MotherJones.com | MoJoBlog - Social Issues and Political Commentary: February 12, 2006

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February 17, 2006

New York judge throws out Canadian's rendition suit

Yesterday, Judge David Trager of the Eastern District of New York threw out a suit filed by a Canadian citizen who was arrested by U.S. authorities at John F. Kennedy airport in 2002 and sent to Syria to be interrogated. The plaintiff, Maher Arar, was suspected by the U.S. government of being a member of al Qaeda. He spent ten months in a Syrian jail, where he claimed he was tortured. Arar also said he was tortured in detention at Kennedy Airport. The United States government has never filed any charges against him.

With the assistance of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Arar filed suit against former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and several other officials. In his 88-page ruling, Judge Trager said that the courts could not interfere with national security or in matters of foreign relations. However, Trager did invite Arar to resubmit his claim that he had been denied due process because of the conditions of his imprisonment.

Barbara Olshanksy, Deputy Legal Director with the Center for Constitutional Rights, said " We will not accept this decision and are committed to continuing our campaign to obtain the truth about what happened to Maher and demand accountability on behalf of the Administration."

Time for a Gas Tax

In the New York Times, Robert Frank discusses the gas tax: "A Way to Cut Fuel Consumption That Everyone Likes, Except the Politicians." Indeed, it's not clear why a $2-a-gallon gas tax—which would then be refunded to Americans through reduced payroll taxes—is so politically unviable, except that it was unpopular when Jimmy Carter first proposed it, and has been stuck with a bad reputation ever since. But here's the bottom line: "In the warmer weather they will have inherited from us a century from now, perspiring historians will struggle to explain why this proposal was once considered politically unthinkable." Right, exactly.

Now there are some decent arguments that a gas tax would have an unfair impact on certain people in the United States: it would fall especially heavily on those who live in rural areas and can't easily adjust their driving habits. Perhaps regional tax credits of sorts could help those who are being disproportionately hurt, but yes, there will be quite a bit of pain. Moreover, there's some evidence that stricter CAFÉ standards on automakers could increase fuel efficiency more gently than gas taxes would (although drivers might just respond by driving more, and total fuel consumption wouldn't go down).

Still, the main point here is that reducing fuel consumption in the U.S. and somehow averting global warming is going to be a massive and radical undertaking—perhaps a near-impossible one. The idea that we can somehow achieve this by doing stuff that doesn't inflict any pain whatsoever is an unrealistic one.

February 16, 2006

The Internet Debate Heats Up in Congress

Yesterday the Congress human rights subcommittee held a seven-hour hearing on the internet censorship debate. Republicans and Democrats chastised internet giants Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Cisco for allowing the Chinese government to limit citizens’ access to preapproved websites. Tom Lantos (D-CA), co-chairman of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, accused the four companies of "nauseating collaboration with a regime of repression,” while Rep. Christopher Smith (R-NJ) equated support for China’s totalitarianism with assistance to the Nazi’s during World War II. Smith later brought Google to center stage, mocking their motto “Don’t Be Evil”, calling the conglomerate “evil’s accomplice.”

Smith hasalready sponsored a bill in Congress that will dictate a set of new mandatory procedures for internet companies. Expected to be introduced in the next several days, the bill would mandate that:

Any U.S. corporation that offers a search service "may not" alter its results in response to the request of an "Internet-restricting country." That last phrase would apparently permit ongoing censorship by Western nations such as Germany, which requires Google to filter Nazi-related sites from search results, and the United States, which imposes a similar requirement on search engines as a result of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Search-engine companies must provide the Office of Global Internet Freedom--a new federal bureaucracy that would be created under the bill--with a list of verboten search terms that have been "provided by any foreign official of an Internet-restricting country."

Any Web site with operations in the U.S. must regularly provide the Office of Global Internet Freedom with a list of content deleted or blocked at the request of an Internet-restricting country.

