Taking Note

Toasting Craig Whitney of The New York Times

On September 30, Craig R. Whitney retires from the New York Times after forty-four years, during which he was a correspondent or bureau chief in Saigon, Bonn, Moscow, London, Paris, and Washington. He was foreign editor and twice an assistant managing editor. Whitney is leaving because the paper requires editors listed on the masthead to do so at age sixty-five. He will not be staying on with any residual arrangement. He is planning to write a book, which would be his third. Let me acknowledge (confess) that Whitney and I have been close friends since 1970, when we arrived in Vietnam as correspondents for the New York Times and the Washington Post, respectively.

China's Gorbachev

The Tiananmen Square uprising of 1989 is one of the seminal events of modern Chinese history. The Communist government’s decision to crush student demonstrations with gunfire and tanks left the country deeply scarred and ended any hope for democracy for at least two to three decades. Yet, even as the mayhem was going on, the Chinese regime refrained from clamping down on the growth of its unbridled capitalism.

Now, twenty years after the calamity in Beijing comes an extraordinary book, Prisoner of the State – written from the perspective of a man who was in the leadership at the time – which attempts to explain why China acted so viciously to stamp out the rebellion while holding on to its market reforms. The author is the former general-secretary of the Communist Party, Zhao Ziyang, who presided over both the vast economic transformations and the insurrectional fervors that gripped China in that period – and who was ultimately dumped from his job for his opposition to China’s hardline policies.  

Nonprofit Hospitals Need to Earn Their Exemptions

If nonprofit hospitals spend far less money on providing charity care for the poor and uninsured than the value of their federal, state and local tax exemptions, do they deserve those exemptions? What about if they turn away indigent patients or hound them with aggressive collection practices?

In May, the Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus, and ranking Republican Charles Grassley seemed to agree that nonprofit hospitals have to start acting more like nonprofits or they could risk losing their benefits. The committee introduced a bipartisan proposal that would have required nonprofit hospitals to provide a minimum amount of charity care, limit how much they charge the uninsured, and to scale back aggressive collection processes or face an excise tax or even an end to their tax-exempt status.

But when the Senate committee released its watered-down version of health care reform earlier this month, these stringent new standards emerged equally weakened. Gone was the requirement that hospitals provide a minimum of uncompensated care. Gone was the threat of an excise tax, and gone was the threat that hospitals could lose their tax-exempt status if they didn’t comply.

Between Mubaraks and a Hard Place

The Obama administration has sought to revitalize the U.S.-Egyptian relationship, which had drifted under the Bush administration. Despite its diminished status, Egypt has emerged as a key regional player as the United States attempts to revitalize the peace process and reorient its policies in the Arab world. This has come at a time when speculation over who will succeed Egypt’s longtime leader, 81-year old president Hosni Mubarak, has increased in the Egyptian, regional, and international media. Much of the focus has rightly been placed on the president’s influential son, Gamal Mubarak. Through a series of constitutional amendments, the regime has in effect constructed a legal framework that appears to predetermine the outcome of succession and all indications point toward a hereditary father-to-son passing of the torch.

 

With significant, but unorganized, discontent with the prospect of a hereditary succession in Egypt, the United States will be faced with the uncomfortable prospect of being seen as approving an essentially undemocratic dynastic process accomplished using ostensibly constitutional means. This is heightened by the longstanding appearance of U.S. acceptance of Gamal Mubarak as a representative of Egypt through numerous official and unofficial visits to Washington where he has been hosted at the White House. This eventuality would also present a problem domestically as some critics of the administration have assailed what they perceive to be a downgrading of human rights and democracy as essential components of U.S. foreign policy in general and U.S.-Egyptian bilateral relations.

 

In a new article in the Fall 2009 World Policy Journal, I evaluate the prospects for regime succession and offer up several recommendations for U.S. policy during the limited transition period prior to national elections when it can shift attention to issues of transparency and process that could play a role in influencing long-term trends in Egypt:

At this late stage, however, there is little that any foreign power—even the United States—could realistically do, even if it were so inclined, to affect the selection of a successor in Egypt. Nor would this be an appropriate intervention. What is essential, however, is that during this transition, Egypt take steps, even if modest ones, toward the establishment of a political culture that can tolerate and support the emergence of independent domestic initiatives aimed at creating governmental accountability. While the United States and the international community will continue to be highly attentive to the regime’s immediate stability, a leadership transition will present an opportunity for Egypt’s allies to state clearly their expectations for transparent, fair, and free elections, Although such procedural propriety will not affect the eventual outcome of elections to determine President Mubarak’s successor, establishing expectations and traditions of transparency and independent oversight will play a part in creating necessary conditions for the emergence of an accountable political culture. Such steps could also provide a platform to begin discussions about the continued long-term need for broad-based institutional and legal reforms.

It is unclear if the United States has broached the topic with their Egyptian interlocutors. If concerns about the prospect of hereditary succession have been raised, such expressions of concern would have been made in private and at the highest levels. In the event that the topic has been discussed, any reservations on the part of the United States have not influenced the planning of the Egyptian regime.

