-on-demand version of Kuttner’s book available simultaneously to all retailers. For a variety of reasons, Amazon would still probably dominate the early sales—through their proprietary Kindle device and a print-on-demand subsidiary—but shutting out other booksellers for a critical sales period is a bad precedent for all concerned.

Instead of a successful launch for what is doubtless a worthwhile contribution to political debate, everyone involved has lost, except Amazon.

There Are Better Options

Israel's response to the Iranian challenge has been out of synch with developing realities for some time. Recently though, it has become dangerously counter-productive, anchored as it is in denial. As Israel intensifies its role as threatener-in-chief, and clings to a "more sticks, bigger sticks" line, events all around are moving on.

The supposed logic behind Israel's escalating threats, suggesting it is ready to go it alone militarily, is threefold. It pressures Iran, thereby increasing international leverage in negotiations; a nervous world feels compelled to up sanctions and deliver results; and the path is smoothed to international acceptance of possible future Israeli action. Except that the logic (always a tenuous one) is now being repudiated on all three fronts.

Iran apparently views the threats as a reason to pursue more vigorously, not desist from, its enrichment program. In general, Iran's perception that it is the threatened party (surrounded by U.S. forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Arabian Gulf) adds impetus to its weapons-acquisition program. Israeli threats only add to that momentum. Sanctions tend to be a plodding, blunt and ineffective policy instrument. Iranian technological advances have outpaced sanctions every time. Anyway, the prospects of intensifying collective UN sanctions has likely been buried in the rubble of America's spat with Russia over Georgia and its breakaway provinces.

Is al-Maliki Making His Move?

Following a May 2008 research trip to Baghdad, I wrote about the increasing tensions over the future of the Sons of Iraq and their integration into the Iraqi security forces. The formal Sons of Iraq program evolved out of tactical alliances formed by U.S. military commanders with tribal forces and former insurgents, which were popularly known as awakening councils or sahwat. These groups turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq, and U.S. military commanders have credited these tactical alliances as one of the main pillars of the security strategy that brought down violence in the country to more manageable levels. As part of the program, the U.S. military provided material support to the groups and sanctioned their policing and security activities.

U.S. military commanders have long argued that some portion of these localized forces should be integrated into the Iraqi security forces to ensure a more sustainable security framework that could withstand a drawdown of U.S. troops.

Moscow and the Merchant of Death

As tensions intensified between the United States and Russia over the crisis in South Ossetia, one person who has no doubt been watching the story very closely is the notorious gun runner Viktor Bout, who is currently sitting in a jail cell in Bangkok. Known as the “Merchant of Death,” Bout is widely believed to have been the most prolific smuggler of black market weapons during the 1990s, who flouted UN embargoes to fuel the bloody conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and other African countries. Bout played a clever game of jurisdictional arbitrage through much of his career, hopscotching from one country to another, always a step ahead of national laws and law enforcement. Eventually he settled in Moscow, where despite an Interpol red notice and the fact that he was wanted in numerous countries, he lived openly, and with impunity, going so far as to grant an interview for a cover story in the New York Times Magazine.

The Toll of War

This post was written by Niko Karvounis and Maggie Mahar and originally appeared on Health Beat

It’s no secret that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have stretched the military thin. Indeed, the past few years have seen a steady flow of news stories depicting just how desperate our armed forces are for warm bodies—including reports that the military is “at its breaking point” and has considered non-citizens for service; that states are seeing their largest mobilization of reservists since World War II; and that the army has abandoned the 24-month limit on time that reservists must serve.

Meanwhile, in November, Stars and Stripes reported that the Pentagon was quietly looking for ways to make it easier for people with “minor” criminal records to join the military. In 2007, the share of Army recruits needing waivers for infractions that included stealing, carrying weapons on schools grounds, and fighting rose to 18 percent –up from 15 percent a year earlier.

There’s no shortage of political objections one can level against the military’s never-ending need for manpower, but there are also some profoundly personal issues to consider when reflecting on just how dangerous it is for our military to deploy—and redeploy—so many soldiers. More than 100,000 American veterans have been sent back to Afghanistan and Iraq despite finishing the terms of their enlistment. Imagine what it means to think that you have fulfilled  your duty—and then to find yourself on the way back to hell.