A new set of federal regulations--apparently aimed at Cisco's routers and software used by the other companies--would be erected to criminalize certain exports to China, Iran, Vietnam and other Internet-restricting nations. Current law permits the export of "publicly available technology and software" to those nations. Those exports would no longer be permitted if software or hardware is exported for the purpose of "facilitating Internet censorship."

Tracking the RFID Revolution

Tiny chips implanted under your skin tracking access and movement: that may sound like something out of a science fiction movie, but these identity tags, more commonly known as RFIDs, could become the wave of the future. As tiny as a grain of rice and medically implanted in your forearm, the chip functions like a UPC code, scanned to access restricted areas, or to help morgue workers identify missing persons or remains. At the moment, the RFID is technically a "passive" chip and doesn't send out any sort of signal, and and isn't used for tracking or surveillance -- at least not yet. With implant machines already used for a wide range of benefits, I wonder how resistant most people would be to adopting something like this. After all, if you're hearing impaired, you get a cochlear implant. Heart problems are often relieved with a pacemaker. So are RFIDs entirely out of the question?

One concern is that these chips might eventually be used for corporate product-tracking. Here’s an example of how this would work: You walk into a supermarket and pass by an innocuous-looking RFID reader. Due to the RFID chip on your credit card, the store knows what you’ve purchased in the past. You then pick up a six pack of Pepsi that has RFIDs attached to each can. Because another RFID reader is in place, when you keep the six-pack in your hands for 15 seconds before putting it back down, Pepsi’s marketing department records this information in order to improve its labeling. When you leave the store with a 6-pack of Coke and walk through a reader, Coke records that its product has just left the store. When you get in your car and pass RFID readers as you get on and off the freeway, the RFID chips on your shirt send information about where your shirt is. When you put your 6-pack in a fridge that also has an RFID reader attached, Coke knows where your soda is. When six cans pass by the reader on the way out of the fridge, Coke knows that the 6 pack is done. Coke then sends you coupons to buy more Coke and also updates your kitchen shopping list.

There are obviously some disconcerting aspects to this scenario. With the database monitoring your activity, choice becomes rather limited. Because all your preferences are catered to, there is little incentive for exploration. The chips could potentially become prey to identity theft, leaving not only your credit card number exposed, but essentially everything about you.

But then again, this whole scenario is probably down the road. The first wave of the RFID revolution will most likely serve as a means of identification, most likely starting with passports. Still, once we begin to entertain the technology, the next wave might not be far behind.

The Pakistani-U.S. Alliance Evolves

Despite nearby chants of "death to the U.S.," a lasting result of the cartoon controversy raging in Europe, U.S. army medics held a small ceremony in Pakistan yesterday to say goodbye to the last U.S. MASH unit there.

The Mobile Army Surgical Hospital has been stationed in Pakistan for the last four months in response to the October 8th earthquake that killed more than 80,000 people. The $4.5 million unit in Northern Pakistan consisted of 84 beds, a surgical suite with two operating tables, two intensive care units, a pharmacy, laboratory, radiology units and a power generation system. The entire operation was donated to Pakistani doctors as the U.S. transitions into using smaller, more flexible, traveling medical teams.

According to U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, the MASH unit "caused tens of thousands of Pakistanis up in this area to change their view of America." Crocker called the recent violent uprisings and slogans the product of a few "agitators," claiming they are not representative of broad Pakistani sentiment towards America.

With the United States giving $510 million to quake relief and reconstruction in Pakistan, the two countries have deepened the alliance that was forged in 2001 at the start of the "war on terror." The Pakistani Surgeon General even announced "Pakistan and the United States have been very close allies for a very long period…these mutual exchanges will further strengthen our bonds."

But in upcoming months Pakistan must solidify its position as an American ally, and prove that the U.S. will benefit from these ties. In addition to recovering from the earthquake, Pakistan now faces periodic revolts, and is redirecting large numbers of ground forces including six army brigades and 25,000 paramilitary men to the Southwestern province, where Baluch nationalists, who accuse the government of exploiting their natural resources, have left 215 dead, carrying out what the Pakistan Human Rights Commission calls, "indiscriminate bombing and strafing."

