Thursday, February 14, 2008
Ramos Horta and the failure of UN police
My comments in the Guardian, comment is free on the reports that Timor L'Este's PM was left bleeding while UN police kept their distance.
Green indeed
Global fuming
Speculator
Investor Relations Magazine
Jan, 2008
What’s green and intoxicating? Ian Williams fuels up
back
‘Green’ has different connotations, the most (over)used conjuring benign visions of environmental soundness. Another implies being gullible and easy to trick. The two sometimes even converge – for example, when health-conscious consumers are tricked into buying overpriced tap water decanted into disposable bottles made of potentially toxic petrochemicals and trucked across continents.
You may think nothing could be greener than bio-fuels, but there are ominous aspects to this issue. Sugarcane is one of the most potent sources of vegetable energy, which is why Brazilians began to put the stuff in their gas tanks when they weren’t drinking it in their caipirinhas. But even cachaca producers complain that bio-ethanol production is driving their costs up the spouts of their stills, while environmentalists note with concern that sugarcane plantations are encroaching on the Amazon rainforest, one of the globe’s last big carbon sinks.
For some Caribbean countries faced with huge imported fuel bills and idle fields because of US and EU protectionism, sugar alcohol as fuel makes sense. But in a world where billions go hungry every day, turning corn into gasoline seems obscene: the grain it takes to fill one SUV tank with bio-ethanol could feed a person for a year.
What’s more, the idea is as dubious economically as it is ethically. There are processes that use waste oils, cornstalks, grass or almost any organic garbage to make bio-diesel, but they do not have big lobbyists on the Hill. Corn gas is economically sustainable only in an insulated environment of corporate welfare, a cocoon of subsidies, tax breaks and high-tariff barriers against imported sugar. It is not even slightly environmentally sustainable. It uses almost as much carbon-based fuel in its production as it delivers, while the resulting higher corn prices will lead to the prairies being plowed, destroying the regrowing carbon sink there.
But corn ethanol makes lots of political sense because politicians collect sack-loads of campaign contributions from its manufacturers and the Florida sugar barons who could not otherwise compete with the Caribbean and Brazil. And in US politics, it’s never a bad thing to have the farm lobby on your side. In the current paranoid climate, it also helps to imply that every dollar that goes to the Midwest corn barons is not going to a fundamentalist Arab sheikh.
Most perniciously, the green glow around corn gas relieves the pressure on Washington and Detroit to do anything about the gas-guzzling monstrosities wallowing along America’s roads. Washington refuses to set carbon limits, enforce stricter fuel efficiency standards or in any way lessen the nation’s addiction to cheap liquid fuel, while simultaneously pumping tax dollars to the corn gas emitters.
Some years ago, Speculator predicted the imminence of the $100 barrel of oil. My grim satisfaction at being correct is made even grimmer by the acquisition of an oil-heated home in the mountains and a car to get to and from it. Even so, I still believe gas is far too cheap in this country – and only higher fuel taxes will force economic design on Detroit and rational planning on the cities.
Speculator
Investor Relations Magazine
Jan, 2008
What’s green and intoxicating? Ian Williams fuels up
back
‘Green’ has different connotations, the most (over)used conjuring benign visions of environmental soundness. Another implies being gullible and easy to trick. The two sometimes even converge – for example, when health-conscious consumers are tricked into buying overpriced tap water decanted into disposable bottles made of potentially toxic petrochemicals and trucked across continents.
You may think nothing could be greener than bio-fuels, but there are ominous aspects to this issue. Sugarcane is one of the most potent sources of vegetable energy, which is why Brazilians began to put the stuff in their gas tanks when they weren’t drinking it in their caipirinhas. But even cachaca producers complain that bio-ethanol production is driving their costs up the spouts of their stills, while environmentalists note with concern that sugarcane plantations are encroaching on the Amazon rainforest, one of the globe’s last big carbon sinks.
For some Caribbean countries faced with huge imported fuel bills and idle fields because of US and EU protectionism, sugar alcohol as fuel makes sense. But in a world where billions go hungry every day, turning corn into gasoline seems obscene: the grain it takes to fill one SUV tank with bio-ethanol could feed a person for a year.
What’s more, the idea is as dubious economically as it is ethically. There are processes that use waste oils, cornstalks, grass or almost any organic garbage to make bio-diesel, but they do not have big lobbyists on the Hill. Corn gas is economically sustainable only in an insulated environment of corporate welfare, a cocoon of subsidies, tax breaks and high-tariff barriers against imported sugar. It is not even slightly environmentally sustainable. It uses almost as much carbon-based fuel in its production as it delivers, while the resulting higher corn prices will lead to the prairies being plowed, destroying the regrowing carbon sink there.
But corn ethanol makes lots of political sense because politicians collect sack-loads of campaign contributions from its manufacturers and the Florida sugar barons who could not otherwise compete with the Caribbean and Brazil. And in US politics, it’s never a bad thing to have the farm lobby on your side. In the current paranoid climate, it also helps to imply that every dollar that goes to the Midwest corn barons is not going to a fundamentalist Arab sheikh.
Most perniciously, the green glow around corn gas relieves the pressure on Washington and Detroit to do anything about the gas-guzzling monstrosities wallowing along America’s roads. Washington refuses to set carbon limits, enforce stricter fuel efficiency standards or in any way lessen the nation’s addiction to cheap liquid fuel, while simultaneously pumping tax dollars to the corn gas emitters.
Some years ago, Speculator predicted the imminence of the $100 barrel of oil. My grim satisfaction at being correct is made even grimmer by the acquisition of an oil-heated home in the mountains and a car to get to and from it. Even so, I still believe gas is far too cheap in this country – and only higher fuel taxes will force economic design on Detroit and rational planning on the cities.
50 years of the Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament
From Tribune, 14 th February
As a young, politically interested science-fiction reading schoolboy, I went on successive Aldermaston marches, singing about the “H Bombs’ thunder” that “echoed like the crack of doom.” I read, and still have a first edition of John Hershey’s Hiroshima, which, in those days of Cuban crises, gave gruesome details of what a nuclear holocaust could be like. It is clear that both in scale of devastation and in their lingering after-effects nuclear weapons were immoral and uniquely evil, not least because of the blow back effect – the fallout came back on the users as well the victims.
But somehow people aren't as scared anymore. Six decades and not a mushroom cloud in anger, and no Cuban style standoffs to raise the anxiety quotient.
It is difficult to be rational about such weaponry, and certainly few governments have succeeded. The USA exploded almost 200 in Nevada where trippers to Las Vegas could watch the fireworks on the horizon. The British stood servicemen in shorts on the decks of ships, and told them to cover their eyes against the flash. The Soviets gave conscripts a glass of vodka and marched them into the mushroom cloud. The French went ahead with a test for de Gaulle, even though the wind was blowing towards nearby islands. Clearly one of the first effects of such weapons was on the sanity of their possessors.
One of things we did at Aldermaston was to distribute the Spies for Peace leaflets that exposed the government's secret plans to run post-nuclear Britain with neo-feudal baronies run from bunkers.
But then, it was not just governments that were a few kilos short of critical mass in the brain department, sometimes even opponents had a whiff of irrationality about them. In the sixties, the Committee of 100 had a demonstration in Moscow, and I remembered some of the Communist CND members were upset. Unilateral disarmament for Britain was one thing, but leave the "Workers' Bomb" alone.
Looking back in sobriety, over Berlin, Korea, Hungary, Berlin and Czechoslovakia, it does indeed take an act of considerable faith to consider Moscow as "peace-loving," even if it were not as much of a threat as the Americans believed. Traumatized by the cost of standing alone in Europe during the war, the post-war British Labour government saw an independent nuclear weapon as an essential survival tool.
Relying on American support had been very costly for Britain: it had been a very risky strategy then and was likely to be even more so in the future, hence the fervour with which Nye Bevan had defended the independent nuclear deterrent, arguing that unilateralism was "an emotional spasm," "sending a British foreign secretary naked into the council chamber."
Perhaps the one good thing about the Polaris deal that turned into Trident is that it disarmed the concept of the "independent nuclear deterrent." Harold McMillan's deal with JFK actually gave up Britain's independence. The country can neither make, nor deliver nuclear weapons without Washington's say-so, and in return it has to snap to attention when the White House calls. The UK is as naked as an Athenian slave in the arena with a Roman sword at his testicles.
More to the point, it puts Britain on the frontline of American unilateralism of a totally different kind to that which we espoused at Aldermaston. Apart from Iraq, it makes us complicit in breathtaking hypocrisy, which says that some countries can have nuclear weapons and others cannot. It ties us to a nation, the USA, which is hedging about the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and reinterprets the Non Proliferation Treaty to exclude Israel and India, while resisting its strengthening. Washington also sends very dangerous signals about the convention on peaceful uses of outer spaces and has unilaterally scrapped arms limitation treaties with Moscow.
The constant hedging about first use and the hints of nuclear bunker-busters show that the collective insanity of the early days is still rampant around the Pentagon and the White House.
In doing so, both they and the British government are in clear violation of their own commitments under the Non Proliferation Treaty that commits them to good faith disarmament. It also pits them against the International Court of Justice ruling in 1996, which found the threat and use of nuclear weapons to be illegal under international law, except in the case of an existential threat to the state possessing them. But even then, the ruling stressed that the NPT commitment "is an obligation to achieve a precise result -- nuclear disarmament in all its aspects -- by adopting a particular course of conduct, namely, the pursuit of negotiations on the matter in good faith."
Under the circumstances, the non-proliferation regime has been relatively successful. South Africa disarmed because the Afrikaaners did not want an African bomb, but it could restart the process – yet it so far has not. Countries like Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and Germany, that could with some seriousness argue their need, have also declined to take up the nuclear option.
Britain apparently now has the second biggest arms budget in the world, to defend one offshore island that is not threatened with invasion from anywhere. Trident never had a "useful" life, but now it is obsolescent, perhaps it could become useful – as a bargaining chip with Iran, India and Pakistan, not to mention North Korea and Israel, to show that a country can remain potent on the world stage even without a nuclear phallus to brandish.
As a young, politically interested science-fiction reading schoolboy, I went on successive Aldermaston marches, singing about the “H Bombs’ thunder” that “echoed like the crack of doom.” I read, and still have a first edition of John Hershey’s Hiroshima, which, in those days of Cuban crises, gave gruesome details of what a nuclear holocaust could be like. It is clear that both in scale of devastation and in their lingering after-effects nuclear weapons were immoral and uniquely evil, not least because of the blow back effect – the fallout came back on the users as well the victims.
But somehow people aren't as scared anymore. Six decades and not a mushroom cloud in anger, and no Cuban style standoffs to raise the anxiety quotient.
It is difficult to be rational about such weaponry, and certainly few governments have succeeded. The USA exploded almost 200 in Nevada where trippers to Las Vegas could watch the fireworks on the horizon. The British stood servicemen in shorts on the decks of ships, and told them to cover their eyes against the flash. The Soviets gave conscripts a glass of vodka and marched them into the mushroom cloud. The French went ahead with a test for de Gaulle, even though the wind was blowing towards nearby islands. Clearly one of the first effects of such weapons was on the sanity of their possessors.
One of things we did at Aldermaston was to distribute the Spies for Peace leaflets that exposed the government's secret plans to run post-nuclear Britain with neo-feudal baronies run from bunkers.
But then, it was not just governments that were a few kilos short of critical mass in the brain department, sometimes even opponents had a whiff of irrationality about them. In the sixties, the Committee of 100 had a demonstration in Moscow, and I remembered some of the Communist CND members were upset. Unilateral disarmament for Britain was one thing, but leave the "Workers' Bomb" alone.
Looking back in sobriety, over Berlin, Korea, Hungary, Berlin and Czechoslovakia, it does indeed take an act of considerable faith to consider Moscow as "peace-loving," even if it were not as much of a threat as the Americans believed. Traumatized by the cost of standing alone in Europe during the war, the post-war British Labour government saw an independent nuclear weapon as an essential survival tool.
Relying on American support had been very costly for Britain: it had been a very risky strategy then and was likely to be even more so in the future, hence the fervour with which Nye Bevan had defended the independent nuclear deterrent, arguing that unilateralism was "an emotional spasm," "sending a British foreign secretary naked into the council chamber."
