Aliens Are Not Running the NHS

(((Health care; UK's "orwellian" National Health Service, which is pretty good and which people generally like pretty well; Obama's plan not really comparable to the NHS, in the first place; the debate is not a rational one, anyway; the paranoid style in American politics.)))

Maybe this is why I've tuned out of politics for so long, now. Because it's just so inane. When Sarah Palin can get away with calling the NHS "evil," as if people in the UK wouldn't raise their hands and say, "hey, we can hear you over here." What was she thinking, that the oppressed sick of the UK would rise up and overthrow their Orwellian NHS overlords? "Mr. Brown, tear down these hospitals!" Now we know that everyone in the UK has been to Room 101, because it's clear that they have been brainwashed to think the NHS is good for them.

Unless they're actually right, of course.

But there is a nice collection of articles and op-eds in the Financial Times (that liberal rag) about the current debate in the US and in particular about the comparison of Obamacare (TM) to the NHS. In the latter, they note right off the bat that, on the one hand, Obama's plan is less "socialized" than the NHS (the government insurer won't run the hospitals), and on the other, that US health care is already more "socialized" than people seem to notice (Medicare and Medicaid). It's a very reasonable article.

Alas, as Edward Luce notes in his op-ed, "reasonable people might as well be living on Venus." Noting the conspiracy-prone nature of American politics, on vivid display at the town hall meetings and related protests, Luce concludes:

Their issues are diverse. But their sentiment is common: America’s constitution is being trashed by un-American values. Which brings us to another important strain in US politics that Mr Obama, along with other educated liberals, shares with the Clintons: the belief that the fight is won or lost over the quality of reason.

No amount of contrary evidence will puncture the view that Mr Obama plans to establish “death panels” that will decide which grannies get to live or die. Nor will reason counter the view that countries such as Canada and the UK push their weakest to the back of the queue. “Who will suffer the most when they ration care?” asked Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska on Thursday. “The sick, the elderly and the disabled, of course.”

Mr Obama’s proposals have many flaws. Reasonable people can disagree on whether the reforms would bring down the cost of healthcare, an overriding priority, or sufficiently expand coverage to include the uninsured, a twin, but not always compatible, goal. For all their impact, reasonable people may as well be living on Venus.

The multi-generation battle to reform healthcare will be won or lost over faith rather than reason. The more nuanced Mr Obama appears, the more frenzy it will provoke in his critics. The more he mentions his mother, denied healthcare by the insurance companies when she was dying of cancer, the more progress he will make. What happened to her was un-American, Mr Obama should say. Forget the details of healthcare reform. The side that identifies with American values will get the upper hand.

We can wish as much as we like that reason would win out in such things, but we ignore the fact that it won't at great peril. There is a price to pay for such naiveté, which is naive with respect to both the nature and the efficacy of rationality. Myself, I have not decided whether or not I am willing to pay it, or even whether it is my decision to make. But let's at least be honest about it (which may or may not be the "rational" thing to do).

Credit Democracy

(((Not universal healthcare, but universal credit; except when you marry your dream girl and you didn't know her credit was bad; relationship between credit, democracy, and housing, especially housing bubbles; credit is not the way to provide housing.)))

Ross McKibbin in the LRB. Aspects are quite specific to Britain, but some fundamental observations are not.

The second inescapable obligation is the return of housing to its proper function: as providing places to live in rather than to speculate on. The relationship of housing to politics in both Britain and the United States is not fully understood even by those who transformed it. They don’t understand it because that would require confronting awkward facts about Anglo-American democracy. Fundamentally, private housing has become a compensation for the increasingly gross maldistribution of income. Inadequate incomes mean that large numbers of people don’t have access to the style of life that has always been the ultimate justification of neoliberalism and to which, reasonably enough, they now believe they have a right. What does give them access to it (in the short term) is credit. But credit has to be secured, and that’s what housing does. However, it works only if house prices keep rising and people have enough income to repay debt. When prices stop going up and people can no longer repay what they owe, the financial system begins to disintegrate. This is what has happened; and it has happened because we have replaced something like social democracy with credit democracy, or universal access to credit, and credit is a thoroughly inadequate substitute because sooner or later it has to be repaid. Which means that people’s incomes have to be sufficient to repay it, and in many cases they aren’t. What we have put in place is a dynamically destructive cycle. The number of houses is rationed in order to force up prices [this ir related to a specific Tory policy]; people buy houses in order to secure credit on the strength of those prices; this encourages a heady belief in perpetual profit and thus both risky lending and risky borrowing; this renders the banking system unstable; and lending both to individuals and among banks then collapses. Such a cycle involves a paradox. Since these credit democracies still hold elections, governments are forced to underwrite savers at the expense of creditors and stockholders. And if savers are also small shareholders, as many are, the price they pay for protecting their deposits is the devaluation of their shares. This is absolutely not what was originally intended. The rationing of house building has one other consequence: it means that many cannot acquire somewhere adequate to live.

Could They Just Handle Iraq for Us?

In a hilarious spat between England and the conservative Muslim world that reads like it would be a great Monty Python sketch, "leading Iranian cleric Hojatoleslam Ahmad Khatami said during his Friday prayers sermon in Tehran [that] 'The old and decrepit government of Great Britain should know that the era of their empire is over and today they are a valet in the service of the United States.'"

Zing!

Apparently, this is supposed to provoke the UK into revoking Sir Salman's knighthood and turning him over, because, apparently, that old fatwa is still in effect.

In Karachi more than 1,000 people chanted their support for comments made on Monday by Religious Affairs Minister Ijaz-ul Haq, that Rushdie's knighthood justified suicide bombings.

You have got to be fucking kidding. Right?

This one is stupid, but it's at least funny. Keep thinking Monty Python -- Eric Idle doing a BBC News report:

Pakistani traders offered a reward of 10 million rupees (165,000 dollars) late Thursday for anyone who beheads Rushdie, while a group of Islamic scholars awarded Osama bin Laden their highest honour in a tit-for-tat move.

Nyah-nyah.

Technorati Tags: Iran UK Rushdie Fatwa Pakistan Knighthood

The Strange Career of the Blair Government

Ross McKibbin has written an astute summation of Blair and New Labour for the latest London Review of Books. For both British and American readers the article should provoke somber reflection on the states of their respective countries: Blair's cynical compromises and missed opportunies will remind Americans of nothing so much as the DLC and the failed promise of the Clinton Presidency.

Unfortunately, I doubt Labour or Democratic politicians will learn any of the lessons offered by the results of their party's makeovers.