Thus far the U.S. has called the deteriorating condition of the region an "internal matter", for Pakistan to address. But if the carnage continues, it will ultimately affect Pakistan’s participation as an ally against Al-Qaeda, calling into question its value as an ally.

New Abu Ghraib Reports

Hard to say which is worse in this Sacramento Bee story about Abu Ghraib. Is it the fact that military officers were harassed and demoted for speaking out to their superiors?

Spc. Samuel Provance, also dressed in Army green, said he was demoted and humiliated after telling a general investigating the Abu Ghraib scandal that senior officers had covered up the full extent of abuse during interrogations of detainees at the U.S. military prison in Iraq.

Or is it reports that children were allegedly being kidnapped and used as "leverage" in interrogations?

Provance made a new allegation about the Abu Ghraib controversy, saying that U.S. forces had captured the 16-year-old son of an Iraqi general under Saddam Hussein, Hamid Zabar, to pressure the general into providing information.

Meanwhile, Salon has obtained thousands of new documents and several new photos related to Abu Ghraib. One early observation: As Jeanne of Body and Soul notes, at first glance, it certainly doesn't appear that a lot of the more horrific allegations by, for instance, Seymour Hersh in his public speaking engagements (notably, of "boys being sodomized") are backed up here at all. Either that means there's still more evidence to come or else Hersh was simply wrong. I would hope the latter, but it's hard to know what to think, really.

San Francisco's Newest Archbishop

When San Francisco Archbishop William Levada left for a new position in Rome last year, gay Catholics were left wondering if a conservative ideologue would replace him. Yesterday afternoon, George H. Niederauer, who is rumored to be sympathetic to homosexuals in his flock, was installed as the eighth archbishop of San Francisco. Several thousand attended the mass at St. Mary’s Cathedral—including Mayor Gavin Newsom—where the mood was joyous.

Niederauer, a native of California who earned a PhD in English Literature at the University of Southern California while a priest, spent much of his homily discussing Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical Deus Caritas Est [God is Love, issued three weeks ago], and referenced poets Robert Frost and T.S. Elliot, as he extolled the values of humility, charity, and love for all. It is still uncertain what the new appointment will mean for San Francisco’s gay believers, but Niederauer did praise the “rich diversity” of Catholics in the city. As one longtime Bay Area Catholic in attendance remarked, “Now we wait and see.”

Increasing the Number of Uninsured

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has released a new study by MIT economist Jonathan Gruber showing that President Bush's proposal to expand Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) would actually increase the total number of uninsured people in the United States. While 3.8 million people would gain coverage, another 4.4 million would actually lose coverage as a number of employers responded to the new tax breaks by dropping their insurance plans. So on net, more people are uninsured. And this all comes at a cost of $156 billion over ten years. Absolutely brilliant.

Now from what I understand, it seems like Gruber's arguing that those 4.4 million would actually see little or no change in real compensation—what will happen is that many small businesses will just prefer to pay their workers in wages rather than health insurance once the tax advantages towards doing the latter disappear—and those 4.4 million would simply choose not to buy insurance. So it's not clear that the situation is entirely catastrophic. (Although those 4.4 million would all likely be relatively healthy people, and their exit from the insurance pool would raise premiums for everyone else.)

Still, we know that HSAs won't reduce total health care costs (how could they, when 80 percent of costs in this country are due to 20 percent of all patients, and that small minority simply can't and won't control their costs by taking out a high deductible?). They do virtually nothing to address the main health care problem in this country: that 60 million people go uninsured in any given year. Besides which, they transfer the costs of health care from the healthy and wealthy to the sick and the poor. In what universe is this a good use of money? We already have a perfectly good single-payer system in this country—Medicare—that, despite Republican efforts to screw it up, does a wonderful job of controlling costs and achieving universal among a vulnerable and expensive population group. A serious health care proposal might look at expanding that rather than tinkering around with frivolous tax breaks at the margins.

