Category: Accountability

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Accountability political challengers

The FUBAR State

Newt Gingrich came from behind for a smashing victory in South Carolina’s primary last Saturday. And yet a more interesting story may be emerging in Iowa: Rick Santorum, not Romney, is apparently the Republican caucus winner. Though that’s not counting the eight precincts whose official results forms went missing.Iowa counties

This could be just another typical screw-​up. Democracy means “rule by the people,” and “the people” aren’t perfect.

Foul-​ups happen.

On the other hand, the whole thing smacks of back-​room manipulation. The fact that the official tabulations were moved away from the traditional site, GOP state party headquarters, to an undisclosed location — allegedly to “protect” the vote-​counting from Occupy protest influence — makes the uncertain results all the more suspect.

And Republicans can’t blame this on Occupiers.

The winner may have been the biggest loser. Santorum got the proverbial bump from the initial Iowa results — losing by a mere handful, it was reported — but Romney received a bump from it too, simply by being declared a winner in the closest caucus race in American history. By “losing control” of the actual count, the Republican Party of Iowa skewed the national election.

Leading into the caucuses, Ron Paul’s supporters sniffed something conspiratorial in the vote count location switch, complaining that such a move could help “disenfranchise” Paul’s supporters, knowing that GOP caucus officials were not at all friendly toward his candidacy.

You’re probably familiar with Stalin’s most famous quote about democracy: “It’s not who votes that counts, but who counts the votes.”

In Iowa, Stalin’s shade sports a mischievous grin.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability folly national politics & policies

Getting It Wrong at the Fed

The Federal Reserve is America’s central bank, and its managers are political appointees. But transparency — an essential feature of the republican form of government — is something that doesn’t quite describe the information we (and our representatives) get about that institution.

“Opacity” is probably the best word to describe former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan’s speeches to Congress — deciphering his testimony was often more difficult than a line-​by-​line interpretation of a Sorbonne phenomenologist.

And full transcripts of the Open Market Committee reports go public only after a long lag. Only last week did 2006’s Federal Reserve insider badinage escape the confines of secrecy, and boy, what a pathetic situation was revealed.

Remember, in 2006 the mortgage boom was reaching its peak, and its excesses were obvious. Federal Reserve insiders made jokes about it, yet “gave little credence to the possibility that the faltering housing market would weigh on the broader economy,” as Binyamin Appelbaum noted in the Wall Street Journal. Geithner went so far as to say that the market’s “fundamentals” looked good, and that outgoing chairman Greenspan’s “greatness … was not fully appreciated,” which Appelbaum cautions is “an opinion now held by a much smaller number of people.”

This weekend at Townhall​.com, I wrote that Rep. Ron Paul was surely right to focus on the Federal Reserve all these years. He bucked the tide and proved himself prescient, just as the folks within the Fed, engaging in groupthink and chummy insider-​to-​insider praise, proved themselves quite clueless.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability free trade & free markets too much government

Who Creates Jobs?

There’s way too much pressure on politicians to “do something.” Most of the things they can do are bad. “Do something” too easily translates to “do anything,” and odds are that “anything” will end up as catastrophe.

There’s a division of labor in doing things: Investors, capitalists, and entrepreneurs create businesses which employ people; legislators and government executives have the more humble task of setting up and refining the groundrules, allowing others to do the great works.

Politicians don’t create jobs as such.

Few politicians understands this. But Gary Johnson, former two-​term governor of New Mexico, does — and he’s running for the Republican presidential nomination.

“The fact is,” he said in the recent debate, “I can unequivocally say that I did not create a single job while I was governor.” He went on to say how proud he was of this fact. New Mexico underwent an “11.6 percent job growth” rate during his two terms. All he did was get government out of the way of businesses.

Now, I understand: The “politician as jobs creator” talk is sometimes just a way to focus attention on getting policy right. National Review Online called Johnson “the best job creator” of all the candidates. The august journal didn’t mean much by it, other than note the statistic.

