Truth and Traditions

Juan Cole has a piece on 10 Ways Arab Democracies Can Avoid American Mistakes. Here they are in brief.

1. Contemporary political campaigns in the US depend heavily on television commercials. In the UK these ads are restricted, and in Norway they are banned. Consider banning them.

2. Do not hold your elections on work days. America’s robber barons put elections on Tuesdays in order to discourage workers, including the working poor, from voting.

3. Have compulsory, government-run voter registration at age 18 or whatever the voting age is. … Compulsory voter registration is correlated with high electoral turnout.

4. About 32 countries in the world have enforced compulsory voting. In Australia, for instance, you have to pay a small fine if you do not vote in certain elections.

5. Make a bill of rights central to your new constitutions, and be specific about what rights people have and what actions infringe against those rights. Include electronic rights to privacy, such as freedom from snooping in private emails or warrantless GPS tracking.

6. Put separation of religion and state in your national constitutions and make it hard to amend the constitution. … If we did not have our First Amendment, our fundamentalists would long since have passed blasphemy and other laws and deprived us of freedom of speech (which they consider a ‘provocation’ just as your fundamentalists do).

7. Keep your defense ministry spending as low as possible consistent with being able to defend your borders. Tunisia, you get this one right.

8. Avoid allowing your judiciaries to become politicized. Having party-dominated executives and legislatures approve judicial appointments has real drawbacks. … Never, ever, ever recognize your corporations as persons under the law.

9. Protect your workers’ unions. Make it illegal to fire workers for trying to unionize. Remove obstacles to unionization.

10. Find a way to fight monopoly practices with strong antitrust legislation and enforcement. … Laws against legislators and regulators being hired by the companies they used to regulate would help tell against the entrenchment of the monopolies.

Just a few years ago, a powerful ideology – the belief in free and unfettered markets – brought the world to the brink of ruin. Even in its hey-day, from the early 1980s until 2007, US-style deregulated capitalism brought greater material well-being only to the very richest in the richest country of the world.

Indeed, over the course of this ideology’s 30-year ascendance, most Americans saw their incomes decline or stagnate year after year.

Moreover, output growth in the United States was not economically sustainable. With so much of US national income going to so few, growth could continue only through consumption financed by a mounting pile of debt.

via The Evils of Unregulated Capitalism | Common Dreams.

Yikes! Maybe we need some TNT to bl;ow this joint.

In the U.S. you can choose between a party that favors whatever small incremental reforms that the banker class will grudgingly permit and a party that wants to accelerate the complete handover of all economic matters to the financial elite while propitiating their populist wing with some auto-da-fe of the moment. In the E.U. you can choose between the parties that got you into this mess and the parties that have no idea how to get you out of it, between two sides of a long-standing collusion. In much of the developing world, where publics have some say either through voting or mass politics, the choice is often between yesterday’s cronies and parasites and tomorrow’s. Maybe you can even trade a distant authoritarian’s exploitation for some home-town exploitation instead, as just happened in South Sudan.

Is there anything we can agree on that’ll move us forward, Burke asks.

Comprehensive transparency in government, business and institutional life is one of those ideas that could arguably be just as important to the Tea Party as it might be to progressives, but only if it applies evenly to everything and everyone, which would take activists on all sides agreeing not to be pawns on the chessboard of the political elite.

Concerning the Murdoch scandal, Burke concludes:

There’s a big difference between serious reforms pursued because the alternative is political destruction at the hands of an outraged, mobilized electorate and viscerally knifing a Caesar after he’s gotten too big for his britches and accumulated too many enemies, too many scores that need settling.

If it’s the former, that’s a sign of hope. Maybe we’re only one misstep or revelation away from a similar public consensus about other open wounds and pressing crises, one precious alignment away from change as a real possibility rather than an empty slogan. If it’s the latter, well, watching Murdoch & Co. get what’s coming to them is a pretty fair popcorn moment as far as it goes, but there’s only so many circuses left before Rome really starts to burn.

via Reform or Schadenfreude? Reading the Fall of the House of Murdoch | Easily Distracted.

The problem is that there a tens of thousands of such cases every day, so the cumulative effect is not minor at all. It’s a disaster.

It became clear to me that as a matter of policy, the hospital was coping with a large number of local patients using its ER for ordinary medical care by passive-aggressive neglect. Unless you walked in with an immediately and obviously life-threatening condition, time would be your triage, not a medical professional. If you could endure waiting eight to nine hours, that was proof that your condition was sufficiently serious that you might need urgent care. The staff there don’t spend much time working up a more nuanced picture on initial evaluation because they don’t want one. They don’t efficiently discard the cases of people who’ve left the facility because they’re stalling the remainder deliberately.

The basic problem faced by this hospital and many others is structurally serious and requires a strong nationally consistent solution. Given that one political party struggled to formulate a fussy, detail-strangled series of half-measures to address the problem and the other party apparently thinks there isn’t any issue in the first place, I’m resigned to this situation happening again to me, my loved ones, my friends, my fellow citizens, for the rest of my life.

This is where we are at now. Decline is not something we need to fear or forestall, it has already happened. America is not in decline, it has declined. A nine-hour wait at a well-built, well-staffed, well-resourced medical center for treatment of a serious condition is decline. As a traveller seeking urgent care, I’ve been seen more quickly in similar facilities in both Africa and Europe.

FWIW, I don’t know whether Tim Burke, the author, has sought medical attention in Africa, but I know that he has done fieldwork in Zimbabwe. Africa is not an abstraction to him. & doubt that his reference to medical care there is a casual one.

H/t Aaron Bady.

via To a Medical Center in Fresno | Easily Distracted.

The larger question is this: Do we try to balance budget deficits just by cutting antipoverty initiatives, college scholarships and other investments in young people and our future? Or do we also seek tax increases from those best able to afford them?

The answer to that question is easy, isn’t it? America is governed by the rich, for the rich, but of a hornwsoggled people.

via Taxes and Billionaires – NYTimes.com.