What the Working Class Is Still Trying to Tell Us

David Brooks in The New York Times



Republican supporters waited to enter a rally in Indiana where President Trump was campaigning days before the midterm elections. Credit Leah Klafczynski for The New York Times


I was ready for massive Democratic turnout for the election on Tuesday. But I was surprised how massive the Republican turnout was in response.

The Republicans who flooded to the polls weren’t college-educated suburbanites. Those people voted for Democrats this year.

They weren’t tax-cut fanatics. Half of the Republican members of the House Ways and Means Committee either left Congress, ran for other offices or were defeated.

They weren’t even small-government Republicans. The same red states that elected conservatives to office also — in Nebraska, Idaho and Utah — approved ballot initiatives to expand Medicaid. The same red states that elected conservatives also approved initiatives — in Arkansas and Missouri — to raise the minimum wage.

These were high-school-educated, working-class Republicans.

A lot of us pundits said Donald Trump should run a positive campaign bragging about all the economic growth. But Trump ran another American carnage campaign. That’s because American life still feels like carnage to many.

This is still a country in which nearly 20 percent of prime-age American men are not working full time. This is still a country in which only 37 percent of adults expect children to be better off financially than they are. This is still a country in which millions of new jobs are through “alternative work arrangements” like contracting or consulting — meaning no steady salary, no predictable hours and no security.

Working-class voters tried to send a message in 2016, and they are still trying to send it. The crucial question is whether America’s leaders will listen and respond.

One way to start doing that is to read Oren Cass’s absolutely brilliant new book, “The Once and Future Worker.” The first part of the book is about how we in the educated class have screwed up labor markets in ways that devalued work and made it harder for people in the working class to find a satisfying job.

Part of the problem is misplaced priorities. For the last several decades, American economic policy has been pinioned on one goal: expanding G.D.P. We measure G.D.P. We talk incessantly about economic growth. Between 1975 and 2015, American G.D.P. increased threefold. But what good is that growth if it means that a thick slice of America is discarded for efficiency reasons? 

Similarly, for the last several decades American, welfare policy has focused on consumption — giving money to the poor so they can consume more. Yet we have not successfully helped poor people produce more so that they can take control of their own lives. We now spend more than $20,000 a year in means-tested government spending per person in poverty. And yet the average poverty rate for 2000 to 2015 was higher than it was for 1970 to 1985.

“What if people’s ability to produce matters more than how much they can consume?” Cass asks.

The bulk of his book is a series of ideas for how we can reform labor markets.

For example, Cass supports academic tracking. Right now, we have a one-size-fits-all education system. Everybody should go to college. The problem is that roughly one-fifth of our students fail to graduate high school in four years; roughly one-fifth take no further schooling after high school; roughly one-fifth drop out of college; roughly one-fifth get a job that doesn’t require the degree they just earned; and roughly one-fifth actually navigate the path the system is built around — from school to career.

We build a broken system and then ask people to try to fit into the system instead of tailoring a system around people’s actual needs.

Cass suggests that we instead do what nearly every other affluent nation does: Let students, starting in high school, decide whether they want to be on an apprenticeship track or an academic track. Vocational and technical schools are ubiquitous across the developed world, and yet that model is mostly rejected here.

Cass also supports worker co-ops. Today, we have an old, adversarial labor union model that is inappropriate for the gig economy and uninteresting to most private-sector workers. But co-ops, drawing on more successful models used in several European nations, could represent workers in negotiations, train and retrain workers as they moved from firm to firm and build a safety net for periods of unemployment. Shopping for a worker co-op would be more like buying a gym membership. Each co-op would be a community and service provider to address a range of each worker’s needs.

Cass has many other proposals — wage subsidies, immigration reforms. But he’s really trying to put work, and the dignity of work, at the center of our culture and concern. In the 1970s and 1980s, he points out, the Emmy Award-winning TV shows were about blue-collar families: “All in the Family,” “Taxi,” “Cheers,” “The Wonder Years.” Now the Emmy-winning shows are mostly about white-collar adults working in Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, New York and Washington. 

We in the college-educated sliver have built a culture, an economy and a political system that are all about ourselves. It’s time to pass labor market reforms that will make life decent for everybody.

Columbus shows Trump how to thrive in the new world order

Rana Foroohar in The Financial Times


A day or two after Donald Trump announced tariffs on a spate of Chinese goods, the world was gripped by fears of a trade war. More than a week later, there is a storyline building that perhaps the US president had the right idea. China is negotiating with the US; the US and South Korea will probably cut a new trade deal. While the administration is right to call China out over unfair trade practices, however, there is also a risk of taking away the wrong message, which is that tariffs are the best way to protect the US Rust Belt. 

China may not play fair, but it plays the long game. This is the crucial point. While Mr Trump rails mostly against the trade deficit, China has an industrial policy designed to win the jobs of the future in strategic high-tech industries. This is the better strategy, as evidenced not only by what is happening in the Middle Kingdom, but also in the US. 

Consider the success of Columbus, Ohio, a city whose fortunes I have followed closely for many years because it is an economic and political bellwether for the country. Politicos come here to take the pre-election temperature of the nation and companies to test drive new products. Columbus is in the heart of the Rust Belt territory that helped elect the president. Mr Trump has visited Ohio in recent days, offering modest federal incentives with the aim of creating a boom in local infrastructure spending (unlikely, given the dismal fiscal picture in many US states and cities). 

Columbus is the third-biggest national market for employment in the manufacture of motor vehicles. Yet the city fathers are not too bothered either way about what the president does or does not do around tariffs. 

“Some industries will win, some will lose,” says Kenny McDonald, the head of Columbus 2020, the regional economic development strategy. “But there’s plenty of people at JPMorgan, Honda and Nationwide [all large local employers] that are right now working on algorithms that may replace their jobs.” 

This statement reflects important truths. During the past four decades, technology has created just as much job disruption, if not more, in the Rust Belt as has trade. After the global financial crisis, Columbus was one of the US cities that suffered most. While it didn’t fall quite as far as the rest of the state thanks to a diversified economy (Columbus is the state capital and also has a strong education sector), it was faced with chopping $100m in municipal spending — more than 15 per cent of its total operating budget — in 2009. 

The city did all the usual back-end trimming of public services. But then, rather than become Detroit, which for a period of time literally couldn’t keep the lights or water on, Columbus also did something else: it thought ahead. 

The Democratic mayor went to the Republican city fathers and persuaded them to support a tax rise, the first in nearly four decades. They agreed, on condition that a chunk of that money would go into a public-private economic development partnership that focused on how to cultivate human capital for an era in which all value will reside in intellectual property, data and ideas. 

They connected community colleges with local companies, domestic and global (L Brands, JPMorgan, Worthington Industries, Honda) to train up a digitally savvy technical workforce. They renovated the crumbling downtown and created new housing stock to appeal to the millennials who had been leaving for greener pastures after their studies. 