February 15, 2006

Gay airline employee told he cannot use his free tickets

Rob Anders of La Mirada, California, is a long-time airline industry employee. At his company's Christmas party, Anders won a pair of round-trip airline tickets from Northwest Airlines, to be used by him and a companion. He chose his partner of fifteen years, and they decided to use the free trip to visit Anders' mother and attend a family reunion in Florida. The airline, however, refused to accept Anders' partner as the other passenger. A Northwest representative said that the airline would recognize only a spouse, another airline employee, or a dependent child as a "companion."

There is plenty wrong with this picture. It is unknown whether Northwest included this strange caveat in the fine print at the Christmas party drawing, but the assumption is that it did not. But let's say that somehow, the restriction was announced; what an odd restriction. Let's say Anders was heterosexual and wanted to take his girlfriend on the trip: according to Northwest, he could not. Let's say he wanted to take his brother on the trip; according to Northwest, he could not.

These issues are interesting, but they are not as important as the fact that Northwest was willing to permit a spouse to accompany the winner of the drawing. Under Califnornia law, 'full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities, privileges, or services in all business establishments of every kind whatsoever' without regard to sexual orientation or marital status" must be granted to all citizens. A letter sent to the airline from the ACLU of Southern California states that:

Because same-sex couples who wish to marry cannot currently do so under California law, using marriage as a criterion discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation. Northwest's policy also discriminates on the basis of marital status because it does not permit unmarried heterosexual individuals to bring the companion of their choice.

Anders and his partner registered as domestic partners in 2004, but the airline representative specifically stated that Northwest would not accept a domestic partner in lieu of a spouse.

Whistleblowers Need Protection

Last week I did a long post arguing that current whistleblower protections for those who want to complain about wrongdoing by the government are hardly sufficient to ensure that everything that needs reporting gets reported. Today the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists have a new editorial out that puts this issue in historical perspective and comes to a similar conclusion. The relevant parts below are well worth reading in full:

In the 1980s, CIA employee Richard Barlow discovered that Pakistan, with the blessing of the Reagan and Bush I administrations, was able to buy restricted nuclear technology-related items in the United States. Barlow also unmasked a coordinated attempt by the U.S. intelligence community to lie to Congress about Pakistan's activities. The result? His security clearance was suspended, and he lost his job. The Reagan and Bush I administrations covered up Barlow's discoveries because, at the time, they needed Pakistan's help to fund and supply the Afghans in their bloody fight with the Soviets.

This was not merely a problem restricted to the presidencies of that era. The then-Democratically controlled Congress steadfastly refused to address the dangerous issues that Barlow raised and was only too happy to try to move them out of the public eye. We are now paying the price for this shortsightedness--what Barlow had discovered was an early incarnation of physicist Abdul Qadeer Khan's illegal, international nuclear proliferation network. Khan, known as the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, has been under house arrest since February 2004. In October 2005, President George W. Bush declared that "The United States . . . has exposed and disrupted a major blackmarket operation in nuclear technology led by A. Q. Khan." But that disruption should have come nearly 20 years ago, when Barlow first raised the alarm. Khan's underground network could have been halted before he leaked nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya, and North Korea.
In light of what happened to Barlow, is it likely that anyone would come forward in similar circumstances now? His case is hardly unique, a fact attested to by the very existence of our organization, the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition. Our members include Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, who reported that Operation Able Danger had information on 9/11 terrorist Mohammed Atta's cell well before the attacks. (Shaffer was subsequently labeled untrustworthy, in part because he admitted to taking government dime pens out of an embassy when he was a high school intern, and his security clearance was revoked.) And then there's Sandalio Gonzalez, a 32-year law enforcement agent, who was forced into retirement for questioning--in an internal memorandum--the federal government's complicity in up to 15 murders in Mexico.

Bureaucrats are playing ducks and drakes with our lives. It is crucial to take measures to prevent retaliation against whistleblowers and to encourage accountability within national security agencies. Retaliation against whistleblowers should be criminalized. The precedent for such legislation already exists, in that the judicial system prosecutes people for obstruction of justice and for witness tampering. To further safeguard the rights of conscientious federal employees, agencies and administrators who retaliate against whistleblowers should be made liable for civil damages, much as they are presently liable for damages in the event of racial or sexual discrimination. And, in order to obviate the painful choice between career and conscience, employees terminated or punitively reassigned for reporting wrongdoing should be awarded their full retirement as if they had continued on in employment. When national security employees charged with securing the well-being of the nation feel confident in reporting malfeasance, the nation as a whole will be much safer.

