Hendrik Hertzberg is smarter than you

He is. Just read this. Here’s an excerpt:

The American health-care system is bloated, wasteful, and cruel. Under the health-insurance-reform package now being bludgeoned into misshapen shape on Capitol Hill, it will still be bloated, wasteful, and cruel—but markedly less so.

…

The most consequential opposition to the reforms now under consideration is coming from a small group of Blue Dog Democrats, who protest that the plan does too little to control costs. To the extent that their concern is genuine, and not just a reflexive deference to wealth (they vociferously oppose a modest surtax on the top one per cent, whose effective tax rates have dropped by fifteen per cent since 1979, while their after-tax incomes have more than tripled), they have a point. But it’s a minor point. The prospective reform has more cost-containment provisions than past attempts, and, thanks in part to those same Blue Dogs, it is acquiring more such elements by the day—for example, the proposal for an independent commission able to set Medicare payment rates, which Obama has also embraced.

But the Blue Dogs are playing a dangerous game of chicken. Even if they’re right that reform would do too little about costs, the alternative—which, as the President has repeatedly pointed out, is the status quo—would do nothing. Ultimately, real cost control will require a strong push away from fee-for-service medicine.

I think that’s right on – the result of health care reform will likely be a markedly better, but still by almost all accounts inefficient and wasteful, health care system. This time. And that’s key – this time. There’s a lot of misinformation out there about health care reform, and that – combined with an understandable reluctance amongst those currently covered to drastically change the system and a political system dead set against such drastic change – means that the best path to a workable health care system is in stutter steps. And if Obama can make one stutter step (and any such step will extend coverage to millions, making their lives significantly better) then he’ll have done his job. It’s just a frustrating process, and with important legislation like this (and anything dealing with global warming, for example) it can have very real, very disastrous consequences.

A little bit of prescience

Sorry I haven’t been posting for the past couple of days (things have been hectic ’round these parts) but I’ve been reading Walt and Mearsheimer’s ‘The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy’ (finally) and I was struck by this quote from Harry Shaw, former head of the Office of Management and Budget’s Military Assistance Branch:

Israel’s settlement policy on the West Bank is at cross-purposes with U.S. interests and contrary to U.S. policy. The lack of progress toward a peace settlement – for which Israel and its Arab neighbors share responsibility – undercuts Arabs who are willing to live in peace and strengthens the influence of Islamic fundamentalists and other Arabs who have no interest in the kind of stable Middle East that would be compatible with U.S. interests and Israel’s security.

The really interesting thing about this statement? He was writing it in 1985-86.

Law-free zones for the poor

This is interesting and depressing. From the Wonk Room over at Think Progress comes a report that finds that the legal needs of the poor in the United States are unmet 80 percent of the time*. While one obvious takeaway from this would be an unsurprising shrug of the shoulders, the other obvious takeaway would be that with a good chunk of the population unable to acquire even the most basic legal services, the legal system (in this scenario) is revealed to be not much more than a pretense or a fraud. And it’s not as if this shabby state of affairs has limited relevance – low-SES populations, especially now, need legal services in a number of areas, ranging from health care to disability benefits, and from compensation disputes to eviction notices (and beyond). And it’s also not as if this is the norm in industrialized nations, or as if this has always been the case:

As the report explains, the United States invests far less in legal services for the poor than other Western industrialized nations.  At the low end, Germany and Finland spent three times as much of their gross domestic product as we do on civil legal services for the poor.  At the high end, England outspends the United States twelve times.

Federal lawmakers deserve much of the blame for this state of affairs.  When President Reagan was elected in 1980, legal services achieved the modest goal of providing two attorneys for every 10,000 poor people in a given area.  Since then, the budget for legal services was slashed twice–first by President Reagan in 1982 and again by the right-wing Congress in 1996–and the federal government now spends, in inflation adjusted dollars, less than half what it spent on legal services for the poor in 1980.  To his credit, President Obama proposed a $45 million–or 15%–increase to federal funding for legal services in 2010, but this is merely a fraction of what is necessary to close the gap.

It also notes that one of the most significant sources of funding for low-income legal services (IOLTA) could be coming under attack by the Roberts Supreme Court in the near future. I suppose at some point one would/should become immune to the virulence with which the GOP apparently hates poor people, but I’m just not there yet.

*The report never properly defines ‘legal needs’, so one should take this statistic with a slight grain of salt (though it’s an extremely troubling state of affairs in any case).

