Taking Note

Bringing News to India's Poorest People

The tribal areas of India are as far from our media culture as it is possible to be in today’s world. But a project called CGNet Swara, serving communities in the state of Chhattisgarh and led by a forty-year-old journalist named Shubhranshu Choudhary, is a fascinating glimpse of how mobile technology can provide news and information to people unlike anything they have ever had before. Choudhary, an experienced television producer with a background in newspapers also, is completing a year as a Knight International Journalism Fellow, a program of the International Center for Journalists based in Washington, which is how I came to meet him.

The essence of his project is this: the Internet, cable television, and newspapers reach only a fraction of the 80 million people in the rural tribal region of central India, but about half the population now has access to mobile phones, which cost the equivalent of only $15 or $20. These people, citizen journalists, supported by a small group of professional editors, can collect and deliver news through what amounts to a portal reachable by a phone number, in effect a voice version of news websites with a menu of stories available for listening.

Media Myths about Dr. Donald Berwick

Kaiser Health News (KHN) reports that “the nomination of Dr. Donald Berwick to run the agency overseeing Medicare appears to be languishing.”   Friday, KHN’s “Health Policy Week in Review” quoted a story that appeared in the New York Times a few days earlier:

"Hospital executives who have worked with Dr. Berwick describe him as a visionary, inspiring leader. But a battle has erupted over his nomination, suggesting that Dr. Berwick faces a long uphill struggle to win Senate confirmation. Republicans are using the nomination to revive their arguments against the new health care law, which they see as a potent issue in this fall's elections, and Dr. Berwick has given them plenty of ammunition. In two decades as a professor of health policy and as a prolific writer, he has spoken of the need to ration health care and cap spending and has confessed to a love affair with the British health care system." 

KHN also points out that according to The Hill, although Senate leaders are nearing an agreement to allow more than 60 Obama nominees to be approved to begin work, Berwick is not on the list  . "'He will not get unanimous consent,' a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told The Hill.

I am not at all persuaded that Berwick’s confirmation is in trouble.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) reports that “the nomination of Dr. Donald Berwick to run the agency overseeing Medicare appears to be languishing.”   Friday, KHN’s “Health Policy Week in Review” quoted a story that appeared in the New York Times a few days earlier:

"Hospital executives who have worked with Dr. Berwick describe him as a visionary, inspiring leader. But a battle has erupted over his nomination, suggesting that Dr. Berwick faces a long uphill struggle to win Senate confirmation. Republicans are using the nomination to revive their arguments against the new health care law, which they see as a potent issue in this fall's elections, and Dr. Berwick has given them plenty of ammunition. In two decades as a professor of health policy and as a prolific writer, he has spoken of the need to ration health care and cap spending and has confessed to a love affair with the British health care system." 

KHN also points out that according to The Hill, although Senate leaders are nearing an agreement to allow more than 60 Obama nominees to be approved to begin work, Berwick is not on the list  . "'He will not get unanimous consent,' a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told The Hill.

I am not at all persuaded that Berwick’s confirmation is in trouble.

Comprehensive Immigration Reform and the Arizona Law

Arizona’s draconian new law allowing police to interrogate suspected illegal immigrants at will and detain them if they can’t produce papers has received support in a number of public polls. But that support has been wrongly interpreted as indicating declining support for comprehensive immigration reform. Recent polling shows just how far from the truth that interpretation is.

Consider these results from a bipartisan poll by Lake Research Partners and Public Opinion Strategies, conducted for America's Voice. In that poll—conducted after passage of the Arizona law—voters were asked if they supported "comprehensive immigration reform," defined as:

Salvaging Afghanistan

"Salvaging Afghanistan" originally appeared on The National Interest Online on Wednesday morning 6/23/2010

The charge of hand-wringing is again heard in the land, mostly from our friends on the Right. Have any doubt about our war in Afghanistan after close to nine years and you are hand-wringing. Eighteen months into the new administration, two strategic reviews, and fifty thousand more troops later—and still, expressing doubt qualifies you for a top hand-wringing citation.

The sad fact is that there has not been enough hand-wringing over Afghanistan, except by General McCrystal, a sore winner who at least up till now pretty well got what he asked for. The upcoming administration review, supposedly due out in December, offers Obama—with two years to go till the election—the last chance of cutting through the fog of Afghan discourse to decide conclusively whether he gets out or gets in deeper.

The Feds Move to Protect Students against the For-Profit Educational Industry

For most of the past thirty years, Congress and federal regulators have jiggered the rules to favor aggressive proprietary schools at the expense of poor, vulnerable students. The federal government’s seeming role was to assure the Education Industry (not to be confused with the nonprofit education “sector”) that its revenues and profits would swell using taxpayer grants and guaranteed loans. It worked.

