Matthew Yglesias's Blog, page 2300

Newt Gingrich's History Of Praise For Donald Berwick's Efforts To Make American Health Care Cost-Effective

Igor Volsky has the scoop:

Don Berwick at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement has worked for years to spread the word that the same systematic approach to quality control that has worked so well in manufacturing could create a dramatically safer, less expensive and more effective system of health and health care.

— Newt Gingrich, August 2000.

Among the elites, there will be great applause for Don Berwick. Among the rest of the country, there will be a very chilly attitude that says is this guy really going to try to impose a British national healthcare system in America? And so, there's a real split emerging in the country. But among the people in the White House, my hunch is almost all of them uniformly agree with what he's doing and uniformly believe that somehow they'll find a way to sell it.

— Newt Gingrich, O'Reilly Factor July 2010 .

You can read more here. Suffice it to say that Gingrich was right the first time.

Talking Feminism and Pop Culture Live in DC on Tuesday

By Alyssa Rosenberg

If you're in Washington on Tuesday and don't have anything to do after work, come out and meet me! I'm doing a panel on feminism and television at the Women's Information Network along with veteran entertainment reporter and American University professor Lorrie Lynch Meier and Howard University's Tia Tyree. The conversation kicks off at 6:30 at 1900 L Street NW, and I imagine it could move to drinks afterwards.

The Decline of Working

Chris Bertram, in the course of denouncing the uselessness of the mainstream neo-liberal sellout so-called left, observes that "in the anglo-american world at least, associated ideas for shorter hours and job sharing are seen as marginal, impractical and extreme."

According to the data series available to me average annual hours worked per employed person is in fact trending downward in Anglophone countries:

It's true that on the European continent average annual hours worked is even lower and there are more explicit anti-work/pro-leisure (or household labor) in place than in Anglophone countries, but the broad trend is cross-national. Over the same period we've also seen the share of the population that's retired go up, and we're seeing people spend more time in school. Even in the belly of the neoliberal beast, in other words, rising hourly productivity manifests itself in part in people spending less of their lives engaged in market production. I'm also not sure I understand what the objection to "keep the masses happy by improving their living standards" is supposed to be. I, for one, would welcome a higher standard of living!

Review: HBO's 'Too Big To Fail'

By Alyssa Rosenberg

Game of Thrones and True Blood may be HBO's hottest shows this summer, but the network's making a big investment in a more grounded direction. It has adaptations of Dick Cheney biographyAngler and 2008 election chronicle Game Change in the pipeline, and is gearing up for Veep, a dark comedy series about an overwhelmed female Vice President, which will air next year. In that environment, HBO's adaptation of Andrew Ross Sorkin's chronicle of the financial crisis, Too Big To Fail, which premieres on the network at 9 PM tonight, is a test of whether HBO can make excellent movies and shows about the inside business of policy and politics—and whether audiences will tune in to watch them.

If Too Big To Fail is any evidence, they certainly ought to. Most movies about the economic crisis focus on the ordinary Americans who have lost their jobs and homes, whether it's Drag Me to Hell, about the inadvisability of foreclosing on a powerful gypsy, or The Company Men, a look at masculinity in the wake of corporate downsizing. The main characters in Too Big To Fail are all secure in their fortunes: they might have to downsize to smaller apartments or give up their commutes by helicopter or NetJet, but they're magnitudes removed from actual desperation. That doesn't mean that the movie isn't dramatic—there are a lot of slammed phones, and a scene of Paulson's staffers listening to him throwing up as yet another deal falls through—but Too Big To Fail can't rely on the immediate relatable suffering of a family losing its home or parents losing their jobs to engage the audience. It has to stand on the strength of its own writing, simultaneously explaining hugely complex financial and legislative negotiations, while also drawing humor and tension out of them.