Perhaps the one good thing about the Polaris deal that turned into Trident is that it disarmed the concept of the "independent nuclear deterrent." Harold McMillan's deal with JFK actually gave up Britain's independence. The country can neither make, nor deliver nuclear weapons without Washington's say-so, and in return it has to snap to attention when the White House calls. The UK is as naked as an Athenian slave in the arena with a Roman sword at his testicles.
More to the point, it puts Britain on the frontline of American unilateralism of a totally different kind to that which we espoused at Aldermaston. Apart from Iraq, it makes us complicit in breathtaking hypocrisy, which says that some countries can have nuclear weapons and others cannot. It ties us to a nation, the USA, which is hedging about the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and reinterprets the Non Proliferation Treaty to exclude Israel and India, while resisting its strengthening. Washington also sends very dangerous signals about the convention on peaceful uses of outer spaces and has unilaterally scrapped arms limitation treaties with Moscow.
The constant hedging about first use and the hints of nuclear bunker-busters show that the collective insanity of the early days is still rampant around the Pentagon and the White House.
In doing so, both they and the British government are in clear violation of their own commitments under the Non Proliferation Treaty that commits them to good faith disarmament. It also pits them against the International Court of Justice ruling in 1996, which found the threat and use of nuclear weapons to be illegal under international law, except in the case of an existential threat to the state possessing them. But even then, the ruling stressed that the NPT commitment "is an obligation to achieve a precise result -- nuclear disarmament in all its aspects -- by adopting a particular course of conduct, namely, the pursuit of negotiations on the matter in good faith."
Under the circumstances, the non-proliferation regime has been relatively successful. South Africa disarmed because the Afrikaaners did not want an African bomb, but it could restart the process – yet it so far has not. Countries like Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and Germany, that could with some seriousness argue their need, have also declined to take up the nuclear option.
Britain apparently now has the second biggest arms budget in the world, to defend one offshore island that is not threatened with invasion from anywhere. Trident never had a "useful" life, but now it is obsolescent, perhaps it could become useful – as a bargaining chip with Iran, India and Pakistan, not to mention North Korea and Israel, to show that a country can remain potent on the world stage even without a nuclear phallus to brandish.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
A Whale of a Tale
Note my restraint: I refrained from calling the Japanese Spermicides!
Ian
A whale of a tale
Japan's killing of whales is unjustified, and its claim that the whaling industry serves a scientific purpose is hypocritical
Ian Williams
Ceticide is silly, as well as not very nice.
I was addressing freshmen politics students at Paterson University about the British elections on the day that Tony Blair was first elected. "Could you tell them about Scotland and Wales?" the professor asked. A large and hitherto comatose football player in the front row suddenly raised his head from the desk and asked: "You mean, like, Moby Dick?" Whales 'R Us for a whole generation.
Whales are clever and cuddly, and they sing. They even have names, like Willy. Like eating dogs and horses, harpooning whales appals the anthropomorphically inclined, a point realised by the Japanese who have responded to the recent Australian court ruling against Japanese whaling in the Antarctic by pointing our the relish with which their prosecutors eat kangaroo.
If the Japanese were to get up and say outright, "We actually like whale meat, we think it's yummy and we are going to chomp our way through it regardless of your anthropomorphic delusions," you could almost respect them. But they don't. They waffle on about scientific research while going through whales as if they were white mice in a laboratory.
As a born-again carnivore, when I chomp through a filet mignon I don't pretend that it is byproduct of tissue sampling for "scientific research", unless gastronomy has moved recently from being an art to a science.
The Norwegians make no such pretence. These cosy Nordic social democrats and suppliers of UN peacekeepers, take as many whales as the Japanese and blithely admit that they are doing it for food. Of course, they are European, were on the right side in the last war and hunt in their own waters, so somehow Greenpeace leaves them alone. It may help that they take less than their own declared quota because demand for it is so low, but is cooking whale meat and eating it with knives and forks really any better than nibbling raw slivers on the end of chopsticks?
Japan sends heavily subsidised ships on long voyages to the opposite pole and then tries to flog the flensed carcasses back home to a generally indifferent public. There are freezers full of whale meat because they can't sell all the by-product of their "research" even to captive audiences like school lunch programmes.
Added to the hidden subsidies are the untold millions in bribes - sorry, aid - that goes to small developing-world countries to join the International Whaling Commission and vote along with the ceticidic Japanese.
At one time, as I remember, it was widely alleged that the steak in British steak and kidney pies of the kind sold in fish & chip shops was in fact whale steak, so I have probably eaten some myself.
But there are differences. Many of the great whales were and still are endangered species, and we have the example of Atlantic cod to show what happens when a species falls below a threshold value. They are also remarkably intelligent and more cogently, there is no humane way to kill Leviathan. Their dying is long and direful. That is why Tokyo got testy when the new Australian government released its official pictures of the beginning of the bloody trail to Japan's restaurant tables.
But the biggest sin of the Japanese government is hypocrisy. Real scientists use neither harpoons nor chopsticks to do biopsies and autopsies.
I eagerly await the government of Japan's announcement that it is setting up a Sashimi Research Council. Its purpose will be to kill lots of whales to investigate the possibility that whale sushi will combat global warming. After all, sashimi saves enormous amounts of carbon output because it does not involved cooking.
However, it would be every bit as blubbery an excuse as the research the Japanese whaling fleet is allegedly conducting, which is simply pandering to a small but very vocal industry than evokes atavistic national pride to keep the yen rolling in. Of course, Japan is not the only country where small lobbies have disproportionate power regardless of international opinion, but does the government really have to put so much effort into it? Can't they promise the whaling ports a bullet train line to bring whale-watching tourists instead?
Ian
A whale of a tale
Japan's killing of whales is unjustified, and its claim that the whaling industry serves a scientific purpose is hypocritical
Ian Williams
Ceticide is silly, as well as not very nice.
I was addressing freshmen politics students at Paterson University about the British elections on the day that Tony Blair was first elected. "Could you tell them about Scotland and Wales?" the professor asked. A large and hitherto comatose football player in the front row suddenly raised his head from the desk and asked: "You mean, like, Moby Dick?" Whales 'R Us for a whole generation.
Whales are clever and cuddly, and they sing. They even have names, like Willy. Like eating dogs and horses, harpooning whales appals the anthropomorphically inclined, a point realised by the Japanese who have responded to the recent Australian court ruling against Japanese whaling in the Antarctic by pointing our the relish with which their prosecutors eat kangaroo.
If the Japanese were to get up and say outright, "We actually like whale meat, we think it's yummy and we are going to chomp our way through it regardless of your anthropomorphic delusions," you could almost respect them. But they don't. They waffle on about scientific research while going through whales as if they were white mice in a laboratory.
As a born-again carnivore, when I chomp through a filet mignon I don't pretend that it is byproduct of tissue sampling for "scientific research", unless gastronomy has moved recently from being an art to a science.
The Norwegians make no such pretence. These cosy Nordic social democrats and suppliers of UN peacekeepers, take as many whales as the Japanese and blithely admit that they are doing it for food. Of course, they are European, were on the right side in the last war and hunt in their own waters, so somehow Greenpeace leaves them alone. It may help that they take less than their own declared quota because demand for it is so low, but is cooking whale meat and eating it with knives and forks really any better than nibbling raw slivers on the end of chopsticks?
Japan sends heavily subsidised ships on long voyages to the opposite pole and then tries to flog the flensed carcasses back home to a generally indifferent public. There are freezers full of whale meat because they can't sell all the by-product of their "research" even to captive audiences like school lunch programmes.
Added to the hidden subsidies are the untold millions in bribes - sorry, aid - that goes to small developing-world countries to join the International Whaling Commission and vote along with the ceticidic Japanese.
At one time, as I remember, it was widely alleged that the steak in British steak and kidney pies of the kind sold in fish & chip shops was in fact whale steak, so I have probably eaten some myself.
But there are differences. Many of the great whales were and still are endangered species, and we have the example of Atlantic cod to show what happens when a species falls below a threshold value. They are also remarkably intelligent and more cogently, there is no humane way to kill Leviathan. Their dying is long and direful. That is why Tokyo got testy when the new Australian government released its official pictures of the beginning of the bloody trail to Japan's restaurant tables.
But the biggest sin of the Japanese government is hypocrisy. Real scientists use neither harpoons nor chopsticks to do biopsies and autopsies.
I eagerly await the government of Japan's announcement that it is setting up a Sashimi Research Council. Its purpose will be to kill lots of whales to investigate the possibility that whale sushi will combat global warming. After all, sashimi saves enormous amounts of carbon output because it does not involved cooking.
However, it would be every bit as blubbery an excuse as the research the Japanese whaling fleet is allegedly conducting, which is simply pandering to a small but very vocal industry than evokes atavistic national pride to keep the yen rolling in. Of course, Japan is not the only country where small lobbies have disproportionate power regardless of international opinion, but does the government really have to put so much effort into it? Can't they promise the whaling ports a bullet train line to bring whale-watching tourists instead?
Monday, February 11, 2008
Taiwan's Healthcare, lessons in civilization for the USA
Health Care in Taiwan: Why Can’t the United States Learn Some Lessons?
An article from the Winter Edition of Dissent Magazine, which you can subscribe to and get good stuff like this all the time.
By Ian Williams
Some years ago in New York I went to hear the Taiwanese health minister describe the country’s new National Health Service. He had just been to visit George W. Bush’s first secretary of health, Tommy Thompson. I could not resist and asked, “While you were in Washington, did you explain to the Republican secretary of health that you’ve introduced a socialized health system?” He looked me squarely in the eyes and said, “You know, it completely slipped my mind!” And well it might. We have heard much tendentious information about the alleged success of Chile’s privatization of social security, but little of the unchallenged efficacy of Taiwan’s health service.
Taiwan inaugurated its National Health Insurance program in 1995. Before then the three major social health insurance programs, Labor Insurance, Government Employee Insurance, and Farmers Insurance, left 40 percent of the population uncovered, many of them children and retirees. Dr. Michael Chen, vice president and chief financial officer of the NHI Bureau, says that there is now 99 percent coverage—he is not sure who the missing 1 percent are, but suspects that they are expatriates who have not registered (apparently, prison inmates are not covered but do receive care in the prison system). Indeed, many expatriates maintain their coverage—including the million or so who now work in mainland China. Conversely, foreign workers in Taiwan are also covered.
NHI premiums cover Western- and Chinese-style medicine, both in- and outpatient, prescription charges, home care, and dentistry. Almost all western-style hospitals and 88 percent of Chinese-medicine clinics are in the system. Though dentists have been opting out of the British National Health dental system in large numbers, almost 95 percent of dental clinics are in the Taiwanese system. Health care is provided by a competitive mixture of municipal and public (about one-third of the beds) and privately owned hospitals that also offer comprehensive primary care. Between them they employ almost two-thirds of doctors. Avoiding the severe conflict of interest that the British system has maintained, doctors contracted to hospitals cannot run private practices on the side.
TAIWAN IS a smaller (twenty-one million people), more compact country than the United States, but the NHI provides many pointers for Americans attempting to secure full health coverage. To begin with, Taiwan had a vigorous market-based health provision system, which has adapted itself, apparently very happily, to the new national service. The former KuoMintang government was an authoritarian social democracy, in the very limited sense that social provision was on the agenda. But corruption and capitalism were fully developed. The NHI was introduced in the early days of democracy, just as the KMT single-party system was being dismantled. It was a popular election issue.
The provision of health care is not nationalized, despite a degree of information and coordination that, for example, the British system cannot match after spending billions on computerization. Rather, the NHI is a classic single payer scheme—the government runs a compulsory, mostly premium-financed insurance system, which negotiates a single payment schedule with the private and municipal or government-owned providers.
On the face of it, the experience of the insured in Taiwan is certainly better than that of Americans dependent on the caprices of commercial health insurers. In 2005, polls showed a 72.5 percent satisfaction rate—and much of the dissatisfaction is with the cost, laughably small though it is by U.S. standards. When co-payments and premiums were increased in 2002, the satisfaction rate plummeted to 59.7 percent. To put this in perspective, the premiums at the maximum are less than $20 (U.S.) per month (the annual per capita GDP is $16,500 U.S.).