Confronting the NSA Spy Scandal

Digby has a fantastic post noting that Democrats are quickly becoming afraid of confronting Bush over the NSA spying scandal, and then making the case for why they shouldn't be scared: "If the Democrats in Congress simply stood together on principle instead of listening to overfed, out of touch strategists who have misdiagnosed the problem for years, they would begin to crawl out of this hole on national security."

Starving Hamas

This seems like a strange way to think about democracy in the Middle East:

The United States and Israel are discussing ways to destabilize the Palestinian government so that newly elected Hamas officials will fail and elections will be called again, according to Israeli officials and Western diplomats.

The intention is to starve the Palestinian Authority of money and international connections to the point where, some months from now, its president, Mahmoud Abbas, is compelled to call a new election. The hope is that Palestinians will be so unhappy with life under Hamas that they will return to office a reformed and chastened Fatah movement.

Right. "Vote any way you want, really; we'll just make sure you starve if you happen to vote the wrong way..." I'm no fan of Hamas, but this sort of thing seems pretty unlikely to encourage any sort of "moderation" from the governing party. Maybe that's the point. It's not a hugely novel approach either. In 1990, during the elections in Nicaragua, the United States let voters know in no uncertain terms that massive amounts of aid would be forthcoming if they voted the Sandinistas out of office and voted in the U.S.-backed Violeta Chamorro. (And the Reagan administration certainly found ways to "destabilize" the leftist Nicaraguan government during the 1980s.) And all Nicaragua got for going along with this plan was the opportunity to be a guinea pig in a grand neoliberal experiment that devastated the country. Maybe the Palestinians should take note.

Holy Terror, Batman

If reading the newspaper doesn't satisfy your hunger for "war on terror" news, soon there will be a new place to turn: the comic book. Frank Miller, who is credited with giving Batman its noir makeover is again revamping the series to echo the national mood. The days of nemeses like the Riddler and the Penguin are apparently behind us, as now, according to Miller "Batman will be kicking a lot of Al Queda butt." Miller acknowledges the new “Holy Terror, Batman” series as a definite piece of propaganda, and wishes "entertainers of our time had the spine and the focus of the ones who faced down Hitler…. it's silly to have Batman out chasing the Riddler when you've got al Qaeda out there."

While many of us relish CSI-style crime dramas, incorporating the "axis of evil" into comic books interferes with the entire fantasy-driven component of the storyline. Batman fighting the jihad pretty much robs readers of the potential for seeking a pure and escapist form of enjoyment. Is there no getting away from foreign policy any more? Hopefully we can incorporate some domestic issues as well. Stand by for "Batman and Robin’s upcoming nuptials" and "Wonder Woman seeks equal pay!"

How Widespread is Censorship in China?

While Google and Microsoft continue to be subject to scrutiny over their censorship of web content in China, the Chinese government claimed yesterday that their internet access is not all that different from the United States. According to Liu Zhengrong, the government internet official, "If you study the main international practices in this regard you will find that China is basically in compliance with the international norm. The main purposes and methods of implementing our laws are basically the same."

Zhengrong noted that major American publications such as the New York Times and the Washington Post claim that they have their own authority to delete stories and topic threads. Zhengrong acknowledged that the Chinese government operates a firewall to censor "harmful content," stressing the importance of protecting children from nasty sites containing pornography. Additionally, he added that individuals have complete freedom to question politically sensitive material, and it’s really just a "tiny percentage" of websites that are restricted in mainland China.

But that doesn't take into account the new restrictions adopted in China last September that bans any internet content that "divulges state secrets," "jeopardizes the integrity of the nation's unity," "harms the honor or interests of the nation," or "propagates evil cults." Also banned are websites that encourage "illegal" gatherings, and "illegal civil demonstrations." Tiananmen Square anyone?