Student loans and Pell Grants were intended to give poor and middle-class students the means to expand their educational and economic opportunities. Instead, hundreds of thousands of poor persons who have sought this financial aid to pursue higher education have been deceived, pressured, overcharged, exploited, and then dropped into bankruptcy—all with the connivance of Congress and federal officials.

Giustozzi on the Taliban

On a non-McChrystal Afghanistan note, I wanted to draw attention to a newly-released report by Antonio Giustozzi published by The Century Foundation. The report, "Negotiating with the Taliban: Issues and Prospects," gives an updated description of various aspects of the Taliban’s organization with an eye toward how the nature of the group’s structure and control would impact potential negotiations. The report incorporates Giustozzi's most recent fieldwork in Afghanistan in April 2010.

Among the key arguments is that the Taliban are best described as a decentralized as opposed to a fragmented organization. While the size and hierarchy within underlying networks vary,Giustozzi goes on to argue that “[a]t the very top, all these networks are kept together by links of personal loyalty to the Amir al Momineen , Mullah Omar.” Obviously, such a conclusion has ramifications for conceiving of and framing a process for a political settlement and militates against the viability of piecemeal approaches toward theTaliban assuming continued resilience of a loose but enduring organizational structure.

Booksellers: A Great Generation

There was big news in the world of bookselling this month. Carla Cohen and Barbara Meade, owners of Politics and Prose, a superb emporium in northwest Washington, D.C, have decided it is time to sell. This is not, we have been assured, a sign of retail distress. It is merely recognition that, in their 70s, succession of some kind is necessary. I am confident in speaking for Politics and Prose customers, and the publishers and authors who have engaged with the store in its illustrious twenty-six-year history, when I say that finding the right new proprietors is very much to be wished. Politics and Prose is what a great bookstore should be, a community anchor with reading groups, almost nightly author events, a helpful and knowledgeable staff, and a downstairs coffee shop. If a single buyer doesn’t emerge, perhaps someone can organize a cooperative in which shares are sold to an array of investors who will then hire a first-rate manager from among the store’s existing senior staff.

In any case, if there were a hall of fame for contemporary book luminaries, Carla and Barbara would be among the first honorees.

The coming transition at Politics and Prose underscores the role of their generation of master booksellers, leaders in the field of independent bookselling from as far back as the 1970s. What characterizes these stalwarts is their commitment to the art of hand-selling good books and the evolving science of marketing in which, it seems, a new challenge emerges every few years since the mid-1980s. First there were the early discount and mall stores in the thousands (now disappearing as their chain owners close them down); then rise of corporate superstores with vast inventories; the “Big Box” stores like Sam’s Club and Wal-Mart, where a small selection of books are stacked on pallets and, increasingly in the past decade, online sales with lower prices and extraordinary focus on delivery—two features the independents find it hard to match. Here is a list of some of my favorites—all of them, as it happens, women who have set standards of success and stature among their peers. Readers could doubtless add other stellar names.

The Public Believes Global Warming Is Happening and Is Ready for Action

Conservatives have done their best to promote the idea that global warming is not happening. And recently they have been pointing to some polls that purport to show increasing public skepticism about global warming. But new Roper data released by Stanford University show that the public, when asked a straightforward question about whether global warming "has probably been happening," endorses the idea that global warming is real by an overwhelming 74-24 margin.

Nor is the public shy about the need for action on this front. In the same poll, a query about whether the government should "limit the amount of greenhouse gases that U.S. businesses put out" yielded a thumping 76-20 majority in favor of such limits.

Home to Roost

It has become politically impossible for President Obama to pursue more stimulus spending to sustain the economic recovery.  Part of this is due to his opponents’ resolve to seize on every opportunity to block what the President wants.  Part is due to the understandable discomfort many people feel at the idea of deficits and debt accumulation.  But the main reason it is impossible today to pursue active fiscal policy is that the capacity for it has been undermined by twenty years of fiscal mismanagement.   Like the mouse that failed to store food for the winter, we have arrived in hard times with the federal borrowing margin severely damaged by twenty years of unnecessary fiscal profligacy.

In 2002, shortly before he was fired as Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neill warned President George W. Bush that the tax cuts of 2001 would have to be paid for with spending cuts or else deficits would continue to be unmanageable.  Vice President Cheney’s much publicized response to the warning was “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” 

Public Strongly Backs Ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”

The House recently voted in favor of repealing the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, and final repeal of this noxious policy is surely very close. Gay men and women will at last be able to serve openly in the U.S. military, a move that has strong backing from the American public.

Consider this result from a recent (May 3-6) Gallup poll on the issue. An overwhelming 70-25 majority of respondents said they were in favor of “allowing openly gay men and lesbian women to serve in the military.”

Lest that crushing majority be thought a fluke, consider this result from an even more recent (May 21-23) CNN poll. The public, by an even larger 78-20 margin, said in that poll that “people who are openly gay or homosexual” should be allowed to serve in the military.