Taiwan has done this for proportionately, less than half the cost of the United States, with costs running at 6.2 percent of gross domestic product in 2005, compared with the following for other countries: United States, 15.2 percent; France, 10.1 percent; Canada, 9.9 percent; United Kingdom, 7.7 percent; Japan, 7.9 percent; South Korea, 5.2 percent (World Health Organization figures for 2003 published in 2006).
In absolute terms, the difference is even starker. In 2003, health spending per head in Taiwan was less than $800 per head of population compared to the U.S. level of approximately $5,500. In fact, by 2005, U.S. health care spending increased 6.9 percent to almost $2.0 trillion, or $6,697 per person, amounting to 16 percent of GDP.
With an aging population demanding more and more innovative medical interventions, the NHI faces similar problems to the United States in terms of the escalation of demand (and thus of cost), but it has contained the growth of health care costs as a share of GDP while expanding coverage to a far higher proportion of hitherto uninsured people than in the United States
The various constituencies seem to have cooperated to avert long-term financial problems, adjusting premiums, co-payments, and provider fees in a way that has left them all reasonably content, while providing protection for weaker and poorer groups and those suffering chronic illnesses. Even the generous safety net seems to have another net below, with exemptions for those who cannot pay, loan option to pay premiums, and referral to charitable organizations for payment when even that fails. For example, by the end of 2004, the NHI had issued 750,000 “Catastrophic Illness” cards, whose holders’ co-payments are either reduced or eliminated entirely. This makes sound social but bad financial sense, as these people account for almost a quarter of the bureau’s expenditure—but that is what national insurance is about.
A common argument against “socialized medicine” in the United States is that it leads to rationing and waiting lists for treatment. However, unlike the Canadian or British systems, and, indeed, unlike health maintenance organizations in the United States, there are simply no waiting lists, except perhaps for organ donor availability. That is in part because, although there is a government sponsored single-payer system, there is not a single provider, and the insured have free choice of doctors and institutions. Indeed, Deputy Minister of Health Tsay Jinn Chen refers to “doctor shopping” on the part of the insured, which introduces market discipline and ensures speedy treatment.
Transition Problems
Of course, the system did not start running as designed immediately. It has needed adjustment, not least to balance revenue and costs and manage demand in a way that does not impinge on health care. In fact, the system does seem to have a considerable degree of adaptability.
When the British National Health System was established in 1947, there were two major fiscal problems. One was that, as Health Minister Aneurin Bevan said, he had to “stuff the maws of doctors with gold” to get them into the system. That was in part because the government was, in effect, nationalizing the old hospitals and employing the doctors on a contractual basis. The other problem, which would be relevant for any U.S. introduction of national insurance, was the “overhang,” the pent-up demand for dentistry, prescription medicine, dentures, and glasses from millions of previously uncovered patients. In Taiwan, Chen described the new system as something like “an all-you-can-eat” restaurant for very hungry people, who no longer had to trade off other purchases against health care.
The introduction of co-payments in Britain in the early 1950s, as a result of the costs of the Korean War, occasioned a huge ideological battle in the Labour Party, with Harold Wilson, later the prime minister, leading a revolt on behalf of a completely free service. In retrospect, admirable though the motives of the Labour revolt may have been, Taiwan’s program of nominal co-payments, with suitable provision for the genuinely needy, seems a sensible way to manage and filter demand.
In order to contain costs, in 2005 the NHI introduced a referral system, aimed at dissuading the insured from racing to the most prestigious hospital or specialist with every headache. They can still do that, but now they face an increased co-payment if they skip referral. The co-payments should not dissuade anyone genuinely ill from seeking help—it is a mere $12 U.S. for an unreferred patient who chooses to go to an Academic Medical Center. For those who go first to a clinic, referred or unreferred, the co-payment is $1.50 U.S.
For some expensive high-tech and experimental procedures preauthorization is needed, but it would appear that this is less onerous than dealing with an American HMO. Equitably counterbalancing the co-payments are ceilings on in-treatment liabilities—for example, an annual cumulative ceiling of approximately $1,300 or 10 percent of per capita income for co-payments. The ceiling has a safety net hanging from it as well, with many exceptions for serious illness, childbirth, rural and outlying areas, and low-income families, to ensure that no one is deterred from seeking the help they need.
Prescription costs are managed similarly. First, the NHI bargains down drug prices and second, co-payments are on a proportional scale with a ceiling of approximately $6. Once again, there are many exemptions for the needy.
Health Care Delivery
The NHI benefits from a longstanding public health system that, even under the Kuo-Mintang, provided a network of inoculation and vaccination, children’s and women’s health care, and which had reduced or eliminated the diseases that otherwise would be prevalent in a subtropical developing country. The NHI is proud, for example, of its 95 percent inoculation rate against measles, which compares to 70 percent in Japan.
Although the competitive free market in health was probably an important factor in averting waiting lists, it did have other consequences, one of which, as Jui-Fen Rachel Lu and William C. Hsiao charge, is that “Taiwan has a fragmented health care delivery system that lacks continuity of care. Its clinical quality of care suffers from years of laissez-faire policy toward clinical practices.” (“Does Universal Health Insurance Make Health Care Unaffordable? Lessons From Taiwan,” Health Affairs, 22:3, 2003.) There are, however, more and more quality controls. By law, only licensed doctors can own a hospital or clinic, for example. Building on that, the persuasive power of the NHI has been creating a family doctor system, in which between five to ten primary care clinics in each area are networked with NHI contracted hospitals to provide an integrated care system, with referrals when needed but with primary care continuity.
It seems that the family practice is an innovation for Taiwan, but harnessed to the network, and with the detailed record keeping made possible by the NHI card, it ensures better primary care. A smart chip in the new insurance cards allows the NHI to look for examples of fraud, overbilling, and similar practices that bedevil Medicare. There are significant fringe benefits, too, for example, keeping track of organ donors, which is especially important in a society where donation is not that common.
NHI providers use the card for financial purposes but also increasingly for clinical record keeping. Since 2004, the IC card has given users access to details of serious illness and injury and major medical examinations and scans, avoiding unnecessary and expensive repeat tests of the kind that happen so frequently in the United States. It stores records of both prescriptions and drug allergies, thus averting the problems of adverse interactions between different medicines, and duplication of prescriptions for dangerous or expensive drugs. In previous years the system was prone to over-prescribing and prescription inflation, but the card checked that tendency. One of the most valuable applications of the NHI’s information system is that of tracking down suspected cases and heading off an epidemic disease, as in the case of SARS.
The card makes it much easier to monitor and detect fraud. In 2004, the NHI reduced or deducted claims from over a thousand institutions, 231 were awarded demerits, which affect their contract payment levels, and 90 were suspended from the system for periods of one to three months. Four were dropped entirely. The information system is so effective that a former CEO of the NHI Bureau once quipped that he knew immediately if the same tooth had “been pulled twice” from any individual.
Revenue and Costs
The IC card helps track payment of premiums and allows prompt reminders of missed premium payments, which ensures coverage for the insured and, equally vital, cash flow for the system. Since it was set up, the costs of the NHI have risen by an annual average of 5.5 percent, while revenues have only risen by 4.7 percent, hence the need for constant fine-tuning of co-payments and attempts to restrain expenditures, which are currently between $11 and $12 billion U.S. The fund is mandated to carry a one-month buffer but has rarely been able to do so. Solutions have included doubling the tobacco tax surcharge and raising the earnings ceiling on contributions, which currently stands at a little over $4,000 per month.
Premium collection is similar to that of Social Security contributions in the United States. Employers and the self-employed are legally bound to pay. However, unlike the US Social Security Fund, the NHI is a genuine pay-as-you go system. The aim is for the premium income to pay costs.
There is a continual tussle over who bears the cost of the national service—currently 27 percent is paid by the government, 35 percent by employers, and 38 percent by employees. The various partners try to shift the burden, and legislators are reluctant to incur popular displeasure by increasing costs to employees, while the influential employers’ organizations also have the ear of negotiators. They talked down the employers’ share of the premium from 80 percent to 60 percent. The government puts in another 10 percent.
The government share, including the tobacco tax surcharge and lottery proceeds, goes disproportionately—but appropriately—to finance the premiums of disadvantaged groups, remote rural dwellers, the indigenous peoples, and the poor. Although all contributors have access to the same services, there is a significant redistributive effect. Six categories of insured pay at different levels, scaled against income, with ceilings.
The insured pay for each dependent, up to a ceiling of three, while the employers pay for an average number of dependents, which takes away the incentive to fire or not hire fecund workers. For the “regional population,” in remote rural areas, the government pays 40 percent and the insured pays 60 percent of the premium, while for low-income households, the government pays the whole premium.
The single-payer system means that the NHI is a monopoly purchaser and so has greater bargaining power with the pharmaceutical companies and with the providers. As in Canada and the United Kingdom, the pharmaceutical companies have to accept reasonable prices, because the NHI has a weight in prescription pricing that is deliberately denied Medicare in the latest U.S. Medicare prescription plan.
Facing up to the pharmaceutical industry allows the single-payer system to control costs, and the technology of the NHI card allows controls of overcharging. It even encourages best practices, such as appropriate use of antibiotics for upper respiratory chest infections, or antacids for stomach problems. The twenty-nine million monthly claims going through the system allow effective analysis of costs and billing patterns.
The NHI does not seem to have abused its monopoly power to drive down doctors’ earnings, as there is vigorous competition among practitioners and institutions for patient patronage, even at the fees collectively agreed upon. The ease of payment, with the government writing the checks, seems to have been a good enough trade-off for the doctors. There is nothing to stop a doctor setting up private practice—except a shortage of clients. The system was originally based on fee for service but then transitioned to a “case-payment” system based on fifty-three items. The program’s chief financial officer, Michael Chen, says that the idea is that the NHI is purchasing “not just medical care, but health, as evidenced by initiatives aiming at encouraging ‘pay for performance.’” The 95 percent inoculation rate against measles suggests the success of the program.
The NHI Committee for the Arbitration of Medical Costs considers not only the overall figures but also individual providers’ performance based on support for patients’ rights, accessibility and satisfaction, efficiency of service, and similar criteria. The committee rewards providers if scored for “excellence” through the “quality assurance funds.”
And in the Superpower?
When General Motors offloads its health care system onto the United Auto Workers, one suspects that disaster has been postponed rather than averted. The Taiwanese example of the single-payer system should prove attractive to everybody but executives and shareholders of health insurers. Many features of the Taiwanese system lend themselves readily to the United States, which is not surprising, because, as Chen admits, the primary model for it was Medicare. But the adjustments the Taiwanese made point to the road not taken in the United States. Avoiding the commercial health insurers for a single-payer system with universal coverage offers great efficiencies at almost every point of the provision network.
The Taiwanese system begins with an idealistic premise—of universal, high-quality health coverage—but then addresses in a most pragmatic way the actual behavior of the constituencies involved: the medical providers, the pharmaceutical companies, and the patients. The frequent readjustments do not pander to the moral panic of freeloading or fraud that often governs legislation and decision-making in the United Kingdom and the United States, but rather to actual, observable behavior.
Of course, the U.S. federal system offers an obstacle to any outright imitation, but no more so than the Canadian provincial system, and, as so often, states could be convinced to participate easily by offering, for example, a proportion of the tobacco taxes on a use-it-or-lose-it basis. Imagine the possibilities if the $250 billion U.S. global tobacco settlement had been allocated to a health insurance scheme instead of, in effect, providing walking around money for the states party to the settlement.
Isn’t it strange that Taiwan, so long dear to the hearts of anticommunist conservatives in the United States, should produce such a socially innovative model? But maybe the source of the model will overcome some of their reflexive opposition.
Ian Williams’s last book, The Alms Trade, on the development of charities and not-for-profit organizations, has just been reprinted by Cosimo Press. His other works include Rum, Deserter, and The UN for Beginners. He is a regular columnist for the Guardian online and writes for many other publications. More work can be found at www.deadlinepundit.blogspot.com
An article from the Winter Edition of Dissent Magazine, which you can subscribe to and get good stuff like this all the time.