Columbus is now one of the top 10 areas that young workers are pouring into (it ranks number three as a city of choice for fashion designers, after Los Angeles and New York). In an effort to move from making bumpers and hubcaps to being part of the internet of things, Columbus bid for, and won, a $40m Department of Transportation grant to become a “smart city” focused on electric vehicles. About $500m of additional investment has followed. 

“This isn’t a five-year plan for economic development, it’s a 100-year plan,” says Alex Fischer, head of the chief executives group the Columbus Partnership. 

The city is part of Elon Musk’s “hyper-loop” plan to create a train that can connect Chicago, Columbus and Pittsburgh in minutes. Ohio State and Columbus State Community College have started some of the first degree programmes in data analytics. Tesla, AWS and Apple have moved into town. Accenture now has an innovation lab on what used to be the site of a large buggy manufacturer. 

It is hard to imagine a greater symbol of change. The Columbus region has, since 2010, created roughly half of all the new jobs in Ohio. Harvard Business School recently wrote a case study about the city’s accomplishments. 

The city’s success is a great example of what American industrial policy can yield. Many countries — not just China, but also a number of European nations — create multiyear plans for economic development. The US does not, of course. Industrial policy have always been dirty words here. 

Mr Trump, and many others, rail against Chinese state-run capitalism. But by demonising the outsider, rather than creating a real national economic development strategy at home, the US is missing the point. Columbus is, in a way, showing how to do Chinese economic development with American characteristics. It’s a strategy worth copying.

'I am drowning and you are describing the water' - A critique of India's liberals

Javed Naqvi in The Dawn

“THEY have the president. They have the vice president. They have both houses of Congress. They have the supreme court too. But, wait a minute, we have the majority.” That was Michael Moore speaking to his audience recently in his one-man show at Broadway about the political equation in Trump’s America.

Moore’s reference was to an encouraging fact that Donald Trump won the election but lost the popular vote. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. The equation applies to Modi’s India too, even if the opposition, rather mysteriously, I feel, doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge it. What did Mr Modi’s fabled popularity in 2014 amount to? He got 52 per cent seats with 31pc votes! Will the Indian opposition heed Moore?

There are understated problems, of course. In America, the opposition comes from the people, militantly united if required or peacefully persevering where it works. The agitators in India are scattered into caste, regional and linguistic pursuits if they are not in the meantime falling at the feet of some fraudulent spiritual guru. As some say, it is a big failure for India’s left that the masses who should be better educated in the 70 years of independence are turning to spurious god men for false hope.

Another pervasive problem is that people almost religiously believe that a court of law can address all the challenges to democracy. “Court-aat bhetu ya,” is a familiar Maharashtrian challenge to an adversary. See you in the court. People are not listening to what Michael Moore knows otherwise.


Fascists are usually better equipped to advance their planned and coordinated objectives by wrecking the legal compact, by hollowing out democracy’s beams and pillars.

Kondratiev waves of high and low emotions have thus stalked too many of my friends over the years, nearly always to do with Indian courts and their rulings and the government’s response or absence of it. The legal defeat of the nefarious privacy bill brought joy beyond belief. Edward Snowden would be smiling. As he would see it, the state already knows far more about its subjects than it perhaps wants to know.

Moreover, how long would it take for an intrusive government to overturn any court ruling, say, by presidential decree? If it won’t do that, it doesn’t need to do that. The creeping fascist challenge comes from overwhelming street power where courts have little say and virtually no control.

Fascists can use instruments of law, of course, to torment their opponents — as they did with the legendary artist M.F. Husain. Recently they commandeered the law against student leaders of rare spunk, while putting a 90pc crippled professor in jail, convincing the courts that the wheelchair-bound man’s freedom was a threat to Indian security.

Fascists are usually better equipped to advance their planned and coordinated objectives by wrecking the legal compact, by hollowing out democracy’s beams and pillars. If they have their way with the constitution they will rewrite it. If not, they will subvert it anyway.

One doesn’t have to look too hard to divine the pattern. People gaping with disbelief at the government’s apparent connivance with a convicted rapist the other day forgot that the Babri Masjid was destroyed only after snubbing the supreme court. Remember how senior politicians thumbed their noses at the court’s restraining orders against changing the status quo in Ayodhya.

Nobody was punished for the outrage. In fact, stalwarts among the accused became powerful ministers. Recently, the supreme court ordered the expediting of cases against men and women involved in the destruction of the mediaeval mosque. The court has set a two-year deadline for a non-stop trial followed by an early verdict. That would roughly coincide with the 2019 general elections.

In the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose equation between Indian fascists and the opposition, the fascists will be inevitably heading the victory celebrations. They will either claim vindication of their false innocence or they would play the martyr. As the dice seems loaded, the opposition, including our liberal friends, doesn’t have a trick to give it succour. Their joy could come by turning a collective if scattered majority into a winning showdown with Prime Minister Modi in two years. The judicial route to retrieve democracy can at best be a palliative, not a cure. Even the judges know that.

Ideologues of fascism are running the government and they are running the parallel government through the lynch mobs. The violent ban imposed by right-wing groups with the connivance of the state on interfaith marriages they nefariously call love jihad, and their intrusion into people’s eating habits and so forth, became possible only by tossing the law books out of the window.

A recent decoy that sent the liberals brimming with joy was the supreme court’s ban on triple talaq, reference to instant divorce by Muslim husbands. Look again, triple talaq was banned in Pakistan in 1961. So why did Tehmina Durrani published My Feudal Lord in 1991? Read it. Among other searing challenges, in which triple talaq comes low down the order, married women in a feudal society struggle to even secure a divorce from a man they didn’t want to live with.

Ms Durrani’s marriage to an eminent political figure turned into a nightmare. Violently possessive and pathologically jealous, the husband cut her off from the outside world. When she decided to rebel, as a Muslim woman seeking a divorce, she signed away all financial support, lost the custody of her four children, and found herself alienated from her friends and disowned by her parents.

We are not even beginning to discuss bride burning and honour killings that stalk women in South Asia with impunity. Banning instant divorce was important, not the celebrations it triggered. “I am drowning, and you are describing the water,” complained Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets. He may have been critiquing the liberal Indians.

And Jesus Said Unto Paul of Ryan ...

Nicolas Kristof in The New York Times

A woman who had been bleeding for 12 years came up behind Jesus and touched his clothes in hope of a cure. Jesus turned to her and said: “Fear not. Because of your faith, you are now healed.”

Then spoke Pious Paul of Ryan: “But teacher, is that wise? When you cure her, she learns dependency. Then the poor won’t take care of themselves, knowing that you’ll always bail them out! You must teach them personal responsibility!”

They were interrupted by 10 lepers who stood at a distance and shouted, “Jesus, have pity on us.”

“NO!” shouted Pious Paul. “Jesus! You don’t have time. We have a cocktail party fund-raiser in the temple. And don’t worry about them — they’ve already got health care access.”

Jesus turned to Pious Paul, puzzled.

