October 1, 2004
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October 1, 2004
The First Debate
f Americans who tuned into last night's presidential debate were waiting for one of the candidates to catch the other in a fatal error, or leave him stammering, the event was obviously a draw. But if the question was whether Senator John Kerry would appear presidential, whether he could present his positions clearly and succinctly and keep President Bush on the defensive when it came to the critical issue of Iraq, Mr. Kerry delivered the goods.
George W. Bush is famous for fierce discipline when it comes to sticking to a carefully honed, simple message. Last night he reiterated this campaign message once again - that "the world is safer without Saddam Hussein" and that things are, on the whole, going well in Iraq. The confidence with which Mr. Bush has kept hammering home those points has clearly had an effect in the polls, encouraging wavering voters to believe that the president is the one who can best lead the country out of the morass he created.
But last night Mr. Bush sounded less convincing when he had to make his case in the face of Mr. Kerry's withering criticism, particularly his repeated insistence that the invasion had diverted attention from the true center of the war on terror in Afghanistan.
Mr. Kerry found the most effective line of argument when he told the audience that "Iraq was not even close to the center of the war on terror" and that the president had "rushed the war in Iraq without a plan to win the peace." It is the strongest and most sensible critique of the administration's actions. Of course, it left Mr. Kerry open to rejoinders by Mr. Bush that Mr. Kerry had sounded far more warlike about Iraq in his pre-campaign persona. That's a fair comment, and one the senator simply has to live with in this campaign. "As the politics changed, his position changed," Mr. Bush said.
But when Mr. Bush jabbed at the senator with a reminder about his infamous comment on voting for a war appropriation before he voted against it, Mr. Kerry had finally found an effective answer. While saying he had made a mistake in the way he had expressed himself, the senator added: "But the president made a mistake in invading Iraq. Which is worse?"
Both men made errors that appeared to be mainly a matter of misspeaking under the pressure of the moment. But Mr. Kerry scored an important point when the president made a more significant slip and talked about the need to go to war because "the enemy attacked us." The person who sent planes smashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Mr. Kerry reminded the audience, was Osama bin Laden, who was operating from Afghanistan, not Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
Meanwhile, Mr. Bush, whose body and facial language sometimes seemed downright petulant, insisted, again and again, that by criticizing the way the war is being run, Mr. Kerry was sending "mixed signals" that threatened the success of the effort.
Before last night's debate, we worried that the long list of rules insisted on by both camps would create a stilted exchange of packaged sound bites. But this campaign was starved for real discussion and substance. Even a format controlled by handlers and spin doctors seemed like a breath of fresh air.
October 1, 2004
Ending the Cycle of Debt
ne of the biggest reasons that very poor countries can't provide decent education and health care is that they are stuck in a cycle of debt owed to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and regional development banks, much of it dating to the 1970's. Most have paid back in interest more than they originally borrowed but haven't been able to touch the principal, and the cycle continues. Nigeria, for example, borrowed $5 billion, has paid back $16 billion and still owes $32 billion on the same debt.
Everyone involved agrees that this is unjust, and the members of the club of nations known as the G-8, whose finance ministers are meeting in Washington on Friday, have endorsed the concept of debt relief. But concrete proposals have been lacking until very recently. Now the United States is proposing to cancel the debts of the world's 30 poorest countries, and Britain has joined in. The rest of the G-8 should endorse this plan.
One motivation for
President Bush's efforts in this area is that he wants the world to greatly reduce Iraq's debt. He has run into objections from other nations who rightly do not want to see a country like Iraq, with the world's second-largest oil reserves, treated better than, say, Burkina Faso. But Mr. Bush's proposal is also consistent with his longstanding campaign to get the banks to give money, rather than lend it, to the poorest nations.
Current efforts to reduce these debts are failing. The Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative began in 1996, and was expanded in 1999, with the purpose of eliminating $100 billion in debt from dozens of poor nations. But it has been too slow and limited. It has not reduced debts to manageable levels.
Poor countries deserve more help to get out from under loans made by banks awash in oil money; a great deal of that loan money went to corrupt dictators. Today, sub-Saharan Africa pays $1.30 in debt service for every dollar it gets in aid, four times what it spends on health care.
Rich countries have yet to agree on who should pay. Britain has offered to contribute 10 percent of the needed money, but other G-8 countries are not likely to be similarly generous. The Bush administration's solution, that the I.M.F. and the World Bank cover the costs, is the best one. Surprisingly, leaders of those institutions, who had previously opposed financing debt cancellation, now say they are willing. One reason is that the I.M.F. owns more than 103 million ounces of gold, a holdover from the gold standard days that it values at about 10 percent of the market price. By selling a small part of that gold at market rates or by simply revaluing it, the I.M.F. could finance debt cancellation painlessly.
