To make up for the recent lack of postage, I'm offering two in a row.
Right next to Dr. Kennedy's editorial in today's Times is the most recent from Paul Krugman, discussing a Canadian advantage of which we spoke last week.
Toyota, Moving Northward
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: July 25, 2005
Modern American politics is dominated by the doctrine that government is the problem, not the solution. In practice, this doctrine translates into policies that make low taxes on the rich the highest priority, even if lack of revenue undermines basic public services. You don't have to be a liberal to realize that this is wrong-headed. Corporate leaders understand quite well that good public services are also good for business. But the political environment is so polarized these days that top executives are often afraid to speak up against conservative dogma.
Instead, they vote with their feet. Which brings us to the story of Toyota's choice.
There has been fierce competition among states hoping to attract a new Toyota assembly plant. Several Southern states reportedly offered financial incentives worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
But last month Toyota decided to put the new plant, which will produce RAV4 mini-S.U.V.'s, in Ontario. Explaining why it passed up financial incentives to choose a U.S. location, the company cited the quality of Ontario's work force.
What made Toyota so sensitive to labor quality issues? Maybe we should discount remarks from the president of the Toronto-based Automotive Parts Manufacturers' Association, who claimed that the educational level in the Southern United States was so low that trainers for Japanese plants in Alabama had to use "pictorials" to teach some illiterate workers how to use high-tech equipment.
But there are other reports, some coming from state officials, that confirm his basic point: Japanese auto companies opening plants in the Southern U.S. have been unfavorably surprised by the work force's poor level of training.
There's some bitter irony here for Alabama's governor. Just two years ago voters overwhelmingly rejected his plea for an increase in the state's rock-bottom taxes on the affluent, so that he could afford to improve the state's low-quality education system. Opponents of the tax hike convinced voters that it would cost the state jobs.
But education is only one reason Toyota chose Ontario. Canada's other big selling point is its national health insurance system, which saves auto manufacturers large sums in benefit payments compared with their costs in the United States.
You might be tempted to say that Canadian taxpayers are, in effect, subsidizing Toyota's move by paying for health coverage. But that's not right, even aside from the fact that Canada's health care system has far lower costs per person than the American system, with its huge administrative expenses. In fact, U.S. taxpayers, not Canadians, will be hurt by the northward movement of auto jobs.
To see why, bear in mind that in the long run decisions like Toyota's probably won't affect the overall number of jobs in either the United States or Canada. But the result of international competition will be to give Canada more jobs in industries like autos, which pay health benefits to their U.S. workers, and fewer jobs in industries that don't provide those benefits. In the U.S. the effect will be just the reverse: fewer jobs with benefits, more jobs without.
So what's the impact on taxpayers? In Canada, there's no impact at all: since all Canadians get government-provided health insurance in any case, the additional auto jobs won't increase government spending.
But U.S. taxpayers will suffer, because the general public ends up picking up much of the cost of health care for workers who don't get insurance through their jobs. Some uninsured workers and their families end up on Medicaid. Others end up depending on emergency rooms, which are heavily subsidized by taxpayers.
Funny, isn't it? Pundits tell us that the welfare state is doomed by globalization, that programs like national health insurance have become unsustainable. But Canada's universal health insurance system is handling international competition just fine. It's our own system, which penalizes companies that treat their workers well, that's in trouble.
I'm sure that some readers will respond to everything I've just said by asking why, if the Canadians are so smart, they aren't richer. But I'll have to leave the issue of America's comparative economic performance for another day.
For now, let me just point out that treating people decently is sometimes a competitive advantage. In America, basic health insurance is a privilege; in Canada, it's a right. And in the auto industry, at least, the good jobs are heading north.
E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com
A genuinely interesting editorial in today's Times asserting the validity of the founding father's Republican Rome-influenced citizen farmer ideal of which was recently mentioned on this blog.
After reading it, the questiong must be asked, why shouldn't we have a much smaller standing army and, when armed force is needed, a draft instituted? Obviously speed is a factor, but is this idea really as antiquated as it first seems?
Wouldn't the nation think extra long and extra hard about an elective war if the President's conflict didn't mean distant aquaintences fighting, but our own family members?