By Ian Williams
Some years ago in New York I went to hear the Taiwanese health minister describe the country’s new National Health Service. He had just been to visit George W. Bush’s first secretary of health, Tommy Thompson. I could not resist and asked, “While you were in Washington, did you explain to the Republican secretary of health that you’ve introduced a socialized health system?” He looked me squarely in the eyes and said, “You know, it completely slipped my mind!” And well it might. We have heard much tendentious information about the alleged success of Chile’s privatization of social security, but little of the unchallenged efficacy of Taiwan’s health service.
Taiwan inaugurated its National Health Insurance program in 1995. Before then the three major social health insurance programs, Labor Insurance, Government Employee Insurance, and Farmers Insurance, left 40 percent of the population uncovered, many of them children and retirees. Dr. Michael Chen, vice president and chief financial officer of the NHI Bureau, says that there is now 99 percent coverage—he is not sure who the missing 1 percent are, but suspects that they are expatriates who have not registered (apparently, prison inmates are not covered but do receive care in the prison system). Indeed, many expatriates maintain their coverage—including the million or so who now work in mainland China. Conversely, foreign workers in Taiwan are also covered.
NHI premiums cover Western- and Chinese-style medicine, both in- and outpatient, prescription charges, home care, and dentistry. Almost all western-style hospitals and 88 percent of Chinese-medicine clinics are in the system. Though dentists have been opting out of the British National Health dental system in large numbers, almost 95 percent of dental clinics are in the Taiwanese system. Health care is provided by a competitive mixture of municipal and public (about one-third of the beds) and privately owned hospitals that also offer comprehensive primary care. Between them they employ almost two-thirds of doctors. Avoiding the severe conflict of interest that the British system has maintained, doctors contracted to hospitals cannot run private practices on the side.
TAIWAN IS a smaller (twenty-one million people), more compact country than the United States, but the NHI provides many pointers for Americans attempting to secure full health coverage. To begin with, Taiwan had a vigorous market-based health provision system, which has adapted itself, apparently very happily, to the new national service. The former KuoMintang government was an authoritarian social democracy, in the very limited sense that social provision was on the agenda. But corruption and capitalism were fully developed. The NHI was introduced in the early days of democracy, just as the KMT single-party system was being dismantled. It was a popular election issue.
The provision of health care is not nationalized, despite a degree of information and coordination that, for example, the British system cannot match after spending billions on computerization. Rather, the NHI is a classic single payer scheme—the government runs a compulsory, mostly premium-financed insurance system, which negotiates a single payment schedule with the private and municipal or government-owned providers.
On the face of it, the experience of the insured in Taiwan is certainly better than that of Americans dependent on the caprices of commercial health insurers. In 2005, polls showed a 72.5 percent satisfaction rate—and much of the dissatisfaction is with the cost, laughably small though it is by U.S. standards. When co-payments and premiums were increased in 2002, the satisfaction rate plummeted to 59.7 percent. To put this in perspective, the premiums at the maximum are less than $20 (U.S.) per month (the annual per capita GDP is $16,500 U.S.).
Taiwan has done this for proportionately, less than half the cost of the United States, with costs running at 6.2 percent of gross domestic product in 2005, compared with the following for other countries: United States, 15.2 percent; France, 10.1 percent; Canada, 9.9 percent; United Kingdom, 7.7 percent; Japan, 7.9 percent; South Korea, 5.2 percent (World Health Organization figures for 2003 published in 2006).
In absolute terms, the difference is even starker. In 2003, health spending per head in Taiwan was less than $800 per head of population compared to the U.S. level of approximately $5,500. In fact, by 2005, U.S. health care spending increased 6.9 percent to almost $2.0 trillion, or $6,697 per person, amounting to 16 percent of GDP.
With an aging population demanding more and more innovative medical interventions, the NHI faces similar problems to the United States in terms of the escalation of demand (and thus of cost), but it has contained the growth of health care costs as a share of GDP while expanding coverage to a far higher proportion of hitherto uninsured people than in the United States
The various constituencies seem to have cooperated to avert long-term financial problems, adjusting premiums, co-payments, and provider fees in a way that has left them all reasonably content, while providing protection for weaker and poorer groups and those suffering chronic illnesses. Even the generous safety net seems to have another net below, with exemptions for those who cannot pay, loan option to pay premiums, and referral to charitable organizations for payment when even that fails. For example, by the end of 2004, the NHI had issued 750,000 “Catastrophic Illness” cards, whose holders’ co-payments are either reduced or eliminated entirely. This makes sound social but bad financial sense, as these people account for almost a quarter of the bureau’s expenditure—but that is what national insurance is about.
A common argument against “socialized medicine” in the United States is that it leads to rationing and waiting lists for treatment. However, unlike the Canadian or British systems, and, indeed, unlike health maintenance organizations in the United States, there are simply no waiting lists, except perhaps for organ donor availability. That is in part because, although there is a government sponsored single-payer system, there is not a single provider, and the insured have free choice of doctors and institutions. Indeed, Deputy Minister of Health Tsay Jinn Chen refers to “doctor shopping” on the part of the insured, which introduces market discipline and ensures speedy treatment.
Transition Problems
Of course, the system did not start running as designed immediately. It has needed adjustment, not least to balance revenue and costs and manage demand in a way that does not impinge on health care. In fact, the system does seem to have a considerable degree of adaptability.
When the British National Health System was established in 1947, there were two major fiscal problems. One was that, as Health Minister Aneurin Bevan said, he had to “stuff the maws of doctors with gold” to get them into the system. That was in part because the government was, in effect, nationalizing the old hospitals and employing the doctors on a contractual basis. The other problem, which would be relevant for any U.S. introduction of national insurance, was the “overhang,” the pent-up demand for dentistry, prescription medicine, dentures, and glasses from millions of previously uncovered patients. In Taiwan, Chen described the new system as something like “an all-you-can-eat” restaurant for very hungry people, who no longer had to trade off other purchases against health care.
The introduction of co-payments in Britain in the early 1950s, as a result of the costs of the Korean War, occasioned a huge ideological battle in the Labour Party, with Harold Wilson, later the prime minister, leading a revolt on behalf of a completely free service. In retrospect, admirable though the motives of the Labour revolt may have been, Taiwan’s program of nominal co-payments, with suitable provision for the genuinely needy, seems a sensible way to manage and filter demand.
In order to contain costs, in 2005 the NHI introduced a referral system, aimed at dissuading the insured from racing to the most prestigious hospital or specialist with every headache. They can still do that, but now they face an increased co-payment if they skip referral. The co-payments should not dissuade anyone genuinely ill from seeking help—it is a mere $12 U.S. for an unreferred patient who chooses to go to an Academic Medical Center. For those who go first to a clinic, referred or unreferred, the co-payment is $1.50 U.S.
For some expensive high-tech and experimental procedures preauthorization is needed, but it would appear that this is less onerous than dealing with an American HMO. Equitably counterbalancing the co-payments are ceilings on in-treatment liabilities—for example, an annual cumulative ceiling of approximately $1,300 or 10 percent of per capita income for co-payments. The ceiling has a safety net hanging from it as well, with many exceptions for serious illness, childbirth, rural and outlying areas, and low-income families, to ensure that no one is deterred from seeking the help they need.
Prescription costs are managed similarly. First, the NHI bargains down drug prices and second, co-payments are on a proportional scale with a ceiling of approximately $6. Once again, there are many exemptions for the needy.
Health Care Delivery
The NHI benefits from a longstanding public health system that, even under the Kuo-Mintang, provided a network of inoculation and vaccination, children’s and women’s health care, and which had reduced or eliminated the diseases that otherwise would be prevalent in a subtropical developing country. The NHI is proud, for example, of its 95 percent inoculation rate against measles, which compares to 70 percent in Japan.
Although the competitive free market in health was probably an important factor in averting waiting lists, it did have other consequences, one of which, as Jui-Fen Rachel Lu and William C. Hsiao charge, is that “Taiwan has a fragmented health care delivery system that lacks continuity of care. Its clinical quality of care suffers from years of laissez-faire policy toward clinical practices.” (“Does Universal Health Insurance Make Health Care Unaffordable? Lessons From Taiwan,” Health Affairs, 22:3, 2003.) There are, however, more and more quality controls. By law, only licensed doctors can own a hospital or clinic, for example. Building on that, the persuasive power of the NHI has been creating a family doctor system, in which between five to ten primary care clinics in each area are networked with NHI contracted hospitals to provide an integrated care system, with referrals when needed but with primary care continuity.
It seems that the family practice is an innovation for Taiwan, but harnessed to the network, and with the detailed record keeping made possible by the NHI card, it ensures better primary care. A smart chip in the new insurance cards allows the NHI to look for examples of fraud, overbilling, and similar practices that bedevil Medicare. There are significant fringe benefits, too, for example, keeping track of organ donors, which is especially important in a society where donation is not that common.
NHI providers use the card for financial purposes but also increasingly for clinical record keeping. Since 2004, the IC card has given users access to details of serious illness and injury and major medical examinations and scans, avoiding unnecessary and expensive repeat tests of the kind that happen so frequently in the United States. It stores records of both prescriptions and drug allergies, thus averting the problems of adverse interactions between different medicines, and duplication of prescriptions for dangerous or expensive drugs. In previous years the system was prone to over-prescribing and prescription inflation, but the card checked that tendency. One of the most valuable applications of the NHI’s information system is that of tracking down suspected cases and heading off an epidemic disease, as in the case of SARS.
The card makes it much easier to monitor and detect fraud. In 2004, the NHI reduced or deducted claims from over a thousand institutions, 231 were awarded demerits, which affect their contract payment levels, and 90 were suspended from the system for periods of one to three months. Four were dropped entirely. The information system is so effective that a former CEO of the NHI Bureau once quipped that he knew immediately if the same tooth had “been pulled twice” from any individual.
Revenue and Costs
The IC card helps track payment of premiums and allows prompt reminders of missed premium payments, which ensures coverage for the insured and, equally vital, cash flow for the system. Since it was set up, the costs of the NHI have risen by an annual average of 5.5 percent, while revenues have only risen by 4.7 percent, hence the need for constant fine-tuning of co-payments and attempts to restrain expenditures, which are currently between $11 and $12 billion U.S. The fund is mandated to carry a one-month buffer but has rarely been able to do so. Solutions have included doubling the tobacco tax surcharge and raising the earnings ceiling on contributions, which currently stands at a little over $4,000 per month.
Premium collection is similar to that of Social Security contributions in the United States. Employers and the self-employed are legally bound to pay. However, unlike the US Social Security Fund, the NHI is a genuine pay-as-you go system. The aim is for the premium income to pay costs.
There is a continual tussle over who bears the cost of the national service—currently 27 percent is paid by the government, 35 percent by employers, and 38 percent by employees. The various partners try to shift the burden, and legislators are reluctant to incur popular displeasure by increasing costs to employees, while the influential employers’ organizations also have the ear of negotiators. They talked down the employers’ share of the premium from 80 percent to 60 percent. The government puts in another 10 percent.
The government share, including the tobacco tax surcharge and lottery proceeds, goes disproportionately—but appropriately—to finance the premiums of disadvantaged groups, remote rural dwellers, the indigenous peoples, and the poor. Although all contributors have access to the same services, there is a significant redistributive effect. Six categories of insured pay at different levels, scaled against income, with ceilings.
The insured pay for each dependent, up to a ceiling of three, while the employers pay for an average number of dependents, which takes away the incentive to fire or not hire fecund workers. For the “regional population,” in remote rural areas, the government pays 40 percent and the insured pays 60 percent of the premium, while for low-income households, the government pays the whole premium.
The single-payer system means that the NHI is a monopoly purchaser and so has greater bargaining power with the pharmaceutical companies and with the providers. As in Canada and the United Kingdom, the pharmaceutical companies have to accept reasonable prices, because the NHI has a weight in prescription pricing that is deliberately denied Medicare in the latest U.S. Medicare prescription plan.