October 1, 2004
Demise of a Blockbuster Drug
erck bowed to the inevitable yesterday when it pulled Vioxx, an arthritis and pain relief drug with $2.5 billion in sales last year, from the market. Evidence that Vioxx may increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes has been accumulating for years, but Merck had always managed to explain it away. The coup de grâce was supplied by new data from a long-term clinical trial that unequivocally showed a small risk of cardiovascular harm in patients taking the drug longer than 18 months. It was the latest twist in a sorry tale of how drugs in this class, known as Cox-2 inhibitors, have been oversold.
Vioxx and its chief rival, Celebrex, made by Pfizer, were originally promoted as an advance over such older anti-inflammatory painkillers as ibuprofen, the main ingredient in Advil and Motrin, and naproxen, Aleve's main ingredient. There is no evidence that the two drugs are any more effective at easing pain, but they were expected to reduce the gastrointestinal side effects, like ulcers and bleeding, that occur in a small percentage of patients on other anti-inflammatory drugs. Thousands of Americans die each year from such gastrointestinal complications. But as it turns out, Vioxx poses an unexpected risk, and the other two drugs in that class, Celebrex and another Pfizer drug, Bextra, have never been clearly shown to reduce ulcers and bleeding.
The belated discovery that Vioxx can be harmful suggests that federal regulators will need to ensure that the other Cox-2 inhibitors, both those on the market and those moving up through the pipeline, are tested long enough to ensure their safety in prolonged use. All anti-inflammatory drugs carry some risk, especially if taken for years at a time.
October 1, 2004
Not in America
mid the shock and shame of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, President Bush vowed that the administration would firmly rededicate the nation to upholding the United Nations' convention against torture. So it was alarming to hear reports from Capitol Hill that the administration supports a draconian proposal to round up foreigners on mere suspicions and send them home to nations notorious for engaging in torture and abuse. The proposal is part of the House's omnibus bill for repairing the national intelligence system - a retrogressive measure that prompted the White House this week to claim to be embracing the Senate's far more sensible version, which stays focused on intelligence agencies.
President Bush himself must make it clear to Congress's Republican leaders that he does, indeed, stand behind the U.N. convention, which bars the deportation of foreigners to homelands found to torture and persecute dissenters. White House officials insisted earlier this week that the administration would oppose poison-pill attachments like this, which could undermine the passage of real reform. But the office of the House speaker, Dennis Hastert, told The Washington Post that the Justice Department fully supports these powers, which would let officials arbitrarily exile suspects who have not been tried or convicted of anything. The burden of proof would be shifted unfairly to the person facing deportation to offer "clear and convincing evidence" that torture would result.
This provision, far from living up to the president's anti-torture vow during the Iraqi prisoner scandal, would undermine it. Human rights groups estimate that hundreds of deportees could be persecuted. Even worse, the measure would be retroactive, creating a fast disposal system for Afghan and Iraqi detainees now wallowing in isolated cells. "If you can't detain them indefinitely, you sure don't want them in America," a spokesman for Mr. Hastert, John Feehery, blithely explained to The Post.
October 1, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Sacrifice and Sabotage
By BOB HERBERT
iola Gregg Liuzzo is not a name that rings many bells anymore.
Mrs. Liuzzo, a white woman who lived in Detroit, was 39 years old, married and the mother of five when she decided, early in 1965, to head south to volunteer her services in the brutal struggle to get blacks the right to vote. She told her husband it was something she just had to do.
She participated in the now legendary march along Route 80, the Jefferson Davis Highway, from Selma to Montgomery, Ala. The march was led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. When it was over, Mrs. Liuzzo offered to drive some of the marchers back to Selma in her two-year-old Oldsmobile.
On the return trip to Montgomery on the night of March 25, Mrs. Liuzzo was accompanied only by a black teenager. On a desolate stretch of the highway, they were overtaken by a car filled with enraged Ku Klux Klansmen and an undercover F.B.I. agent. Mrs. Liuzzo was shot in the face and killed. The car ended up in a ditch. The teenager survived by pretending he was dead.
Last night's presidential debate was an important exercise in American-style democracy. But democracy has no real meaning when citizens qualified to vote are deliberately prevented from casting their ballots, or are intimidated to the point where they are too frightened to vote.