But too often politicians decide they can create jobs by taking money from all of us in taxes and investing it in private companies or new government programs. Those politicians aren’t creating jobs for us, but doing a job on us. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability ideological culture

A Membership Group vs. Its Members

What is the American Medical Association for? The group claims, in public-​relations-​ese, that its function is “to promote the art and science of medicine and the betterment of public health.”

But ask a doctor. You are apt to get a very different diagnosis.

The September 2011 survey of “Physicians Opinions About the American Medical Association,” published by Jackson & Coker, a physician recruitment firm, makes that very clear. Here are a few highlights:

  • “The AMA’s Stance and Actions Represent My Views”: 77 percent of doctors disagree.
  • “I agree with the AMA’s Position on Health Reform”: 70 percent disagree.
  • … effectively supports “physician practice autonomy”: 69 percent disagree.
  • … effectively insulates “physicians from intrusive government regulations”: 78 percent disagree.
  • … “protects physicians from insurance company abuses”: 75 percent disagree.

Those percentages include non-​member and non-​practicing doctors. Understandably, members of the AMA are more positive than non-​members. But even among member doctors, a majority disapproves of the AMA’s insurance protection (the last bullet point, above).

The AMA carries a lot of weight in public policy debate. Unfortunately, its history of lobbying government has been very … “progressive,” paternalistic, and heavy-handed. 

For example, before the AMA dominated American national medical policy, doctors routinely engaged in extensive pro bono work for the poor. The AMA worked mightily to stop that. 

The result of this prescription? Medicare, Medicaid … and an insolvent entitlement system.

Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability national politics & policies

The Last Dark Chapter?

Last week, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues revealed that United States federal government researchers purposely infected unwilling Guatemalans with deadly sexually transmitted diseases (syphilis, gonorrhea and chancroid) back in the 1940s.

Between 1946 and 1948, U.S. personnel experimented on more than 5,000 Guatemalans — including prisoners, mental patients, and even children — without their consent. At least 83 Guatemalans died during the project.

In at least one case, a woman dying from the syphilis she had been given was infected with other diseases to boot. Unconscionable.

One commission member, Raju Kucherlapati of Harvard Medical School said, “These researchers knew these were unethical experiments, and they conducted them anyway.”

Anita Allen of the University of Pennsylvania added, “These are very grave human rights violations.”

Commission chair Amy Gutmann pointed out that, “This is a dark chapter in our history. It is important to shine the light of day on it.”

She’s right. And note that this dark crime was committed by members of America’s “greatest generation.” When some people have power over others bad things seem to happen — throughout history, even among people like us. Not surprisingly, holding power accountable, especially when it’s exercised thousands of miles or oceans away, has proven mighty difficult.

This ought not be repeated. If we are the government, we must do something about it. But in an era of secret CIA prisons, what’s really to prevent it from happening again?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability national politics & policies

Mann FOIA Dump

Michael Mann’s Last of the Mohicans was a great film.

But the work of Michael Mann the climatologist?

Quite another story.

He’s the biggest name behind the much-​disputed “hockey stick” graph of world temperatures — the “hockey stick” being the shape of the upward temperature spike in recent times. Mann was also one of the biggest offenders in the Climategate scandal, where emails showed more politicking than objectivity going into how climate models were concocted and presented to the public.

In May, a Virginia state judge ordered the University of Virginia to release Mann’s data and emails under the state’s Freedom of Information Act. Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and the American Tradition Institute (ATI), smelling something fishy in Mann’s work, sued for access to the basic data. ATI now has a disk with info, saying the info dump is about a third of what they requested.

ATI folks haven’t had time to study the data.

Mann has been exonerated from the charge of “research misconduct” by the National Science Foundation — the organization found no “direct evidence” of “data fabrication or data falsification.” Still, Mann’s obvious bias continues to do more than raise eyebrows.

Ronald Bailey, who reports on all this for Reason, yearns to make FOIA battles superfluous. He urges “publicly funded researchers” to place their raw data up on the Internet for public testing — true transparency (and completely in the spirit of scientific method).

Well, that might happen … after a few more FOIA battles.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.