Facing up to the pharmaceutical industry allows the single-payer system to control costs, and the technology of the NHI card allows controls of overcharging. It even encourages best practices, such as appropriate use of antibiotics for upper respiratory chest infections, or antacids for stomach problems. The twenty-nine million monthly claims going through the system allow effective analysis of costs and billing patterns.
The NHI does not seem to have abused its monopoly power to drive down doctors’ earnings, as there is vigorous competition among practitioners and institutions for patient patronage, even at the fees collectively agreed upon. The ease of payment, with the government writing the checks, seems to have been a good enough trade-off for the doctors. There is nothing to stop a doctor setting up private practice—except a shortage of clients. The system was originally based on fee for service but then transitioned to a “case-payment” system based on fifty-three items. The program’s chief financial officer, Michael Chen, says that the idea is that the NHI is purchasing “not just medical care, but health, as evidenced by initiatives aiming at encouraging ‘pay for performance.’” The 95 percent inoculation rate against measles suggests the success of the program.
The NHI Committee for the Arbitration of Medical Costs considers not only the overall figures but also individual providers’ performance based on support for patients’ rights, accessibility and satisfaction, efficiency of service, and similar criteria. The committee rewards providers if scored for “excellence” through the “quality assurance funds.”
And in the Superpower?
When General Motors offloads its health care system onto the United Auto Workers, one suspects that disaster has been postponed rather than averted. The Taiwanese example of the single-payer system should prove attractive to everybody but executives and shareholders of health insurers. Many features of the Taiwanese system lend themselves readily to the United States, which is not surprising, because, as Chen admits, the primary model for it was Medicare. But the adjustments the Taiwanese made point to the road not taken in the United States. Avoiding the commercial health insurers for a single-payer system with universal coverage offers great efficiencies at almost every point of the provision network.
The Taiwanese system begins with an idealistic premise—of universal, high-quality health coverage—but then addresses in a most pragmatic way the actual behavior of the constituencies involved: the medical providers, the pharmaceutical companies, and the patients. The frequent readjustments do not pander to the moral panic of freeloading or fraud that often governs legislation and decision-making in the United Kingdom and the United States, but rather to actual, observable behavior.
Of course, the U.S. federal system offers an obstacle to any outright imitation, but no more so than the Canadian provincial system, and, as so often, states could be convinced to participate easily by offering, for example, a proportion of the tobacco taxes on a use-it-or-lose-it basis. Imagine the possibilities if the $250 billion U.S. global tobacco settlement had been allocated to a health insurance scheme instead of, in effect, providing walking around money for the states party to the settlement.
Isn’t it strange that Taiwan, so long dear to the hearts of anticommunist conservatives in the United States, should produce such a socially innovative model? But maybe the source of the model will overcome some of their reflexive opposition.
Ian Williams’s last book, The Alms Trade, on the development of charities and not-for-profit organizations, has just been reprinted by Cosimo Press. His other works include Rum, Deserter, and The UN for Beginners. He is a regular columnist for the Guardian online and writes for many other publications. More work can be found at www.deadlinepundit.blogspot.com
Robert Harris's Fatherland is one of the books I consider in a forthcoming Common Review piece on alternative history. I am not sure this one is alternative history.
Ghastly Times
Robert Harris "Ghost" Simon & Schuster
Reviewed by Ian Williams for the Catskill Review of Books
There are times when fiction is “essentially” true, when we get more insight about the motivations and characters of real historical figures from a novel than from any amount of breathless prose based on privileged access interviews.
Primary Colors certainly evoked the essence of the Clintons' and inadvertently and tangentially said much about the appalling state of media and publishing when bitchy editorialists spent more time lamenting the originally anonymous author Joe Klein’s refusal to ‘fess up when the suspicious fingers pointed his way than they did considering the accuracy of his artistry.
Robert Harris’s “Ghost” explores what many would consider to be the essence of Tony Blair – which plausibly explores how a lightweight but charismatic politician vaulted to become leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom despite an almost complete lack of political pedigree, or indeed of visible ideology. It provides an answer to the mystery of how someone who was apparently sincere and well- wishing in a sort of nondescript "nice" way should have become such a complete helot to the worst kind of American conservatism.
From a writer's point of view, Robert Harris also explores the sad and lonely world of the Ghostwriter – hence, at least in part, the title. For the other part of the explanation you will have to read to the end, but he heads the chapters with apposite quotes from a real "how-to" book on ghostwriting.
The book is told from the viewpoint of a craftsman-like hack, a competent, hard working and cynical drudge who earns his crust form ghosting the memoirs of fading rock starts, soccer plays and celebrity bimbos. He gets an offer he can't refuse. Lang's previous ghost has, ironically, joined the heavenly choir in his own right in mysterious circumstances on the ferry to Martha's Vineyard where the recently resigned Prime Minister of Britain is holed up in a borrowed mansion striving to meet the deadline for his vastly over-advanced memoirs.
The other reason he is holed up is that the International Criminal Court is on his case. He had ordered British forces to kidnap alleged Al Qaeda operatives from Pakistan and hand them to the CIA for rendition to obliging allies with scant regard for international conventions against torture. Britain is a signatory to the ICC treaty and of course, the US is not.
"Ghost" works as a taut and well-written thriller so I would hate to spoil it for readers, but I think it would not spoil it too much to say that Adam Lang (an old Scottish name, like Blair) had fallen under undue influence from the CIA. This is not as far-fetched or paranoid as it seems. During the Cold War, many aspirant Labour politicians were courted by a variety of Atlanticist bodies, many of them funded by the CIA.
Some were genuinely democratic socialists in opposition to Communism and totalitarianism. In that sense taking the American dime was less reprehensible than the likes of Philby taking the Soviet kopek. After all, in general, Washington did not directly interfere with post-War Labour's establishment of the trappings of a West European Social Democracy in Britain. Indeed, the Conservative Party before Thatcher did not try to dismantle the National Health Service or the opening up of educational opportunities.
Nevertheless, the American influence was visible in what was generally regarded as Labour's right wing which in conjunction with the communist influenced members, led to a false dualism that stereotyped those who opposed Soviet-style communism as "right wing, and pro-American. It made life hard for those like Harold Wilson whose desperate attempts as Prime Minister to forge an independent role for Britain and Europe between the two extremes certainly helped provoke the persistent and weird British establishment rumours that he was a KGB agent.
Anyone who has had contacts with the interface between New and Old Labour will recognize the types, and occasionally even the characters in Harris's depiction. This gripping and rewarding novel displays all the skills he has used previously in historical contexts in a contemporary scenario.
Ghastly Times
Robert Harris "Ghost" Simon & Schuster
Reviewed by Ian Williams for the Catskill Review of Books
There are times when fiction is “essentially” true, when we get more insight about the motivations and characters of real historical figures from a novel than from any amount of breathless prose based on privileged access interviews.
Primary Colors certainly evoked the essence of the Clintons' and inadvertently and tangentially said much about the appalling state of media and publishing when bitchy editorialists spent more time lamenting the originally anonymous author Joe Klein’s refusal to ‘fess up when the suspicious fingers pointed his way than they did considering the accuracy of his artistry.
Robert Harris’s “Ghost” explores what many would consider to be the essence of Tony Blair – which plausibly explores how a lightweight but charismatic politician vaulted to become leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom despite an almost complete lack of political pedigree, or indeed of visible ideology. It provides an answer to the mystery of how someone who was apparently sincere and well- wishing in a sort of nondescript "nice" way should have become such a complete helot to the worst kind of American conservatism.
From a writer's point of view, Robert Harris also explores the sad and lonely world of the Ghostwriter – hence, at least in part, the title. For the other part of the explanation you will have to read to the end, but he heads the chapters with apposite quotes from a real "how-to" book on ghostwriting.
The book is told from the viewpoint of a craftsman-like hack, a competent, hard working and cynical drudge who earns his crust form ghosting the memoirs of fading rock starts, soccer plays and celebrity bimbos. He gets an offer he can't refuse. Lang's previous ghost has, ironically, joined the heavenly choir in his own right in mysterious circumstances on the ferry to Martha's Vineyard where the recently resigned Prime Minister of Britain is holed up in a borrowed mansion striving to meet the deadline for his vastly over-advanced memoirs.
The other reason he is holed up is that the International Criminal Court is on his case. He had ordered British forces to kidnap alleged Al Qaeda operatives from Pakistan and hand them to the CIA for rendition to obliging allies with scant regard for international conventions against torture. Britain is a signatory to the ICC treaty and of course, the US is not.
"Ghost" works as a taut and well-written thriller so I would hate to spoil it for readers, but I think it would not spoil it too much to say that Adam Lang (an old Scottish name, like Blair) had fallen under undue influence from the CIA. This is not as far-fetched or paranoid as it seems. During the Cold War, many aspirant Labour politicians were courted by a variety of Atlanticist bodies, many of them funded by the CIA.
Some were genuinely democratic socialists in opposition to Communism and totalitarianism. In that sense taking the American dime was less reprehensible than the likes of Philby taking the Soviet kopek. After all, in general, Washington did not directly interfere with post-War Labour's establishment of the trappings of a West European Social Democracy in Britain. Indeed, the Conservative Party before Thatcher did not try to dismantle the National Health Service or the opening up of educational opportunities.
Nevertheless, the American influence was visible in what was generally regarded as Labour's right wing which in conjunction with the communist influenced members, led to a false dualism that stereotyped those who opposed Soviet-style communism as "right wing, and pro-American. It made life hard for those like Harold Wilson whose desperate attempts as Prime Minister to forge an independent role for Britain and Europe between the two extremes certainly helped provoke the persistent and weird British establishment rumours that he was a KGB agent.
Anyone who has had contacts with the interface between New and Old Labour will recognize the types, and occasionally even the characters in Harris's depiction. This gripping and rewarding novel displays all the skills he has used previously in historical contexts in a contemporary scenario.
Saturday, February 09, 2008
"Non" to Blair
Nicolas Sarkozy's attempts to push Tony Blair as president of the new European Union is a stark contrast to previous French treatment of British prime ministers - and not much to the credit of either Blair or Sarkozy.
Two score years ago and five, Charles de Gaulle gave the doigt to Britain's prime minister Harold McMillan and vetoed his application to join the European community. Four years later, the general did it again for Harold Wilson who had succeeded to No 10 Downing Street by then.
Apart from payback time for all the humiliations that he saw heaped on France and himself by Britain - including the British failure to be occupied by the Nazis - De Gaulle's argument was that Britain would be a Trojan horse for American influence in Europe. To some extent he was right, even if his real motive was to keep out a rival for influence in Charlemagne's former realms. But it has taken Tony Blair to make him absolutely right about the Trojan horse.
On one level, it is, like Blair's Middle East position, yet another non-job designed to give a redundant statesman a sense of self-importance. But from another point of view, it is an insult to Europe. Symbolically, Blair for European president would be like running the Reverend Ian Paisley for Pope. Elected into office as a Europhile, Blair soon followed the Murdoch line of reflexive contempt for Brussels, while acting as Washington's agent in the continent, fulfilling all of De Gaulle's worst fears.
While Europe is clearly a success story in economic terms, despite the anally retentive influence of German central bankers, it punches way below its weight in global politics, and one reason for that has been Blair's determination to toe whatever line came from Washington. With the League of Nations style of consensus decision-making in Europe, foreign policy decisions are reduced to the lowest common denominator, which for much of the last decade has been Blair, with occasional help from Berlusconi and the Poles.
It is also interesting to contrast Blair's absolute subservience to Washington with his Labour predecessor's role. Wilson managed to keep Britain out of the Vietnam despite Lyndon Baines Johnson's enormous pressure and his speech, in response to de Gaulle's veto, is worth looking at to see an alternative to both pandering and crude anti-Americanism. He said:
While pledging Britain's loyalty to the Atlantic Alliance, he explained:
Ironically, as American industrial hegemony dissolved, and Europe's collective financial strength began to outstrip America's, Blair reduced Britain to absolute diplomatic helotry to the worst and most reactionary White House ever while the dollar declined by levels far worse than the beleaguered pound sterling ever did.
