Karim Sadjadpour & Trita Parsi on the meaning of the Ashura protests

For those who are interested in watching this sort of thing on-line, I recommend this clear, perceptive, and illuminating discussion of Iran's political crisis from the PBS News Hour a few days ago (December 28, 2009). The two discussants, Karim Sadjadpour (of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) and Trita Parsi (of the National Iranian American Council), do an excellent job of spelling out the reasons for both (cautious) optimism in the long term and anxious uncertainty in the short term.

One point may be worth highlighting. They both argue that, at this point, it is both right and politically realistic (as opposed to 'realist') for the US to demonstrate its clear and solid "moral support" for democratic forces in Iran. "They should continue to express solidarity with the Iranian people and make it clear to the Iranian people that the United States is on the right side of history and the United States very much wants to see them them to succeed." Once, the regime could use such statements of support to paint reformists and dissidents as tools of the west, particularly the US, but "not any longer." The regime is now sufficiently discredited, and the opposition has sufficiently demonstrated its breadth and depth within Iran, that most Iranians will no longer swallow this line. That sounds right to me.

Karim Sadjadpour is someone whose judgment on these matters has been consistently excellent, informed, and intelligently pro-democratic. He merits very close attention whenever he talks about Iran.

With Trita Parsi (of the National Iranian American Council), the situation is slightly more complex. In the past--I want to put this carefully--Parsi has taken positions on foreign-policy issues that have sometimes brought him close, at least, to being a subtle apologist for the Iranian regime and its propaganda line. (One especially conspicuous example is his tendentious and misleading Israel-bashing book on the three-way relationship between Iran, Israel, and the US.) However, ever since the current political crisis in Iran blew up in June with the fraudulent election and the massive popular protests against it, Parsi's sympathies have been solidly and unequivocally with the democratic opposition, and his analyses of the unfolding dynamics of the situation have been generally on-target and often penetrating. That's true again in this discussion.

--Jeff Weintraub

Iran in revolt - "This is the month of blood, Yazid will fall!"

A report on last Sunday's demonstrations in Tehran that I posted here included the following passage:

Pro-opposition demonstrators throughout the country infused anti-government slogans with religious vocabulary traditionally used during Ashura mourning ceremonies. "This is the month of blood, Yazid will fall!" they shouted, likening Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei with Yazid, the caliph responsible for Hossein's death. Slogans grew more radical Sunday, with shouts of "Death to Khamenei," reverberating throughout the Iranian capital.

In case any of you might be asking yourself, "Who is Yazid?" ... the independent journalist/blogger Michael Totten, writing from his base in Beirut, explains what that means.

--Jeff Weintraub

(P.S. My guess is that in this case Yazid will indeed fall, but probably not this month.)
==============================
Michael Totten
December 29, 2009
The Iranian Regime’s Battle of Karbala

The Iranian citizens’ uprising against their government has been sustained for six months now, and it took an interesting turn over the weekend. Security forces reportedly opened fire against demonstrators and even killed the nephew of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi – and they did it during Ashura. There are few things “supreme guide” Ali Khamenei could have done to enrage religious conservatives and harden them against his regime more than this. As one demonstrator put it, “killing Muslims on Ashura is like crucifying Christians on Christmas.”

“The clock began to tick for Ayatollah Khamenei’s fall from today,” said one of Iran’s few former female members of parliament Fatemeh Haghighatjou. “Killing people on Ashura shows how far Mr. Khamenei is willing to go to suppress the protests. People are comparing him more with Yazid because they consider him responsible for the order to use violence against people.”

Ashura is a Shia religious holiday, and it is not joyous. It is a day of lamentation that marks the date when the forces of the Umayyad caliph Yazid killed Hussein, son of Ali and grandson of the Prophet Mohammad, during the Battle of Karbala in the year 680. It’s one of the most infamous episodes in the struggle for power that permanently ruptured the house of Islam into its warring Sunni and Shia halves. The Shia – the partisans of Ali and his lineage – have been at war with the Sunnis – those who took the side of Yazid – for thirteen centuries. That Khamenei’s security people would murder unarmed demonstrators on this day of all days, and that his opponents now denounce him as the Yazid of Iran, may very well set most of the religious conservatives against him for as long as he and his government live.

Haghighatjou isn’t the only one using this kind of language. You’ll find regular citizens comparing Khamenei to Yazid and Tehran to Karbala with even a cursory scan of Iranian Internet commentary during the last couple of days.

The Iranian government knows very well what a devastating accusation this is. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini compared the tyrannical Shah Reza Pahlavi to Yazid during the revolution he led in 1979, and his successor Khamenei tries to pass himself off as a modern Ali even now. More recently, the regime’s Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders used this charge against Israel in 1982 to ignite a decades-long insurgency in South Lebanon.

[Etc.]

Iran in revolt - A crowd disarms the riot police

In this striking video clip from Iran today (via Andrew Sullivan), a crowd of demonstrators appears to surround, overrun, and disarm a group of riot police--not kill them, but forcibly disarm them and burn their motorcycles.

(My impression is that the black-clad riot police in this video are not from the regular police, but belong to the so-called "special guards" units from the Revolutionary Guards. But I can't read the Farsi note accompanying this YouTube video, so that's just a surmise.)

Obviously, one can't be sure of either the provenance or the authenticity of any videos coming out of Iran these days. But the incident portrayed in this accords with a pattern reported very widely over the past week and a half: In many places, the protesters are losing their fear of the repressive forces, and are no longer easily intimidated by them. And both the basij storm-troopers and the regular police, for their part, are reluctant to start simply firing into the crowds and killing large numbers of people. (They have done it on a number of occasions lately, but the killings of demonstrators during the Ashura religious holiday has provoked considerable outrage, so the decision-makers within the regime are probably hesitant to cross that line completely.)



At the moment, there are many signs that the side with confidence and momentum is the popular movement opposing the regime, and not the regime and its repressive apparatus. My guess is that those in power will respond pretty soon by dramatically escalating their levels of violence and brutality (to accompany their escalating arrests of opposition figures and their relatives). But that's just a guess. We all have to stay tuned ...

=> Meanwhile, below is a report from the invaluable website Tehran Bureau about the massive protests in Tehran on Sunday and their violent suppression. It also sums up much of what has been going on during this remarkable week and a half since the death of Grand Ayatollah Montazeri on Sunday, December 20.

--Jeff Weintraub
==============================
Tehran Bureau
December 28, 2009
Religious holiday turns bloody
By CORRESPONDENTS in Tehran and Washington, D.C.

Iranian security forces opened fire on protesters during anti-government demonstrations on Sunday, killing at least nine people and arresting more than 300 demonstrators in what marked the largest and most violent anti-government protests in the Islamic Republic since the summer, according to witnesses, opposition websites and state media.

Thousands of Basij militia forces, police and anti-riot forces armed with guns, batons, pepper gas and tear gas clashed with protesters in squares throughout the Iranian capital. Protestors fought back fiercely, at times tearing out slabs of concrete from city sidewalks and smashing it to hurl stones at security forces, witnesses said.

Demonstrations, which took place on Ashura -- a religious holiday commemorating the death of Imam Hossein, Shi'ite Islam's most revered martyr -- spanned from northern Tehran through the central part of the city to include Azadi Square, Enghelab Square, Seventh of Tir Square, Valiasr Square, Imam Hossein Square and Karim Khan Street.

Protests also took place in south-central and south-east Tehran, and in the cities of Shiraz, Arak, Najafabad, Isfahan, Mahshad and Babol, reported witnesses and opposition websites.

Sunday also marked the seventh day of mourning for Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, a prominent "Grand" Ayatollah and founding father of the Islamic Republic who later became a staunch critic of the Iranian government. Mr. Montazeri's death last Sunday sparked a fresh wave of protests throughout Iran. A Reformist website said late Sunday that state authorities declared martial law in the Grand Ayatollah's hometown of Najafabad.

Pro-opposition demonstrators throughout the country infused anti-government slogans with religious vocabulary traditionally used during Ashura mourning ceremonies. "This is the month of blood, Yazid will fall!" they shouted, likening Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei with Yazid, the caliph responsible for Hossein's death. Slogans grew more radical Sunday, with shouts of "Death to Khamenei," reverbrating throughout the Iranian capital.

Lines of "Special Guards" clad in black uniforms accompanied riot police to blockade and cordon off access to Valiasr Square early Sunday afternoon, said a university student attending the protests. Witnesses said police shot at protesters by Azadi Square and bludgeoned one protester to death in central Tehran. Another protester was run over by a security van in Valiasr Square, according to witnesses.

"A riot police van ran over a guy [in Valiasr]...It just ran over him like he was a bug. I saw it and I'm shaken up real bad," a witness told Tehran Bureau in an email.

Opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi's nephew was among the protesters killed Sunday, according to Mr. Mousavi's Kalameh website. Mousavi's international spokesman wrote on his website late Sunday that Mr. Mousavi's 43-year old nephew Seyed Ali Habibi Mousavi was assassinated in front of his home Sunday and was not shot during protests as initially reported. Mr. Mousavi was run over by a sport utility vehicle in front of his home, Paris-based Mohsen Makhmalbaf wrote on his personal website. Five men then emerged from the car and one of them shot Mr. Habibi Mousavi through the chest, he said. Security agents told Mr. Mousavi's family late Sunday that they would be taking his body to the Kahrizak medical facility and told his family that they could not have a funeral, according to Mr. Makhmalbaf.

The New York Times reported Sunday that Tehran's Najmieh Hospital had performed 17 operations on people with gunshot wounds. A doctor said the hospital was treating 60 people with serious head injuries, including three who were in critical condition, according to the newspaper.

Medical personnel in Isfahan told Tehran Bureau that Revolutionary Guard agents forcefully evacuated some patients who had come for treatment after being beaten at protests. "They brought a few of the injured today to the Al Zahra hospital in Isfahan. One man in his 30s was so severely beaten that he was unconscious and immediately taken to the resuscitation room. Minutes after his arrival, plainclothes agents turned up and ordered hospital officials to immediately transfer the man to the Sadoughi Hospital, which is run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps," a member of the hospital staff told Tehran Bureau. "As far as I know, there were no reported deaths here," the hospital staff member said.

State television said police used only anti-riot gear against protesters, and did not use guns, reporting that four people were killed Sunday -- with one individual killed by gunfire, two people killed in a car accident and one person falling off of a bridge. "In light of the fact that the police did not use arms [guns], [the death by bullet] is very suspicious and is being investigated," reported state television.

Reformist media said Sunday that some police forces refused orders to shoot at pro-opposition demonstrators during protests in central Tehran. "Police forces are refusing their commanders' orders to shoot at demonstrators in central Tehran. Some of them attempted to shoot into the air when pressured by their commanders," the Jaras website said.

Demonstrators captured and set fire to a number of police cars and motorcycles, according to witnesses and videos posted on YouTube. Dumpsters were also set on fire and protesters set fire to a police fieldpost after pulling out officers inside, according to witnesses.

"At Valiasr and Enghelab [Freedom Square], police forces attacked us. We dispersed into nearby alleys. After awhile, we heard cheering and whistling. Venturing back out, we saw that people had managed to overwhelm the police and had captured three of them, disarmed them of (their) shields and batons and let them go," a witness told Tehran Bureau by telephone Sunday. "Black smoke was rising from the direction of Karim Khan Street. Police cars had been set on fire," the witness said.

The National Geographic compares health care costs

My friend Magali Sarfatti-Larson wisely recommends that everyone carefully consider a striking chart put together by the National Geographic that lays out (a) health care spending per person and (b) average life expectancy in a range of affluent societies. (Per capita health costs are on the left, life expectancies are on the right.)

Here is how National Geographic sums up the results:

The United States spends more on medical care per person than any [other] country, yet life expectancy is shorter than in most other developed nations and many developing ones. Lack of health insurance is a factor in life span and contributes to an estimated 45,000 deaths a year. Why the high cost? The U.S. has a fee-for-service system—paying medical providers piecemeal for appointments, surgery, and the like. That can lead to unneeded treatment that doesn’t reliably improve a patient’s health. Says Gerard Anderson, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who studies health insurance worldwide, “More care does not necessarily mean better care.” —Michelle Andrews

Again, to see the chart, click HERE (per capita health costs on the left, life expectancies on the right).

Keep well,
Jeff Weintraub

Iran in revolt

If anyone was tempted to believe (or hope) that the repressive efforts of the Iranian regime had been able to crush the Green Wave of mobilized political opposition touched off by the stolen election in June 2009, the eruption of mass demonstrations in cities all over Iran this week has made it clear that the Iranian opposition is far from fading away. On the contrary, all the evidence suggests that active opposition to the regime is not only alive but spreading more widely, both geographically and socially, and often getting more radicalized as well.

Today's LA Times story about the protests by Ramin Mostaghim and Borzou Daragahi emphasizes the widening scope of anti-regime feeling they express:

Large-scale protests spread in central Iranian cities Wednesday, offering the starkest evidence yet that the opposition movement that emerged from the disputed June presidential election has expanded beyond its base of mostly young, educated Tehran residents to at least some segments of the country's pious heartland.

Actually, this formulation is misleading. The notion that the June protests were restricted to" mostly young, educated Tehran residents" was a key theme of pro-regime propagandists and those who were taken in by then, but even then this slogan was demonstrably false. As Mostaghim and Borzou Daragahi themselves say later in the article (doesn't anyone proofread these articles for consistency?), "Tehran's mass postelection protests, which were crushed by authorities, drew Iranians from all walks of life." However, it does appear that the current protests are drawing participants from even wider sectors of the population.

Demonstrations took place in Esfahan, a provincial capital and Iran's cultural center, and nearby Najafabad, the birthplace and hometown of Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, whose death Saturday triggered the latest round of confrontations between the opposition movement and the government.

The central region is considered by some as the conservative power base of the hard-liners in power.

Iranian authorities are clearly alarmed by the spread of the protests. Mojtaba Zolnour, a mid-ranking cleric serving as supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's representative to the elite and powerful Revolutionary Guard, acknowledged widespread unrest around the country. [....]

As protests after the death of Montazeri, Iran's leading dissident cleric, broke out in the shrine city of Qom, Esfahan and Najafabad this week, Tehran has remained relatively quiet. But authorities are bracing for widely anticipated demonstrations linked to Ashura, a major religious holy day this weekend on which Shiite Muslims commemorate the 7th century death of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the prophet Muhammad.

"The demise of Ayatollah Montazeri agitated the traditional and middle-aged walks of life," said Hamid-Reza Jalaipour, an opposition supporter and Tehran social scientist. "Despite all the restrictions, his death triggered a wider social movement in which traditional-minded and religious people get more involved in the protests."

[....] The latest protests broke out late Tuesday, on the religiously significant third day after Montazeri's death.

Video posted on the Internet showed dozens of demonstrators marching through Esfahan as drivers halted their cars to block approaching security forces. The amateur video showed plainclothes security officers struggling with protesters on the streets.

The rest of the article is here.

=> Scott Lucas at Enduring America emphasizes the same points even more strongly:

It’s no longer “just” Tehran. It’s no longer “just” students. It’s no longer “just” a Green elite v. the “common people” of Iran. [....]

In the weeks after the election, almost all of the video and most of the reporting came out of Iran’s capital, so the stage for the political conflict was Tehran. And even when, despite the restrictions of the Government, footage came out of other cities, the protests were often those on university campuses.

Of course, the camera’s lie might have been one of omission. From mid-June, we have heard of disquiet throughout Iran. Where we could get reliable sources, we have noted the protests and discussions from Shiraz to Tabriz to Mashhad to Hamedan. Yet we could only see a tip of what might lay below the waterline of political events.

So those defending the Iranian regime as stable or widely-supported — harking back to Ahmadinejad’s alleged 63% vote in June — could always assert that those reporting on a widespread opposition were exaggerating, distorting, fantasising.

No longer.

In the excitement since Sunday, I’m not sure it has quite sunk in. The hundreds of thousands who mourned Grand Ayatollah Montazeri on Monday were not in Tehran. (Had there been unrestricted movement from Tehran to Qom, who knows how many more would have spilled beyond the iconic photos and videos of demonstrations we posted on Monday/Tuesday?) Yesterday, despite the forced suspension of the memorial service for Montazeri, they turned out in Isfahan. Later, despite a “ban” on any ceremonies, they appeared in Najafabad.

It continues today —a service, led by Ayatollah Bayat-Zanjani, is to be held in Zanjan. And it will continue tomorrow and Saturday and Sunday, the holy day of Ashura.

And as it continues, those on the streets and in front of the mosques are not just a core of students — Governments will always try to say it’s just “the students”, who have no responsibilities of employment or the common sense of adulthood to check their whimsical protests. The videos testify to the range of ages and backgrounds, beyond any label of “reformist” or “conservative”, now involved in the rallies. [....]

Stay tuned....

(The video at the top of this post was shot in Najafabad on December 23. Thanks for the tip about the video and about Scott Lucas's post from Andrew Sullivan.)

--Jeff Weintraub

Ralph Nader assesses Obama's first year as President: "Uncle Tom" after all

From an interview published in the Daily Beast (December 18, 2009):

“Is the title of your article ‘I told you so?’” [Nader] asked. “This is what I meant a year ago when I said the next year will determine whether Barack Obama will be an Uncle Tom groveling before the demands of the corporations that are running our country or he’ll be an Uncle Sam standing up for the American people.”

Always being so right must be a real burden.