Disenfranchisement comes in many guises. Two professors at the University of Miami did an extensive analysis of so-called voter errors in Miami-Dade County that has not previously been reported on, and that gives us an even more troubling picture of the derailment of democracy in Florida in the 2000 presidential race.
Bonnie Levin, a professor of neurology and psychology, and Robert C. Duncan, a professor of epidemiology, said the purpose of their study was to examine the demographics associated with the uncounted votes in Miami-Dade, a county that disqualified 27,000 votes.
Most of the public attention surrounding Florida's disputed election focused on "under-votes," when machines failed to record a vote for some reason - because of the notorious dimples or hanging chads in punch-card ballots, for example.
Professor Levin told me yesterday that the study convinced her that a much bigger problem in Miami-Dade involved "over-votes," instances in which ballots were reported to have been disqualified because individuals cast votes for more than one presidential candidate.
In their analysis, the professors factored in variables associated with increased errors, such as advanced age or lower education levels. What they found startled them. The instances of voter errors, after taking all relevant variables into account, was much higher - higher than could reasonably have been expected - in predominantly African-American precincts. And, peculiarly, there was an especially high amount of over-voting among blacks.
"Although African-American and Hispanic precincts are similar in terms of household income and education, the African-American precincts have many more over-votes and under-votes," the professors wrote. "Interestingly, they differ strongly in party affiliation (African-American predominantly Democrat, Hispanic more Republican)."
Surprise, surprise.
Dr. Levin said she did not believe these were the kinds of honest errors one would expect to find in an analysis of voting patterns. Something else was at work. "The data show that it was so specific to certain precincts," she said. "It was so targeted toward African-Americans. There was nothing random about it."
She said, "The most important finding was that education was not a predictor for African-Americans."
Now, in the 2004 presidential election, we're already seeing widespread vote-suppression efforts, from the failed attempt by the Jeb Bush administration to use bogus, biased lists of alleged felons to efforts in many parts of the country to prevent the registration of new voters, especially African-Americans.
The people trampling on voting rights today are following the same ugly tradition that resulted in the disenfranchisement of millions of black Americans and led to the murder of Viola Liuzzo and others.
At one time it was the Democratic Party that produced the grandmasters in the art of disenfranchisement. Now that torch has been passed to the Republicans.
President Bush could put a stop to it, but so far he's chosen not to.
October 1, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
America's Lost Respect
By PAUL KRUGMAN
s a result of the American military," President Bush declared last week, "the Taliban is no longer in existence."
It's unclear whether Mr. Bush misspoke, or whether he really is that clueless. But his claim was in keeping with his re-election strategy, demonstrated once again in last night's debate: a president who has done immense damage to America's position in the world hopes to brazen it out by claiming that failure is success.
Three years ago, the United States was both feared and respected: feared because of its military supremacy, respected because of its traditional commitment to democracy and the rule of law.
Since then, Iraq has demonstrated the limits of American military power, and has tied up much of that power in a grinding guerrilla war. This has emboldened regimes that pose a real threat. Three years ago, would North Korea have felt so free to trumpet its conversion of fuel rods into bombs?
But even more important is the loss of respect. After the official rationales for the Iraq war proved false, and after America failed to make good on its promise to foster democracy in either Afghanistan or Iraq - and, not least, after Abu Ghraib - the world no longer believes that we are the good guys.
Let's talk for a minute about Afghanistan, which administration officials tout as a success story. They rely on the public's ignorance: voters, they believe, don't know that even though the United States promised to provide Afghanistan with both security and aid during its transition to democracy, it broke those promises. It has allowed the country to slide back into warlordism - and allowed the Taliban to make a comeback.
These days, Mr. Bush and other administration officials often talk about the 10.5 million Afghans who have registered to vote in this month's election, citing the figure as proof that democracy is making strides after all. They count on the public not to know, and on reporters not to mention, that the number of people registered considerably exceeds all estimates of the eligible population. What they call evidence of democracy on the march is actually evidence of large-scale electoral fraud.
It's the same story in Iraq: the January election has become the rationale for everything we're doing, yet it's hard to find anyone not beholden to the administration who believes that the election, if it happens at all, will be anything more than a sham.
Yet Mr. Bush and his Congressional allies seem to have learned nothing from their failures. If Mr. Bush is returned to office, there's every reason to think that they will continue along the same disastrous path.
We can already see one example of this when we look at the question of torture. Abu Ghraib has largely vanished from U.S. political discussion, largely because the administration and its Congressional allies have been so effective at covering up high-level involvement. But both the revelations and the cover-up did terrible damage to America's moral authority. To much of the world, America looks like a place where top officials condone and possibly order the torture of innocent people, and suffer no consequences.