For him to hobble Europe as its president just as it is becoming economically capable of holding its own against the US would have truth emulating the fiction of Robert Harris, whose novel Ghost postulates an uncannily Blair-like British prime minister who had been recruited by the CIA to ensure precisely the kind of helotry we have seen. In retrospect, Harris's scenario looks a lot less paranoid than all those spook inspired stories about Wilson being a KGB plant. The EU should say "non" to Sarkozy's choice.
Two score years ago and five, Charles de Gaulle gave the doigt to Britain's prime minister Harold McMillan and vetoed his application to join the European community. Four years later, the general did it again for Harold Wilson who had succeeded to No 10 Downing Street by then.
Apart from payback time for all the humiliations that he saw heaped on France and himself by Britain - including the British failure to be occupied by the Nazis - De Gaulle's argument was that Britain would be a Trojan horse for American influence in Europe. To some extent he was right, even if his real motive was to keep out a rival for influence in Charlemagne's former realms. But it has taken Tony Blair to make him absolutely right about the Trojan horse.
On one level, it is, like Blair's Middle East position, yet another non-job designed to give a redundant statesman a sense of self-importance. But from another point of view, it is an insult to Europe. Symbolically, Blair for European president would be like running the Reverend Ian Paisley for Pope. Elected into office as a Europhile, Blair soon followed the Murdoch line of reflexive contempt for Brussels, while acting as Washington's agent in the continent, fulfilling all of De Gaulle's worst fears.
While Europe is clearly a success story in economic terms, despite the anally retentive influence of German central bankers, it punches way below its weight in global politics, and one reason for that has been Blair's determination to toe whatever line came from Washington. With the League of Nations style of consensus decision-making in Europe, foreign policy decisions are reduced to the lowest common denominator, which for much of the last decade has been Blair, with occasional help from Berlusconi and the Poles.
It is also interesting to contrast Blair's absolute subservience to Washington with his Labour predecessor's role. Wilson managed to keep Britain out of the Vietnam despite Lyndon Baines Johnson's enormous pressure and his speech, in response to de Gaulle's veto, is worth looking at to see an alternative to both pandering and crude anti-Americanism. He said:
"The concept of a powerful Atlantic partnership can be realised only when Europe is able to put forth her full economic strength so that we can, in industrial affairs, speak from strength to our Atlantic partners."
While pledging Britain's loyalty to the Atlantic Alliance, he explained:
"Loyalty never means subservience. Still less must it mean an industrial helotry under which we in Europe produce only the conventional apparatus of a modern economy, while becoming increasingly dependent on American business for the sophisticated apparatus which will call the industrial tune in the 70s and 80s."
Ironically, as American industrial hegemony dissolved, and Europe's collective financial strength began to outstrip America's, Blair reduced Britain to absolute diplomatic helotry to the worst and most reactionary White House ever while the dollar declined by levels far worse than the beleaguered pound sterling ever did.
For him to hobble Europe as its president just as it is becoming economically capable of holding its own against the US would have truth emulating the fiction of Robert Harris, whose novel Ghost postulates an uncannily Blair-like British prime minister who had been recruited by the CIA to ensure precisely the kind of helotry we have seen. In retrospect, Harris's scenario looks a lot less paranoid than all those spook inspired stories about Wilson being a KGB plant. The EU should say "non" to Sarkozy's choice.
Friday, February 08, 2008
Thursday, February 07, 2008
Annapolis and the UN
Anniversaries
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January-February 2008, pages 28-29
United Nations Report
Annapolis Conference Coincided With Resolution 181, Har Homa Anniversaries
By Ian Williams
A week after the Nov. 27 Annapolis conference, and a decade after the Clinton administration vetoed a Security Council resolution condemning a new illegal Israeli settlement at Abu Ghneim/Har Homa outside Bethlehem, Israel announced plans to expand it by 300 homes. (AFP Photo/Thomas Coex).
THE ANNAPOLIS PHOTO-EVENT took place as scheduled, and since no one had any concrete expectations from the event, it was a great success. In fact, it was such a hit that we can expect to see many more repeat performances.
Everyone turned up for it—except the winners of the last Palestinian elections, who were not invited—and pretty much everyone went away empty-handed, except perhaps the U.S. and Israel, who could tell the world that they were doing their best with yet another lap of the road map.
One can never be sure about anniversaries and their significance, but the week of the conference coincided with several which the schedulers in the State Department either overlooked or puckishly giggled at when they set the date.
It was the 60th anniversary of U.N. Resolution 181, where the international community forced partition on the participants. Within a week, we also saw the 40th anniversary of Security Council Resolution 242, which is cited much more often than 181. It is interesting how this has developed.
Resolution 181, which established a Jewish state, was a General Assembly resolution. Since the U.S. lost its automatic majority in the Assembly, it has become usual to say that its resolutions—including the one accepting the International Court of Justice’s finding that Israel’s annexation wall is illegal—are non-binding.
This is something of an anomaly for a state whose raison d’être is based on historical claims, since if General Assembly resolutions are not binding, then the creation of Israel as a Jewish state was not binding on the Arabs or anyone else. The resolution does in fact say that any breach by any party is a threat to peace and security to be dealt with by the Security Council—which is, of course, still “dealing” with it 60 years later.
Supporters of Palestinian rights have somersaulted in the opposite direction, however, arguing that General Assembly resolutions are binding—but they tend to overlook Resolution 181, which the Arab states in the U.N. at the time disregarded. It certainly was unjust in terms of self-determination, but legal.
The Jewish state held barely a majority of Jews and thus incorporated, presumably against their will, 400,000 Palestinian Arabs. The resulting map broke many existing principles—not least that of cartography. It produced a checkerboard state, without consulting the occupants directly.
For a non-binding resolution, 181 certainly has had some strong repercussions, not least international legal support for a Jewish state, which still exists, but also about the status of Jerusalem. Under the resolution it was to become “corpus separatum” under U.N. direction—which is why today, except for a few banana republics, no country in the world, not even the U.S., will build an embassy there, or recognize it as Israel’s capital, eternal or otherwise.
Indeed, it is a telling argument against Palestinian claims to the city as its capital—but, for obvious reasons, not one that Israel and its supporters are likely to make.
On the other hand, Israel’s legal claim to the strip of land along Lake Tiberias that Syria occupied from 1948 to 1967 is based solely on 1947’s resolution's apportioning that to the Jewish State.
Of course, the Syrian claim, such as it is, actually falls in line behind that of the Palestinian Authority, if it is accepted that the 1948 armistice line is now the basis of negotiation.
To add to the sense of historical irony, it is also 10 years since the U.S., under President Bill Clinton, vetoed a Security Council resolution against Israeli settlement building in the Abu Ghneim/Har Homa area. The General Assembly subsequently passed the resolution.
A week after Annapolis, as if to celebrate, Israel announced that it was building 300 more homes in the illegal settlement. It is worth remembering what now presidential contender and then U.N. Ambassador Bill Richardson said on behalf of the Clinton administration when he cast the veto: that the United States “shared the concerns expressed about the decision of the Israeli Government to begin construction on the East Jerusalem site,” but “it disagreed on the best method of addressing the situation.
“The United States opposition to the resolution should not be interpreted as an expression of support for the construction in East Jerusalem,” Richardson continued. “Construction on the site was not helpful to the peace process. The parties must take special care to avoid pre-emptive actions that could be seen to prejudge the outcome of negotiations. The decision on East Jerusalem was regrettable. The controversy would not be resolved, however, by interference from the Council. It could only be resolved by the parties themselves.”
So there we are. Some 15 years after Oslo and the so-called peace process, and the Clintonian decision that the parties should negotiate their differences, the illegal settlement is up, running and expanding in defiance of the latest pledges from the Israeli government to their American sponsors, who are still pushing the Palestinians into negotiations with no legal preconditions.
Perhaps now is the time for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to draw a line on the road map between the initial resolution and the final status. He should apologize for the failure of the Arab states to accept Resolution 181 and its determination that there should be a Jewish state. But he should then state his intention to use the resolution’s map as the starting point for negotiations to get back to the 1967 armistice line, rather than start at the latter and negotiate backward to the Separation Wall.
While Resolution 181 may seem anachronistic, its drafters realized that the boundaries made no geographic or economic sense, and drew up plans for an economic and customs union with free transit—which would almost make a two-state solution feasible.
It allowed people to reside in one state while holding citizenship of the other, which points to solutions to populations left behind any new boundaries established. Abbas might offer to allow the settlers to stay under Palestinian jurisdiction, after suitable compensation for the value of the land that was stolen to settle them—in return for the settlement of an equal number of Palestinians on the other side of the Green Line.
The Palestinian Mission to the U.N. has consistently realized the importance of international law and United Nations resolutions, and so, obliquely, do the Israelis and the Americans. They know that the only way to legalize a settlement is for the United Nations to accept it, and that the only way that can happen is if the Palestinian representatives give away their legal rights.
Hence the emphasis from Clinton onward on “negotiations” with no legal context, and the continuous efforts of Israel and the U.S. to find Palestinian negotiators to talk to who will give up those rights. The Israeli subtext has always been that they will talk only to people who they think will give them what they want.
The sad thing is that the United Nations, as a body, far from asserting its own decisions and principles, has been roped in, by being included in the “Quartet,” in an attempt to bend and break the world body.
But almost unobserved across the world, the tide might be turning. In the European Union, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has gone, leaving behind a trail of party funding scandals that keep returning to active pro-Israeli groups, and in Poland the government that always agreed with Bush has also lost, so there is now a possibility for a slightly more assertive European Union policy. The Australian government of John Howard, which swung to support both Bush and Israel, also has been ousted. Maybe there is hope yet for international law.
Ian Williams, a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations, is working on a book about U.N.-Haters in the U.S., and has a blog at. His last book was Rum: A Social and Sociable History of the Real Spirit of 1776.
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January-February 2008, pages 28-29
United Nations Report
Annapolis Conference Coincided With Resolution 181, Har Homa Anniversaries
By Ian Williams
A week after the Nov. 27 Annapolis conference, and a decade after the Clinton administration vetoed a Security Council resolution condemning a new illegal Israeli settlement at Abu Ghneim/Har Homa outside Bethlehem, Israel announced plans to expand it by 300 homes. (AFP Photo/Thomas Coex).
THE ANNAPOLIS PHOTO-EVENT took place as scheduled, and since no one had any concrete expectations from the event, it was a great success. In fact, it was such a hit that we can expect to see many more repeat performances.
Everyone turned up for it—except the winners of the last Palestinian elections, who were not invited—and pretty much everyone went away empty-handed, except perhaps the U.S. and Israel, who could tell the world that they were doing their best with yet another lap of the road map.
One can never be sure about anniversaries and their significance, but the week of the conference coincided with several which the schedulers in the State Department either overlooked or puckishly giggled at when they set the date.
It was the 60th anniversary of U.N. Resolution 181, where the international community forced partition on the participants. Within a week, we also saw the 40th anniversary of Security Council Resolution 242, which is cited much more often than 181. It is interesting how this has developed.
Resolution 181, which established a Jewish state, was a General Assembly resolution. Since the U.S. lost its automatic majority in the Assembly, it has become usual to say that its resolutions—including the one accepting the International Court of Justice’s finding that Israel’s annexation wall is illegal—are non-binding.
This is something of an anomaly for a state whose raison d’être is based on historical claims, since if General Assembly resolutions are not binding, then the creation of Israel as a Jewish state was not binding on the Arabs or anyone else. The resolution does in fact say that any breach by any party is a threat to peace and security to be dealt with by the Security Council—which is, of course, still “dealing” with it 60 years later.
Supporters of Palestinian rights have somersaulted in the opposite direction, however, arguing that General Assembly resolutions are binding—but they tend to overlook Resolution 181, which the Arab states in the U.N. at the time disregarded. It certainly was unjust in terms of self-determination, but legal.
The Jewish state held barely a majority of Jews and thus incorporated, presumably against their will, 400,000 Palestinian Arabs. The resulting map broke many existing principles—not least that of cartography. It produced a checkerboard state, without consulting the occupants directly.
For a non-binding resolution, 181 certainly has had some strong repercussions, not least international legal support for a Jewish state, which still exists, but also about the status of Jerusalem. Under the resolution it was to become “corpus separatum” under U.N. direction—which is why today, except for a few banana republics, no country in the world, not even the U.S., will build an embassy there, or recognize it as Israel’s capital, eternal or otherwise.
