Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Blog

Make Them Answer the Tough Questions: The Realities of Political Debate and Health Care in 2008

By Carey Kriz

The elephant is in the room, and it is time that the political parties seeking to run the U.S. government start acting like they understand the issues of U.S. health care in 2008. First a couple of questions that we need to start asking: Will universal health insurance fix our health care system? The answer is easy: absolutely not. A bumper sticker approach to solving problems means identifying one big emotional issue and suggesting an obvious solution. For health care there a number of these, with the big story being the unfeeling administrator denying benefits to a patient with real needs. Ultimately, this story comes back to the failure of our insurance industry to be portable, to be with you throughout your lifetime and generally to be fair.

And yes, this is a great cause. But it is not the answer.

Will more doctors bring more health care to our communities? The answer to this one is also easy: absolutely not. The U.S. system of educating and branding physicians is arguably the best in the world. Yet we have an imbalance in knowledge and need to think about why our neighbors are getting so fat, or indulging in behaviors that are obviously bad for them. Do any of us understand that we are actually in charge of our bodies?

Will blockbuster science and new drugs cure disease? Dreaming is good for us, and we do have a number of major scientific advances that impact the world of health care – and how that health care can lead to improved longevity and a better quality of life. But science alone is not the answer here. We have a problem in health care that cuts across treatments, diagnosis and infrastructures.

So what will fix our health care system? For the answer to this question start asking your political leaders where all the money is going – and whether we have any idea of the cost/benefits of our investments. When we think of spending money on health care what we fail to also mention is that we spend more than anyone else in the world, that we have declining productivity in our quality of life indices, and are making a “business” out of something that comes close to being a survival requirement. Guess who pays the highest cost for drugs in the world? Yes: we do. Not your neighbors in Australia and Singapore – or Europe.

Imagine how stupid we would look as a society if we charged for the right to breathe air. Now imagine denying someone access to care because they slipped through the coverage cracks – or discriminating against them because they already had a disease. Now add to this reality that a ton of people were making money from this mess, including big investment funds, management, professionals and shareholders. Yes we have cancer and it has metastasized into every corner of the health system. The fix will not be pleasant and will definitely be painful. But it is a requirement and it will be hard on all of us.

So it’s time to put some real debate into health care and start looking at the elephant of big business, profits and motivation. Hiding from a problem, or misleading the public about how bad it is, will not solve it.

Carey Kriz is the author of The Patient Will See You Now (Rowman and Littlefield).

Valentine’s Day in DeKalb: Two, Three, Many Virginia Techs?

Ben Agger and Timothy W. Luke

Last Thursday, February 14^th, 2008, Steven Kazmierczak reportedly shot and killed five students, and then turned a weapon on himself at Northern Illinois University. At least sixteen students were wounded in the rapid-fire shootings in this large NIU lecture hall during class. We have few certain details about the shooter, except that he used four weapons, two of which were purchased legally within the past week—a shotgun and a 9mm Glock semi-automatic handgun. Ironically, he purchased two magazines and a holster for the Glock from the same online vendor which sold Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter, one of his guns through a dealer transfer last spring.

Apparently, he was a good student (a former sociology major at NIU) who had no police record. He was pursuing graduate studies in social work at the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois. It was also rumored that he recently had ceased taking mood-modifying medication and had broken up with a live-in girl friend. He was 27 when he died in the large NIU lecture hall. Yet, there was another side to him. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in September 2001, but soon was “administratively discharged” within six months. More recently, he took a job as an officer at the Rockville Correctional Facility in Indiana in September 2007, but he failed to complete his preliminary training after only two weeks, and then never returned to work.