This is the point Jeff made a while back wondering, if this is a just conflict, why there were not lines of young men elbowing each other out of the way for the honor of enlisting. As we've seen, the polar opposite of this scene is occuring.
A question worth asking. Read on.
The Best Army We Can Buy
By DAVID M. KENNEDY
Published: July 25, 2005
THE United States now has a mercenary army. To be sure, our soldiers are hired from within the citizenry, unlike the hated Hessians whom George III recruited to fight against the American Revolutionaries. But like those Hessians, today's volunteers sign up for some mighty dangerous work largely for wages and benefits - a compensation package that may not always be commensurate with the dangers in store, as current recruiting problems testify.
Neither the idealism nor the patriotism of those who serve is in question here. The profession of arms is a noble calling, and there is no shame in wage labor. But the fact remains that the United States today has a military force that is extraordinarily lean and lethal, even while it is increasingly separated from the civil society on whose behalf it fights. This is worrisome - for reasons that go well beyond unmet recruiting targets.
One troubling aspect is obvious. By some reckonings, the Pentagon's budget is greater than the military expenditures of all other nations combined. It buys an arsenal of precision weapons for highly trained troops who can lay down a coercive footprint in the world larger and more intimidating than anything history has known. Our leaders tell us that our armed forces seek only just goals, and at the end of the day will be understood as exerting a benign influence. Yet that perspective may not come so easily to those on the receiving end of that supposedly beneficent violence.
But the modern military's disjunction from American society is even more disturbing. Since the time of the ancient Greeks through the American Revolutionary War and well into the 20th century, the obligation to bear arms and the privileges of citizenship have been intimately linked. It was for the sake of that link between service and a full place in society that the founders were so invested in militias and so worried about standing armies, which Samuel Adams warned were "always dangerous to the liberties of the people."
Many African-Americans understood that link in the Civil War, and again in World Wars I and II, when they clamored for combat roles, which they saw as stepping stones to equal rights. From Aristotle's Athens to Machiavelli's Florence to Thomas Jefferson's Virginia and Robert Gould Shaw's Boston and beyond, the tradition of the citizen-soldier has served the indispensable purposes of sustaining civic engagement, protecting individual liberty - and guaranteeing political accountability.
That tradition has now been all but abandoned. A comparison with a prior generation's war illuminates the point. In World War II, the United States put some 16 million men and women into uniform. What's more, it mobilized the economic, social and psychological resources of the society down to the last factory, rail car, classroom and victory garden. World War II was a "total war." Waging it compelled the participation of all citizens and an enormous commitment of society's energies.
But thanks to something that policymakers and academic experts grandly call the "revolution in military affairs," which has wedded the newest electronic and information technologies to the destructive purposes of the second-oldest profession, we now have an active-duty military establishment that is, proportionate to population, about 4 percent of the size of the force that won World War II. And today's military budget is about 4 percent of gross domestic product, as opposed to nearly 40 percent during World War II.
The implications are deeply unsettling: history's most potent military force can now be put into the field by a society that scarcely breaks a sweat when it does so. We can now wage war while putting at risk very few of our sons and daughters, none of whom is obliged to serve. Modern warfare lays no significant burdens on the larger body of citizens in whose name war is being waged.
This is not a healthy situation. It is, among other things, a standing invitation to the kind of military adventurism that the founders correctly feared was the greatest danger of standing armies - a danger made manifest in their day by the career of Napoleon Bonaparte, whom Jefferson described as having "transferred the destinies of the republic from the civil to the military arm."
Some will find it offensive to call today's armed forces a "mercenary army," but our troops are emphatically not the kind of citizen-soldiers that we fielded two generations ago - drawn from all ranks of society without respect to background or privilege or education, and mobilized on such a scale that civilian society's deep and durable consent to the resort to arms was absolutely necessary.
Leaving questions of equity aside, it cannot be wise for a democracy to let such an important function grow so far removed from popular participation and accountability. It makes some supremely important things too easy - like dealing out death and destruction to others, and seeking military solutions on the assumption they will be swifter and more cheaply bought than what could be accomplished by the more vexatious business of diplomacy.