Most of the time, the movie succeeds. Peter Gould's slimmed down almost 600 pages of actual text in Andrew Ross Sorkin's book into 98 minutes, cutting out characters' biographies, condensing protracted negotiations between Lehman Brothers and potential buyers into single scenes. The movie relies on montages of actual cable reports to provide context, but other than that, and a single scene where Paulson and Jim Wilkinson explain some of the financial instruments involved in the meltdown to Michele Davis to prepare her to brief the press, it mostly trusts the audience to keep up. It's a risk, but with a small, curated audience like HBO's, probably a reasonable gamble. The movie doesn't need to waste time outlining John Thain's compensation history to make him look avaricious when he complains about possible golden parachute limits during the meetings setting up the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

The movie isn't afraid to hammer home its politics in moments like that, or in a scene set during Paulson's trip to China. It begins with a moment of physical comedy when a Chinese official tries to get Paulson to take a miniature Chinese flag. When he won't accept it, the official hands the flag off to a little girl, who Paulson hustles to get out of the frame. Later, over dinner, another official tells Paulson that the Russians approached the Chinese about dumping their investments in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in concert to strike a blow to the American economy. ""The amount of debt your country carries is a terrible vulnerability," the official demurs, delivering a warning. "We declined, respectfully."

And the movie is often very funny. Tony Shaloub as John Mack (just one example of the uniformly excellent casting—my favorite may be Dan Hedaya's brief turn as Barney Frank) grumbles "Here comes goddamn eHarmony," as Tim Geithner tries to force through mergers. Warren Buffett (Ed Asner) debates with his granddaughters over ice cream at Dairy Queen about whether to take a call from Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein. And Paul Giamatti is marvelously twitchy as Ben Bernanke, needling Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson (William Hurt) so he can't even get through breakfast.

But ultimately, it's a tragedy. The movie begins after the government rescue of Bear Stearns, but long after the meltdown had become inevitable. There are no real heroes here: the bankers who assemble to try to save Lehman at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in a roll call reminiscent of a heist movie are really trying to undo the disaster they are all partially responsible for. And at the end, there's just Paulson staring out a window, hoping vainly for the best. That optimism is horribly naive, in retrospect. But if all of HBO's upcoming political projects are this well-designed and -executed, at least we'll reap some good art from national tragedy, works that sharply articulate the policy and political failures of the last decade.

Bibi Netanyahu's Victory

To further the weekend pushback against the idea that Bibi Netanyahu is somehow blundering by showing Barack Obama the back of his hand, read this article in the Hill:

"It would undermine Israel's strategic depth, increasing its vulnerability to both military invasions and the sorts of rocket and missile attacks that Hamas carries out in Gaza," Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), head of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said Friday in a statement. "Doubling down on failed policies will not lead to the changes we need. It's time for the Obama administration to change course."

Rep. Steve Rothman (D-N.J.) delivered a similar message, arguing that reverting the borders would only embolden Hamas to launch more attacks. [...]

Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) echoed that sentiment, saying the 1967 borders "were simply not defensible, and Israel must not be made to return to them."

It's noteworthy that these attacks not only involve misrepresenting what Obama said, but that many of them are coming from members of Barack Obama's party. So in sum what we saw this week is that the President of the United States made it clear that he disagrees with the regional policy of the Israeli government, but despite that disagreement intends to keep Israel as the number one recipient of US foreign aid and that he also intends to put America's diplomatic clout at Israel's disposal in the coming controversy over a Palestinian declaration of statehood. Meanwhile, despite Obama's lack of desire to shift US policy, he's subject to opportunistic political attacks from members of the opposition party, attacks which are echoed rather than rebutted by members of his own political coalition. Meanwhile, despite an overhyped trend toward younger Jewish American adopting more sympathetic views toward Palestinians, the fact of the matter is that the Palestinian cause is deeply and increasingly unpopular in the United States:

The upshot is that with a series of bold strokes following Barack Obama's inauguration, Netanyahu has debunked the Barak/Sharon/Olmert/Livni centrist conventional wisdom that has previously dominated Israeli politics. It turns out that it's not true that Israel needs to be willing to make tactical concessions to the Palestinians or even be polite to the White House in order to retain American support. Israel has a basically free hand to behave as it wishes, taking the pieces of the West Bank it wants. And note that the populist nationalist parties gaining steam in Europe are, as an extension of their anti-immigrant/anti-Muslim views, much more strongly pro-Israel than mainstream European parties.

If liberal American Jews think this strategy is morally wrong (I do!) or that it's a strategic mistake for the United States to go along with it (me too!), that it involves denying sufficient weight to the objective humanity of Palestinians, then we ought to say that. Simply assuming that it can't work is, I think, a slightly naive read of the situation.