“Why, they can pray for a cure,” Pious Paul explained. “I call that universal health care access.”

Jesus turned to the 10 lepers. “Rise and go,” he told them. “Your faith has made you well.” Then he turned back to Pious Paul, saying, “Let me tell you the story of the good Samaritan.

“A man was attacked by robbers who stripped him of clothes, beat him and left him half dead. A minister passed down this same road, and when he saw the injured man, he crossed to the other side and hurried on. So did a rich man who claimed to serve God. But then a despised Samaritan came by and took pity on the injured man. He bandaged his wounds and put the man on his own donkey and paid an innkeeper to nurse him to health. So which of these three should we follow?”

“Those who had mercy on him,” Pious Paul said promptly.

Jesus nodded. “So go ——”

“I mean the first two,” Pious Paul interjected. “For the Samaritan’s work is unsustainable and sends the wrong message. It teaches travelers to take dangerous roads, knowing that others will rescue them from self-destructive behaviors. This Samaritan also seems to think it right to redistribute money from those who are successful and give it to losers. That’s socialism! Meanwhile, if the rich man keeps his money, he can invest it and create jobs. So it’s an act of mercy for the rich man to hurry on and ignore the robbery victim.”

 “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of Heaven,” Jesus mused to himself. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter heaven.”

“Let me teach you about love, Jesus — tough love!” Pious Paul explained. “You need a sustainable pro-business model. And you need to give people freedom, Jesus, the freedom to suffer misery and poverty.”

“The Lord God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor,” Jesus replied, emphasizing the last two words. Then he turned to a paralyzed beggar at his feet. “Stand up!” Jesus told the man. “Pick up your mat and go home.” As the man danced about joyfully, Pious Paul rolled his eyes dismissively.

“Look, Jesus, you have rare talent, and it should be rewarded,” Pious Paul said. “I have a partner, The Donald, who would like to work with you: He’d set up a lovely hospital, and the rich would come and pay for you to heal them. You’d get a percentage, and it’d be a real money-spinner. Overhead would be minimal because every morning you could multiply some loaves and fishes. You could strike it rich!”

“Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of God,” Jesus said. “But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received comfort.”

“Oh, come on, Jesus,” Pious Paul protested. “Don’t go socialist on me again. Please don’t encourage class warfare. The best way to help the needy is to give public money to the rich. That then inspires the poor to work harder, galvanizes the sick to become healthy, forces the lepers to solve their own problems rather than kick back and depend on others. That’s why any realistic health plan has to focus on providing less coverage for the poor, and big tax benefits for the rich. When millions of people lose health care, that’s when a country is great again!”

“From everyone who has been given much,” Jesus told him, “much will be required.”

“Well, sure, this hospital would have a foundation to do some charity work. Maybe commissioning portraits of The Donald to hang in the entrance. But let’s drop this bleeding heart nonsense about health care as a human right, and see it as a financial opportunity to reward investors. In this partnership, 62 percent of the benefits would go to the top 0.6 percent — perfect for a health care plan.”

Jesus turned to Pious Paul on his left and said: “Be gone! For I was hungry and you gave me no food; I was thirsty, and you gave me no drink; and I was sick, and you did not help me.”127COMMENTS

“But, Lord,” protested Pious Paul of Ryan, “when did I see you hungry or thirsty or sick and refuse to help you? I drop your name everywhere. And I’m pro-life!”

“Truly, I say to you,” Jesus responded, “as you did not help the homeless, the sick — as you did not help the least of these, you did not help me.”

Post-Soviet Russia, Made in the U.S.A.

White fragility, white fear: the crisis of racial identity

Marcus Woolombi Waters in The Guardian

With the US election now decided it’s interesting watching the fallout asking how this could have happened. I read an article last week that provided some insight. “Behind 2016’s Turmoil, a Crisis of White Identity” was written by Amanda Taub and published in the New York Times. It highlighted the rise of white supremacists across the globe under the veil of conservative nationalism.

Taub claims white anxiety has fueled 2016’s political turmoil in the west referencing Britain’s exit from the European Union, Donald Trump’s Republican presidential ascension and the rise of rightwing nationalism in Norway, Hungary, Austria, Germany and Greece.

Michael Ignatieff, a former Liberal party leader in Canada, said that in the west, “what defined the political community” for many years “was the unstated premise that it was white.”

The rejection of racial discrimination has, by extension, created a new, broader international community. The United States has had their first black president, London a Muslim mayor and Melbourne a Chinese lord mayor. But rather than advancement many whites feel a painful loss and it is here we are seeing the rise of Trump.

Meanwhile across the west we see hate against Muslims, refugees and ethnic minorities with the racist catch cries, “I want my country back,” “we are full,” “Australia for Australians,” and, of course, “let’s make America great again.” Lecturer and author Robin DiAngelo, calls this movement “white fragility,” the stress white people feel in trying to understand they are not special and are just another race like any other.

White fragility leads to feelings of insecurity, defensiveness, even threat. It creates a backlash against those perceived as the “other.” One example is terrorism seen as an act of people of colour, but never perpetrated by white people.

Remember the mass murder in the US city of Charleston, where a white man killed nine black people in a church, seen to be motivated by depression, alienation and mental illness – not terrorism.

In Brisbane, Australia, again depression was cited as the cause when an Indian bus driver, Manmeet Alisher, 29, was burned alive by a white man. Queensland police and media were quick to suggest, one, the attack was not terrorism and two, not racially motivated. Could you imagine if it was a man of colour killing a white man on public transport?

India’s prime minister Narendra Modi even called Malcolm Turnbull to express concern felt in India over Alisher’s death, in light of the racially-motivated attacks on Indian students recently in Australia. But again these attacks were also denied as being racially motivated.

Consider the task force established in Kalgoorlie following the tragic death of Aboriginal teenager Elijah Doughty, who was run down by a 55-year-old white man. The task force is focusing on 30 “at risk families” rather than attempting to close down websites that Debbie Carmody from the Tjuma Pulka Media Aboriginal Corporation says, “incite violence, and murder towards Wongatha youth, and literally tell people to go out and kill”.

Colin Barnett, premier of Western Australia, said that a new safe house would likely offer young children somewhere to go to late at night “if their parents aren’t around or they’re not capable at the time”. The undercurrent of racism within the comment takes away from the circumstances of Doughty’s death suggests problems associated towards Aboriginal families instead.

Kalgoorlie’s mayor John Bowler went as far to say “social problems” in his town “begin with Aboriginal parents”, while claiming that each generation of Aboriginal people is “worse than the one before”.

Kalgoorlie is home of the biggest open pit mine in Australia where its website proudly claims it donates $460m to the local community each year. So why are our people not benefiting from such support? I will tell you who is benefiting – the local Golf Club that just had a $10m renovation approved by the local council.

As stated by Mick Gooda, co-chair of the royal commission into the detention of children in the NT, such mining towns do nothing to lift the quality of life of our people, instead establishing Aboriginal fringe communities out of town “like we’ve got in places like Kalgoorlie, Darwin and Alice Springs”.

