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931. Yemen: state fragility, piety, and the problems with intervention

Author:
Lisa Wedeen
Publication Date:
03-2010
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Norwegian Centre for Conflict Resolution
Abstract:
The issue of state fragility and the presence of radical religious movements in Yemen have occasioned misperceptions and confusions in recent debates about the country. This report argues that the language of “failed states” arises nearly exclusively in relation to countries deemed threatening to US security interests. Moreover, this language obscures rather than reveals how regime incentives to build state institutions can be incompatible with regime interests in survival. The result is that a seemingly neutral analytical category misrepresents local realities even while it is used as a warrant for policy initiatives that are likely to be counterproductive.
Topic:
Government, Islam, Terrorism, and Fragile/Failed State
Political Geography:
United States, Middle East, Yemen, and Arabia

932. Armistice Now: An Interim Agreement for Israel and Palestine

Author:
Ehud Yaari
Publication Date:
03-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Foreign Affairs
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
More than 16 years after the euphoria of the Oslo accords, the Israelis and the Palestinians have still not reached a final-status peace agreement. Indeed, the last decade has been dominated by setbacks -- the second intifada, which started in September 2000; Hamas' victory in the January 2006 Palestinian legislative elections; and then its military takeover of the Gaza Strip in June 2007 -- all of which have aggravated the conflict.
Topic:
Government
Political Geography:
America, Israel, Palestine, and Arabia

933. India's Rise, America's Interest: The Fate of the U.S.-Indian Partnership

Author:
Evan A. Feigenbaum
Publication Date:
03-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Foreign Affairs
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
Until the late 1990s, the United States often ignored India, treating it as a regional power in South Asia with little global weight. India's weak and protected economy gave it little influence in global markets, and its nonaligned foreign policy caused periodic tension with Washington. When the United States did concentrate on India, it too often fixated on India's military rivalry with Pakistan. Today, however, India is dynamic and transforming. Starting in 1991, leaders in New Delhi -- including Manmohan Singh, then India's finance minister and now its prime minister -- pursued policies of economic liberalization that opened the country to foreign investment and yielded rapid growth. India is now an important economic power, on track (according to Goldman Sachs and others) to become a top-five global economy by 2030. It is a player in global economic decisions as part of both the G-20 and the G-8 + 5 (the G-8 plus the five leading emerging economies) and may ultimately attain a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. India's trajectory has diverged sharply from that of Pakistan. With economic growth, India acquired the capacity to act on issues of primary strategic and economic concern to the United States. The United States, in turn, has developed a growing stake in continued Indian reform and success -- especially as they contribute to global growth, promote market-based economic policies, help secure the global commons, and maintain a mutually favorable balance of power in Asia. For its part, New Delhi seeks a United States that will help facilitate India's rise as a major power. Two successive Indian governments have pursued a strategic partnership with the United States that would have been unthinkable in the era of the Cold War and nonalignment. This turnaround in relations culminated in 2008, when the two countries signed a civil nuclear agreement. That deal helped end India's nuclear isolation by permitting the conduct of civil nuclear trade with New Delhi, even though India is not a party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Important as the agreement was, however, the U.S.-Indian relationship remains constrained. For example, although U.S. officials hold standing dialogues about nearly every region of the world with their counterparts from Beijing, Brussels, and Tokyo, no such arrangements exist with New Delhi.
Topic:
Government
Political Geography:
United States, Washington, India, and New Delhi

934. They Spend WHAT? The Real Cost of Public Schools

Author:
Adam B. Schaeffer
Publication Date:
03-2010
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Cato Institute
Abstract:
Although public schools are usually the biggest item in state and local budgets, spending figures provided by public school officials and reported in the media often leave out major costs of education and thus understate what is actually spent.
Topic:
Economics, Education, Government, and Monetary Policy

935. Defining Success: The Case against Rail Transit

Author:
Randal O'Toole
Publication Date:
03-2010
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Cato Institute
Abstract:
Over the past four decades, American cities have spent close to $100 billion constructing rail transit systems, and many billions more operating those systems. The agencies that spend taxpayer dollars building these lines almost invariably call them successful even when they go an average of 40 percent over budget and, in many cases, carry an insignificant number of riders. The people who rarely or never ride these lines but still have to pay for them should ask, “How do you define success?"
Topic:
Government, Markets, and Infrastructure
Political Geography:
America