Move on up…

I was just browsing Kevin Drum’s blog and came across this incredible chart (below) coming from Pew Global Attitudes. One of the questions looks at world opinion on whether America will do the right thing in world affairs, and compares the results from the Bush years and Obama now. The results are shocking.

Look at those numbers – they’re stunning. While numbers in the Middle East, for example, show a moderate jump in optimism, those in Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Spain, and Japan are remarkable (Germany alone shows a +79 jump). As Drum notes, these numbers will inevitably slip, but their mere existence points to a very real accumulation of soft power for the Obama administration. It’s a little difficult to measure how that power can be wielded, but that fact that it’s there certainly gives Obama a good deal more leeway than other heads of state might have (and other American presidents for that matter).

It’s also interesting to note that the only country that registered a decrease in its faith that the U.S. will do the right thing is Israel. This really isn’t much of a surprise – Obama has taken a much harder line on Israel than Bush did, and *may* even end up holding his word on the settlements issue – but it’s certainly telling.

Wild as the Taliban

So in the unsurprising news file, things are really not looking good in Pakistan right now. At all. It continues to be the single scariest country in the world, and things look as if they’re getting worse. I’ve written about the mammoth problems facing Pakistan in the past – here for example – and with the combination of the ‘creeping Talibanization’ of large swathes of the country and a foreign policy that seems to be at odds with the real threat facing the country, it’s not looking good. Nicholas Kristof had a great column today on the radicalization of large parts of Pakistan, including those far away from the traditionally troublesome northwest:

Even here in Karachi, the pragmatic commercial hub of the country, extremists have taken over some neighborhoods. A Pakistani police document marked “top secret,” given to me by a Pakistani concerned by the spreading tentacles of jihadis, states that Taliban agents sometimes set up armed checkpoints in one such neighborhood here.

These militants “generate funds through criminal activities like kidnapping for ransom, bank robbery, street robbery and other heinous crimes,” the report says.

The mayor of Karachi, Syed Mustafa Kamal, confirms that Pashtun tribesmen have barred outsiders from entering some neighborhoods.

“I’m the mayor, and I have three vehicles with police traveling with me. And even I cannot enter these areas or they will blow me up,” Mr. Kamal said, adding, “Pakistan is in very critical condition.”

Lala Hassan of the Aurat Foundation, which works on social issues, said: “There’s no doubt militancy is increasing day by day, not only in Karachi but all over Pakistan.”

A recent story in the NYT also underscored the challenge facing the country (and the U.S. as it works towards defanging al Qaeda and the Taliban) – instead of focusing on the most immediate threats to its stability, Pakistan is tunnel-visioned on its traditional archenemy, India.

Pakistan is objecting to expanded American combat operations in neighboring Afghanistan, creating new fissures in the alliance with Washington at a critical juncture when thousands of new American forces are arriving in the region.

Pakistani officials have told the Obama administration that the Marines fighting the Taliban in southern Afghanistan will force militants across the border into Pakistan, with the potential to further inflame the troubled province of Baluchistan, according to Pakistani intelligence officials.

Pakistan does not have enough troops to deploy to Baluchistan to take on the Taliban without denuding its border with its archenemy, India, the officials said. Dialogue with the Taliban, not more fighting, is in Pakistan’s national interest, they said.

While I don’t hold much hope for Pakistan reorienting its priorities to suit American foreign policy, it’s worth noting that at this point the Taliban and other Islamic extremists pose a far realer danger to Pakistan than India and its Kashmir skirmish does.

In regards to what the U.S. can actually do right now, Kristof offers a couple of suggestions. I have mentioned in previous posts that attempting to economically stabilize the country should be the primary foreign policy goal, but as Kristof points out redirecting military aid towards its education system would do wonders as well.

If we want to stabilize Pakistan, we should take two steps. First is to cut tariffs on manufactured imports from Pakistan. That would boost the country’s economy, raise employment and create good will. Cutting tariffs is perhaps the most effective step we could take to stabilize this country and fight extremism.

Second, we should redirect our aid from subsidies to the Pakistani military to support for a major education initiative. A bill in the Senate backed by the Democrat John Kerry and the Republican Richard Lugar would support Pakistani schools, among other nonmilitary projects, and would be an excellent step forward.

In rural Pakistan, you regularly see madrassas established by Islamic fundamentalists, typically offering free tuition, free meals and even scholarships to study abroad for the best students. It’s clear that the militant fundamentalists believe in the transformative power of education — and they have invested in schools, while we have invested in the Pakistani Army. Why can’t we show the same faith in education as hard-line Muslim fundamentalists?