What we need is an effort to regain our good name. What we're getting instead is a provision, inserted by Congressional Republicans in the intelligence reform bill, to legalize "extraordinary rendition" - a euphemism for sending terrorism suspects to countries that use torture for interrogation. This would institutionalize a Kafkaesque system under which suspects can be sent, at the government's whim, to Egypt or Syria or Jordan - and to fight such a move, it's up to the suspect to prove that he'll be tortured on arrival. Just what we need to convince other countries of our commitment to the rule of law.
Most Americans aren't aware of all this. The sheer scale of Mr. Bush's foreign policy failures insulates him from its political consequences: voters aren't ready to believe how badly the war in Iraq is going, let alone how badly America's moral position in the world has deteriorated.
But the rest of the world has already lost faith in us. In fact, let me make a prediction: if Mr. Bush gets a second term, we will soon have no democracies left among our allies - no, not even Tony Blair's Britain. Mr. Bush will be left with the support of regimes that don't worry about the legalities - regimes like Vladimir Putin's Russia.
October 1, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Retiring Minds Want to Know
By AUSTAN GOOLSBEE
hicago — Even as I.B.M.'s pension difficulties make headlines - the company has agreed to pay current and former employees $320 million to settle some charges that changes to its plan discriminated against older workers - a more serious financial disaster looms for the pension system. Taxpayers could face an even larger bill from corporations' failure to put enough money into their pension funds.
Yet neither candidate for president even mentions the problem, and Congress has actually made it worse. The crisis concerns the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the federal agency that insures workers' pensions in case their employer defaults. The agency charges employers a premium for the insurance, and that money is supposed to cover its costs. The system is not supposed to cost taxpayers anything. But a dreadful lack of judgment, coupled with a new federal law, could leave the public with a $100 billion bill.
In the past two years, the agency has watched its net financial position deteriorate by $20 billion. Overall, corporate pension plans have some $450 billion less than they need to meet their commitments. While corporations are legally required to make these payments unless they declare bankruptcy and can prove they are under "severe financial distress," as much as $100 billion of this bill is owed by companies that are in financial trouble. Just this month, for example, United and US Airways, both of which are already in bankruptcy, announced plans to renege on their pension requirements.
Why doesn't the agency have the money to cover this shortfall? Fundamentally, it is an insurance company. Higher risk ought to mean higher prices; a regular sky diver, for example, pays higher life insurance premiums. But the pension agency doesn't work that way.
The agency's fees are unrelated to investment risk. It charges a fixed amount per corporation and an additional fee based on the amount its pension fund is underfinanced. United had about two-thirds of its pension fund in risky investments, including junk bonds and a Ghanaian gold-mining company. Yet if United had invested every dollar in United States Treasury bonds, it would have paid exactly the same premium to the pension agency.
Thus corporations have little incentive to invest workers' retirement savings wisely. If a bet wins big, a corporation can add that money to the pension plan and keep the funds it would otherwise have been required to contribute. If it loses big, the government will bail it out.
Congress is doing its best to make financial catastrophe more likely. In April, it passed a law that changed accounting rules to make it easier for companies to underfinance pensions. It also gave some companies in the two industries with the worst pension problems - airlines and steel - a two-year waiver from the usual requirement that they close their pension gaps with their own money and allowed them to defer some payments.
Unsurprisingly, they are taking advantage of the opportunity. Continental Airlines, for example, recently announced it would not make a contribution this year to its employees' pension plan. If these corporations declare bankruptcy and default on their pensions, the government bailout will need to be that much larger. According to the pension agency, this law could reduce company contributions by more than $80 billion.
Congress should not be making it easier for corporations to shirk their pension obligations - and neither
President Bush nor Senator John Kerry should remain silent when they do. (While Mr. Bush signed the bill into law, neither Mr. Kerry nor his running mate, John Edwards, were present the day the bill passed in the Senate.) If Washington were truly concerned about workers, it would ensure that the pension agency remains solvent. One step in the right direction would be to have the agency charge higher premiums for corporations that make risky investments.
In the meantime, workers with old-style pensions should know that they are at risk of losing a great deal - a prospect that has become all too real for many employees in the airline industry, who frequently gave up wage increases in part for the promise of more generous pensions. Those pensions will be greatly reduced if the pension agency takes over.
It may be too late for many such employees to rescue their pensions. But it's not too late for Congress to act to ensure that employers, not taxpayers, pay more to protect the retirement of working Americans.
Austan Goolsbee is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.
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