936. From the Editor

Publication Date:
04-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Objective Standard
Institution:
The Objective Standard
Abstract:
This issue of The Objective Standard begins our fifth year of publication, and 2010 is shaping up to be our most exciting year to date. A few items of note: TOS is now on more than four hundred newsstands, and this number is increasing steadily. Look for us in Barnes Noble, Bookstar, Hastings, and other bookstores and newsstands nationwide.
Topic:
Government

937. Letters and Replies

Publication Date:
04-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Objective Standard
Institution:
The Objective Standard
Abstract:
Thank you for publishing Paul Beard's excellent article regarding the California Coastal Commission. Perhaps it was intended to be implied, but nowhere in the article was it stated that Pacific Legal Foundation, whose Coastal Land Rights Project Mr. Beard now heads, has represented the property owners in all of the cases he described.
Topic:
Government
Political Geography:
United States

938. Citizens United and the Battle for Free Speech in America

Author:
Steve Simpson
Publication Date:
04-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Objective Standard
Institution:
The Objective Standard
Abstract:
The Supreme Court's recent decision in Citizens United v. FEC is one of the most important First Amendment decisions in a generation and one of the most controversial. In it, the Supreme Court struck down a law that banned corporations from spending their own money on speech that advocated the election or defeat of candidates. In the process, the Court overturned portions of McConnell v. FEC, a case in which the Supreme Court, a mere six years ago, upheld McCain-Feingold, one of the most sweeping restrictions on campaign speech in history.
Topic:
Government
Political Geography:
America

939. Government-Run Health Care vs. the Hippocratic Oath

Author:
Paul Hsieh
Publication Date:
04-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Objective Standard
Institution:
The Objective Standard
Abstract:
When medical students graduate from medical school, they take an oath-the Hippocratic oath-in which they solemnly swear, above all, to use their best judgment in treating their patients. Doctors hold this oath as sacrosanct; they regard upholding it as morally mandatory, and violating it as out of the question. But in order to uphold this oath, in order to practice medicine in accordance with their best judgment, doctors must be free to practice in accordance with their best judgment. Unfortunately, U.S. politicians are working feverishly to prevent doctors from upholding the Hippocratic oath. How so? By implementing government-run health care. Politicians' efforts to impose government-run health care include their goal of "guaranteeing" health care to everyone. But whenever the government attempts to "guarantee" health care, it must also control the costs of that service-which means, it must dictate how doctors may and may not practice. Toward this end, as Harvard professor Martin Feldstein notes, advocates of government-run health care call for "comparative effectiveness" practice guidelines. Quoting the White House Council of Economic Advisers, Feldstein points out that these guidelines are designed to ration health care and reduce spending by "implementing a set of performance measures that all providers would adopt" and by "directly targeting individual providers . . . (and other) high-end outliers."1 ("High-end outliers" is government-speak for "physicians who order more tests or perform more procedures than the government deems appropriate.") An example of such "effectiveness" guidelines is the new federal recommendations for screening mammography. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recently recommended restricting mammogram screening to women over age fifty, despite the fact that medical organizations such as the American Cancer Society and the American College of Radiology-whose conclusions are based on years of peer-reviewed scientific research-have long recommended that women begin routine mammography at age forty.2 The USPSTF argues that eliminating mammograms for women between ages forty and forty-nine would result in only one additional cancer death per nineteen hundred women screened-an increase in death that they evidently consider acceptable.3 The announcement of these new guidelines caused so much public controversy that Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sibelius quickly backpedaled and stated that these particular USPSTF recommendations would be "nonbinding."4 But what does "nonbinding" mean when it refers to the guidelines of a government agency? The government is an agent of force. Any government "recommendations" come with at least the implicit threat that recalcitrant doctors may face negative consequences. Not surprisingly, government medical agencies have already adopted the new guidelines. The California state government has begun using the USPSTF guidelines to determine which services patients in the Medi-Cal program may and may not receive.5 (Medi-Cal is the California equivalent of Medicaid in other states.) Government-funded health programs in New York and Ohio have already begun turning away women under fifty seeking mammograms.6 And, Sibelius's reassurances notwithstanding, Congress is considering giving the USPSTF legal authority to determine which screening tests will or will not be covered for patients with private health insurance.7 How are American physicians responding to these developments? Fortunately, many have chosen to ignore the guidelines, to continue practicing according to their best medical judgment, and to order mammograms on their female patients between ages forty and fifty as they see fit.8 But bear in mind that the White House Council of Economic Advisers has already pejoratively labeled such physicians "high-end outliers." If the government decided to enforce its "comparative effectiveness" guidelines, such doctors could be punished at any moment. And bear in mind what the punishment would be for: upholding their Hippocratic oath, their promise to practice according to their best judgment for the best interests of their patients.
Topic:
Government
Political Geography:
United States