It’s the same in Port Hedland, Australia’s largest distribution centre for iron ore where in March 2016 a record of 39.6m tons was exported. Port Hedland boasts $1m bungalows and apartment blocks, but in South Hedland, where Ms Dhu infamously died in custody our people continue to live in squalor and poverty.

As a young Kamilaroi I witnessed the same apartheid (let’s start calling it for what it is) practised when I visited the Aboriginal community of Toomelah just down the road from Goondiwindi. Rather than identify the problem, columnists like Andrew Bolt refuse to engage with the disadvantages faced by Aboriginal communities.

Only recently in his blog for the Herald Sun, Andrew Bolt published “How activists use Aborigines to censor debate” where the blog stated the Human Rights Commission was “disgraceful” and the Racial Discrimination Act as “sinister”, when writing about the Bill Leak cartoon. The blog went on to add, “so many journalists are on the side of the censors, attacking the free speech they should be defending to the death”.

The anger against “censorship” by the white privileged is explained by Amanda Taub who writes in her article: “For many western whites, opportunities for reaching the top of the hill seem unattainable. So their identity, their whiteness feels under threat and more important than ever.”

In other words, if you were supported for the majority of your life in a world that reinforced whiteness, settlement and colonisation of great white pioneers via invasion and genocide, whites as superior and blacks as inferior and in need of civilisation, rather than embrace a deconstruction of the truth, you become fearful.

'Racist' cartoon stokes debate over treatment of Indigenous Australians



And because the foundations of white identity were based on denial and non-truths rather than acceptance, you fear this “truth” will destroy or diminish an identity you cherish, and because you have no understanding of a world beyond whiteness, you have no culturally acceptable way to articulate what you perceive as a crisis.

In watching the destruction of Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and other third world nations of colour around the world at the hands of white developed countries, the days of thinking of domestic terrorism as the work of a few Klansmen or belligerent skinheads are over.

As Morris Dee and J. Richard Cohen wrote in the New York Times in their 2015 article “White Supremacists Without Borders”: “We know Islamic terrorists are thinking globally, and we confront that threat. We’ve been too slow to realise that white supremacists are doing the same.”

They are just better organised, resourced and firmly embedded into our institutions and structures.

It took Barack Obama to crush the Brexit fantasy

Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian

The US president destroyed one of the Vote Leave campaign’s core arguments, ending a week that may define the referendum debate

‘The president spelled out that America has no intention of forming some new, closer relationship with a Brexited Britain … it would be at ‘the back of the queue’ if it sought to agree a new treaty with the US.’ Illustration: Nate Kitch


No wonder they were desperate that he keep his mouth shut. At his podium in Downing Street Barack Obama flattered his hosts, paid lip service to the notion that the referendum on British membership of the European Union on 23 June is a matter for the British people – and then calmly ripped apart the case for Brexit.

It was the Vote Leavers’ worst nightmare. For years – no, decades – the anti-EU camp has suggested that Britain’s natural habitat is not among its continental neighbours but in “the Anglosphere”, that solar system of English-speaking planets which revolves around the United States. Break free from Brussels and we could embrace our kindred spirits in Sydney, Toronto and especially New York, Washington and Los Angeles. The Brexit camp has long been like the man who dreams of leaving his wife for another woman, one who really understands him.

Barack Obama: Brexit would put UK 'back of the queue' for trade talks



Obama is that other woman. And today he told the outers their fantasies were no more than that. First in print and then, more explicitly, in person he spelled out that America has no intention of forming some new, closer relationship with a Brexited Britain. On the contrary, a post-EU Britain would be at “the back of the queue” if it sought to agree its own, new trade treaty with the US.

America, he told his British audience – hence his use of “queue”, not “line” – likes the fact that Britain is already married: it works out really well for all three parties involved. His message was unambiguous. Don’t rush into a hasty divorce because you think we’re waiting for you with open arms. We’re not.

At a stroke, he had crushed not only a core part of the leavers’ economic argument – that it’ll be a breeze for Britain to exit the EU and trade just as prosperously as a solo nation – but something bigger: the notion that a brighter, non-European future beckons. Obama burst that bubble.

He also explained that of course he had the right to speak, despite Brexiteer Liam Fox’s letter signed by 100 MPs urging him to stay out of the EU debate. As Obama put it, since the leavers are offering “an opinion about what the US is going to do, I thought you might want to hear an opinion from the president of the United States on what the US is going to do”. And the opinion he gave was devastating.

That he had every right to speak is obvious, by the leavers’ own logic. He and the country he leads have been invoked as central to the alternative utopia that awaits us on Brexit. If he wants to tell us that utopia is an illusion, we need to hear it.

Hence the Brexiteers’ fury. They know how badly Obama’s words undermine their case, especially after what has been a week from hell for the out campaign. One that ended in the absurdity of a Ukip MEP, Mike Hookem, lurching into full-bore anti-Americanism, winding the clock back to 1939 to argue that the US had it in for us even then, seeing the second world war as a way of “smashing the UK’s influence in the world”. When a party defined by its loathing of the EU finds itself attacking the US, you know things have gone awry.

The same is true of Boris Johnson’s Sun screed, which dipped into Donald Trump’s Bumper Book of Political Wisdom to suggest that the “half-Kenyan” president cannot be trusted because he is filled with “ancestral” loathing of Britain.

What an interesting choice of word that “ancestral” was. Not “post-colonial”, which would have located this supposed antipathy in the 20th century, but “ancestral” to be run alongside “half-Kenyan”. It was a reminder of the brilliant slapdown Obama once issued to Trump, when the tycoon was demanding to see Obama’s birth certificate. From the podium at the 2011 White House correspondents’ dinner, Obama said he could go one better and show his birth video. He promptly played a clip from the Lion King, of Simba the newborn cub held aloft – as graceful a way of calling out a racist as one can imagine.

This, incidentally, is where the contortions of Brexit have left Johnson. It may still be true that the London mayor’s decision to back Vote Leave – when his elastic relationship with principle could just as easily have sprung the other way – was politically smart, all but guaranteeing the backing of the Eurosceptic Tory selectorate when they choose a successor to David Cameron. But it’s extracting a price.

Once Johnson promised to be the face of metropolitan inclusivity, a Tory able to reach non-Tories by carrying less of their nasty party baggage. Yet this campaign is stripping away that gloss, reminding us that it was always a fake. Recall that Johnson once spoke of “piccaninnies” and wrote of African men with “watermelon smiles”. In the Spectator in 2002, he declared of Africa: “The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more.”

Every day he spends tag-teaming with Nigel Farage – who repeated the mayor’s “half-Kenyan” line – risks trashing the Boris brand, defining Johnson as less a future prime minister than a figure of the fringes, less a lovable maverick than a rather unpleasant oddball.