The Foreclosure Backlog

If a bank forecloses on a few houses amidst a generally healthy housing market, it repossesses and sells them. Ultimately, the bank recoups a large share of its lending losses, the foreclosed-on family gets out from under an obligation to pay bills it can't afford, and a new family gets a home. But when mass foreclosures hit, you get a glut:

All told, they [i.e., banks] own more than 872,000 homes as a result of the groundswell in foreclosures, almost twice as many as when the financial crisis began in 2007, according to RealtyTrac, a real estate data provider. In addition, they are in the process of foreclosing on an additional one million homes and are poised to take possession of several million more in the years ahead.

Five years after the housing market started teetering, economists now worry that the rise in lender-owned homes could create another vicious circle, in which the growing inventory of distressed property further depresses home values and leads to even more distressed sales. With the spring home-selling season under way, real estate prices have been declining across the country in recent months.

Part of the problem here is simply one of expertise. In principle, there could be such a thing as a firm that owns large swathes of single-family homes and manages and lends them. A bank that forecloses on lots of homes could operate such a firm as an income generating subsidiary. Or it could sell a huge tranche of houses to such a firm. But in practice, this isn't really a business anyone's in. Large-scale rental property management happens overwhelmingly in the small minority of American housing units that are multifamily dwellings. Consequently, we manage to simultaneously have a deficit of homes relative to households and a surplus of homes relative to homebuyers.

'Game of Thrones' Open Thread: The Head That Wears the Crown

By Alyssa Rosenberg

Game of Thrones is a big, complex story about a lot of things: the way gender roles can poison people's lives, the gap between the highest and lowest classes of society, the interaction between religion and magic, medieval debt ceilings. But the most important question both George R. R. Martin's novels and HBO's adaptation is what makes for good leadership, and how to bridge the gap between roles and the people who have the misfortune to fill them.

All season, the show's drawn out how miserable Robert Baratheon is atop the Iron Throne. Tonight, he's smacking his wife for insisting that he's wrong in his role, losing his temper when Cersei tells him "I should wear the armor and you the gown," then confessing to Ned Stark, "See what she does to me, my loving wife. I should not have hit her. That was not…that was not kingly." It's an indication of Robert's unsuitability that he escapes his kingship by foisting the power of his office on a man who, though he is a good and decent person, we know by now is entirely unsuited for it. Ned might be a good Hand, even a good king, in a fairy-tale world, but he governs by ideal, rather than by any sense of the pragmatic. He's more concerned with the quality of process than with outcomes.

Similarly, it's interesting to watch Viserys Targaryen watch his sister, and discover that there's more to kingship than a title. One of my biggest complaints about this adaptation is that so much of Dothraki society and custom's been cut in the television scripts, and I think the scene of Dany eating a stallion's heart would be more powerful if the show had explained why the ritual was important. But seeing Dany do something difficult through Viserys' eyes, and seeing how disconcerted he is by the affection the Dothraki bear her is revealing of how little prepared he is to rule, how little he knows about what makes people loyal.

And the small, contrasting stories of the Mountain and Bronn take that lesson down the societal hierarchy. Grand Maester Pycelle's bewilderment at the news that Gregor Clegane has finally become a mad dog shows what a mistake it is to assume that a title elevates a base man. "Why should he turn brigand?" Pycelle asks plaintively. "The man is an anointed knight." Spiritual rabies, it turns out, is more powerful than an oath. Similarly, when Tyrion bets on a sellsword to champion him in trial by combat, he and the Vale discover how little a title is worth. When he beats her champion, Lysa Arryn complains that "You don't fight with honor." "No," Bronn says matter-of-factly, "he did." Maybe there was a time when men and their roles matched comfortably. But with winter coming, it may be safer to be a misfit or an outlaw.

Reprisals In The New Libya

Sudarsan Raghavan reports for the Washington Post on the fact that civil wars are ugly business:

With Libya essentially divided in half by conflict, the U.S.- and NATO-backed rebels who control much of the east are carrying out what many view as a campaign of retaliation against those once aligned with Gaddafi, according to relatives and rebel commanders and officials. Such targeting raises questions about the character of the government taking shape in eastern Libya and whether it will follow basic principles of democracy and human rights. Moreover, such acts could further deepen divisions in Libya's tribal society and diminish the sort of reconciliation vital for stability in a post-Gaddafi era.