940. The Practicality of Private Waterways

Author:
Alan Germani and J. Brian Phillips
Publication Date:
04-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Objective Standard
Institution:
The Objective Standard
Abstract:
For centuries, few have questioned the idea that waterways-streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans-are or should be "public property." The doctrine of "public trust," with roots in both Roman and English common law, holds that these resources should not be privately owned but rather held in trust by government for use by all. The United States Supreme Court cited this doctrine in 1892, ruling that state governments properly hold title to waterways such as lakes and rivers, "a title held in trust for the people of the state that they may enjoy the navigation of the waters, carry on commerce over them, and have liberty of fishing therein freed from the obstruction or interference of private parties."1 This "public ownership," however, is increasingly thwarting the life-serving nature of waterways as sources of drinking water, fish, and recreation. Predictably, when a resource-whether a park, an alleyway, or a pond-is owned by "everyone," its users have less incentive to protect or improve its long-term value than they would if it were owned by an individual or a corporation. Users of "public property" tend to use the resource for short-term gain, often causing the deterioration of its long-term value-the well-known "tragedy of the commons." This phenomenon is perhaps nowhere clearer than in the case of waterways. "Public ownership" of waterways has led to, among other problems, harmful levels of pollution and depleted fish populations. Many waterways around the world have become so polluted that they are no longer fit for human use. In 2004, the Environmental Protection Agency reported that one-third of America's lakes and nearly one-fourth of its rivers were under fish-consumption advisories due to polluted waters.2 In 2005, officials in China estimated that 75 percent of that nation's lakes were contaminated with potentially toxic algal blooms caused by sewage and industrial waste.3 And the World Commission on Water has found that half the world's rivers are either seriously polluted or running dry from irrigation and other human uses or both.4 By one estimate, the contaminated drinking water and poor sanitation that result from pollution and low water levels account for five to ten million deaths per year worldwide.5 In addition to containing harmful levels of pollution, many of the world's waterways are being fished in a manner that is depleting fish populations and threatening with extinction fish species such as red snapper, white sturgeon, and bluefin tuna-species highly valuable to human life.6 By 2003, primarily due to fishing practices associated with public waterways, 27 percent of the world's fisheries (zones where fish and other seafood is caught) had "collapsed"-the term used by scientists to denote fish populations that drop to 10 percent or less of their historical highs.7 In 2006, the journal Science published a study that offered a grim prediction: All of the world's fisheries will collapse by 2048.8 Whether or not all of the world's fisheries will collapse in a mere forty years, the data clearly show that current fishing practices are depleting supplies of many species of consumable fish. At best, at the current rate of fish depletion, many fishermen will lose their livelihoods and consumers will have fewer and fewer species from which to choose, species that will become more and more expensive. What solutions have been proposed? Federal and state governments have attempted to remedy these problems through regulation-violating rights and creating new problems in the process. For example, twenty-five states prohibit or severely restrict the use of laundry detergents containing phosphates, substances that harm aquatic life when present in water in high quantities.9 A growing number of state and local governments-including Westchester County, New York, and Annapolis, Maryland-are enacting similar regulations on phosphate-containing fertilizers.10 These laws violate the rights of detergent and fertilizer manufacturers by precluding them from creating the products they choose to create-and they violate the rights of consumers who want to buy such products rather than more-expensive, less-effective alternatives. Further, these rights-violating prohibitions have proven impractical in achieving their purpose: Despite many such regulations having been in effect for nearly forty years,11 an estimated two-thirds of America's bays and estuaries still contain harmful amounts of phosphates.12 Regulations regarding sewage treatment have proven similarly impractical: Since 1972, the federal government has forced water utilities to spend billions of dollars upgrading water treatment facilities, and yet, during the past four years, record numbers of beaches have closed due to pollution from sewage.13 And, for what it is worth, the EPA predicts that by 2016 American rivers will be as polluted by sewage as they were in the 1970s.14 Government efforts to address depleted fish populations have proven similarly impractical. The history of the halibut industry in Alaska is an illuminating case in point. In the 1970s, the International Pacific Halibut Commission (IPHC)-a U.S.