But it’s the wider Vote Leave campaign that has found itself in the wrong place. An anti-EU movement can’t also be anti-US, not without looking as if it hates everyone. Nor is it good to pit yourself against an American president who, whatever his domestic standing, remains in high esteem in Britain and Europe. It’s just too irresistibly tweetable to ask: if Obama’s for remain, and Trump and Le Pen are for leave, whose side are you on?

Above all, the core case advanced by the leavers on the US is flawed. Fox and others say Obama is a hypocrite because the US would never accept for itself the limitations on sovereignty demanded of Britain by the EU. But the comparison is silly. Britain is strong and rich, but it is also a relatively small country adjacent to a continent. The US virtually is a continent.

What makes sense for one would not make sense for the other. Besides, as Obama explained in Downing Street, the US does trim its sovereignty when it suits its purposes: it agrees to be bound by the trade rulings of the World Trade Organisation and Nafta, even if that means Congress is forced to back down on its own decisions.

All told, the Obama visit has been one of those episodes that say rather more than was ever intended. It says that this president retains a lustre even now, eight years on – one that only grows as you contemplate the contest to take his place. It says that, for all of the remain campaign’s problems, Leave now has to rebuild – after a dreadful seven days that began with Treasury numbers showing Brexit will make Britons poorer, and ended with a surgical evisceration from the world’s most powerful man.

And it said something about Britain’s relationship with the US. Ever needy to hear that we’re still special to the Americans, to hear that their president loves our queen and loves our talisman, Winston Churchill, we still listen to them – even when they tell us there’s no future for just the two of us together, that we need to stay in the marriage we’re in, even if sometimes it feels a little loveless.

How corruption revealed in Panama Papers opened the door to Isis and al-Qaida

Patrick Cockburn in The Independent

Who shall doubt 'the secret hid

Under Cheops' pyramid'

Was that the contractor did

Cheops out of several millions?

The message of Rudyard Kipling's poem is that corruption is always with us and has not changed much down the ages. There is some truth in this, but degrees of corruption greatly matter, as the Cheops would have found to his cost if he tried to build his pyramid in modern Iraq instead of ancient Egypt. The project would cost him billions rather than millions - and he would be more likely to end up with a hole in the ground than anything resembling a pyramid.

Three years ago I was in Baghdad after it had rained heavily, driving for miles through streets that had disappeared under grey-coloured flood water combined with raw sewage. Later I asked Shirouk Abayachi, an advisor to the Ministry of Water Resources, why this was happening and she said that "since 2003, $7bn has been spent to build a new sewage system for Baghdad, but either the sewers weren't built or they were built very badly". She concluded that "corruption is the key to all this".

Anybody discussing the Panama Papers and the practices of the law firm Mossack Fonseca should think about the ultimate destination of the $7bn not spent on the Baghdad drainage system. There will be many go-betweens and middle men protecting anyone who profited from this huge sum, but the suspicion must be that a proportion of it will have ended up in offshore financial centres where money is hidden and can be turned into legally held assets.

There is no obvious link between the revelations in the Panama Papers, the rise of Islamic State and the wars tearing apart at least nine countries in the Middle East and North Africa. But these three developments are intimately connected as ruling elites, who syphon off wealth into tax havens and foreign property, lose political credibility. No ordinary Afghans, Iraqis and Syrians will fight and die for rulers they detest as swindlers. Crucial to the rise of Isis, al-Qaida and the Taliban in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan is not their own strength and popularity, but the weakness and unpopularity of the governments to which they are opposed.

Kipling was right in believing that there has always been corruption, but since the early 1990s corrupt states have often mutated into kleptocracies. Ruling families and the narrow coteries around them have taken a larger and larger share of the economic cake.

In Syria since the turn of the century, for instance, the rural population and the urban poor no longer enjoyed the limited benefits they had previously received under an equally harsh but more egalitarian regime. By 2011, President Bashar al-Assad's first cousin Rami Makhlouf was reported to be a dominant player in 60 per cent of the Syrian economy and to have a personal worth of $5 billion.

In Iraq earlier this year, a financial specialist, who wished to remain anonymous, said that the government of prime minister Haider al-Abadi held files on corrupt individuals, including "one politician who has amassed a fortune of $6 billion through corrupt dealings."

The danger of citing extreme examples of corruption from exotic and war-ravaged countries like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria is that these may sound like events happening on another planet. But the political and economic systems in Iraq and Afghanistan were devised under the tutelage of the US and allies like Britain. They were proponents of free market economics which in the West may increase inequality and benefit the wealthy, but in Kabul and Baghdad were a license to steal by anybody with power.

Neo-liberal economists have a lot to answer for. A few days after Isis had captured Mosul in June 2014, I was in Baghdad and asked a recently retired four-star Iraqi general why the much larger and better-equipped Iraqi army had been defeated so swiftly and humiliatingly. He replied that the explanation was: "Corruption! Corruption! Corruption!"
He added that this was pervasive and had begun when the US was building a new Iraqi military after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, when the American commanders had insisted on out-sourcing food and other supplies to private contractors. These businessmen and the army officers soon determined that, if the Iraqi government was paying money to feed and equip a battalion of 600 men, but its real strength was only 150, they could pocket the difference. So profitable was this arrangement that by 2014 all officers' jobs were for sale and it cost $200,000 to become a colonel and up to $2m a general in charge of a division.

Blatant corruption at the top in Kabul and Baghdad has been frequently reported over the years, though nothing much seems to change. But it is a mistake to imagine that this was simply the outcome of a culture of corruption specific to Afghanistan and Iraq. The most corrupt ministers were appointed and the most crooked contracts signed at a time when US officials were the real decision-makers in Baghdad.

For example, the entire military procurement budget of $1.2 billion was effectively stolen in 2004/5 when the Defence Ministry was substantially under US control, raising questions of the competence, or even collusion, of the US authorities.

The situation has got worse, not better. "I feared seven or eight years ago that Iraq would become like Nigeria," said one former minister in 2013, "but in fact it is far worse."

He cited as evidence a $1.3bn contract signed by a minister with one foreign company that had only a nominal existence - and a second company that was bankrupt. This took place in a country in which one third of the labour force is unemployed, and, if the underemployed are taken into account, the figure rises to over half.
The use of offshore financial centres by the moneyed elite in the oil states and much of the rest of the world is not always to avoid taxes which they would not pay if they kept the money at home, but in some cases to conceal what they have stolen and later to legally launder it.
Some of this can be done by buying property in places like Baghdad, which explains why property prices in that dangerous city are as high as London. But it is safer and better to buy property in London itself, something that will ultimately require the services of a company like Mossack Fonseca - though these services will be far removed from the original toxic source of the investment.

The Panama Papers give insight into the names and mechanisms through which globalised elites hide their wealth and avoid paying tax on it. Commentators now predict that popular disgust with political establishments will benefit radical leaders like Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK.

What they do not see is that the way in which the detachment of interests of elites from the countries they rule has already produced states that have failed or are failing, or are wracked by conflict and war.