At all events, as far as Nader is concerned, the health care bill that has finally emerged from this year's legislative sausage-grinder is the final proof that Obama turned out to be a grovelling Uncle Tom--to borrow his classy formulation--just as he predicted. (Does that mean that those of us who voted for Hillary Clinton in the primaries should feel vindicated in Ralph's eyes? I suspect not.)

Nader instead recommended that legislators and the White House scrap the bill entirely and embark on a nationwide tour to generate grassroots support for single-payer health care, which they would then attempt to pass through reconciliation, which requires only a bare majority in the Senate. Given the narrow margins for even the House bill, which requires only a majority to pass, the prospect seems politically unthinkable—but Nader insists that it could be done.

Could be, but I'm skeptical.

On the other hand, when Nader suggests that many die-hard Obama enthusiasts might start to reach their limits, he may be on to something. It's also possible, though, that when he predicts that their disillusionment will lead to an outright break, he may be exaggerating somewhat and/or indulging in wishful thinking. That remains to be seen.

Nader cited a number of cases in which he was encouraged to see people he considered loyal Democrats stand up to their lawmakers on principle.

“Markos, he finally turns around—this guy is an indentured servant of the Democratic Party, and he’s finally breaking. [Arianna Huffington] is chirping up,” he said. “And they go a long way—they’ve given Obama the biggest elastic band in Democratic Party history and it’s reaching the point of snapping.”

He added that MSNBC’s Ed Schultz and Keith Olbermann were also “starting to break,” although he acknowledged that he still has trouble getting invited on their shows.

As for Nader's own plans:

Nader, who is considering a third-party run in Connecticut against Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), said the health-care revolt has generated more interest in his campaign, but he has yet to make up his mind if he’ll run—or if he’ll seek the White House again in 2012. As for whether growing disillusionment with the two major parties might provide him with fuel for a comeback after being cast as a pariah in 2000, Nader suggested it might be a bridge too far.

Well, at least that's a relief. Anyone interested in reading the whole article can find it here.

--Jeff Weintraub

P.S. As far back as January 2008, the left-wing anti-American Australian/British journalist John Pilger described Obama as "a glossy Uncle Tom," but most alleged "progressives" in the US have been more hesitant about going there. Not Nader, it seems.

Ahmadinejad on geopolitics and the return of the Hidden Imam

According to the Iranian news website Tabnak, in an address that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad delivered on December 4 to "the families of martyrs and altruists in Isfahan," he explained the reasons for recent US policies in the Middle East. Of course, oil is involved. But more fundamentally, the US government is trying to prevent the return of the Hidden Imam.

In short, although most western analysts have completely missed this key fact, the Bush/Cheney administration was acting primarily on the basis of Shiite eschatology, and the Obama administration has followed suit.

No, this is not a parody from the Onion. Nor is it a piece of malicious neocon/Zionist/Orientalist/war-mongering propaganda concocted to distort the views of President Ahmadinejad, whom we all know to be the head of an impeccably "realist" and "pragmatic" government. Tabnak is an Iranian news website with hard-line anti-reformist views and connections to elements in the Revolutionary Guards.

Professor Shaul Bakhash was kind enough to provide an English-language translation of some key passages from Ahmadinejad's speech, which I post with his permission:

"It is true that these arrogant powers are after the oil and wealth of this country. But beneath all this, they have another reason on the basis of which they act. Of course, they don't reveal this in the news. But we have obtained the documents [that show] that they believe that one of the kin of the blessed Prophet has appeared in this spot, and he will make the roots of all the oppressors of the world wither. They have drawn up all these plans to prevent the appearance of His Eminence. And they know that the Iranian nation is the ground-layer of this event and will be the ally of this government."

President Ahmadinejad also described the iron logic of Iran's centrality to the entire international system. He said: "Reagan and the American Secretary of State of the time, who are both among the stupidest men of the world, had announced that 'we want to erase the name of Iran from geography.'" [JW: Of course, that quotation is pure fabrication, possibly with a bit of projection thrown in.] However, he noted, the Middle East is the most important region of the world and Iran the most important country in the Middle East: "Therefore, Iran must be regarded as the most important country in the world....Without the Iranian nation, they [the great powers] are nothing in the world."

The independent website Tehran Bureau also posted its own translation of the Tabnak report (below). Or those of you who know Farsi (unlike me!) can read it here.

As President Ahmadinejad put it in this illuminating speech:

In my last visit to New York, I asked them, 'Is there not one sane person in your country to tell you these things?'"

Sounds like a reasonable question to me.

--Jeff Weintraub
==============================
Tehran Bureau
December 6, 2009
Ahmadinejad has proof US trying to stop Hidden Imam
------------------------------
Ahmadinejad says he has proof US trying to stop Hidden Imam
Tabnak | Dec. 4, 2009

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that he has documented evidence that the United States was trying to prevent the coming of the Hidden Imam (messiah).

According to a Khabar Online report, Ahmadinejad expounded on the plots hatched by the East and West for the annihilation of Iran.

"[Ronald] Reagan and his foreign minister were two of the stupidest people in the world," he said, addressing an audience of the families of martyrs and altruists in Isfahan on Friday.

Referring to his June reelection, Ahmadinejad said, "The enemy... was hyping the issue as if the Iranian nation has been weakened and as if this was the best opportunity to get concessions from them. But your humble son [Ahmadinejad] stood in front of the oppressive powers and shouted: You are dead wrong! The Iranian nation will put you in your place."

"In the recent [post-election] incident, they claimed that they had devised a plan that could bring hundreds of governments to their knees," he continued. "But he who is on the righteous path will always be victorious and will never see defeat."

Ahmadinejad said that the oppressive powers were after Iran's oil and other natural resources. "They have a reason for this and they act upon that reason," he said. "However, they do not break the news about it. We have documented proof that they believe that a descendant of the prophet of Islam will raise in these parts [Middle East] and he will dry the roots of all injustice in the world. They have devised all these plans to prevent the coming of the Hidden Imam because they know that the Iranian nation is the one that will prepare the grounds for his coming and will be the supporters of his rule."

"They have planned to annihilate Iran. This is while all policymakers and analysts believe Iran is the true winner in the Middle East," he went on to proclaim.

"In Afghanistan, they are caught like an animal in a quagmire. But instead of pulling their troops out to save themselves, they are deploying more soldiers. Even if they stay in Afghanistan for another 50 years they will be forced to leave with disgrace -- because this is a historical experience [repeated countless times]. In my last visit to New York, I asked them, 'Is there not one sane person in your country to tell you these things?'"

Ahmadinejad said that the most important region of the world was the Middle East and the most important country in the Middle East was Iran.

"They know themselves that they need Iran in the Middle East, but because of their arrogance they do not want to accept this reality. They are nothing without the Iranian nation and all their rhetoric is because they don't want to appear weak."

Health care reform: The moral heart of the matter

This follows up my recent post titled Mutual responsibility, solidarity, democracy, and health care (explained by Matt Steinglass). I quoted from a piece on the Economist's "Democracy in America" blog that points out, correctly, that "You cannot have universal health insurance without a mandate" and then explains why this is so. I indicated that this discussion "gets to the heart of the matter" and commended "its clear statement of the basic principles at stake."

A friend e-mailed me to chide me a bit for those last formulations. The piece I cited may well get to "the heart of the matter" in terms of the specific topic it addressed--the need for a health-insurance mandate as part of the logic of universal coverage. But by comparison with the more fundamental moral issues that are really at the heart of the health care controversy, those issues are secondary and almost quasi-technical.

My friend is definitely right about that, and I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. To help clarify the larger picture, here is his very cogent overview of the matter (posted with his permission):

You surprise me. The moral heart of the matter is in your headline about mutual responsibility et al.-- a decent affluent society ensures that all its people can get adequate health care and doesn't make this a matter of individual resources or accidents.

The secondary point (the political heart of the matter, if you will) is that once you affirm the moral point there is strong pressure toward doing this in somewhat more sensible, fair, and efficient ways (in other words, try and go after the insurance companies later, once you've made universal access a foundational principle).

The piece you cited gets at the very important tertiary point (the economic/administrative heart of the matter) that adverse selection will inevitably undermine a health insurance system that permits people to choose to opt out. The side critique/analysis of left populism is also a plus.

But, in my view, Obama and the Democratic Party need to hammer on the moral vision as the heart of this and related matters and take the consequences. That may not win, but the alternatives are worse.

I agree.

--Jeff Weintraub

Did China deliberately wreck the Copenhagen climate-change conference?

During the Bush II administration, the US government made itself notorious as one of the major obstacles to serious international action on climate change. Now that a new US administration is trying to move away from that role, it appears that the Chinese government may be taking it over.

That's the assertion made by Mark Lynas, a writer and activist on climate change who was attached to the delegation from the Maldives (which seems to have given him more access than most journalists to some key meetings). The Chinese government, he argues, worked systematically--and effectively--to sabotage the conference and prevent it from achieving any significant results. It did this actively and brazenly behind the scenes, and indirectly through various proxies in the public meetings.