The life of a robust democratic society should be strenuous; it should make demands on its citizens when they are asked to engage with issues of life and death. The "revolution in military affairs" has made obsolete the kind of huge army that fought World War II, but a universal duty to service - perhaps in the form of a lottery, or of compulsory national service with military duty as one option among several - would at least ensure that the civilian and military sectors do not become dangerously separate spheres. War is too important to be left either to the generals or the politicians. It must be the people's business.
David M. Kennedy, a professor of history at Stanford and the author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning "Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945," is working on a book about the American national character.
In their most recent email to to their respective massive email mailing lists, John Kerry and MoveOn.org had this to say called for signatures on their petitions calling for the removal of Karl Rove.
Here's John Kerry's email:
Less than two weeks ago, members of the johnkerry.com community demanded that Karl Rove be fired for his deliberate attempt to, once again, use the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks to divide America. Now Karl Rove is embroiled in another controversy concerning the leaked identity of a covert CIA agent, which was done to punish her husband, a man who had the courage to tell the truth about manipulated intelligence in Iraq.
Karl Rove is the President's top advisor in the White House and what he has admitted doing has deep and troubling consequences for our national security.
It's hard to understand how the President can tolerate his top advisor being involved in exposing a CIA agent in the name of politics by telling reporters about her work - making her already dangerous job that much more dangerous.
In order to do what the President called on us to do earlier this week - "continue to take the fight to the enemy" - the White House and Karl Rove must stop taking it to their so-called political enemies here at home.
It's perfectly clear that Rove - the person at the center of the slash and burn, smear and divide tactics that have come to characterize the Bush Administration - has to go.
The problem is that, instead of protecting the American people from real threats to our security, this Administration spends its time protecting Karl Rove. That's not leadership.
They're doing their best to brush off this new Rove controversy as just another political story, but this time they are having a harder time getting away with it. That's why, if we raise our voices now, we can really make a difference. Please ask all your friends to sign our "Fire Rove" petition today:
Despite carefully worded denials, it is now apparent that Karl Rove discussed the identity of an undercover CIA agent with a reporter. His clear aim was to discredit that agent's husband who had dared to challenge the Administration in the buildup to the war.
There appears to be no limit to the lengths to which Rove - and this Administration - will go. But, there is a limit to the patience of the American people - and we have reached it. President Bush has a choice to make: Spend the months ahead focused on protecting Karl Rove's job security or spend them focused on protecting America's national security.
We are asking the President and the White House to do what they promised. When the scandal first broke, here's what the President's spokesman, Scott McClellan, said:
"If anyone in this Administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this Administration." (9/29/03, White House press briefing). Now we will find out if the Administration honors its word. Call on President Bush to keep his word and fire Rove now:
It's as simple as this: We need President Bush and his White House staff to focus on finally taking action necessary to avoid a quagmire in Iraq. The American people can't afford to wait while the White House spends its time and energy defending a top presidential aide's dangerous political maneuvers.
In the days ahead, the President will either make good on his promise to hold accountable those who shared the identity of a secret soldier in the war on terror - or he'll prove that promise hollow.
We now know that Karl Rove "was involved" in a breach of national security. Decency - and the interests of the American people - demand an end to Karl Rove's days in the White House. It's time for you to demand it as well.
http://www.johnkerry.com/firerove
I urge you to take action right now.
Sincerely,
John Kerry
And now for MoveOn.org:
Dear MoveOn member,
On Sunday, Newsweek magazine revealed that Karl Rove, the President's key political advisor, was responsible for disclosing the identity of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame.1 Rove's lawyer has confirmed that he was involved.2
Last year, President Bush promised that anyone at the White House involved in the leak would be fired.3 We believe that the President should stick to his word. That's why we're calling on him to fire Karl Rove.
Valerie Plame was an operative working on stopping the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction—the most important beat at the CIA and one of the most important jobs in the country.4 Rove revealed her identity and destroyed her network of connections to settle a political score. He weakened America's national security. For that alone, he deserves to be fired.