Because legitimate news sources, or "news work units," must be approved by the People’s Republic, that means news content on all other websites, bulletin boards and blogs are considered illegitimate. And that means that the government has the authority to condemn any material that contradicts what has been established as sanctioned news. And ta-dah! Officials from the People’s Republic of China can then say that all they’re doing is “closely monitor(ing) the spread of illegal information."

Although Zhengrong denied assertions that individuals have suffered jail sentences resulting from the dissemination of information against the government, a 2005
study examining violence against journalists reveals that:

China boasts the largest number of "cyber dissidents" in prison (62). These are internet users and bloggers whose activity has been tracked and deemed harmful.

China has the largest number of imprisoned journalists (32), such as journalist Yu Dongyue, who is serving an 18 year sentence for spreading “counter-revolutionary propaganda” after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.

However, in regards to our current political landscape, nothing is more disturbing than China's praise for the Bush administration's monitoring of email and phone traffic in an attempt to inhibit the circulation of "harmful information." As they say, imitation is the finest form of flattery.

February 14, 2006

Is Europe Doomed?

Cato Unbound has an interesting debate going on right now over the future of Europe. Theodore Dalrymple asks, "Is 'Old Europe' Doomed?" and argues that at the very least the continent is "sleepwalking to further relative decline," probably, in part because too much left-style regulation is strangling the economy, compared with the "success" of neoliberalism here in the United States. Charles Kupchan takes a contrarian view, noting that the EU is about as wealthy as the United States (and that includes a number of Eastern European countries that are still developing). Anne Applebaum thinks Dalrymple may have a point.

It's an interesting debate, but it's not clear that Europe's really doing so much worse than the United States in the usual economic terms. (Dalyrmple also makes various cultural arguments that I'll set aside here.) Here, for instance, is economist Robert Pozen's take on those perennial Europe-U.S. comparisons:

Gross domestic product has grown at an average rate of 3.3 percent a year in the United States over the last decade, compared to 2.1 percent a year in the EU15. Per capita GDP growth, however, has been very similar: 1.8 percent a year in the United States, 1.7 percent in the EU15. The main factor driving higher U.S. economic growth is not greater productivity gains; it is a more rapidly expanding population.

Right. Europe's growing at a slower rate than the United States primarily because, as Pozen says, its population hasn't been expanding as quickly as ours—a "problem" that could be easily corrected if the EU continues to swallow up countries to the east. Plus, as Olivier Blanchard has argued, Europeans have less income per capita because they prefer to work less and take more vacation than we do. It's a choice they've made, certainly a fair one, and hardly reason to think they're "doomed."

Nor is unemployment in Europe necessarily as bad—or at least as disastrous—as people make it out to be. According to the OECD, Germany has an official unemployment rate of 9.5 percent. (Compared to 5.5 percent for the United States—although this number likely understates the problem.) But that figure includes the former East Germany, where unemployment still hovers above 20 percent; in West Germany, unemployment is about 7.5 percent, hardly a catastrophe.

So Germany just hasn't been able to integrate a developing country into the fold all that successfully over the past decade and a half, though I'd like to know how quickly the United States could achieve success if it assimilated, say, Central America. But that doesn't mean Germany's labor policies and regulations are fatal to job-creation, either. (One culprit for Germany's unemployment rate is probably the European Central Bank's tight monetary policy, for instance.)

Beyond that, there are also reasons to think that the United States won't trounce Europe economically forever. In the future, the U.S. could become increasingly burdened by high defense spending and persistent budget deficits. One might note that part of the reason for the huge productivity boost in the United States over the past few decades has been that women have been entering the workforce in large numbers, a process that's only begun in Europe. (65 percent of American women work outside the home, compared to only 55 percent of European women—and countries like Italy and Greece are particularly imbalanced on this front.) Moreover, this study argues that European firms are still trying to implement fancy new IT technologies and learn various new retail techniques, and once they do, they'll rapidly catch up with their American peers. Maybe some of that's wrong, but it's reason not to be entirely confident that the European economy is "doomed."