Indeed, it is a telling argument against Palestinian claims to the city as its capital—but, for obvious reasons, not one that Israel and its supporters are likely to make.
On the other hand, Israel’s legal claim to the strip of land along Lake Tiberias that Syria occupied from 1948 to 1967 is based solely on 1947’s resolution's apportioning that to the Jewish State.
Of course, the Syrian claim, such as it is, actually falls in line behind that of the Palestinian Authority, if it is accepted that the 1948 armistice line is now the basis of negotiation.
To add to the sense of historical irony, it is also 10 years since the U.S., under President Bill Clinton, vetoed a Security Council resolution against Israeli settlement building in the Abu Ghneim/Har Homa area. The General Assembly subsequently passed the resolution.
A week after Annapolis, as if to celebrate, Israel announced that it was building 300 more homes in the illegal settlement. It is worth remembering what now presidential contender and then U.N. Ambassador Bill Richardson said on behalf of the Clinton administration when he cast the veto: that the United States “shared the concerns expressed about the decision of the Israeli Government to begin construction on the East Jerusalem site,” but “it disagreed on the best method of addressing the situation.
“The United States opposition to the resolution should not be interpreted as an expression of support for the construction in East Jerusalem,” Richardson continued. “Construction on the site was not helpful to the peace process. The parties must take special care to avoid pre-emptive actions that could be seen to prejudge the outcome of negotiations. The decision on East Jerusalem was regrettable. The controversy would not be resolved, however, by interference from the Council. It could only be resolved by the parties themselves.”
So there we are. Some 15 years after Oslo and the so-called peace process, and the Clintonian decision that the parties should negotiate their differences, the illegal settlement is up, running and expanding in defiance of the latest pledges from the Israeli government to their American sponsors, who are still pushing the Palestinians into negotiations with no legal preconditions.
Perhaps now is the time for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to draw a line on the road map between the initial resolution and the final status. He should apologize for the failure of the Arab states to accept Resolution 181 and its determination that there should be a Jewish state. But he should then state his intention to use the resolution’s map as the starting point for negotiations to get back to the 1967 armistice line, rather than start at the latter and negotiate backward to the Separation Wall.
While Resolution 181 may seem anachronistic, its drafters realized that the boundaries made no geographic or economic sense, and drew up plans for an economic and customs union with free transit—which would almost make a two-state solution feasible.
It allowed people to reside in one state while holding citizenship of the other, which points to solutions to populations left behind any new boundaries established. Abbas might offer to allow the settlers to stay under Palestinian jurisdiction, after suitable compensation for the value of the land that was stolen to settle them—in return for the settlement of an equal number of Palestinians on the other side of the Green Line.
The Palestinian Mission to the U.N. has consistently realized the importance of international law and United Nations resolutions, and so, obliquely, do the Israelis and the Americans. They know that the only way to legalize a settlement is for the United Nations to accept it, and that the only way that can happen is if the Palestinian representatives give away their legal rights.
Hence the emphasis from Clinton onward on “negotiations” with no legal context, and the continuous efforts of Israel and the U.S. to find Palestinian negotiators to talk to who will give up those rights. The Israeli subtext has always been that they will talk only to people who they think will give them what they want.
The sad thing is that the United Nations, as a body, far from asserting its own decisions and principles, has been roped in, by being included in the “Quartet,” in an attempt to bend and break the world body.
But almost unobserved across the world, the tide might be turning. In the European Union, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has gone, leaving behind a trail of party funding scandals that keep returning to active pro-Israeli groups, and in Poland the government that always agreed with Bush has also lost, so there is now a possibility for a slightly more assertive European Union policy. The Australian government of John Howard, which swung to support both Bush and Israel, also has been ousted. Maybe there is hope yet for international law.
Ian Williams, a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations, is working on a book about U.N.-Haters in the U.S., and has a blog at
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
Machine-made Victory
Super Tuesday: Clinton may have won New York, but the breadth of Obama's support was heartening
Ian Williams
February 6, 2008 4:18 AM | Guardian
With minutes of the last lever on New York's voting machines clunking over, all the agencies were announcing for certain a Clinton victory. It was based on exit polls, but the media presented it with such absolute certitude that it smacked of a North Korean general election result announced the day before the vote.
In fact, it was hard to choose. With a hundred million plus dollars each in their campaign war chests, one could not predict victory on the generally accepted (eccentric millionaires like Forbes and Huffington apart) grounds of who spent the most on advertising.
Never mind the voting, or even the fundraising, it is fashion week in New York, and the campaign was about style rather than content. And no wonder Obama was gaining. He certainly has more style than Clinton, whose marriage did not endow her with her husband's unsurpassed worldly wealth of charisma.
On the streets of New York, young and enthusiastic Obama supporters certainly outnumbered Clintonistas, and the Calypso King of the Caribbean, the Mighty Sparrow weighed in on his behalf with a jaunty lyric, "Barack the Magnificent" whose chorus
"Barack! Barack! He is fighting for openness and honest government.
Barack is doggedly defiant: phenomenal strength, and wisdom beyond comment,"
made up in enthusiasm what it lacked in scansion.
In the smoke-filled rooms of the New York Democratic establishment, Clinton had it sewn up, at least in public with Charley Rangel, dean of the Congressional Black Caucus enthusiastically supporting her even if his constituents voted entirely differently. And there are certain incumbent New York advantages such as some all-Hasidic districts which pull in 100% of the return for her.
It had been noticed that Governor Elliot Spitzer, despite a formal obeisance to the Clinton camp, was somewhat missing in action as the vote approached. Perhaps he was just repaying Hillary for her quickness in repudiating his driving licences for illegals initiative, or maybe it was just nervous apprehension that Obama would continue rising, but he managed to screw his support to the sticking place and turned up with all the other Dem pols to the Clinton victory party.
Yes, Clinton won New York, but it was her home state and with the full support of the machine behind her it was no landslide. Similarly in New Jersey, the machine delivered, but in Connecticut, where the machine does not rule, Obama won.
His entirely respectable showing guarantees him a significant share of the New York delegation and the implication that many white Democrats supported him was substantiated in other wins beyond the Confederacy.
In the end, he clearly does represent change to a lot of voters, and his showing should reassure some tactical voters who wonder how he would fare in a general election. While we know that Clinton is in the pocket of the corporate interests who have bankrolled her so handsomely, Obama is still an unknown quantity. They have also been writing cheques for him on a munificent scale. One only hopes that he does not disappoint his enthusiastic supporters by staying bought.
But whatever his policies, his victory would mean not just an end to the Bush era, but to the ghosts of Jim Crow that have been the basis for Republican victories ever since the party of Lincoln played the race card in the old Confederacy - and, one might add, Rudi Giuliani's mayoralty in New York City, which is why the breadth of his support there is so heartening.
Ian Williams
February 6, 2008 4:18 AM | Guardian
With minutes of the last lever on New York's voting machines clunking over, all the agencies were announcing for certain a Clinton victory. It was based on exit polls, but the media presented it with such absolute certitude that it smacked of a North Korean general election result announced the day before the vote.
In fact, it was hard to choose. With a hundred million plus dollars each in their campaign war chests, one could not predict victory on the generally accepted (eccentric millionaires like Forbes and Huffington apart) grounds of who spent the most on advertising.
Never mind the voting, or even the fundraising, it is fashion week in New York, and the campaign was about style rather than content. And no wonder Obama was gaining. He certainly has more style than Clinton, whose marriage did not endow her with her husband's unsurpassed worldly wealth of charisma.
On the streets of New York, young and enthusiastic Obama supporters certainly outnumbered Clintonistas, and the Calypso King of the Caribbean, the Mighty Sparrow weighed in on his behalf with a jaunty lyric, "Barack the Magnificent" whose chorus
"Barack! Barack! He is fighting for openness and honest government.
Barack is doggedly defiant: phenomenal strength, and wisdom beyond comment,"
made up in enthusiasm what it lacked in scansion.
In the smoke-filled rooms of the New York Democratic establishment, Clinton had it sewn up, at least in public with Charley Rangel, dean of the Congressional Black Caucus enthusiastically supporting her even if his constituents voted entirely differently. And there are certain incumbent New York advantages such as some all-Hasidic districts which pull in 100% of the return for her.
It had been noticed that Governor Elliot Spitzer, despite a formal obeisance to the Clinton camp, was somewhat missing in action as the vote approached. Perhaps he was just repaying Hillary for her quickness in repudiating his driving licences for illegals initiative, or maybe it was just nervous apprehension that Obama would continue rising, but he managed to screw his support to the sticking place and turned up with all the other Dem pols to the Clinton victory party.
Yes, Clinton won New York, but it was her home state and with the full support of the machine behind her it was no landslide. Similarly in New Jersey, the machine delivered, but in Connecticut, where the machine does not rule, Obama won.
His entirely respectable showing guarantees him a significant share of the New York delegation and the implication that many white Democrats supported him was substantiated in other wins beyond the Confederacy.
In the end, he clearly does represent change to a lot of voters, and his showing should reassure some tactical voters who wonder how he would fare in a general election. While we know that Clinton is in the pocket of the corporate interests who have bankrolled her so handsomely, Obama is still an unknown quantity. They have also been writing cheques for him on a munificent scale. One only hopes that he does not disappoint his enthusiastic supporters by staying bought.
But whatever his policies, his victory would mean not just an end to the Bush era, but to the ghosts of Jim Crow that have been the basis for Republican victories ever since the party of Lincoln played the race card in the old Confederacy - and, one might add, Rudi Giuliani's mayoralty in New York City, which is why the breadth of his support there is so heartening.
Monday, February 04, 2008
Darwin Tax not Death Tax
Guardian Comment is Free - full text
Ian Williams
One of the cleverest moves the Republicans have made was to label inheritance tax the "death tax", - an unscrupulous move which in the UK the Conservatives unusually stole a march on New Labour by adopting.
It is clearly not a tax on the deceased, who are beyond even the IRS's intrusive reach. It is a tax on their heirs. As a con trick it is on a par with persuading 70% of Americans that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. Untold millions of voters, whose only chance of amassing the $4m that is exempted under current rules would be to win the lottery, went into a panic about their post-mortem taxes. Since only 2% of estates fall under inheritance tax, their families' chances of being affected are not that far from their chances of winning the lottery.
Many of their estates will be hard put to pay their funeral costs, never mind approaching the taxable limits. (Personally I think a real death duty - a heavy excise duty on embalming fluid would be an environmentally and socially useful fiscal measure, but that's another issue.)
Perhaps because so many Democratic leaders have ancestral financial advantages - think Gore, think Kennedy - they have not seized upon the appropriate response, and called inheritance tax the "Paris Hilton tax", or the "idle legacy and remittance duty".
Money already talks too loud in contemporary America, and it speaks with forked tongue. When a congressman talks about reducing taxes, they do not rush to raise the tax thresholds on earned income so that already struggling working Americans will escape taxation. In response to the very rich people who pay for their campaigns, most of the relief goes to those who already have lots of money. The dividend tax cut, for example netted Wal-Mart's notoriously shy Walton family hundreds of millions. It is no surprise that they are now leading exponents of a repeal of the inheritance tax.
Wal-Mart is not, of course, a struggling family business. It is a public company in which the Walton family happens to own lots of stock (and on whose board Hillary Clinton once sat). For better or worse, it will not close down if they have to sell their shares. Indeed it may well improve if the dead hand of a family that thinks taxes are for little people is taken off.
There is certainly room for discussions to take the family home out of the equation, or even the family farm (although agribusiness has already pretty much taken most of them out of the discussion) and even to discuss the threshold. But if the bloated rich really care about their heirs, we should watch with interest to see how many of them put "do not revive" or "no heroic measures" clauses in the living wills for 2010, the year when the wrestling in Congress sees the inheritance tax set at zero. After all, Wal-Mart did not hesitate to declare additional dividend pay to take advantage of the reduction of the dividend tax.