Copenhagen was a disaster. That much is agreed. But the truth about what actually happened is in danger of being lost amid the spin and inevitable mutual recriminations. The truth is this: China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful "deal" so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame. How do I know this? Because I was in the room and saw it happen.

China's strategy was simple: block the open negotiations for two weeks, and then ensure that the closed-door deal made it look as if the west had failed the world's poor once again. And sure enough, the aid agencies, civil society movements and environmental groups all took the bait. [....]

All very predictable, but the complete opposite of the truth. Even George Monbiot, writing in yesterday's Guardian, made the mistake of singly blaming Obama. But I saw Obama fighting desperately to salvage a deal, and the Chinese delegate saying "no", over and over again. [....]

Sudan behaves at the talks as a puppet of China; one of a number of countries that relieves the Chinese delegation of having to fight its battles in open sessions. It was a perfect stitch-up. China gutted the deal behind the scenes, and then left its proxies to savage it in public.

Of course, it's to be expected that the Chinese government would want to avoid pressures or commitments to reduce China's own greenhouse gas emissions. But, according to Lynas, they went a lot further than that. If the following is correct, it's a bit startling:

To those who would blame Obama and rich countries in general, know this: it was China's representative who insisted that industrialised country targets, previously agreed as an 80% cut by 2050, be taken out of the deal. "Why can't we even mention our own targets?" demanded a furious Angela Merkel. Australia's prime minister, Kevin Rudd, was annoyed enough to bang his microphone. Brazil's representative too pointed out the illogicality of China's position. Why should rich countries not announce even this unilateral cut? The Chinese delegate said no, and I watched, aghast, as Merkel threw up her hands in despair and conceded the point. Now we know why – because China bet, correctly, that Obama would get the blame for the Copenhagen accord's lack of ambition.

China, backed at times by India, then proceeded to take out all the numbers that mattered. [....] The long-term target, of global 50% cuts by 2050, was also excised. No one else, perhaps with the exceptions of India and Saudi Arabia, wanted this to happen.

Why would the Chinese do this? Lynas's analysis is both straightforward and, at the very least, plausible.

All this raises the question: what is China's game? Why did China, in the words of a UK-based analyst who also spent hours in heads of state meetings, "not only reject targets for itself, but also refuse to allow any other country to take on binding targets?" The analyst, who has attended climate conferences for more than 15 years, concludes that China wants to weaken the climate regulation regime now "in order to avoid the risk that it might be called on to be more ambitious in a few years' time".

[....] China knows it is becoming an uncontested superpower; indeed its newfound muscular confidence was on striking display in Copenhagen. Its coal-based economy doubles every decade, and its power increases commensurately. Its leadership will not alter this magic formula unless they absolutely have to.

On environmental issues, this strategy would put the Chinese government into effective alliance with climate-change denialists and anti-multilateralists in US politics. In the end, Lynas draws a larger conclusion that is even more depressing than his analysis of the Copenhagen conference:

Copenhagen was much worse than just another bad deal, because it illustrated a profound shift in global geopolitics. This is fast becoming China's century, yet its leadership has displayed that multilateral environmental governance is not only not a priority, but is viewed as a hindrance to the new superpower's freedom of action. I left Copenhagen more despondent than I have felt in a long time. After all the hope and all the hype, the mobilisation of thousands, a wave of optimism crashed against the rock of global power politics, fell back, and drained away.

=> Is Lynas's account of China's role in the Copenhagen conference on-target? One can't say for sure without further information, but it certainly does sound plausible, and his larger analysis also makes good sense. More important than my own non-expert reaction is the fact that someone like James Fallows, who knows a great deal about China and is also generally sympathetic to China and the Chinese, had pretty much the same reaction. That is, he couldn't confirm Lynas's account himself, but it certainly didn't strike him as inherently implausible. Fallows correctly describes this as "A story that, if true, is important" (see also his follow-up here). Very important. And, I suspect, probably true.

--Jeff Weintraub
==============================
The Guardian
Tuesday 22 December 2009 19.54 GMT
How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room
As recriminations fly post-Copenhagen, one writer offers a fly-on-the-wall account of how talks failed
Mark Lynas

Copenhagen was a disaster. That much is agreed. But the truth about what actually happened is in danger of being lost amid the spin and inevitable mutual recriminations. The truth is this: China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful "deal" so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame. How do I know this? Because I was in the room and saw it happen.

China's strategy was simple: block the open negotiations for two weeks, and then ensure that the closed-door deal made it look as if the west had failed the world's poor once again. And sure enough, the aid agencies, civil society movements and environmental groups all took the bait. The failure was "the inevitable result of rich countries refusing adequately and fairly to shoulder their overwhelming responsibility", said Christian Aid. "Rich countries have bullied developing nations," fumed Friends of the Earth International.

All very predictable, but the complete opposite of the truth. Even George Monbiot, writing in yesterday's Guardian, made the mistake of singly blaming Obama. But I saw Obama fighting desperately to salvage a deal, and the Chinese delegate saying "no", over and over again. Monbiot even approvingly quoted the Sudanese delegate Lumumba Di-Aping, who denounced the Copenhagen accord as "a suicide pact, an incineration pact, in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries".

Sudan behaves at the talks as a puppet of China; one of a number of countries that relieves the Chinese delegation of having to fight its battles in open sessions. It was a perfect stitch-up. China gutted the deal behind the scenes, and then left its proxies to savage it in public.

Here's what actually went on late last Friday night, as heads of state from two dozen countries met behind closed doors. Obama was at the table for several hours, sitting between Gordon Brown and the Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi. The Danish prime minister chaired, and on his right sat Ban Ki-moon, secretary-general of the UN. Probably only about 50 or 60 people, including the heads of state, were in the room. I was attached to one of the delegations, whose head of state was also present for most of the time.

What I saw was profoundly shocking. The Chinese premier, Wen Jinbao, did not deign to attend the meetings personally, instead sending a second-tier official in the country's foreign ministry to sit opposite Obama himself. The diplomatic snub was obvious and brutal, as was the practical implication: several times during the session, the world's most powerful heads of state were forced to wait around as the Chinese delegate went off to make telephone calls to his "superiors".

Shifting the blame

To those who would blame Obama and rich countries in general, know this: it was China's representative who insisted that industrialised country targets, previously agreed as an 80% cut by 2050, be taken out of the deal. "Why can't we even mention our own targets?" demanded a furious Angela Merkel. Australia's prime minister, Kevin Rudd, was annoyed enough to bang his microphone. Brazil's representative too pointed out the illogicality of China's position. Why should rich countries not announce even this unilateral cut? The Chinese delegate said no, and I watched, aghast, as Merkel threw up her hands in despair and conceded the point. Now we know why – because China bet, correctly, that Obama would get the blame for the Copenhagen accord's lack of ambition.

China, backed at times by India, then proceeded to take out all the numbers that mattered. A 2020 peaking year in global emissions, essential to restrain temperatures to 2C, was removed and replaced by woolly language suggesting that emissions should peak "as soon as possible". The long-term target, of global 50% cuts by 2050, was also excised. No one else, perhaps with the exceptions of India and Saudi Arabia, wanted this to happen. I am certain that had the Chinese not been in the room, we would have left Copenhagen with a deal that had environmentalists popping champagne corks popping in every corner of the world.

Strong position

So how did China manage to pull off this coup? First, it was in an extremely strong negotiating position. China didn't need a deal. As one developing country foreign minister said to me: "The Athenians had nothing to offer to the Spartans." On the other hand, western leaders in particular – but also presidents Lula of Brazil, Zuma of South Africa, Calderón of Mexico and many others – were desperate for a positive outcome. Obama needed a strong deal perhaps more than anyone. The US had confirmed the offer of $100bn to developing countries for adaptation, put serious cuts on the table for the first time (17% below 2005 levels by 2020), and was obviously prepared to up its offer.

Above all, Obama needed to be able to demonstrate to the Senate that he could deliver China in any global climate regulation framework, so conservative senators could not argue that US carbon cuts would further advantage Chinese industry. With midterm elections looming, Obama and his staff also knew that Copenhagen would be probably their only opportunity to go to climate change talks with a strong mandate. This further strengthened China's negotiating hand, as did the complete lack of civil society political pressure on either China or India. Campaign groups never blame developing countries for failure; this is an iron rule that is never broken. The Indians, in particular, have become past masters at co-opting the language of equity ("equal rights to the atmosphere") in the service of planetary suicide – and leftish campaigners and commentators are hoist with their own petard.

With the deal gutted, the heads of state session concluded with a final battle as the Chinese delegate insisted on removing the 1.5C target so beloved of the small island states and low-lying nations who have most to lose from rising seas. President Nasheed of the Maldives, supported by Brown, fought valiantly to save this crucial number. "How can you ask my country to go extinct?" demanded Nasheed. The Chinese delegate feigned great offence – and the number stayed, but surrounded by language which makes it all but meaningless. The deed was done.