UN: Shut Guantanamo Down

Following an 18 month investigation directed by the UN Commission on Human Rights, five experts have called for the U.S. to close Guantanamo Bay. Determining that the force feeding techniques employed by the facility are acts of torture, the UN envoys have composed a 38-page report on their findings. Although the report will not be released until the next UN Commission meeting on March 13, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack has already started doing damage control, calling the findings "unfounded."

The reason? The UN experts based their findings on interviews with released prisoners, lawyers, family members and U.S. officials, but never personally toured the facility. Now it's true that the UN members did in fact reject an invitation to visit the detention center, but McCormack has already acknowledged that even if they had accepted, they would not have been granted access to prisoners. Nevertheless, McCormack added, "just because they decided not to take up the U.S. government on the offer to go to Guantanamo Bay does not automatically give them the right to publish a report that is merely hearsay and not based on fact."

So sometime during the last six months, the Bush administration "invited" inspectors to tour the facility, but purely on the basis of limited access—all so that the White House could dispute the authenticity of the report when it finally came out.

It should also be noted that last June UN inspectors were sitting around waiting to gain access to Guantanamo, a year after their initial "strong and urgent" request to access the facility. Calling U.S. authorities unresponsive, UN representative Paul Hunt called for an investigation to "check the accuracy of … other allegations concerning the health of detainees …. to see the conditions for myself, to talk privately with detainees and to discuss on site with medical staff and others….So I'm extremely disappointed that despite waiting for 18 months, and despite several requests, the authorities have not seen fit to grant permission to visit Guantánamo Bay."

February 13, 2006

Immigration Agents Pose as OSHA Officials

Steven Greenhouse reported on a ploy by immigration officials to catch undocumented immigrants; the officials would pose as officials from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and then and deport catch any unsuspecting illegal immigrants who came their way.

Right, very clever. Really, though, all this does is ensure that undocumented workers will be even less likely to seek out actual work-safety officials in the event that they, say, get injured on the job—and Hispanic workers already have disproportionately high injury rates at work. And with fewer immigrants willing to speak out, employers will have even less incentive to maintain safety standards at work. Business wins, while immigrants will continue to resemble indentured servants more and more. Very clever, indeed.

Why Ration Health Care?

In the health care debate, there's often much talk that so much money is "wasted" trying to save those in the last years of their life. (The statistic that gets hauled out here is that the share of Medicare costs incurred by patients in their last year of life is about 28 percent.) In the New York Times last year, Daniel Altman suggested that major health care costs could be saved simply by, well, letting people die earlier:

End-of-life care may also be a useful focus because, in some cases, efforts to prolong life may end up only prolonging suffering. In such cases, reducing pain may be a better use of resources than heroic attempts to save lives.

On the other hand, the other day Max Sawicky highlighted a quote from a textbook by economist Jonathan Gruber that says—regardless of one's moral views on the question—that this is unrealistic:

[A] common fact cited by analysts to declare our health care system "wasteful" is that 30% of medical spending is on people in the last six months of their lives so that we are "wasting" money on a population that will die anyway. The problem with this argument is that doctors don't know in advance who is in the last six months of their lives and who might live for many more years. Only a small share of this spending during the last six months of life is for those we know are at the end of life. The rest of the spending may not be wasteful, in that it may have some chance of significantly extending life

That seems like the more sensible view. It is true that some other countries, like Britain, use the notion of "quality-adjusted life years" to ration care at the end of life. So, for instance, if a treatment costs X amount of money but will likely only prolong life for Y years, and X*Y is under some defined limit—in Britain's NHS, it's about £30,000—then the government simply won't pay for it. (Patients can, however, pay for it with their own money, if they can afford it.)