A cartel of EU elites -

A shocking revelation on the EU troika - interview with Yannis Varoufakis

‘Quarterly capitalism’ is short-term, myopic, greedy and dysfunctional

Will Hutton in The Guardian


It has been obvious for years that British capitalism is profoundly dysfunctional. In 1970, £10 of every £100 of profit was distributed to shareholders: today, under intense pressure from short-term owners, companies pay out £70. Investment, innovation and productivity have slumped. Few new companies grow to any significant size before they are taken over.

Exports have stagnated. The current account deficit is at record proportions. The purpose of companies now is not to do great things, solve great problems or scale up great solutions –why capitalism is potentially the best economic system – it is to become payolas for their disengaged owners and pawns in the next big deal or takeover. Not only the British economy suffers – this process has become the major driver of rising inequality, low pay and insecurity in the workplace as management teams are forced to treat workers as costly commodities rather than allies in business building.
Regular readers of this column will be familiar with the refrain, and the stubborn resistance from the British mainstream. There is absolutely nothing wrong at all with the British private sector, runs the Conservative argument: to the extent the British economy does have problems they are rooted entirely in taxation, regulation, unions and government. But in a week when the Financial Times – a great British asset and embodiment of the best of our journalism – has been sold to Nikkei for no better reason than to support Pearson’s short-term share price, powerful and public criticism of the way British capitalism operates has come from an unexpected quarter.

Last year, the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, called on firms to have a greater “sense of their responsibilities for the system”, in particular the social contract on which market capitalism’s long-term dynamism depends. On Friday’s Newsnight, the chief economist of the Bank of England, Andy Haldane, built on the governor’s concerns. He began with the seven-fold increase in the proportion of profit distributed to shareholders in dividends and bought-back shares over the last 45 years, which he said necessarily “leaves less for investment”. The explanation was simple: British (and indeed American) company law “puts the shareholder at front and centre. It puts the short-term interest of shareholders in a position of primacy when it comes to running the firm.” He thought company law that placed shareholders on a more equal footing with other stakeholders – workers, customers, clients – would work better. Dare I say it – stakeholder capitalism?

He damned the way the public limited company has developed. “The public limited company model has served the world well from a growth perspective. But you can always have too much of a good thing. The nature of shareholding today is fundamentally different than what it was a generation ago. The average share was held by the average shareholder, just after the war, for around six years. Today, that average share is held by the average shareholder for less than six months. Of course, many shareholders these days are holding shares for less than a second.”

In New York, at almost exactly the same time Newsnight was transmitting its interview with Andrew Haldane, Hillary Clinton was speaking from the same script, attacking what she called “quarterly capitalism”. “American business needs to break free from the tyranny of today’s earning report so they can do what they do best: innovate, invest and build tomorrow’s prosperity,” the Democratic presidential front runner declared. “It’s time to start measuring value in terms of years – or the next decade – not just next quarter.” She does not want to reinvent the public limited company, but she proposed the most far-reaching tax reforms of any Democrat presidential nominee to change the incentives for shareholders and executives alike. In American terms this is a revolution.

It is long overdue and the argument is beginning to get traction in the US. Free-market apologists insist that the more cash is handed back to shareholders, then the more they have to invest in innovation. The stock market is doing its job: promoting efficiency. The trouble is that everyone can see it’s 100% wrong. The market is hopelessly inefficient, greedy and myopic. When Larry Page and Sergey Brin floated Google, they took care to insulate the company from “quarterly capitalism”: they accorded their shares as Google’s founders 10 times the voting rights in order to protect their capacity to innovate from the stock market – what they considered Google’s real business purpose.

From robots to self-driving cars, from virtual reality glasses to investigating artificial intelligence, Google is now one of the most innovative firms on Earth. Meanwhile the typical US Plc, like its counterpart in Britain, is hunkering down, investing and innovating ever less and distributing more cash to shareholders for the reasons Haldane explains. Far from market efficiency, the whole system is undermining the legitimacy of capitalism.

But bit by bit influential voices such as Haldane’s are having the nerve to declare the Anglo-American system does not work. A rich collection of reflections and commentary edited by Diane Carney (Mark Carney’s wife) was published after London’s Inclusive Capitalism conference last month. Yet, except for former business secretary Vince Cable, no leading British politician has entered the lists. It will be intriguing how George Osborne reacts: one instinct will be to sack Carney and Haldane, as he has done Martin Wheatley, the head of the Financial Conduct Authority, for being too tough on the City. Another will be to co-opt the argument for the one nation Tory cause before the Labour party does.

He needn’t worry too much. One of the reasons that Tony Blair dropped his advocacy for stakeholder capitalism back in 1996 after the publication of The State We’re In was because too many leftwing Labour MPs took the Jeremy Corbyn line that the party’s mission was to socialise capitalism rather than reform it, while too many rightwing Labour MPs such as Peter Mandelson and Alistair Darling were terrified of upsetting business, as today, it seems, is Liz Kendall. He had zero internal political support, business was distrustful and the Tories were accusing him of returning to 1970s corporatism. Today the Bank of England and the likely next US president are supporters. Will one of the contenders for the Labour leadership have the courage to make the case? So far, they have all been mute. If Andy Haldane has done nothing else, he will have dramatised the poverty of today’s thinking about capitalism – in both main political parties.

Who is bombing whom in the Middle East?

Robert Fisk in The Independent

Let me try to get this right. The Saudis are bombing Yemen because they fear the Shia Houthis are working for the Iranians. The Saudis are also bombing Isis in Iraq and the Isis in Syria. So are the United Arab Emirates. The Syrian government is bombing its enemies in Syria and the Iraqi government is also bombing its enemies in Iraq. America, France, Britain, Denmark, Holland, Australia and – believe it or not – Canada are bombing Isis in Syria and Isis in Iraq, partly on behalf of the Iraqi government (for which read Shia militias) but absolutely not on behalf of the Syrian government.

The Jordanians and Saudis and Bahrainis are also bombing Isis in Syria and Iraq because they don’t like them, but the Jordanians are bombing Isis even more than the Saudis after their pilot-prisoner was burned to death in a cage. The Egyptians are bombing parts of Libya because a group of Christian Egyptians had their heads chopped off by what might – notionally – be the same so-called Islamic State, as Isis refers to itself. The Iranians have acknowledged bombing Isis in Iraq – of which the Americans (but not the Iraqi government) take a rather dim view. And of course the Israelis have several times bombed Syrian government forces in Syria but not Isis (an interesting choice, we’d all agree). Chocks away!

It amazes me that all these warriors of the air don’t regularly crash into each other as they go on bombing and bombing. And since Lebanon’s Middle East Airlines is the only international carrier still flying over Syria – but not, thank heavens, over Isis’s Syrian capital of Raqqa – I’m even more amazed that my flights from Beirut to the Gulf have gone untouched by the blitz boys of so many Arab and Western states as they career around the skies of Mesopotamia and the Levant.