In 2010 we should watch the actuarial progress of the Walton family and their peers with interest but few expectations for signs of self-sacrifice. After all, they have bankrolled a party that wants to give them hundreds of billions in tax relief but thinks that paying for health insurance for nine million poor kids would break the Federal Reserve.
In fact, the inheritance tax should really be called the Darwin tax. Anyone with enough money to get caught by the IRS is stupid enough to a) believe that they are immortal, or b) think that they are clever enough to dispense with the services of estate planning accountants and lawyers. The gene pool and society are enhanced if their offspring don't get large dollops of free money. With the very real educational and social advantages that wealthy parents give their progeny, windfall inheritances just deprive them of the get up and go urges that free-marketeers always urge on the unemployed.
This is a view clearly shared by some of the more entrepreneurial souls including Conrad Hilton, who obviously thinks that his daughter can provide for herself by using her own distinctive skills. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates likewise have put their fortunes to use for good works, and Buffet gets years lopped off purgatory by giving his to the Gates Foundation rather than by bidding for nominal immortality with his own eponymous foundation.
Ian Williams
One of the cleverest moves the Republicans have made was to label inheritance tax the "death tax", - an unscrupulous move which in the UK the Conservatives unusually stole a march on New Labour by adopting.
It is clearly not a tax on the deceased, who are beyond even the IRS's intrusive reach. It is a tax on their heirs. As a con trick it is on a par with persuading 70% of Americans that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. Untold millions of voters, whose only chance of amassing the $4m that is exempted under current rules would be to win the lottery, went into a panic about their post-mortem taxes. Since only 2% of estates fall under inheritance tax, their families' chances of being affected are not that far from their chances of winning the lottery.
Many of their estates will be hard put to pay their funeral costs, never mind approaching the taxable limits. (Personally I think a real death duty - a heavy excise duty on embalming fluid would be an environmentally and socially useful fiscal measure, but that's another issue.)
Perhaps because so many Democratic leaders have ancestral financial advantages - think Gore, think Kennedy - they have not seized upon the appropriate response, and called inheritance tax the "Paris Hilton tax", or the "idle legacy and remittance duty".
Money already talks too loud in contemporary America, and it speaks with forked tongue. When a congressman talks about reducing taxes, they do not rush to raise the tax thresholds on earned income so that already struggling working Americans will escape taxation. In response to the very rich people who pay for their campaigns, most of the relief goes to those who already have lots of money. The dividend tax cut, for example netted Wal-Mart's notoriously shy Walton family hundreds of millions. It is no surprise that they are now leading exponents of a repeal of the inheritance tax.
Wal-Mart is not, of course, a struggling family business. It is a public company in which the Walton family happens to own lots of stock (and on whose board Hillary Clinton once sat). For better or worse, it will not close down if they have to sell their shares. Indeed it may well improve if the dead hand of a family that thinks taxes are for little people is taken off.
There is certainly room for discussions to take the family home out of the equation, or even the family farm (although agribusiness has already pretty much taken most of them out of the discussion) and even to discuss the threshold. But if the bloated rich really care about their heirs, we should watch with interest to see how many of them put "do not revive" or "no heroic measures" clauses in the living wills for 2010, the year when the wrestling in Congress sees the inheritance tax set at zero. After all, Wal-Mart did not hesitate to declare additional dividend pay to take advantage of the reduction of the dividend tax.
In 2010 we should watch the actuarial progress of the Walton family and their peers with interest but few expectations for signs of self-sacrifice. After all, they have bankrolled a party that wants to give them hundreds of billions in tax relief but thinks that paying for health insurance for nine million poor kids would break the Federal Reserve.
In fact, the inheritance tax should really be called the Darwin tax. Anyone with enough money to get caught by the IRS is stupid enough to a) believe that they are immortal, or b) think that they are clever enough to dispense with the services of estate planning accountants and lawyers. The gene pool and society are enhanced if their offspring don't get large dollops of free money. With the very real educational and social advantages that wealthy parents give their progeny, windfall inheritances just deprive them of the get up and go urges that free-marketeers always urge on the unemployed.
This is a view clearly shared by some of the more entrepreneurial souls including Conrad Hilton, who obviously thinks that his daughter can provide for herself by using her own distinctive skills. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates likewise have put their fortunes to use for good works, and Buffet gets years lopped off purgatory by giving his to the Gates Foundation rather than by bidding for nominal immortality with his own eponymous foundation.
Sunday, February 03, 2008
Friday, February 01, 2008
Lest We Forget, Cohen's Peter Panglossianism, full text
From the Guardian 31 January
In tragedy, hubris, over-reaching pride, is what leads to the fall from fortune of the hero.
Roger Cohen's boosterism in the New York Times on "America's Riveting Democracy" is symptomatic. In Recessional, at the height of the Pax Britannica, Rudyard Kipling could foresee:
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Not to mention a special mention for the neocons:
For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard -
All valiant dust that builds on dust.
But there are no signs off such maudlin introspection in Cohen, who claims that the Pax Americana is "the unsung success story that gives pessimistic pontificators the time and luxury to postulate its demise". That would of course be a reference to making Iraq an economic and social desert and calling it peace, or practicing interventio interruptus in Afghanistan before pulling out to hunt the Snark in Iraq. Or it could be a reference to the peace that American partisanship has brought about in Gaza and the West Bank.
If he had contented himself with saying that the USA is still the most important superpower in the world, and had great potential for good, he would have had a point. But his exultant tone gives jingoism a bad name. He lacks the foresight even of the neocon and Star War boosters. At least they foresaw the eclipse of American economic power, and want to consolidate military supremacy.
Cohen cheers: "Obamania shows how great America's hold on the planetary imagination remains." Let us consider this. Maybe the rest of the world realises what many Americans seem to have forgotten, that Senator Obama's parents could not legally marry in the 16 states with miscegenation laws. The rest of the world might be seeing Obama's candidacy as a civility test for the superpower: has it exorcised Jim Crow, or is it still waiting for the Republicans (or indeed ex-President Clinton) to wheel it out the closet?
"As this election campaign is demonstrating, the United States remains the most vital, open, self-renewing and democratic society on earth," says Cohen, referring to elections in which the primaries are open only to those who can raise $120 million in campaign contributions. As Will Sutton went to the banks, so candidates go to the plutocrats, because that's where the money is - and that is why the money, in corporate welfare and tax breaks, will continue to go to the rich no matter who is elected. They are nails in the coffin, not rivets, until there is serious reform of election financing.
That is also why his Panglossian analysis of the "wishful thinking" that "the military strains in Iraq and Afghanistan, a credit crunch, spiraling debt and the specter of recession form a picture of American overreach and decline."
The US is running a huge fiscal deficit, a huge balance of payments crisis, and is bogged down in self-inflicted military commitments that it cannot successfully cope with. In doing so, it is dependent on the kindness of strangers, whom it habitually insults, including Chinese and other Asian central banks and Muslim oil producers. Roger really should have a touch of the recessionals.
The usual excuses are offered. "At a piddling 232 years old, the United States is a mere teen in historical terms. Demography, Google and the political fever of these primaries all indicate its vigor."
In fact, at 232 years, the US is old enough to know better. As an independent polity it is older than Italy, Germany, India and probably 180 other members of the United Nations. It is time for it, and Roger Cohen, to grow up and stop making excuses like a self-indulgent aging baby boomer with Peter Panglossian syndrome.
The citizens of Sweden, Holland, Britain, France and Spain can testify that there are positive advantages to giving up on hegemony and empire. Your children are not sent to die in faraway countries. The resources that used to go on military power can stay at home and provide education, health and pensions for your own citizens rather than bombs for denizens of other lands.
Yes, the US could exercise leadership, but it could also do some catching up and join the world community so people will listen. The next president and Congress could sign and ratify the Land Mine and Child Soldiers Conventions, the International Criminal Court, the Test Ban Treaty, the Law of the Sea, the Kyoto Protocols, like all the countries you actually want to lead. The US could actually adhere to the Geneva Conventions and stop kidnapping and torturing people. It would indeed be a small step for the next president, but a giant leap forward for mankind.
Even with your breathless patriotic purple prose, Roger, I bet you can't hold your breath that long.
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe -
Such boasting as the Gentiles use
Or lesser breeds without the Law
Rudyard Kipling was a patriot, who also welcomed rising American power even as he regretted what he saw as British decline. The US needs patriots like him, who can welcome a sharing of responsibility.
In tragedy, hubris, over-reaching pride, is what leads to the fall from fortune of the hero.
Roger Cohen's boosterism in the New York Times on "America's Riveting Democracy" is symptomatic. In Recessional, at the height of the Pax Britannica, Rudyard Kipling could foresee:
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Not to mention a special mention for the neocons:
For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard -
All valiant dust that builds on dust.
But there are no signs off such maudlin introspection in Cohen, who claims that the Pax Americana is "the unsung success story that gives pessimistic pontificators the time and luxury to postulate its demise". That would of course be a reference to making Iraq an economic and social desert and calling it peace, or practicing interventio interruptus in Afghanistan before pulling out to hunt the Snark in Iraq. Or it could be a reference to the peace that American partisanship has brought about in Gaza and the West Bank.
If he had contented himself with saying that the USA is still the most important superpower in the world, and had great potential for good, he would have had a point. But his exultant tone gives jingoism a bad name. He lacks the foresight even of the neocon and Star War boosters. At least they foresaw the eclipse of American economic power, and want to consolidate military supremacy.
Cohen cheers: "Obamania shows how great America's hold on the planetary imagination remains." Let us consider this. Maybe the rest of the world realises what many Americans seem to have forgotten, that Senator Obama's parents could not legally marry in the 16 states with miscegenation laws. The rest of the world might be seeing Obama's candidacy as a civility test for the superpower: has it exorcised Jim Crow, or is it still waiting for the Republicans (or indeed ex-President Clinton) to wheel it out the closet?
"As this election campaign is demonstrating, the United States remains the most vital, open, self-renewing and democratic society on earth," says Cohen, referring to elections in which the primaries are open only to those who can raise $120 million in campaign contributions. As Will Sutton went to the banks, so candidates go to the plutocrats, because that's where the money is - and that is why the money, in corporate welfare and tax breaks, will continue to go to the rich no matter who is elected. They are nails in the coffin, not rivets, until there is serious reform of election financing.
That is also why his Panglossian analysis of the "wishful thinking" that "the military strains in Iraq and Afghanistan, a credit crunch, spiraling debt and the specter of recession form a picture of American overreach and decline."
The US is running a huge fiscal deficit, a huge balance of payments crisis, and is bogged down in self-inflicted military commitments that it cannot successfully cope with. In doing so, it is dependent on the kindness of strangers, whom it habitually insults, including Chinese and other Asian central banks and Muslim oil producers. Roger really should have a touch of the recessionals.
The usual excuses are offered. "At a piddling 232 years old, the United States is a mere teen in historical terms. Demography, Google and the political fever of these primaries all indicate its vigor."
In fact, at 232 years, the US is old enough to know better. As an independent polity it is older than Italy, Germany, India and probably 180 other members of the United Nations. It is time for it, and Roger Cohen, to grow up and stop making excuses like a self-indulgent aging baby boomer with Peter Panglossian syndrome.
The citizens of Sweden, Holland, Britain, France and Spain can testify that there are positive advantages to giving up on hegemony and empire. Your children are not sent to die in faraway countries. The resources that used to go on military power can stay at home and provide education, health and pensions for your own citizens rather than bombs for denizens of other lands.
Yes, the US could exercise leadership, but it could also do some catching up and join the world community so people will listen. The next president and Congress could sign and ratify the Land Mine and Child Soldiers Conventions, the International Criminal Court, the Test Ban Treaty, the Law of the Sea, the Kyoto Protocols, like all the countries you actually want to lead. The US could actually adhere to the Geneva Conventions and stop kidnapping and torturing people. It would indeed be a small step for the next president, but a giant leap forward for mankind.
Even with your breathless patriotic purple prose, Roger, I bet you can't hold your breath that long.
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe -
Such boasting as the Gentiles use
Or lesser breeds without the Law
Rudyard Kipling was a patriot, who also welcomed rising American power even as he regretted what he saw as British decline. The US needs patriots like him, who can welcome a sharing of responsibility.
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