The shooting in DeKalb, Illinois occurred almost exactly ten months after the shootings at Virginia Tech last April, when 33 died, including students in classrooms, some of their professors, and the gunman himself. On November 7, 2007 Pekka Eric Auvinen walked into his high school in Tuusula, Finland, and shot eight people, killing five, and then also turned the gun on himself. There are parallels between these three bloody events: The shooters were young males; they used deadly semi-automatic weapons; they burst into school classrooms to do their damage; they took their own lives. There were apparent differences, too, although as yet we know next to nothing about the ‘real’ Steve Kazmierczak. Cho had already been identified in the Virginia mental health system as a troubled individual, and a potentially dangerous one at that. And Auvinen and Cho left video and written manifestos. In his testimony, Cho acknowledged the inspiration of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, who killed twelve of their high-school classmates and a teacher at Columbine in Colorado on April 20, 1999.

How are we to understand the sequencing and connections among Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tuusula, and now Northern Illinois? It is unimaginable that the Valentine Day’s Massacre in DeKalb would have occurred in the way that it did without Virginia Tech having occurred, as the December shootings in Finland also demonstrated. Tech is imbedded in DeKalb as its prototype and possibility. Kazmierczak might have found other ways to kill and to die without the example of Tech (and Columbine or Tuusula before it), but he surely framed his actions last Thursday within the scenario of last April in Blacksburg, Virginia.

 

This is not to suggest that DeKalb is simply a copy-cat killing. What did Klebold, Harris, Cho, Auvinen, and Kazmierczak have in common that led them to enact these epic killings and suicides, on school grounds? It seems they were alone in a crowd; they were alienated, lacking social ties. Whether they were mentally ill or not is somewhat beside the point. They might have been stopped, helped, redirected—yes, even medicated. We are intensely interested in the experience of being alone in a crowd, in Cho’s case as an Asian-American outsider on a big-time college/fraternity campus, which considers itself ‘Hokie Nation,’ —the illusion of tight community achieved through the gridiron Gemeinschaft of the Virginia Tech campus. And in the hours after the NIU attack, the response in DeKalb, Illinois and around the nation was to appeal to the school’s athletic mascot, the Husky, and tout “Huskie Spirit.” Perhaps we know only this: people more on the inside do not tend to commit mass murder and then take their own lives.

It cannot escape notice that the killers at Columbine, Blacksburg, Tuusula and DeKalb were men.  Women usually do not embark on shooting/suicide escapades, even though not even a week before on February 8, 2008 at Louisiana Technical College a female student shot two classmates and then herself in a classroom. Four of the five killed at DeKalb were women students, and many of those killed in Tuusula and Blacksburg also were female. This is a potent admixture: social isolation, male gun culture, fantasies of revenge.

Were the killers evil madmen predestined to wreck havoc? Were they beyond social influence and redirection? They committed mad acts, to be sure. But there is a thin boundary between those who keep their demons within, and at bay, and those who erupt. The answer to these acts of deliberate madness lies not in armoring our campuses but in acknowledging people’s interior turmoil and trying to help, where possible. This is difficult amid a sea of faces in large college lecture halls. But can we afford to reduce such acts merely to irreversible psychopathology? Columbine and Virginia Tech have now become a set piece—a media spectacle--with a certain inexorable momentum.

Ben Agger is professor of sociology and humanities at University of Texas, Arlington.  Timothy W. Luke is professor of political science at Virginia Tech. They co-authored a book There is a Gunman on Campus: Tragedy and Terror at Virginia Tech forthcoming in April 2008.

Ron Paul’s Presidential Campaign: A Libertarian Dimension?

By John F. Welsh

The presidential campaign of Texas congressman Ron Paul has received considerable attention from the national media in recent weeks because of the success of his online fundraising efforts, his victories in many straw polls of Republican organizations around the country, and his performance in the nationally televised debates of Republican candidates. The cable news channels, which had been particularly dismissive of his ideas and candidacy, are now willing to include discussion of Ron Paul, although he is still not, in their parlance, a “top-tier” candidate.

Despite the media’s promotion of its self-assigned authority to legitimate and anoint viable presidential candidates and political tendencies, there is growing prairie fire of dissatisfaction with the “top-tier” candidates in both national parties and an antagonism toward the mainstream approaches to the political issues confronting the United States. Much of the dissatisfaction is clearly rooted in frustration with the indolence and incompetence of the Bush administration, especially its failures with the Iraq war and an increasingly unfocused War on Terror. However, a considerable amount of this antipathy goes beyond George W. Bush and is directed toward the national political class as a whole, including the liberal Democrats, neoconservative Republicans, and the religious right, who have set the policy agenda in this country for at least the past three decades, but who have also collectively demonstrated that they cannot govern the country effectively.