Now in "U.S. Health Care Spending in an International Context," Uwe Reinhardt et. al., suggested that the United States was spending an extraordinary amount on health care that yielded very few additional "quality-adjusted life years," especially since neither Medicaid nor Medicare set explicit limits here, and noted that policymakers should consider explicit limits if they wanted to cut costs. Any sort of public debate on this question would obviously be politically divisive—when do you decide that it's too expensive to save a person's life for another six months? What sort of cutoff do you set?

And anyway, is this something we even should consider? Perhaps Britain has it wrong. As Gruber points out, it's not always clear that a given treatment will "only" extend life by a small bit of time. And even if Medicare and Medicaid currently don't ration care in the way the NHS does, both programs certainly do ration care right now (to take an easy example: many doctors and hospitals that do particular procedures won't take Medicare patients at all), and it's not obvious that further rationing by either program will reduce spending as much as people think.

It also seems like a bad idea to try to cut health care costs by cutting care itself—we are obviously getting something for all of these new health care technologies, and as a society that continually gets richer this seems like something worth paying for. At any rate, there are scores of other inefficiencies in the U.S. health care system—including costly monopolies by the AMA and the drug industry, as well as undue administrative costs—that ought to be addressed long before people even start talking about further reductions in care.

Cracker Barrel sued for discrimination--again

A gay woman in Londonderry, New Hampshire, has sued a Cracker Barrel restaurant, claiming that management did nothing after she complained of employees sexually assaulting her and making crude references to her sexuality. The woman, Bonnie Usher, joined the Cracker Barrel staff as a cook in 2000. In the complaint she filed with New Hampshire human rights commission, she says that she was denied better work shifts and promotions because she is a woman, that she was subjected to abusive language, was groped by a co-worker, and that a photo of the groping was hung on the wall of the restaurant's employee area.

Usher was fired in 2004, and she is maintaining that the company fired her because she complained about mistreatment on the job. A spokesman for Cracker Barrel says the company was not aware of Usher's complaints.

Bonnie Usher's suit is interesting because it adds gender discrimination and sexual harrassment to a long list of employee complaints over many years. In the early 90's, a Cracker Barrel memo, written by a company executive, was leaked. The memo stated that managers should fire employees who did not "demonstrate normal heterosexual values." One lesbian employee, Cheryl Summerville, said the reason given on her separation papers was "Employee is gay." Summerville's Cracker Barrel was in Georgia, where there is no state protection for gay workers, so she was unable to take legal action against the company. There was a shareholder outcry against Cracker Barrel's policy, and a decade-long boycott of the restaurant by gays and gay rights activists, leading to the addition of a non-discrimination clause in Cracker Barrel's employee policies.

Then there was the matter of discrimination against African Americans. A civil rights investigation found that black diners in Cracker Barrel restaurants in seven states--about 50 Cracker Barrel locations--were segregated from whites in restaurant seating, seated after white customers who arrived later, and given inferior table service. Interviews with employees revealed that managers "often directed, participated in, or condoned the discriminatory behavior."

In 2004, Cracker Barrel agreed to change its training and management practices to prevent discrimination against African American customers, though the company denied the allegations made against it. There were a hundred suits filed by individuals against Cracker Barrel, and--according to attorney Heidi Doerhoff--"They're still fighting tooth and nail against all the private plaintiffs."

Cracker Barrel's Equal Opportunity Statement claims that "Cracker Barrel will not tolerate any form of discrimination, harassment or retaliation affecting its employees or applicants due to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, age, marital status, medical condition, or disability." Though any chain can undergo the misfortune of having one of its franchises dishonor the company's non-discrimination policy, accusations--so far, all of them proven--against Cracker Barrel have been so numerous for so long that the addition of a new one does not speak well for the company's desire to change its ways.

Oppose Torture, Get Fired

Some ledes just speak for themselves: "The CIA’s top counter-terrorism official was fired last week because he opposed detaining Al-Qaeda suspects in secret prisons abroad, sending them to other countries for interrogation and using forms of torture such as “water boarding”, intelligence sources have claimed."

That would be in addition, of course, to the State Department officials who are being sidelined because they had favorable views towards arms control, and the top NASA scientist who was being pressured into silence for speaking out about global warming. And that's just the news from the past few weeks.