The sectarian and theological nature of this war seems perfectly clear to all who live in the Middle East – albeit not to our American chums. The Sunni Saudis are bombing the Shia Yemenis and the Shia Iranians are bombing the Sunni Iraqis. The Sunni Egyptians are bombing Sunni Libyans, it’s true, and the Jordanian Sunnis are bombing Iraqi Sunnis. But the Shia-supported Syrian government forces are bombing their Sunni Syrian enemies and the Lebanese Hezbollah – Shia to a man – are fighting the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s Sunni enemies, along with Iranian Revolutionary Guards and an ever-larger number of Afghan Shia men in Syrian uniforms.

And if you want to taste the sectarianism of all this, just take a look at Saudi Arabia’s latest request to send more Pakistani troops to protect the kingdom (and possibly help to invade Yemen), which came from the new Saudi Crown Prince and Defence Minister Mohammed bin Salman who at only 34 is not much older than his fighter pilots. But the Saudis added an outrageous second request: that the Pakistanis send only Sunni Muslim soldiers. Pakistani Shia Muslim officers and men (30 per cent of the Pakistani armed forces) would not be welcome.

It’s best left to that fine Pakistani newspaper The Nation – and the writer Khalid Muhammad – to respond to this sectarian demand. “The army and the population of Pakistan are united for the first time in many years to eliminate the scourge of terrorism,” Muhammad writes. But “the Saudis are now trying to not only divide the population, but divide our army as well. When a soldier puts on a uniform, he fights for the country that he calls home, not the religious beliefs that they carry individually… Do they (the Saudis) believe that a professional military like Pakistan… can’t fight for a unified justified cause? If that is the case then why ask Pakistan to send its armed forces?”

It’s worth remembering that Pakistani soldiers were killed by the Iraqi army in the battle for the Saudi town of Khafji in 1991. Were they all Sunnis, I wonder?

And then, of course, there are the really big winners in all this blood, the weapons manufacturers. Raytheon and Lockheed Martin supplied £1.3bn of missiles to the Saudis only last year. But three years ago, Der Spiegel claimed the European Union was Saudi Arabia’s most important arms supplier and last week France announced the sale of 24 Rafale fighter jets to Qatar at a cost of around £5.7bn. Egypt has just bought another 24 Rafales.

It’s worth remembering at this point that the Congressional Research Services in the US estimate that most of Isis’s budget comes from “private donors” in – you guessed it – Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE and Kuwait.

But blow me down if the Yanks are back to boasting. More than a decade after “Mission Accomplished”, General Paul Funk (in charge of reforming the Iraqi army) has told us that “the enemy is on its knees”. Another general close to Barack Obama says that half of the senior commanders in Isis have been liquidated. Nonsense. But it’s worth knowing just how General Pierre de Villiers, chief of the French defence staff, summed up his recent visits to Baghdad and Iraqi Kurdistan. Iraq, he reported back to Paris, is in a state of “total decay”. The French word he used was “decomposition”. I suspect that applies to most of the Middle East.

On Yemen - The US isn’t winding down its wars – it’s just running them at arm’s length

Seumas Milne in The Guardian

So relentless has the violence convulsing the Middle East become that an attack on yet another Arab country and its descent into full-scale war barely registers in the rest of the world. That’s how it has been with the onslaught on impoverished Yemen by western-backed Saudi Arabia and a string of other Gulf dictatorships.

Barely two weeks into their bombardment from air and sea, more than 500 have been killed and the Red Cross is warning of a “catastrophe” in the port of Aden. Where half a century ago Yemenis were tortured and killed by British colonial troops, Houthi rebels from the north are now fighting Saudi-backed forces loyal to the ousted President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi. Up to 40 civilians sheltering at a UN refugee camp in the poorest country in the Arab world were killed in a single Saudi air attack last week.

Somalia lends support to Saudi-led fight against Houthis in Yemen

 

Read more

But of course the US and Britain are standing shoulder to shoulder with the Saudi intervention. Already providing “logistical and intelligence” support via a “joint planning cell”, the US this week announced it is stepping up weapons deliveriesto the Saudis. Britain’s foreign secretary, Phillip Hammond, has promised to “support the Saudi operation in every way we can”.

The pretext for the Saudi war is that Yemen’s Houthi fighters are supported by Iran and loyal to a Shia branch of Islam. Hadi, who was installed after a popular uprising as part of a Saudi-orchestrated deal and one-man election in 2012, is said to be the legitimate president with every right to call on international support.

In reality, Iran’s backing for the homegrown Houthis seems to be modest, and their Zaidi strand of Islam is a sort of halfway house between Sunni and Shia. Hadi’s term as transitional president expired last year, and he resigned in January before fleeing the country after the Houthi takeover of the Yemeni capital Sana’a. Compare Hadi’s treatment with the fully elected former president of Ukraine, whose flight from Kiev to another part of the country a year ago was considered by the western powers to have somehow legitimised his overthrow, and it’s clear how elastic these things can be.

But the clear danger of the Saudi attack on Yemen is that it will ignite a wider conflagration, intensifying the sectarian schism across the region and potentially bring Saudi Arabia and Iran into direct conflict. Already 150,000 troops are massed on the Yemeni border. Pakistan is under pressure to send troops to do Riyadh’s dirty work for it. The Egyptian dictator Abdel Fatah al-Sisi has said he will despatch troops to fight in Yemen “if necessary”.

The Houthi uprising, supported by parts of the army and Hadi’s predecessor as president, has its roots in poverty and discrimination, and dates back to the time of the US-British invasion of Iraq more than a decade ago. But Yemen, which has a strong al-Qaida presence, has also been the target of hundreds of murderous US drone attacks in recent years. And the combination of civil war and external intervention is giving al-Qaida a new lease of life.

For the Saudis, Yemen is about enforcing their control of the Arabian peninsula and their leadership of the Sunni world

The idea that the corrupt tyranny of Saudi Arabia, the sectarian heart of reaction in the Middle East since colonial times, and its fellow Gulf autocracies – backed by the Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu – are going to bring stability, let alone freedom, to the people of Yemen is beyond fantasy. This is the state, after all, that crushed the popular uprising in Bahrain in 2011, that funded the overthrow of Egypt’s first elected president in 2013, and has sponsored takfiri jihadi movements for years with disastrous consequences.

For the Saudis, the war in Yemen is about enforcing their control of the Arabian peninsula and their leadership of the Sunni world in the face of Shia and Iranian resurgence. For the western powers that arm them to the hilt, it’s about money, and the pivotal role that Saudi Arabia plays in protecting their interests in the oil and gas El Dorado that is the Middle East.

Since the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan, the US and its allies are reluctant to risk boots on the ground. But their military interventions are multiplying. Barack Obama has bombed seven mainly Muslim countries since he became US president. There are now four full-scale wars raging in the Arab world (Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen), and every one of them has involved US and wider western military intervention. Saudi Arabia is by far the largest British arms market; US weapons sales to the Gulf have exceeded those racked up by George Bush, and last week Obama resumed US military aid to Egypt.