China's game

All this raises the question: what is China's game? Why did China, in the words of a UK-based analyst who also spent hours in heads of state meetings, "not only reject targets for itself, but also refuse to allow any other country to take on binding targets?" The analyst, who has attended climate conferences for more than 15 years, concludes that China wants to weaken the climate regulation regime now "in order to avoid the risk that it might be called on to be more ambitious in a few years' time".

This does not mean China is not serious about global warming. It is strong in both the wind and solar industries. But China's growth, and growing global political and economic dominance, is based largely on cheap coal. China knows it is becoming an uncontested superpower; indeed its newfound muscular confidence was on striking display in Copenhagen. Its coal-based economy doubles every decade, and its power increases commensurately. Its leadership will not alter this magic formula unless they absolutely have to.

Copenhagen was much worse than just another bad deal, because it illustrated a profound shift in global geopolitics. This is fast becoming China's century, yet its leadership has displayed that multilateral environmental governance is not only not a priority, but is viewed as a hindrance to the new superpower's freedom of action. I left Copenhagen more despondent than I have felt in a long time. After all the hope and all the hype, the mobilisation of thousands, a wave of optimism crashed against the rock of global power politics, fell back, and drained away.

John Birch Society to co-sponsor the next Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)

Here's a blast from the past!

In case the John Birch Society doesn't ring a bell, it was (and apparently still is) a notorious far-right nutcase group, founded in 1958 by a businessman named Robert Welch, whose trademark was paranoid and delusional conspiracy theories. And in case you think that I am exaggerating unfairly when I use words like "paranoid" and "delusional," let me just mention that Robert Welch accused President Dwight D. Eisenhower of being "dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy" (no, I'm not making that up). That captures the general style of their world-view. I remember hearing a fair amount about the John Birch Society back in the early and mid-1960s, but I haven't thought about them for a long time, and if I had been asked, I would have guessed that the organization either went out of business decades ago or had dwindled down to a few dedicated geriatric wackos.

Apparently not. Not only is the John Birch Society still alive and kicking, but it seems that the it will be one of the co-sponsors of the next Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in February 2010. Now, in my opinion, a lot of the other CPAC participants, past and future, are already hard-right extremists only tenuously in contact with reality. But including the John Birch Society, no less, brings this tendency to the point of self-parody.

But, again, don't just take my word for it. Yesterday a writer on the right-wing website Pajamas Media, who (unlike me) is sympathetic to CPAC and all its works, and who also happens to have up-to-date information about the contemporary JBS, described this as a "monumentally stupid decision." He also patiently explained why even CPAC should continue to regard the John Birch Society as a fringe group beyond the pale of political respectability (as, say, William F. Buckley argued over four decades ago). At the very least, he suggested, "CPAC has made a major PR mistake in forming this alliance with JBS."

Could be, if anyone notices. But then again, in the era of Tea Parties and Sarah Palin (an invited speaker at the February CPAC), are paranoid and delusional conspiracy theories really that far out of the CPAC mainstream?

--Jeff Weintraub
====================
Pajamas Media
December 22, 2009
CPAC: Consciously Providing Ammo to Critics
The 2010 conservative shindig will be sponsored by the conspiracy theorists of the John Birch Society.
By Ryan Mauro

(Ryan Mauro is the founder of WorldThreats.com and the director of intelligence at the Asymmetrical Warfare and Intelligence Center (AWIC). He’s also the national security researcher for the Christian Action Network and a published author. He can be contacted at TDCAnalyst@aol.com.)

The writers of The Daily Show, Colbert Report, and Saturday Night Live (although I’m not convinced they’ve even had writers lately) can have February 18-20, 2010, off. The hosts can handle it themselves. On those dates, the jokes will practically write themselves as the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) takes place — co-sponsored by the John Birch Society. Every liberal commentator needs to send a thank-you note to CPAC’s organizers for that monumentally stupid decision.

By having the John Birch Society sponsor it, CPAC can guarantee that 90% of the coverage regarding the conference will relate to JBS’ oh-my-god-look-a-conspiracy attitude rather than the heavy-hitters and rising stars of conservatism and libertarianism that speak there. Instead of focusing on politics, reporters will ask attendees for their response to the JBS controversy and will ask organizers whether they are in such financial distress that they had to embrace a fringe group for support.

Here’s a little history on JBS for those of you that may not understand why this issue is going to overshadow any agenda pursued at the conference. The organization was founded in 1958 by Robert Welch, a businessman concerned about communist infiltration of the U.S. It is understandable why people would initially be drawn into his fold, given advances internationally by hostile communist powers and their intense espionage efforts in the West. However, Welch, apparently believing in the supreme competence of government, could not fathom that the U.S. government failed to halt such advances unless it secretly sympathized with the enemy’s success. A conspiracy theory that the European and American governments were secretly pursuing a socialist one-world government to merge our societies with that of the communists was born.

William F. Buckley Jr. was one of the most prominent critics of JBS, aware that its paranoia undermined efforts by the political right to give more attention to the menacing threat posed by the communists. Buckley wrote that Welch “said Dwight D. Eisenhower was a ‘dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy,’ and that the government of the United States was ‘under operational control of the Communist Party.’ It was, he said in the summer of 1961, ‘50-70 percent’ communist-controlled.”

Today, many decent people are still part of JBS, some of whom don’t fully accept its theories. They are anti-globalist, favor a U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations, are socially conservative, and want to dramatically reduce spending and the size of government. With the Republican Party viewed by many conservatives as having betrayed its principles, it’s not a surprise that a group would be embraced as long as it is upholding conservative ideals, even if it has some wacky theories.

JBS is also very aggressive in its recruiting efforts. I remember being 15 or 16 years old, and I had just published my first couple of articles on the Internet. As I did some research, I decided to try a trial subscription of The New American, which is owned by JBS. Very soon after, I was emailed and then visited by a representative of the organization trying pretty forcefully to sell me a full subscription and educate me about the new world order conspiracy. I was introduced to a myriad of organizations that acted as fronts for the new world order agents and shown how virtually everyone of significance in politics and the media was part of them. He boasted of the summer camps the group ran to educate youngsters in great things like the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and, of course, the manipulation carried out by the freedom-hating globalist forces. “Be leery of Bush and Cheney,” I was warned, due to the vice president’s membership in the Council on Foreign Relations. The conspiracy warned about by Welch still existed today, albeit in a more modern manifestation.

In 2002 and 2003, I read some free issues of The New American and couldn’t get past why, if the Bush administration was supposedly involved in this conspiracy, it would raise the ire of many of the world’s countries (also said to be involved in the NWO) by acting without UN approval in invading Iraq. I remember reading an article explaining that the U.S. had begun Operation Iraqi Freedom to enforce UN law as part of the conspiracy, not for national security reasons. Other articles entertained the idea that the American people had been deliberately misled to support the war.

Ironically, in warning about such conspiracies, JBS undermines a crucial argument of conservatism: that the government becomes far less competent as it grows. Think about it. Such theories require that both U.S. political parties, despite all their differences, unite for a choreographed effort to bring about a socialist new world order in concert with a host of other countries, political parties, and businessmen. Tens of thousands of people must be involved with complete devotion, with none defecting out of moral conviction, and all resisting the temptation to become rich and famous by exposing the conspiracy. Now, that’s competence! If they can pull that off, then government-run health care is a cinch!

The whole problem with JBS’ arguments is that big government is not flawlessly competent. Look at Katrina. Look at Iraq. A massive conspiracy on this order cannot be carried out without betrayal and leaks taking place. If governments like Iran and China, with all their brutality, can’t keep their secrets from getting out, how can a greater number of countries and powerful individuals and organizations with greater restraint on enforcing their secrecy pull it off?

The most concerning element of this development is the question of how much influence JBS will have over CPAC, an event whose importance in the conservative movement can’t be understated. Is this simply a reflection of the dissatisfaction of conservatives, willing to find just somebody to uphold small government? Is this a reflection of libertarians just looking for somebody to oppose overseas wars and the war on drugs, and push more radical policies than most conservatives are willing to consider?

CPAC has made a major PR mistake in forming this alliance with JBS. It won’t be long until the media puts all those taking part on the defensive, forcing the organizers to spend precious time explaining this move. From now on, when I hear the acronym “CPAC,” I won’t think “Conservative Political Action Conference.” I’ll think “Consciously Providing Ammo to Critics.”

Would the Senate HCR bill actually help most people with their health care costs? (contd.)

That's a question that Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight answered with a resounding yes.

Now Jonathan Cohn (of the New Republic) and Jonathan Gruber (of MIT) did the calculations, based on Congressional Budget Office estimates, and Matthew Yglesias turned the results into a bar graph. Again, the answer seems to be yes.

(As with Nate Silver's estimates, these are cost projections for 2016. The 2009 Federal Poverty Line for a family of 4 is an annual income of about $22,000; according to the figures in the Cohn & Gruber table, Gruber seems to have estimated the corresponding FPL in 2016 at around $24,200.)