But as it turns out, that's also the White House's official position. Press Secretary Scott McClellan told the press in September of 2003, when the story first broke, that anyone at the White House who was involved would be fired "at a minimum."5 And when asked on June 10th, 2004, if he would "stand by your pledge to fire anyone found" to have leaked the agent's name, President Bush responded, simply, "Yes."6
Of course, in the past the White House has strenuously denied that Rove had anything to do with it. In 2003, McClellan said that he'd asked Rove if he was involved, and Rove had said he wasn't.7 "The president knows that Karl Rove wasn't involved."8 "I've made it very clear, he was not involved, that there's no truth to the suggestion that he was."9 Asked again if Rove was involved, McClellan responded, "That's just totally ridiculous."10
So what did McClellan have to say about the clear discrepancies between what the President Bush and he had said in 2003 and what Newsweek reported on Sunday? Nothing. Here's an excerpt from the transcript:
Q: Do you want to retract your statement that Rove, Karl Rove, was not involved in the Valerie Plame expose?
A: I appreciate the question. This is an ongoing investigation at this point. The president directed the White House to cooperate fully with the investigation, and as part of cooperating fully with the investigation, that means we're not going to be commenting on it while it is ongoing.
Q: But Rove has apparently commented, through his lawyer, that he was definitely involved.
A: You're asking me to comment on an ongoing investigation.
Q: I'm saying, why did you stand there and say he was not involved?
A: Again, while there is an ongoing investigation, I'm not going to be commenting on it nor is ... .
Q: Any remorse?11
It's worth noting that both Bush and McClellan have commented on the case repeatedly since 2003.12
Republicans claim that the furor over this case is just politics as usual. But what Rove did has serious ramifications. Here's the story in a nutshell: In 2002, former Ambassador Joe Wilson was sent by the CIA to investigate rumors that Saddam Hussein had attempted to purchase uranium from Niger. Wilson found nothing, and wrote about it in a New York Times op-ed column on July 6, 2003 after President Bush used the claim as part of the case for war. Wilson was married to Valerie Plame, an undercover operative, who was revealed shortly thereafter by conservative columnist Robert Novak. Novak cited "senior administration officials" as his source that Plame was an operative.13
Why out Plame? While we don't know the full story, there are a couple of reasons to do so: to exact revenge on Wilson for refusing to toe the Administration line, and to send a message to would-be whistle-blowers that they should keep their mouths shut.
In any case, Plame's work was important, and by exposing her identity, the leaker destroyed ten years of covert relationship-building and could have jeopardized the lives of other covert agents in the field. At best, it was recklessly irresponsible; at worst, it was malicious; and either way, the leaker undermined our national security.
That's why we, like the President, believe it's time to fire anyone who was involved with the leaking of Plame's name. And now we know that means firing Karl Rove.
Sign our petition now at:
http://www.moveonpac.org/firerove/?id=5782-5859053-ebLGsoeb818mWYCl1z6vCA&t=2
And thanks for everything you're doing.
Sincerely,
—Eli, Jennifer, Wes, Matt and the MoveOn PAC Team
Tuesday, July 12th, 2005
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:HR00676:@@@L&summ2=m&
Here is the United States National Health Insurance Act bill introduced earlier this year by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI).
Working For Change is encouraging a letter-writing campaign, here is the text of their recomended letter to be sent to your representatives.
I am writing to urge you to support and become a cosponsor of H.R. 676, the United States National Health Insurance Act.
The United States is the only industrialized nation that does not guarantee access to health care as a human right. What's more, 28 industrialized nations have single payer universal health care systems like the type proposed in this bill -- privately delivered health care, publicly financed -- and none spend as much per capita on health care as the United States. As Americans, we tend to believe that we have the best health care system in the world, but it isn’t true. We rank near the bottom among industrial countries in indicators from life expectancy (20th) to infant mortality (23rd).
Not only does the quality of our health care lag behind similar nations, American health care is the most costly in the world. Health care costs have become a major burden on those businesses that continue to provide insurance coverage: General Motors now spends about $1525 on health care for every car it produces or roughly $6 billion in 2005.
These costs are so burdensome to US corporations that more and more companies either don't offer health coverage, or the coverage is so expensive for the employees that few can afford to participate in the plan. As a result, there are now more than 46 million uninsured Americans -- many of them working long hours but still unable to afford coverage.
Clearly the system is broken and in need of drastic revision.
