Taking Note

Ready For Good Government

If 2007 marked the end of an economic period – the era of make-believe wealth created in assert bubbles – 2008 marked the end of an ideological period: the era of irrational exuberance for unregulated markets.  The good news is that President Obama appears to be an extraordinarily able leader, and he will enter office with extraordinary leeway to mold the future of the U.S. economy. The bad news has two parts. First, the field for President Obama will be so wide open because the economy will be in the worst shape since the Great Depression, with enormous slack (which good policy can put to work for the common good). Second, the ameliorative measures tried so far, measures that have been pretty bold and expensive, have not stopped the downward spiral of the economy.

Four Health Care Media Myths That Didn’t Go Away in 2008

No matter how you slice it, health care is complicated—which means that the media has a vital role to play in helping the public navigate the ins and outs of the issue. Unfortunately, more often than not, reporters, commentators, and pundits don’t serve as trustworthy guides when it comes to health care. In fact, 2008 saw the media once again regurgitating myths that obscure the facts surrounding health care in the United States. Here are some of the most egregious offenders.  

Access Is Not a Problem

In August, John Goodman, president of the right-wing National Center for Policy Analysis, wrote a ridiculous blog post arguing that nobody lacks health insurance in the United States because “only people who are denied care are truly uninsured.” Thus, because hospitals are required by law to provide emergency services, every American essentially has health insurance. “Voila!” says Goodman: access to health care is not a problem.

Goodman’s ramblings would have been easy to overlook as right-wing nonsense if the Dallas Morning News hadn’t reported his comments twice and declared them “simple and logical.” Equally unfortunate was the fact that CNN.com uncritically parroted his absurd claim. From these high-profile news outlets, Goodman’s ludicrous argument trickled down to the punditocracy: in September, conservative commentator Glenn Beck smugly declared that, because it’s “against federal law to deny health care to someone who needs it,” we shouldn’t worry about issues of access.  

The Best and the Worst of 2008: The World

Choosing which developments of the past year may prove of enduring significance, whether as the most positive or negative or some mixture of both, is inevitably subjective, but this observer of the global scene would spotlight the following:

 Ten Best

 ·      Bush agrees to Iraq withdrawal. After nearly six years of summoning America to fight till “victory” in Iraq, President George W. Bush capitulated to the demands of the elected regime the United States had brought to Baghdad for the complete withdrawal of all U.S. troops by 2011. Far from locking in an open-ended U.S. military presence in the Arab heartland as advocates of the invasion had expected, the status of forces agreement became the rallying point for a fractious Iraqi political class—emboldened by an improving security situation—to unite in demanding that the Americans go home.

 ·      Cuba opens the door a crack. The Castro family continued to hold the reins in Havana after an incapacitated Fidel’s resignation, but successor Raúl initiated a series of steps to loosen the straitjacket of his brother’s purist communism: permitting Cubans to buy cell phones and computers; issuing private taxi licenses; opening foreign tourist enclaves to Cubans; allowing farmers to buy land and sell produce directly; even eliminating some salary caps. Though security services continued to jail dissenters, Cuba signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights that Fidel had long opposed, prompting the European Union to relax sanctions against Havana and again join this year’s lopsided U.N. majority (185–3) calling for an end to the failed U.S. embargo.

Front Pages

A surprise bestseller this holiday season is The New York Times: The Complete Front Pages 1851–2008 (Black Dog and Leventhal). It got as high as number 13 on the New York Times Book Review nonfiction list, was sold out at Amazon, and retailing at $60 was a pricey gift, for a book. As an artifact for a history buff, it is worth every penny. The immediacy of next day coverage of great events is irresistible. Almost every story of our time has its forebears. On Friday, October 25, 1929, the headline was “Worst Stock Crashes Stemmed by Banks . . . Leaders Confer, Find Conditions Sound.” On the day after Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, the off-lead was “Worst City Crisis since 1933 Is Seen in State Tax Plan.” The last page in the book is March 19, 2008, and the main headline is “Fed Trims Rates Sharply Sending the Markets up . . . Signs of Split on Policy at Central Bank.”

The book comes with three DVD-ROMs “with all 54,267 front pages and links to the full articles.” In his introduction, Times executive editor Bill Keller writes, “The front page is imperfect, evolving and quite possibly, endangered. . . . This album of faces from the past century and a half is a treasury of ourselves.” Right on all counts.