--Jeff Weintraub
==============================
Matthew Yglesias
Monday, December 21, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Health Reform Will Save Families Money

Left-critics of the health reform bill have done a good job of pointing out that even with reform, decent health insurance may not meet everyone’s standard of “affordable” for many middle class families. That said, the relevant question here is “compared to what?” Jon Cohn and Jonathan Gruber pulled together a big table showing how families of four would fare with and without reform. My value-added is to turn it into a bar graph:



Big savings! Good stuff.

Theda Skocpol on health care reform, then and now

Anything that Theda Skocpol has to say about the politics of social policy in the US has to be taken very seriously, and that definitely includes her interventions in debates over the politics, political economy, and policy substance of the current health care reform effort. That makes it especially interesting to read and compare two pieces she wrote on this subject for Talking Points Memo six months apart, one in June 2009 and the other on December 19, 2009. Both are strongly and cogently argued, but their messages point in strikingly different directions. Perhaps they don't quite contradict each other, but at least they're in sharp tension.

I don't say that as a criticism. Actually, comparing Skocpol's arguments in these two pieces helps to illuminate some of the deepest, most difficult, and most genuinely intractable dilemmas involved in this whole political struggle. Some highlights:

=> "Robust Health Care Reform is the Moment of Truth for Obama and the Democrats" (June 24, 2009)

Fellow Americans, and fellow Democrats and Obama supporters, we are at a moment of truth, a pivotal turning point -- in the form of what happens in the next days and weeks with robust, universal health reform. A fork in the road socially, economically -- and politically. It could go either way depending on Obama and the Democratic officeholders many of us worked so hard to elect. They have the power to act, but will they use it -- or lose it?

If at this remarkable juncture Obama and the Democrats cannot enact a robust health care reform -- with a strong nationwide public option, cost controls, and nearly universal coverage -- I would not want to be in charge of fundraising and mobilization for them in the 2010 and 2012 elections! Most of us who supported them last time will of course not vote for a Republican.. But if Obama and the Democrats cannot act now on a once in a half century challenge and opportunity, they are not worthy of extra energy. [....]

Key leaps forward for U.S. public social provision -- Social Security, Medicare, etc. -- have NEVER happened through "bipartisan" compromises and they always happen in close votes. They have always sqweaked through after gargantuan effort, strong presidential pressure, and refusal to allow eviscerating compromises. Think of Social Security if the Clark amendment -- allowing corporate opt-out -- had passed in 1935. We would not have it. And conservatives and the medical and insurance establishments cried "socialism" in 1965, too. We would not have Medicare if we had listened.

Obama and the Democrats are coming off a historic, landslide election. They have all the popular support for robust reform they will ever have. Good policy design as well public desire for change and considerations of social justice and economic efficiency insist that they enact health care reform with a strong public plan in the mix. That is the only way to move toward cost control and guaranteed access with quality to all -- especially for Americans in lower economic strata or in rural states where one or two private insurers call the tune. [....]

The stakes here in political-economic terms are NOT between a "free market" and "government control." They are between two alternative uses of government regulations and subsidies: [....] So-called conservatives seeking "compromise" on health care reform want more subsidies for their buddies' profits, and want to force more Americans to buy inefficient products (through a mandate to buy private insurance). If Obama and the Democrats agree to such compromises under the name of "reform" they will have squandered the country's future economically -- and undercut their own political fortunes for the future.

Because let's not kid ourselves: WHATEVER passes this year will make the Democrats owners of the health care mess going forward. If they just throw more subsidies and piecemeal regulations into the current system, they will ensure galloping public costs for residual arrangements and for subsidies to private insurers who will easily find ways to avoid sick or costly patients. Businesses and citizens will grow more and more irritated as time passes, and will blame the Democrats. Rightly so. [....]

=> "Defend and Demand: The Progressive Way Forward" (December 19, 2009)

The 2009 health reform end game -- yes, the end of the beginning is in sight -- has been excruciating for progressives. Reforming health care in the real world in which we live means paying to include millions more Americans while fending off all of the tricks America's privileged, left and right, use to resist paying taxes; and it means finding ways to use public regulations and subsidies to put health delivery and finance on a more sustainable path for us all, while watching key mechanisms like the public option shrink and disappear to buy the votes of a few weasely "Democrats" in Congress who want to guarantee profits for private insurers.

Understandably, some progressives see what's left at the end of these struggles as not worth their support. But history tells us this is mistaken. We should take the many big steps forward that are on the table now -- above all the expanded entitlement, the regulations of private insurance, and the increased subsidies for the less fortunate -- and accept that true "health care reform" remains a multi-year, multi-election struggle. Social Security took several decades to become universal and adequate; Medicare did not include cost controls or key benefits for many years. Both programs moreover, had to be improved and defended at the same time, because conservatives attacked and tried to dismantle, even as liberals fought to improve and expand. The same will happen here.

So what should happen next for progressives? We have to DEFEND AND DEMAND AT THE SAME TIME-- and keep at it:

-- We must curb our doubts enough to celebrate what is good in the accomplishments and promises of this round in health reform, and make sure that those Congressional Democrats who fought for the best parts of this reform survive in 2010 and 2012. There is a huge amount of good in even the compromised Senate bill. It marks the accomplishment of a century-long struggle to say that all Americans deserve public help to ensure affordable health care coverage; and there are billions in subsidies to help many lower and middle-income people afford health care. [Etc.]

=> What changed in the meantime? Well, no doubt watching the health care reform effort make its way through the political meatgrinder this year has been a sobering experience. As John Maynard Keynes once said: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

That doesn't necessarily mean that Skocpol's present position is the correct one, though I'm inclined to agree with it myself. But the crucial point is that morally serious political judgment has to take account of reality, with all its constraints and imperfections and ethical irrationalities, as well as ideals. (And has to do this without succumbing either to doctrinaire and unrealistic moralism or to spineless and unprincipled opportunism masquerading as 'pragmatism'--which, as Max Weber explained in his great essay "Politics as a Vocation," is not easy.)

--Jeff Weintraub

P.S. As I was finishing up this post, I noticed that Matt Yglesias also urged people to read and ponder Weber's arguments in "Politics as a Vocation"--and quoted one of the key passages, too. At moments like these, it's hard to avoid thinking about Weber's analysis of what it means to pursue what he calls an "ethic of responsibility" in politics. Matt ends on the right note:

[This] is perhaps a long-winded way of explicating Weber’s maxim: “Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards."

But we might also note what Weber says next:

It takes both passion and perspective. [....] [E]ven those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now, or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today. Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he shall not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say 'In spite of all!' has the calling for politics.

Will the current health care reform bill actually help most Americans with their health care bills?

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, whose statistical analyses command general respect, does the calculations and concludes that the answer is unambiguously yes.

His recent post on this subject (tactfully entitled "Why Progressives Are Batshit Crazy to Oppose the Senate Bill") sums things up with the following chart comparing what health-care insurance premium would look like in 2016 for a median-income family (a) if the current Senate bill is passed and (b) if nothing is passed and current trends continue ("Status Quo"), along with (c) a third estimate that factors in the long-term effects of the SCHIP child insurance coverage passed in February 2009, which are trickier to calculate:



Of course, even if one accepts all the figures in this chart, that wouldn't settle the question of whether or not passing the currently available HCR bill is, overall and on balance, a good or bad idea. This leaves a lot of important political and policy issues hanging. Nevertheless, the point being made here does help to frame and clarify those debates in a useful way.

--Jeff Weintraub

Sarah Palin wins PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year Award" for "Death Panels"

This strikes me as a very plausible choice for the top spot--at least in the context of US politics--not only because of the audacious and reckless dishonesty of this particular lie (even for Sarah Palin), but also because it really took hold in public discourse, was exceptionally successful in helping stir up political hysteria and paranoia and poisoning the whole political process, and generated a whole range of quotable Republican spin-offs (including Senator Charles Grassley's "pull the plug on Grandma," House Republican Leader John Boehner's "government-encouraged euthanasia," and the wave of totally slanderous attacks by Newt Gingrich and others smearing the researcher, bio-ethicist, and health care adviser Ezekiel Emanuel.)

Seniors and the disabled "will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care."
Sarah Palin on Friday, August 7th, 2009 in a message posted on Facebook

What was most astonishing (but, alas, not surprising) was that this blatant and pernicious falsehood came, not from some fringe wacko or obscure Congressman or political shock-radio host, but from a former Republican candidate for Vice-President of the United States. For those of us who have felt some respect for John McCain over the years, his cynical irresponsibility in nominating this person, almost sight unseen, to be his running mate in 2008 continues to be a bit of a shock. As for Sarah Palin, one of the most striking features of her political style is the fact that she doesn't just lie and prevaricate continually (that's not uncommon among politicians, though rarely to the same extent), but when one of her lies is exposed, she continues to repeat it undaunted. And in this case, as I noted, even allegedly more 'respectable' national Republicans mostly jumped on the bandwagon, more or less.