Under H.R. 676 a family of three earning $40,000 would pay about $1,600 per year to have full health coverage, excluding non-essential cosmetic procedures, but including long term care, dental care, mental health care, choice of doctors and prescription drugs. Physicians for a National Health Program reports that under a "Medicare For All" plan, the nation could save over $286 billion dollars a year in total health care costs. That's enough to cover all the uninsured and provide full prescription drug coverage for everyone in the United States.
It is time to provide quality health care to all by supporting and cosponsoring H.R. 676. I look forward to hearing how you will address this important issue.
Sincerely,
I noticed Bill Colrus (thepulseblog.chattablogs.com) mentioning that Toyota recently decided to build a plant in Canada because the potential workforce in the American South is severly undereducated.
"The factory will cost $800 million to build, with the federal and provincial governments kicking in $125 million of that to help cover research, training and infrastructure costs.
Several U.S. states were reportedly prepared to offer more than double that amount of subsidy. But Fedchun said much of that extra money would have been eaten away by higher training costs than are necessary for the Woodstock project.
He said Nissan and Honda have encountered difficulties getting new plants up to full production in recent years in Mississippi and Alabama due to an untrained - and often illiterate - workforce. In Alabama, trainers had to use "pictorials" to teach some illiterate workers how to use high-tech plant equipment.
"The educational level and the skill level of the people down there is so much lower than it is in Ontario," Fedchun said."
He didn't, however, mention another reason cited as giving Canada the edge- their universal health care system.
"In addition to lower training costs, Canadian workers are also $4 to $5 cheaper to employ partly thanks to the taxpayer-funded health-care system in Canada, said federal Industry Minister David Emmerson."
Seeing that he has run a number of right-wing editorials in his alt-weekly (which is a good read) I guess it was convenient for Bill to cut out this information.
http://www.cbc.ca/cp/business/050630/b0630102.html
In the wake of the London attacks Ryan proposes a truly frightening foreign policy.
(http://davidson.chattablogs.com/archives/025448.html)
"More troops. More tanks. More ships. More planes. More guns. More bombs. Whatever it takes to render the godforsaken hole that is the Middle East into a single piece of slag, it's not too high a price to pay.
"Moral high-ground" be damned. At this rate they'll never take that from us. This is an enemy that needs to be defeated immediately, utterly, and completely, to the point that it should be burned even from memory. I want people three generations from now to be absolutely petrified of taking up arms against the West."
Anger is understandable. Calls for justice are appropriate. But how can this bloodlust be defended?
"Bin Laden and his cronies are fighting the kind of war where the only way to win is to not only kill your enemy, but also to kill all his kids so that they don't come after you in twenty years. The Romans knew how to do this: they salted Carthage, and - surprise, surprise - a century-old conflict came to a screeching halt. Cultures that fully agreed to become part of Rome were welcomed and treated fairly and justly. Cultures that resisted were utterly destroyed. Pleasant? No. But Rome created a thousand years of prosperity for what was at the time the known world."
Emulating the foreign policy of a bloodthirsty juggernaut like imperial Rome is, to say the least, a bad idea.
Rome had many admirable ideas. Republican government, the citizen-farmer backbone of society, unprecedented public works, no wonder our founding fathers adopted so many Roman symbols, language and ideals.
But the way they interacted with other nations? No thanks. There are enough countries that are now accusing the US of creating an empire as it is, (I don't think we're there yet, but give it some time.)
Before becoming a Roman provincial backwater, Carthage and its population were starved and decimated (one in ten men were ritually executed) and much of the surviving population that did not die in the ensuing fire was sold into slavery, to say nothing of the salted earth.
This is how we should treat the people of Iraq?
The prosperity Ryan mentions (which certainly lasted nothing like a millenium) was the result of a slave-based economy and unrelenting brutality.
Prisoners of war were routinely crucified. (I read an account of this type of execution in some book you may have heard of, sounded very unpleasant.) Political assasinations were the norm. Of the much heralded 'twelve Caesars' I can only think of two who died of natural causes, and even those are disputed. This is not exactly the high-water mark of humanity. Heck, as Jesus forsaw, Jerusalem was leveled during the Rome's height of glory, the Pax Romana (Peace of Rome).
Playing by the rules is supposed to be what makes us the good guys and them the bad guys.