 

While regime stability will be the paramount consideration governing the United States’ approach to succession in Egypt, the overriding question of the country’s long-term stability should not be taken for granted. While Egypt is unlikely to see a violent revolutionary response to a dynastic approach to succession, the building discontent in Egypt with the lack of good governance and human security should worry Egypt’s allies, including its most consequential partner, the United States.

 

To read the rest of the article, follow the link to the World Policy Journal.

Public Views of Obama Remain Favorable

The conservative narrative about President Barack Obama is that he is rushing down the road to socialism and the public is rising up against his big government schemes. So the florid anti-Obama rhetoric of the “tea party” activists and Joe Wilsons of the world is not extreme, but rather an expression of underlying public sentiment.

Newly released data from the Pew Research Center indicate just how fanciful this narrative is. The public’s view of Obama remains, in fact, very favorable across a wide range of characteristics. The conservatives’ extreme views on Obama are just that—extreme—and should in no way be confused with the American people’s views.

In the Pew poll, 83 percent describe Obama as a good communicator, 78 percent describe him as warm and friendly, 70 percent describe him as well informed, 69 percent describe him as well organized, 68 percent describe him as “someone who cares about people like me,” 65 percent say he is a strong leader, 64 percent say he is trustworthy, and 58 percent say he is able to get things done.

The Misleading Attack on the Dartmouth Research

“It’s like whack-a-mole,” a Dartmouth researcher commented in a recent e-mail. He was referring to that fact that, as Congress moves closer to the day when it will reconcile House and Senate versions of health-care reform legislation, critics seem to be popping up everywhere to question more than two decades of  Dartmouth University research that exposes the waste in our health care system. 

Dartmouth’s researchers can barely keep up. No sooner have they responded to one op-ed than another mole appears, attempting to undermine the credibility of the research.

Until very recently, “The Dartmouth Research” has been widely accepted. The work done by Drs. Jack Wennberg, Elliott Fisher and their colleagues has established the fact that in some regions of the country, patients receive far more aggressive and expensive care than in other communities. Yet—and here’s the shocker—when patients receive more intensive care, outcomes are no better. Sometimes they are worse.

Judgment Day for the Google Book Pact

Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers (in unlikely fraternity) have bowed to the very large number of petitioners who oppose their agreement that would profoundly affect the digital future of books. A hearing  long scheduled for October 7, before District Court Judge Denny Chin in New York is now expected to be postponed while all concerned consider objections to the accord  reached a year ago that gave Google vast rights to scan books and devised a system for paying authors and publishers for the right to do so. The pact—actually the settlement of a suit filed by the authors and publishers to stop Google from what they saw as uncontrolled digitizing of their work would be a fundamental step in the world of letters’ adjustment to all the new ways literature and information are distributed.

At its core, the meaning of the agreement is that Google, the preeminent repository of digitized data and the foremost organizer of access to it, has acknowledged the obligation to compensate providers of content for use of their material in digital forms. The pell-mell scanning of millions of books from libraries and other sources represented an overwhelming threat to the printed word; comparable to what happened when music lost its moorings as unauthorized file sharing replaced royalties and sales. As the news universe discovered to its profound chagrin, once the concept of free use of content is established, it is damnably hard to reverse course. The Google settlement provides payment now and procedures for the future that assure the rights of those who create material to benefit from the use of it. Bravo to that.

Obama Week on the World's Premier Stage

As secretary of state for President Reagan, George Shultz rebuked fire-breathing conservatives who wanted to slash American dues payments to the United Nations, asserting that just having every foreign minister in the world he might want to see on hand in New York for a week every year made U.N. dues a bargain investment for U.S. diplomacy.

By Shultz's standard, Barack Obama is reaping treble returns for America this week as he makes his first appearance as president at the United Nations.  Never has an American president been greeted on the U.N.'s unique global stage with such giddy anticipation, or undertaken so extensive and substantive a schedule there. 

Afghan Fallout from the Italian Job

The near panic gripping the Italian government in the wake of Thursday's suicide bombing that killed six Italian soldiers in Afghanistan is not a hopeful omen for President Obama's strategy to stabilize that country.  Conservative prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, long a stalwart ally of former president George Bush, Friday sounded almost like Democratic critics of Obama's policy in calling urgently for "a transition strategy to transfer more responsibility to the government of Hamid Karzai" and speed the withdrawal of NATO troops.

The Undeserving

It is no accident that civility broke down in Congress when President Obama was discussing the access of immigrants to health care.  The most persistent and entrenched reason for opposing progressive change in America has been that “the undeserving” might benefit.  With health care reform, too, much of the opposition, at its core, comes from those who would rather have nobody benefit than to see benefits extended to groups they despise.

Behind most progressive policy is the notion “there but for the grace of God go I.”  Empathy for others carries the self-interested kernel that any one of us could have ended up in someone else’ position.  Compassion stops when it is beyond the imagination to project oneself into another person’s circumstances.   Someone in a situation that only idiots and scoundrels should end up in, must be an idiot or a scoundrel,  and deserves no support.  Of course, the more like us a person is, the easier it is to feel empathy.