News for June 9
June 9, 2009 by Barbara
Filed under News and Analysis
As you might have noticed from my tagline at the bottom of my posts, I’m a student, and as students are sometimes wont to do, I am taking a summer school class this week. That’s an all-day class in addition to working (not just for the lovely people at The Xenia Institute, but also a couple of other jobs that help pay the bills!) and homework, so posting will be rather light on the commentary this week. But feel free to add your own!
Health Care Reform Plan for Beginners : The Many Flavors of the Public Plan | Ezra Klein @The Washington Post
For most of you, this is the big one. The inclusion of a strong public insurance option has become, for most observers I know, the single most recognizable marker for victory. If the public plan exists, liberals have won. If it’s eliminated, or neutered, then conservatives have triumphed.
The public plan has a very particular political lineage: The lesson liberals took from the 1994 health reform fight was that you couldn’t threaten the insurance coverage individuals already had. For many policy wonks, the central problem in health care was the existence of private insurance coverage. For most Americans, however, the central problem was that they could lose their private insurance coverage, and be left with something they didn’t like, or nothing at all. This effectively ruled out something like single-payer, or even Bill Clinton’s managed-care-within-managed-competition model. It ruled out anything that began by changing the health care coverage of those who wanted to keep their current policies.
But that political insight didn’t cancel out the policy insight: The private insurance market is a mess. It’s supposed to cover the sick and instead competes to insure the well. It employs platoons of adjusters whose sole job is to get out of paying for needed health care services that members thought were covered.
- Related link: Why Americans Don’t Want Single-Payer | AlterNet
- Related link: The White House Needs to Fight for Health Care | Salon
Has the Geithner Plan Succeeded? | FiveThirtyEight
Ezra Klein has noticed something that the rest of the world seems to have ignored: Tim Geithner’s Public-Private Investment Partnership Plan, announced to great fanfare and much controversy in March, has gone kaput. The banks aren’t interested, and the FDIC has (temporarily, it says) pulled the plug.
Ezra takes this as an ambiguous sign: “The economy certainly “feels” better,” he writes, “and that’s been enough to drain the urgency from some of these questions. But have the questions really gone away?”.
I’ll stick my neck out there and say that it’s more unambiguously a positive sign.
To Hell With Human Trafficking | God’s Politics
Is it possible that we as Christians just aren’t angry enough about injustices like human trafficking and slavery? Perhaps we’ve grown too desensitized, domesticated, and docile. I’m not trying to say this for the sake of the ’shock factor’ — I really believe there are times when the church needs to have a deep[er] anger about the grave injustices of the world, particularly when it involves the exploitation of children. Have we deduced our faith to convenient and self-serving pleasantries?
Because we are informed and transformed by Christ, I wonder if we just need to say:
To Hell with [insert injustice here]. Enough is enough.
What else can you say when many sources cite as high as 27 million slaves around the world? In the sex trade industry, 80 percent are women and over half are minors (aka: children and teenagers) some younger than my three kids who are 10, 8, and even 6.
I guess Cornel West has a more eloquent way of saying the above:
Indifference to injustice is more insidious than the injustice itself.
Muslims Murder, Christians Don’t: What Went Missing in Analysis of Tiller’s Executioner | Religion Dispatches
On June 1, the New York Times ran a story, “Seeking Clues on Suspect in Shooting of Doctor,” an investigation into a little known anti-abortion activist, Scott Roeder, who’d been arrested for gunning down Kansas abortion provider George Tiller, as the latter handed out bulletins in the foyer of his Wichita Lutheran church. Apparently, Roeder caught the relevant civil agencies off guard. Though they knew of his outspoken anti-abortion views and his previous forms of protest, they did not consider him dangerous—a sentiment shared by Roeder’s fellow anti-abortion activists and family members.
As the Times headline suggests, there must have been something in Roeder’s background that everyone missed, which would explain why he crossed the line from protest to murder.
Similar questions regarding the motives for murder apparently do not linger around the June 1 killing of an army recruiter, Private William A. Long, in Little Rock, Arkansas. The June 2 headline in the Times purports to give the “Report of Motive in Recruiter Attack,” and introduces the alleged killer, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, as “an American convert to Islam.”
Shakira’s Children | New York Magazine
Last October, on the plane from Miami to San Salvador, Shakira stared into her MacBook, pondering. The next morning, she was to give a speech on the importance of early-childhood development to an Ibero-American summit meeting that would gather most of the heads of state of Latin America as well as the prime minister and king of Spain, the prime min
This was not the usual venue for Shakira Mebarak Ripoll of Barranquilla, Colombia. That would be stadium-size, and could be anywhere in the world, filled with thousands and thousands of fans, the people who have made her among the biggest-selling female vocalists on the planet. Shakira has this other side — she began charitable work right after she had her first big hit, at 18 — and two years ago she, her longtime boyfriend, Antonio de la Rua, and some of their friends conceived the idea of a loose union of Ibero-American singers, called ALAS (“wings” in Spanish), which would use the power of their fame to mobilize fans, and the politicians fans vote for, to advance the cause of early-childhood development. Since then they had rallied most of the biggest pop stars in the Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking worlds; held enormous concerts in Mexico and Argentina; gained the philanthropic support of some of Latin America’s richest families (as well as Warren Buffett’s son Howard); and captured the attention of a good number of heads of state. Now, flying down to El Salvador, staring at her Mac, she was, perhaps, approaching her moment of political breakthrough.
…
Celebrity philanthropy, rock ’n’ roll philanthropy, is no longer a novelty, but what Shakira and ALAS were trying was indeed new. They were looking to use the power of pop to help the populations not of distant impoverished lands but of the Ibero-American world from which they come. They have a policy focus — early-childhood nutrition, education and medical care — that is on a scale beyond the reach of private charity. It requires the steady effort of the state. It cannot be addressed by rich countries’ check-writing. So the trick is to take pop celebrity, marry it to big business and permanently alter the way Latin American governments help care for the young and the poor. What the golden-haired young woman staring at her laptop was trying to do was a tall order, given the fragility of celebrity influence, the dubious track record of Latin American governments in providing social services and the lengthening shadow of a global recession that was straitening everyone’s budget. But she is not someone whom it would be reasonable to underestimate.
Barbara Schwartz is the editorial director at the Xenia Institute. She lives in Oklahoma City, Okla., and currently is pursuing a Master of Divinity degree at Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa.
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