What unites these otherwise disparate political actors in the governing elite is their fundamental belief in the unconstrained use of the power of the state in the achievement of public policy objectives, whether these include the redistribution of wealth, the management of political speech, or the imposition of religious definitions of legitimate marriages. Our national political culture has become collectivist and statist. Our individual problems and challenges are transformed into policy issues and the federal government, especially, is the presumed vehicle for solving them.

Ron Paul is an attractive presidential candidate to many Americans because the libertarian dimension of his platform is a welcome alternative to the absolute commitment to collectivism and statism by the political class in the United States. Ron Paul’s campaign and his performance in the Republican presidential debates have interjected some life into an otherwise dismal political ritual because many of his ideas pose serious questions about the appropriate role of the state in society. Paul has also challenged the notion that the federal government is able to address the multifaceted crisis confronting the United States. A large component of Ron Paul’s appeal is the libertarian trajectory of many of his ideas.

Consequently, many libertarians are delighted with the attention and support Ron Paul has received in recent weeks, much of which is evident in the success of his fundraising. Other libertarians are skeptical of his candidacy, or hostile to it, because of specific policy positions he has taken, such as his pro-life stance on abortion and his “border security first” position on immigration.

While most libertarians particularly like his opposition to the Iraq War, many question whether Paul’s positions adequately reflect a libertarian perspective. In short, the concern is that the totality of Paul’s ideas and proposals do not sufficiently differentiate his libertarianism from the nativist or paleo-conservative tendencies within the Republican Party. Pat Buchanan’s support for Paul’s candidacy only lends credence to the concern that Paul is better described as a paleo-conservative than a libertarian. Much of the discussion about Paul’s candidacy that has occurred at LeftLibertarian.org reflects this general discomfort among some libertarians with Paul’s candidacy. The prevailing viewpoint at LewRockwell.com is that Paul’s candidacy provides a profound opportunity for both America and libertarianism.

Beyond the concerns with some of Paul’s policy perspectives, there are also some significant structural or organizational sorts of questions that Paul’s candidacy poses about the relationship between libertarianism and the political system in the United States. While the pundits on the cable news channels are concerned with Paul’s electability and the extent to which the Republican Party can accommodate libertarianism and still appeal to its conservative base, libertarians should be concerned with the extent to which their philosophy can meld with the Republican Party without compromising the fundamental principles of libertarianism and, thereby, relinquishing its identity as an alternative political philosophy and movement? Is libertarianism destined to become nothing more than one philosophic tendency safely tucked away within the Republican Party? If so, what happens to its potential as an oppositional philosophy and a movement devoted to the radical transformation of the social structure and culture of the United States?

A more radical libertarian and individualist perspective suggests that voting and participation in the democratic political process is much more of a surrender of sovereignty than an expression of it. If so, the more significant questions pertaining to Ron Paul’s campaign for the presidency of the United States are not the appeal of his policy positions nor his electability in 2008. Instead, the more significant issues pertain to the long-term consequences for the struggle for individual liberty. Is the struggle for individual liberty promoted or inhibited by efforts to elect a president who believes in some libertarian ideas? The focus on presidential politics within the Republican Party tends to detract from and undermine the interest in developing libertarianism as an oppositional social movement so that it can effectively challenge collectivism and statism in politics, culture, and everyday life in the United States.

 
John F. Welsh is the author of After Multiculturalism: The Politics of Race and the Dialectics of Liberty.