-backed intergovernmental regulatory agency-established a five-month fishing season in public waters off the Alaskan coast with the hope of maintaining halibut populations, which had become severely depleted. But forcibly limiting the time during which fishermen could operate did little to improve the fishery's viability: Fishermen simply worked more vigorously during the season, and the halibut population remained at historically low levels. So, in the 1980s, the IPHC attempted to remedy the problem by reducing the five-month fishing season dramatically-to as few as two days.15 During these shortened windows of opportunity, fishermen took extreme risks to maximize their catches, only to be "rewarded" onshore with the plummeting prices of a glutted market. And, in the end, the huge catches brought in by fishermen on these days were still large enough to jeopardize the halibut population.16 So, in 1995, the IPHC dropped the idea of a short fishing season and instead introduced a "catch share program," through which it limits each fisherman's yearly catch to a percentage of what it deems to be a "safe" overall halibut harvest. But neither has this policy helped the situation; today, after more than two decades of shifting regulations, the usable halibut population in Alaskan waters is less than in 1985.17 Although some claim that still more government regulations are required to combat the ongoing problems of pollution and depleted fish populations, any such coercive measures are in principle doomed to failure because they attempt to treat problems in the waterways while ignoring their actual cause: "public ownership." Government force may provide a disincentive for certain behaviors, but this disincentive does not motivate the users of waterways to maintain or enhance the life-serving value of these resources. As a result, America's waterways remain largely and significantly polluted, and fish populations, even where they are stabilizing, remain at levels insufficient to meet the growing demand for seafood. . . . Endnotes The authors would like to thank Craig Biddle, Dwyane Hicks, and Thomas A. Bowden for discussions that aided the authors' understanding of the issues discussed in this article, and Matthew Gerber, Ben Bayer, and Steve Simpson for helpful comments made to earlier drafts. 1 Illinois Central R.R. Co. v Illinois (1892) 146 U.S. 387, 452. 2 Jaime Holguin, "Pollution Overtaking Lakes, Rivers,," CBSNews.com, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/08/24/tech/main638130.shtml. 3 Antoaneta Bezlova, "China's Toxic Spillover," Asia Times, December 2, 2005, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/GL02Cb06.html. When consumed by fish, shellfish, and livestock, such hazardous algae can enter the human food chain. 4 Mary Dejevsky, "Half of World's Rivers Polluted or Running Dry," The Independent, November 30, 1999; http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/half-of-worlds-rivers-polluted-or-running-dry-1129811.html. 5 http://www.grinningplanet.com/2005/07-26/water-pollution-facts-article.htm. 6 http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/fishwatch/species/red_snapper.htm , Species l ist from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; http://ecos.fws.gov/tess_public/SpeciesReport.do?groups=E=L=1; http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/07/060724-bluefin-tuna.html. 7 "Catch Shares Key to Reviving Fisheries," Environmental Defense Fund, http://www.edf.org/article.cfm?contentID=8446. 8 Cornelia Dean, "Study Sees 'Global Collapse' of Fish Species," New York Times, November 3, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/03/science/03fish. 9 http://enviro.blr.com/enviro_docs/88147_9.pdf. 10 Juli S. Charkes, "Board Votes to Ban Phosphate Fertilizers," New York Times, May 1, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/nyregion/westchester/03lawnwe.html; Karl Blankenship, "Annapolis to Ban Use of Fertilizer with Phosphorus in Most Cases," Bay Journal, http://www.bayjournal.com/article.cfm?article=3511. 11 Michael Hawthorne, "From the Archives: Banned in Chicago but Available in Stores," Chicago Tribune, April 4, 2007, http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-daley-phosphates,0,2871187.story. 12 http://www.grinningplanet.com/2005/07-26/water-pollution-facts-article.htm. 13 http://www.nrdc.org/water/oceans/ttw/titinx.asp and http://epa.gov/beaches/learn/pollution.html#primary. 14 Martha L. Noble, "The Clean Water Act at 30-Time to Renew a Commitment to National Stewardship," Catholic Rural Life Magazine, vol. 45, no. 2, Spring 2003, http://www.ncrlc.com/crl-magazine-articles/vol45no2/Noble.pdf. 15 http://www.fishex.com/seafood/halibut/halibut.html. 16 Halibut populations continued to decline, and the IPHC decreased the allowed catch more than 26 percent between 1986 and 1995. http://www.iphc.washington.edu/halcom/commerc/limits80299.htm. 17 The total catch share for halibut-which is based on "exploitable biomass"-declined between 1985 and 2009. For 1985 limits, see http://www.iphc.washington.edu/halcom/commerc/limits80299.htm. For 2009 limits, see http://www.iphc.washington.edu/halcom/newsrel/2009/nr20090120.htm.
Topic:
Government
Political Geography:
United States and America