I have been casting around for some time to find a way to say that the New York Times is one of the core institutions of American life and that acknowledging this reality is not an act of sycophancy, earnestness, or friendship (and yes, over many years, including those I worked at the Washington Post, I have had many friends at the Times). The Complete Front Pages gives me that chance. You need a table or a very good armchair, as well as a computer, to navigate through this massive volume. But what you find is nothing less than a record of what has been happening in our world for a very long time.

Never Waste a Crisis: Creating a New Government for a New Economy

While the outlines of the soon-to-be-trillion dollar stimulus program are not firm, some of the key elements are becoming more visible: repairing roads and expanding transit systems, upgrading the energy grid and weatherizing structures, bigger children’s health programs and new health care information systems, fixing school facilities as well as creating new teacher training and early childhood programs, and providing assistance to low-income families. While implementing any one of these is daunting enough in scale to keep a boatload of bureaucrats busy, in this case, they all need to be pressed simultaneously if the flow of new dollars is to work quickly enough to keep the frightened economy from heading into a pure panic.

The Public Is Optimistic that Government Can Fix the Economy

The incoming Obama administration faces daunting economic problems. Yet the public is remarkably optimistic that the government can overcome these challenges. Consider these results from a recent Pew Research Center poll: Sixty-eight percent say that, as Americans, we can always find ways to solve our problems, compared to just 27 percent who say the country can’t solve many of its most important problems.

What’s more, the public said by 59 to 35 that the government can successfully address our economic problems when specifically queried about whether the federal government still has the power to fix the economy or whether globalization has made this task too difficult to accomplish.

The Failings of the Central Criminal Court of Iraq

In May 2008 I traveled to Baghdad with Joseph Logan, Iraq researcher for Human Rights Watch, to undertake a research project on Iraq’s flagship criminal justice institution, the Central Criminal Court of Iraq (CCCI). The court was established by the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in 2003, and it was granted nationwide jurisdiction with a mandate to focus on terrorism and the most serious security-related cases within the framework of Iraqi criminal law. The court also hears the cases of a number of detainees referred by the U.S. military.

During our time in Baghdad we attended more than 70 investigative hearings and five trials involving 17 defendants, and we conducted extensive interviews with Iraqi judges, officials, lawyers, defendants, and detainees. We also met with U.S. military and embassy officials. The research was made possible by the high level of cooperation we received from Iraqi judicial officials and judges, who allowed us unfettered access to investigative hearings and trials and also allowed us to interview detainees. In fact, many of the Iraqi judges we met were forthright in acknowledging the failings we brought up in our discussions, and, in many instances, this was reflected in the numerous cases that were dismissed due to credible allegations of torture and coercion or serious indications of the misuse of secret informants.

The Top Dozen Insights of Conservatives, 2008

It was a brutal year for the conservative movement, which at long last came crashing down after dominating American politics for nearly 30 years. One small consolation for at least some leading thinkers on the right is that they began to demonstrate perceptiveness that by and large eluded them in preceding years. Here are the top twelve insights of  prominent conservatives in 2008:

The Best and Worst in Education - 2008

In many ways, 2008 was a great year for education, with the election of a new president who is willing to both invest in and reform American schools.  Also encouraging was the emergence of a new kind of school integration based primarily on economic status to replace race-based plans struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.  At the same time, however, 2008 was deeply disheartening year for education, as long-running tensions between some civil rights groups and liberal pundits on the one hand, and teacher unions and academics on the other, threatened to deteriorate into an all-out education war on the left.

We begin with the bad news:

Stimulating the Government, Not Just the Economy

There are many opportunities that a significant stimulus program presents for the incoming administration besides a chance to turn the US economy around by creating jobs and restoring confidence.  Some of the goals that have been talked about explicitly – repairing long-ignored and aged infrastructure as well as creating a platform for long-term increases in national productivity – may turn out to be more difficult to achieve than we hope.  But there is one major change that President Obama and the new Congress can achieve through the stimulus package that is perhaps more important than any other: a reversal of nearly half a century of decline in the role of the Federal government in our lives.

The roots of this decline stem from an unfortunate confluence of interests that started at the end of the Johnson Administration but which gained enormous momentum in the Nixon, Reagan and Bush years.  Direct Federal spending on programs that benefitted local communities had been significant in the years since the New Deal and running through the Great Society.  Some of these were programs that were implemented by the Federal government itself – such as the national highway system – and others were implemented by the states and cities but with strong Federal guidance.