UEFA Efforts to Eliminate Racism

By Christos Kassimeris

Racism has long tarnished the game of football in quite a few European countries, though it seems that it has recently emerged with a new -– even uglier -– face, since a number of racist incidents now involve not only fans but players and officials as well. The apparent lack of ethos that characterizes a section of fans, predominantly, has certainly disturbed national and European football governing bodies alike. Nevertheless, their attempts to rid the popular game off all forms of discrimination have rarely been crowned with success. Even though some players and clubs have already been fined by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), racist incidents across the continent continue to blemish football. It is not surprising, therefore, that Michel Platini, President of UEFA, has condemned the phenomenon of racism in football on more than one occasion, ever since his election on January 2007, while also emphasizing UEFA’s commitment to secure a racism-free environment in all European stadiums. In this respect, it is important to note that his determination to combat racism in European football is likely to materialize following his latest statements. Platini recently declared that UEFA would openly support any referee’s decision to bring a football match to an abrupt end, after having consulted the match delegate, when fans engage in racist chanting or abuse a player in a similar fashion. For the record, Rene Temmink belongs to that rare breed of referees that took such action in a game between ADO Den Haag and PSV Eindhoven during the 2005-2006 Dutch football season. Such measures may, indeed, prove more successful than previous UEFA-sponsored tactics to eliminate racism from football, such as the Ten Point Plan of Action for Professional Football Clubs, intended to promote the participation of ethnic minority communities in football. In any case, Platini’s remarks should be treated with some skepticism. Unless referees are officially backed by UEFA the popular game will only suffer more, given that certain supporters of clubs may not hesitate to resort to racist abuse in order to halt a game that is likely to find their beloved team on the losing side. Hence, supporting such courageous referees should definitely be regarded as the starting point of what would be a promising anti-racism campaign in European football, but ‘support’ alone is clearly insufficient. It is essential that the actions of the men-in-black are followed by severe penalties imposed by the European governing body, regardless of the clubs’ record and status in national or continental competitions. Racism has no place in football and must be eliminated with effect.

Christos Kassimeris is assistant professor in political science and heads the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Cyprus College in Nicosia and author of European Football in Black and White: Tackling Racism in Football forthcoming in December 2007.

Evangelical-Jewish Relations

By Alan Mittleman

A group of 34 evangelical leaders recently sent President Bush a letter indicating their support for a Palestinian state. Both sides, they claim, “have legitimate rights stretching back for millennia to the lands of Israel/Palestine,” according to an article in the International Herald Tribune (July 29, 2007). Such a declaration would, of course, be unremarkable had it come from a liberal, mainline Protestant body. Coming from the evangelical world, however, makes it noteworthy. The evangelical community has been stalwart in its support for Israel, as well as in its suspicion toward the Palestinians. The signers of this letter, however, claim that the public face of evangelicalism, as a staunchly pro-Israel community, does not do justice to the inner diversity of the community. According to one evangelical leader, Rev. Joel Hunter, most of the community should not be considered Christian Zionists but is “really open” and seeks “justice for both parties.”

The pastors and leaders behind this initiative—who are identified with the growing progressive wing of the evangelical world—intend their message to be heard by Muslims, as well. The letter is being translated into Arabic and sent to Muslims abroad to offset the image of American evangelicals as lock-step followers of maximalist Zionism. 

This display of internal diversity within evangelicalism suggests the healthy dissent of a community come of age. Just as some evangelicals have taken a “liberal” line on the environment, the war in Iraq, or the use of torture, so too here, complicating the public image of the community is not a bad thing. Anyone who supports pluralism and the free exchange of ideas might welcome this intramural dialogue. Although I very much reject their argument—do Palestinian Arabs really have claims reaching back millennia? Millennia? lands of Israel/Palestine?—I recognize their need to make it based on their understanding of the biblical imperative of justice.

Let us be clear, however, this group does not represent a majority. It represents, at best, a vocal minority. Drawing on several surveys of evangelical opinion from 1994-2005, the political scientist John Green finds that in the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians 56% of evangelicals sympathized more with Israel as opposed to 6%, who sympathized more with the Palestinians. (38% had no opinion.) Forty one percent of the general public, by comparison, sympathized with Israel; 13% with the Palestinians; 46% had no opinion. Majority evangelical backing for Israel both internally and comparatively is striking. When asked why they sympathized with Israel, 84% said it was because “God gave Israel to the Jews.” It would be hard to read the Bible without coming to this conclusion, especially if one hews to a non-suspicious approach to the text.