In my view, there's nothing incredibly surprising here and it only "raises questions" in the sense that it's always been kind of unclear what the anti-Gaddafi rebels are all about. But it's not particularly surprising for a new regime that comes to power in a violent struggle to engage in some violent persecutation of members of the old regime. The real problem here is not with the Libyans, but with the conceit in the West that it's possible to undertake a purely "humanitarian" intervention into an ongoing political struggle being waged with military violence.

Disabled Parking Pass Abuse

Kevin Drum requested my take on an interesting LA Times story about abuse of disabled parking permits in Southern California.

As you know, my baseline on this is that a parked car takes up space—which is to say land—and land isn't free. It's especially not free in the Westide of Los Angeles (which contrary to reputation is pretty densely populated) and especially especially not free "in such high-volume parking districts as Beverly Hills' Golden Triangle, downtown's Fashion District and Westwood." But the key thing is that these aren't so much "high-volume parking districts" as they are places where land is expensive and also people want to park. A disabled parking permit affords one privileged access to certain parcels of land. Oftentimes—as, in, say Maine—this is a low-value courtesy to hand out, but in a place like southern California it's quite valuable. And since it's valuable, people want to sell it or lease it to others who might value it.

The problem with the article is that it posits market-priced parking as part of the problem when really it's the essence of the solution:

Under California law, as in most states, cars displaying a disabled placard may park for free for an unlimited time at metered spaces. The placard holder does not have to own or drive the vehicle, but if a relative or friend is using the placard to secure free, unlimited parking, then the placard holder must accompany that person or be within "reasonable proximity."

The law was intended to make it more convenient for individuals with missing or paralyzed extremities, impaired vision or heart, circulatory or lung disease to park conveniently and for as long as necessary to visit doctors or run errands. A disabled placard may be prescribed by, among others, a medical doctor, a nurse practitioner, a certified nurse midwife, a physician's assistant, a chiropractor or an optometrist.

Precisely the point of demand-responsive parking is that anyone should be able to park conveniently for any duration of time. Instead of rationing parking via time limits, you simply charge a market-clearing price for the space. That means it may be very expensive to park for a long time in certain locations, but it's always possible to do so. This system, if properly implemented, changes the question of parking "for individuals with missing or paralyzed extremities, impaired vision or heart, circulatory or lung disease" from one of making exceptions to the rationing regime into one of redistributing economic resources appropriately. What's needed isn't special parking placards for people with a note from a health care professional (apparently 10 percent of California's population has one) but redistribution of income to poor people.

(And, yes, this is my anser to most problems—market prices + redistribute income to poor people = win)

Assuming Netanyahu Knows What He's Doing

Jeffrey Goldberg notes that Benjamin Netanyahu's approach to the US-Israel relationship is inconsistent with the idea that he lives in terror of the Iranian nuclear weapons program:

For decades, Israel has been a bipartisan cause on Capitol Hill. It will remain so for a while, but Netanyahu is, through his pedantic and pinched behavior, helping to weaken Israel's standing among Democrats. Why is this so important? Because Israel has no friends left in the world except for the United States (and in fairer weather, Canada, Australia and Germany). As it moves toward a confrontation with Iran, it needs wall-to-wall support in America. You would think that Netanyahu, who is sincere in his oft-stated belief that Iran poses quite possibly the greatest danger Israel has ever faced, would be working harder than he is to ensure Democratic, and presidential, support, for this cause.

And you can forget Barack Obama and the Democratic Party in this analysis. It's no secret that the Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf are objectively aligned with Israel on the Iran question. Nor is it a secret that said governments can't afford to be publicly seen as lining up with Israel as long as the Palestinian issue is an open sore. Substantial concessions to the Palestinians as part of an effort to build as broad as possible a coalition against Iran seems like a no-brainer.

Unless, that is, you really and truly on the merits don't want to make substantial concessions to the Palestinians. When I went to the Gush Etzion settlement bloc it was clearly a very nice place. If I lived there, I wouldn't want to give up that land any more than Americans want to give their houses back to the Native Americans. Route 443 through the West Bank is a very useful piece of transportation infrastructure, and the people who benefit from it don't want to give it up any more than any other commuters around the world want to give up their infrastructure. The Israeli settlers in and around Hebron are clearly very committed religious believers, who no more want to give up than do the tens of thousands of deeply committed anti-abortion activists around America. "Lets keep this land" isn't a crazy policy agenda. Reluctance to give up land won in a war is a very common national priority. But I think it's time for Americans—and especially American Jews—who don't agree with this priority to stop being puzzled by it.