The fact that they can get away with this sort of thing to the extent that they have probably says something troubling and significant about the larger pathologies of our current political culture, not just about them. But that's not a good reason to cynically shrug our shoulders and simply accept this level of blatant political lying as a fact of life--or to pretend that outright political lies are not actually lies.

For those of you who have forgotten some of the details of this sorry episode (which isn't really over), PolitiFact's announcement of this "Lie of the Year Award" spells out the story (below).

Yours for reality-based discourse,
Jeff Weintraub

P.S. It might be worth adding one important detail that PolitiFact's account leaves out. (I guess they figured they couldn't include everything.) The provision to have Medicare cover voluntary end-of-life counseling between doctors and patients, which Palin described as a mandate for "death panels" and which then touched off a generalized Republican propaganda frenzy, was originally proposed by a conservative Republican Senator from Georgia, Johnny Isakson. This was a proposal he had been pushing for years. Among other things, in 2007 he co-sponsored the Medicare End-of-Life Planning Act. In 2009 he proposed this again during early discussions of the health care reform legislation, and a provision along these lines got incorporated into the evolving HCR bill.

In an interview right after Palin's "death panels" assertion hit the airwaves, Isakson expressed some bewilderment about how this common-sense proposal could possibly be twisted or misconstrued into a scheme for government-enforced euthanasia:

How someone could take an end of life directive or a living will as that is nuts. You're putting the authority in the individual rather than the government. I don't know how that got so mixed up.

After this interview was published, Isakson came under heavy pressure from the Republican leadership, who forced him to issue some follow-up statements trying to pretend that the measures he had been proposing for years were somehow significantly different from the one incorporated into the 2009 health care reform bill. But these fudges and recantations were, to put it mildly, unconvincing. For Isakson's honest assessment of the "death panels" nonsense, which helps to clarify some of the substantive issues, read what he said in that interview.

================================
PolitiFact.com
Published on Friday, December 18th, 2009 at 5:15 p.m
PolitiFact's Lie of the Year: 'Death panels'
By Angie Drobnic Holan

Of all the falsehoods and distortions in the political discourse this year, one stood out from the rest.

"Death panels."

The claim set political debate afire when it was made in August, raising issues from the role of government in health care to the bounds of acceptable political discussion. In a nod to the way technology has transformed politics, the statement wasn't made in an interview or a television ad. Sarah Palin posted it on her Facebook page.

Her assertion — that the government would set up boards to determine whether seniors and the disabled were worthy of care — spread through newscasts, talk shows, blogs and town hall meetings. Opponents of health care legislation said it revealed the real goals of the Democratic proposals. Advocates for health reform said it showed the depths to which their opponents would sink. Still others scratched their heads and said, "Death panels? Really?"

The editors of PolitiFact.com, the fact-checking Web site of the St. Petersburg Times, have chosen it as our inaugural "Lie of the Year."

PolitiFact readers overwhelmingly supported the decision. Nearly 5,000 voted in a national poll to name the biggest lie, and 61 percent chose "death panels" from a field of eight finalists. (See the complete results.)

This is the story of how two words generated intense heat in the national debate over health care.

• • •

The former governor of Alaska had been out of the headlines since she announced her resignation on July 3; the Facebook message instantly brought her back to the political stage.

"As more Americans delve into the disturbing details of the nationalized health care plan that the current administration is rushing through Congress, our collective jaw is dropping, and we're saying not just no, but hell no!" Palin wrote.

"The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's ‘death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."

It wasn't the first time opponents of the Democratic plans for health care had raised the specter of euthanasia. In February, the conservative editorial page of the Washington Times compared plans for more funding for health information technology with eugenics programs instituted in Nazi Germany.

Democrats in the House introduced a bill July 14 that closely mirrored President Barack Obama's campaign promises on health care. The bill increased regulation of insurance companies, proposed a national health insurance exchange where individuals and small business could shop for plans, expanded health programs for the poor, and gave incentives to doctors and hospitals for efficiency and improved care. It did not promote euthanasia.

On July 16, Betsy McCaughey, the former lieutenant governor of New York and a conservative health care commentator, suggested that the Democratic plan included a measure requiring seniors be told how to end their lives. "Congress would make it mandatory — absolutely require — that every five years people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner," she said on a radio show hosted by conservative Fred Thompson.

PolitiFact gave McCaughey a Pants on Fire rating for that statement. There were no mandatory sessions proposed. Instead, for the first time, Medicare would pay for doctors' appointments for patients to discuss living wills, health care directives and other end-of-life issues. The appointments were optional, and the AARP supported the measure.

Nevertheless, Republican officials began amplifying McCaughey's comments.

House Republican Leader John Boehner issued a statement July 23 that said, "This provision may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia if enacted into law."

Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., said on the House floor July 28 that a Republican alternative for health reform was "pro-life because it will not put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government."

Palin's statement then launched the health care debate into overdrive. The term was mentioned in news reports approximately 6,000 times in August and September, according to the Nexis database. By October, it was still being mentioned 150 to 300 times a week.

• • •

The phrase "death panels" appears to be original to Palin. A search of news databases showed no use prior to her Facebook posting.

History professor Ian Dowbiggin, who has written several books on medical history, euthanasia and eugenics, said he had never heard the term before Palin used it. He said the phrase invokes images of Nazi Germany, which denied life-saving care to people who were not deemed useful enough to broader society. Adolf Hitler ordered Nazi officials to secretly register, select, and murder handicapped people such as schizophrenics, epileptics, disabled babies and other long-stay hospital patients, according to Dowbiggin.

"It's not far-fetched to make the historical argument that as you get government more and more involved in health care, you create an environment that is more hospitable to the legalization of forms of euthanasia," Dowbiggin said. "But the Nazi example should be used very advisedly."

"This is an issue that's being exploited by political figures who are opposed to the health care legislation," he added. "They're trying to sensationalize the issue as much as possible to drum up opposition."

On Aug. 10, PolitiFact rated Palin's statement Pants on Fire. In the weeks that followed, health care policy experts on both the right and the left said the euthanasia comparisons were inaccurate. Gail Wilensky, a health adviser to President George H.W. Bush, said the charge was untrue and upsetting.

"I think it is really unfortunate that this has been raised and received so much attention because there are serious issues to debate in health care reform," she said at a forum on Sept. 3.

But some prominent Republicans didn't reject the death panels claim.

Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the Finance Committee, told people at a town hall meeting on Aug. 12 that people "have every right to fear. You shouldn't have counseling at the end of life; you ought to have counseling 20 years before you're going to die. You ought to plan these things out. And I don't have any problem with things like living wills, but they ought to be done within the family. We should not have a government program that determines you're going to pull the plug on Grandma."

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, asked about the issue on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, said, "You are asking us to trust turning power over to the government, when there are clearly people in America who believe in establishing euthanasia, including selective standards."

• • •

Democrats responded by saying the accusation wasn't true and highlighting the actual Medicare provision and what it said.

That wasn't necessarily an effective strategy, said Drew Westen, a psychologist who studies political communication and advises Democrats on messaging. "Instead of stopping and asking themselves, 'What are Republicans trying to appeal to?', the Democrats rolled their eyes and said, 'Isn't this stupid,' " he said. "On one level, it was stupid, but on another level, it was hitting seniors very close to where they live."

People intuitively understand that health care reform is about lowering costs, and end-of-life care can be quite costly, he said. The "death panels" claim exploited fears that people already had. Rather than just saying the claim wasn't true, Westen said, a better response would be that there already are "death panels" — run by insurance companies.

"That's the response that should have been there, from the first day the attack was made," Westen said. "You never let an attack like this stand or go unresponded to in any 24-hour cycle."

The charge was raised repeatedly during August town hall meetings. The claim particularly caught the attention of seniors, said John Rother, a health policy expert with the AARP. "That's who's most sensitive to any suggestion of denial of necessary care or being told you can't get the care you need from your doctor," he said.

The town hall meetings highlighted the partisan divisions when it came to death panels. The claim excited the Republican base along with the Tea Party to mobilize a vocal opposition, Rother said. "If your start-out stance is being distrustful of government, then this fit right into your worldview." Though nonpartisan, AARP has generally supported Democratic efforts to pass health care legislation.

• • •

Two independent polls showed that about 30 percent of the public believed death panels were part of health care reform, both the week after Palin made the comment and a month later.

Yet seniors were no more likely to believe it than other age groups. The polls showed a closer correlation by party, with Republicans more likely to say that death panels were part of the plans pending in Congress. It's not clear whether Palin's comments swayed anyone who was undecided or unsure about health care reform.

"It touched a nerve of anxiety, and then there was a big response from the press and from experts that assured people that euthanasia wasn't anywhere near this debate," said Robert Blendon, a Harvard University researcher who studies public opinion on health care. "Most people, at the end of the day, did not believe it was being proposed."