What has changed is that, in true imperial fashion, the west’s alliances have become more contradictory, playing off one side against the other. In Yemen, it is supporting the Sunni powers against Iran’s Shia allies. In Iraq, it is the opposite: the US and its friends are giving air support to Iranian-backed Shia militias fighting the Sunni takfiri group Isis. In Syria, they are bombing one part of the armed opposition while arming and training another.

A tilt towards Iran can be offset with war in Yemen or Syria. Something similar can be seen in Latin America

The nuclear deal with Iran – which the Obama administration pushed through in the teeth of opposition from Israel and the Gulf states – needs to be seen in that context. The US isn’t leaving the Middle East, as some imagine, but looking for a more effective way of controlling it at arm’s length: by rebalancing the region’s powers, as the former MI6 officer Alastair Crooke puts it, in an “equilibrium of antagonisms”.

So a tilt towards Iran can be offset with war in Yemen or Syria. Something similar can be seen in US policy in Latin America. Only a couple of months after Obama’s historic opening towards Cuba last December, he signed an order declaring Cuba’s closest ally, Venezuela, “an unusual and extraordinary threat to US national security” and imposed sanctions over alleged human rights abuses.

Those pale into insignificance next to many carried out by the US government itself, let alone by some of its staunchest allies such as Saudi Arabia. There’s no single route to regime change, and the US is clearly hoping to use the opportunity of Venezuela’s economic problems to ratchet up its longstanding destabilisation campaign.

But it’s a game that can also go badly wrong. When it comes to US support for Saudi aggression in Yemen, that risks not only breaking the country apart but destabilising Saudi Arabia itself. What’s needed is a UN-backed negotiation to end the Yemeni conflict, not another big power-fuelled sectarian proxy war. These calamitous interventions have to be brought to an end.

The World Today - VENEZUELA

Analysis of Obama's decision to label Venezuela a security threat to the USA

The Role of the IMF in the world

The Shock Doctrine - A documentary on the book by Naomi Klein

Important Health Warning

As many as 8 lakh international students, including about 96,000 Indian students, are at a huge disadvantage in the USA for no health insurance will pay more than 80 percent of their medical bills—that too after a one-time deductible of $500 (Rs 30,000) on first visit to a clinic.

ABHIJIT MAZUMDAR in Outlook India

Dushyant Kumar, a student at the University of Illinois in the U.S., was having bouts of intermittent spasms in his stomach but a visit to the university hospital made him double up in pain on learning about staggering amount of money he would have to spend on medical tests. As an international student, Kumar said, “Despite having student health insurance cover, I was supposed to shell out $600 (Rs 36,000) for only an ultrasound.” 

Healthcare remains a concern for Indian students as well as citizens of the U.S. While U.S. citizens have health insurance cover that would pay a substantial portion of their medical bills, as many as 8 lakh international students, including about 96,000 Indian students, are at a huge disadvantage for no health insurance will pay more than 80 percent of their medical bills—that too after a one-time deductible of $500 (Rs 30,000) on first visit to a clinic. 

Procedures such as an ultrasound or a CT scan cost upward of $1000 (Rs 60,000) in the U.S, which essentially means an international student first pays $500 (Rs 30,000) one-time deductible and another $100 (Rs 6,000) as 20 percent of the total cost he is supposed to shoulder. All this after he pays a huge sum for being insured for the year.

Mounting healthcare cost is a bane on a society that has over 5,500 hospitals and 8 lakh doctors to cater to a population of about 31 crore. Sample this—a woman delivering a kid, and that too without complications, will pay about $30,000 (Rs 18 lakh). 

Unlike in India, where purchasing medical insurance is still not in vogue due to a variety of reasons, few in the U.S. can afford the spiralling costs of healthcare without medical insurance whose monthly premium jacks up the expenditure for a family of four by several hundred dollars each month, with a sizeable chunk of the population—totalling over 2 crore—remaining uninsured. This is in sharp contrast to the fact that the U.S. spends over 10 percent of its Gross Domestic Produce (GDP) on healthcare, making it one of the few nations to do so, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

The recently instituted Patient Protection and the Affordable Care Act (PPACA), better known as Obama Care—a derisive reference by President Barak Obama’s trenchant opponents—aims at lowering the uninsured rate and making insurance more affordable for all. However, its real achievement lies in having insurance providers include pre-existing conditions of those seeking insurance cover—a feature that was, until recently, non-existent. Also, the Act makes it mandatory for companies having more than 100 employees to provide them with insurance cover, irrespective of their race, gender and orientation. 

However, it does not change the ground realities for international students, who will still pay 20 percent of their medical bills, and the over 80 lakh illegal immigrants in the country for whom there will be no insurance cover. They would have to fend for themselves, their only solace being their inclusion in emergency care. Vocal support for this Act pales into insignificance in Republican bastions such as Tennessee and Mississippi, where its mere mention triggers angry rebuttals and baleful predictions. “It would make the monthly premium significantly go up,” said Paul Sanderson, a Tennessee-based insurance agent. Also, the one-time deductible that a person pays on first visit to a doctor would increase, he warned. 

But those are not the only issues plaguing the healthcare industry. Getting to see a doctor on time and paying medical bills are hurdles most people face, bringing to the fore broader issues of healthcare and its reform for a country that boasts of cutting-edge technology and state-of-the-art research. Li Chang (name changed), a teacher of library science, landed at the JFK Airport in New York, USA, ill at ease with the weather after visiting her sister in Canada. Suffering acute lung infection, she rang up a doctor for an early appointment to control the bouts of coughing and fits of wheezing as she doubled in distress. “The doctor gave me a date one month down the line, forcing me to fight on—unaided and alone,” Chang said.

Buying a medical insurance is not a guarantee that all will be well. Doctors refusing to treat patients having insurance policies of certain companies, a variety of alternative forms of medicine, including Ayurveda and Homoeopathy, not being included despite recognition from the federal government, many emergency-room doctors not under the ambit of insurance companies and being termed “out-of-network” doctors, and thus having to be paid by patients over and above the hospital bill, have left many with no option but to mortgage their property. Oftentimes, and funnily, though, a person will have to enquire about both the hospital and the doctor he will most likely seek an appointment with being on the right side of his insurance provider. There have been incidents of a doctor not being registered by an insurance provider despite the hospital he was working with being registered with it.

Adding to the woes of the sick is “drive-by doctoring” where patients have had to pay consultants and assistants to doctors, too, at times out of their own pockets after their insurers refused to pay them. These assistants are called in at the discretion of the doctor, often with questionable motives in doing so. This translates into specialists being called in—and increasing the medical bills—when even a resident or a nurse can handle the situation in the emergency room. Sometimes doctors split the profit with such assistants or consultants, experts said.

The politics of the system too has a role to play in the way things are moving in the healthcare industry. With upbeat Republicans gaining control of the Senate, Obama supporters fear that the government-initiated reforms in the health sector may be halted by the Republicans who do not support the health policies of the U.S. government.