As the furor over the phrase settled down, Democrats used it as evidence that Republicans were unreasonably opposing health reform.

President Obama rebutted the claim in a major health care address on Sept. 9: "Some of people's concerns have grown out of bogus claims spread by those whose only agenda is to kill reform at any cost. The best example is the claim, made not just by radio and cable talk show hosts, but prominent politicians, that we plan to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens. Such a charge would be laughable if it weren't so cynical and irresponsible. It is a lie, plain and simple."

The phrase has been mentioned in the Congressional record about 40 times since Palin's Facebook posting, but virtually all were Democrats citing it as an example of Republican intransigence.

"You know, GOP used to stand for Grand Old Party," said Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., on Nov. 7. "Now it stands for Grandstand, Oppose, and Pretend. They grandstand with phony claims about nonexistent death panels. They oppose any real reform." The House voted in favor of health care legislation the same day.

• • •

Rep. Earl Blumenauer, the Oregon Democrat who promoted the provision that allowed Medicare to pay for doctor appointments about end-of-life counseling, said he sees both positives and negatives from the controversy.

On the positive side, he said he's optimistic the Medicare provision will make it into the final version of health care reform, which is still pending in the Senate, and people had more conversations about making their wishes known for things like living wills or do-not-resuscitate orders.

"It really did energize people who deal with palliative care," he said. "Ultimately, it helped advance the cause of giving people more control over end-of-life decisions."

On the other hand, he said, the episode suggests that political distortions need to be confronted faster and more forcefully.

"It's a sobering prospect that political discourse is going to resemble hand-to-hand combat for the foreseeable future," he said.

That doesn't bode well for keeping average citizens involved in the political process, especially those who are independent or not particularly partisan.

"I think they're losing their appetite to wade through the vitriol, and I'm in the same boat," Blumenauer said. "We are moving to a point where we drive normal people away, and everybody else gets their news and increasingly opinion prescreened, going for days never hearing an opposing viewpoint. That gives me pause."

• • •

As for Palin, she told the conservative National Review in an interview on Nov. 17, the same day her best-selling memoir Going Rogue was released, that she didn't regret her comments. (PolitiFact's calls and e-mail to Palin were not returned.)

"To me, while reading that section of the bill, it became so evident that there would be a panel of bureaucrats who would decide on levels of health care, decide on those who are worthy or not worthy of receiving some government-controlled coverage," she said. "Since health care would have to be rationed if it were promised to everyone, it would therefore lead to harm for many individuals not able to receive the government care. That leads, of course, to death."

"The term I used to describe the panel making these decisions should not be taken literally," said Palin. The phrase is "a lot like when President Reagan used to refer to the Soviet Union as the 'evil empire.' He got his point across. He got people thinking and researching what he was talking about. It was quite effective. Same thing with the ‘death panels.' I would characterize them like that again, in a heartbeat."

The Republican Health Care Blunder? (Jonathan Chait)

The Republican columnist David Frum argued a few weeks ago that the Republican Party's all-or-nothing gamble on a strategy of pure obstructionism was likely to backfire on them.

The furious rejectionist frenzy of the past 12 months is exacting a terrible price upon Republicans. We’re getting worse and less conservative results out of Washington than we could have negotiated, if we had negotiated.

Maybe. It's clear that their unrelenting "Party of No" strategy is bad for the country, but it remains to be seen whether it will turn out to be a tactical error in narrowly partisan terms.

Meanwhile, with regard to the legislative struggle over health care reform, which appears to be moving toward a climax, the New Republic's Jonathan Chait suggests that the Republicans really have blown it in precisely the way that Frum warned against.

The United States is on the doorstep of comprehensive health care reform. It's a staggering achievement, about which I'll have more to say later. but the under-appreciated thing that strikes me at the moment is that it never would have happened if the Republican Party had played its cards right.

At the outset of this debate, moderate Democrats were desperate for a bipartisan bill. They were willing to do almost anything to get it, including negotiate fruitlessly for months on end. We can't know for sure, but Democrats appeared willing to make enormous substantive concessions to win the assent of even a few Republicans. A few GOP defectors could have lured a chunk of Democrats to sign something far more limited than what President Obama is going to sign. [....]

But Republicans wouldn't make that deal. The GOP leadership put immense pressure on all its members to withhold consent from any health care bill. [....] The unified partisan front of the Republican Party forced the Democrats to adopt their own unified partisan front, something that appeared impossible as recently as this last summer. [....]

The Republicans eschewed a halfway compromise and put all their chips on an all or nothing campaign to defeat health care and Obama's presidency. It was an audacious gamble. They lost. In the end, they'll walk away with nothing. The Republicans may gain some more seats in 2010 by their total obstruction, but the substantive policy defeat they've been dealt will last for decades.

The next few weeks (not to mention the 2010 midterm elections) may tell us a bit more about whether Chait is counting the chickens before they've hatched. And, of course, his retrospective assessment of what might or might not have been possible if the Republicans had pursued a different strategy is also open to question. But this analysis is worth considering.

--Jeff Weintraub
==============================
New Republic (On-Line)
December 19, 2009 | 3:56 pm
The Republican Health Care Blunder
Jonathan Chait

The United States is on the doorstep of comprehensive health care reform. It's a staggering achievement, about which I'll have more to say later. but the under-appreciated thing that strikes me at the moment is that it never would have happened if the Republican Party had played its cards right.

At the outset of this debate, moderate Democrats were desperate for a bipartisan bill. They were willing to do almost anything to get it, including negotiate fruitlessly for months on end. We can't know for sure, but Democrats appeared willing to make enormous substantive concessions to win the assent of even a few Republicans. A few GOP defectors could have lured a chunk of Democrats to sign something far more limited than what President Obama is going to sign. And remember, it would have taken only one Democrat to agree to partial reform in order to kill comprehensive reform. I can easily imagine a scenario where Ben Nelson refused to vote for anything larger than, say, a $400 billion bill that Chuck Grassley and a couple other Republicans were offering.

But Republicans wouldn't make that deal. The GOP leadership put immense pressure on all its members to withhold consent from any health care bill. The strategy had some logic to it: If all 40 Republicans voted no, then Democrats would need 60 votes to succeed, a monumentally difficult task. And if they did succeed, the bill would be seen as partisan and therefore too liberal, too big government. The spasm of anti-government activism over the summer helped lock the GOP into this strategy -- no Republican could afford to risk the wrath of Tea Partiers convinced that any reform signed by Obama equaled socialism and death panels.

The role of Olympia Snowe is interesting here. Snowe negotiated seriously for months, and Democrats met what seemed to be her substantive concerns, but, like the Russian army retreating before Napoleon, she insisted that the bill be drawn out indefinitely. Snowe demanded that the process not be rushed, but she never defined what a reasonable time frame would be. In the summer, "taking your time" and "doing it right"meant waiting until after the August recess. In the fall, it meant until after Thanksgiving. Now it means until after Christmas. If it lasted until next year, eventually Republicans would demand that the process not be rushed before the midterm elections, and that the fair thing would be to let the people decide in the 2010 elections.

The GOP leadership has every incentive to stretch the process out as long as possible. It runs out the clock on the first two years of the Obama presidency, after which high unemployment and the natural effects of an off-year election would produce a Congress far less likely -- perhaps totally unwilling -- to cooperate with Obama. Snowe might have diverged from the party line on substance, but she seems to have agreed to hold the line on process. At some point, process becomes substance. Thus Snowe effectively removed herself from the negotiations.

And so Democrats found themselves all alone. It seems to be around August when the party realized that bipartisan dealmaking was not at hand, and it had to pass a bill or face the same calamity as it did in 1994. Politically speaking, there were no good options left, but passing a bill offered the least bad option. The unified partisan front of the Republican Party forced the Democrats to adopt their own unified partisan front, something that appeared impossible as recently as this last summer. This passage from the New York Times is telling:

Faced with Republican opposition that many Democrats saw as driven more by politics than policy disagreements, Senate Democrats in recent days gained new determination to bridge differences among themselves and prevail over the opposition.

Lawmakers who attended a private meeting between Mr. Obama and Senate Democrats at the White House on Tuesday pointed to remarks there by Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, as providing some new inspiration.

Mr. Bayh said that the health care measure was the kind of public policy he had come to Washington to work on, according to officials who attended the session, and that he did not want to see the satisfied looks on the faces of Republican leaders if they succeeded in blocking the measure.

Evan Bayh! When you've turned the somnolent, relentlessly centrist Indiana Senator into a raging partisan, you've really done something. The Republicans eschewed a halfway compromise and put all their chips on an all or nothing campaign to defeat health care and Obama's presidency. It was an audacious gamble. They lost. In the end, they'll walk away with nothing. The Republicans may gain some more seats in 2010 by their total obstruction, but the substantive policy defeat they've been dealt will last for decades.