These leaders do not speak for the majority. At best, they speak for the 38% who have no opinion and the 6% whose sympathies lie with the Palestinians. Perhaps more probing into the evangelical majority would reveal nuances, hesitations, or gradations of support for Israel. For my part, I am thankful that the majority stands behind Israel. I do not want evangelicals to support Israel naively or credulously; I want them to support Israel —warts and all—intelligently and with full recognition of the fundamental justice of its cause. 

Alan Mittleman is Director of the Louis Finkelstein Institute for Religious and Social Studies and Professor of Jewish Philosophy at The Jewish Theological Seminary.  His latest book Uneasy Allies? Evangelical and Jewish Relations , co-edited with Byron R. Johnson and Nancy Isserman, will be published by Lexington Books this month.

Human Rights: A Trilogy

By Judith Blau and Alberto Moncada

Any nation's peoples share a world view that helps them make sense of their history, of the present, and a world view that is more or less consistent with national social, political, and economic institutions. In the United States, the central value in that world view has been individualism, helping Americans make sense of key chapters in American history: the early entrepreneurial settlers (who Weber described as the embodying the spirit of capitalism), the immigrant experience, the settling of the frontier, and, most importantly, capitalism. Of course there is much in American history that does not exemplify this key value of individualism, but the way that rights have been defined in America, as civil and political rights, are purely individualistic and are at odds with the understanding of human rights elsewhere in the world.

A thesis that links the three books in the trilogy on human rights is that human rights as a logic and set of practices is sweeping the globe, embraced by people everywhere, but Americans are slow to comprehend what human rights are because Americans interpret the world in terms of individual rights, not rights they share with others. In the first volume of the trilogy, Human Rights: Beyond the Liberal Tradition we highlight how American liberalism is key to what is often called, 'American exceptionalism' (or roguishness) and clarify what human rights are--as a world view, as international law, embedded in civil society, and as a broad social movement. We also give examples of how people elsewhere are interpreting human rights.

Human rights made their dramatic formal appearance on the world stage in 1948, with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and then in subsequent international human rights treaties (none of which have been ratified by the US without a statement that they do not apply in the US!) As countries gained their independence from colonial powers, they often adopted human rights provisions in their Constitutions. More recently, in response to the voracious forces of globalization, nearly all countries that did not have such provisions revised their constitutions to include them. The second volume of the trilogy, Justice in the United States: Human Rights and the US Constitution provides many examples of constitutions and clarifies how the US Constitution could be revised to include human rights.

There are many factors playing a role in what is called, the 'worldwide human rights revolution,' and human rights are playing a increasingly important role in development, protection of indigenous people, international approaches to housing, restoration of peasants' lands, micro-credit, and environmental sustainability projects. Humanitarian law is an important branch of human rights and a major milestone has been the establishment of the International Criminal Court in 2002. Social movements, including the World Social Forum, the international peasants movement, landless movements, are propelled by demands for human rights. We argued that there are now two logics--that of human rights and that of neoliberalism capitalism. The welfare of the world's people is at stake. The third volume of the trilogy, Freedoms and Solidarities:In Pursuit of Human Rights  discusses these as opposing logics. In this volume we also more deeply explore the philosophical underpinnings of liberalism and human rights by drawing on the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, and contemporary philosophers.

Judith Blau is professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and president of the US chapter of Sociologists without Borders. She is the author of Architects and Firms, The Shape of Culture, Social Contracts and Economic Markets, and Race in the Schools, editor of The Blackwell Companion to Sociology, and co-editor, with Keri Iyall Smith, of The Public Sociologies Reader. She has published over 75 articles in scholarly journals, and was the president of the Southern Sociological Society. Judith Blau's webpage is: http://www.unc.edu/~jrblau/

Alberto Moncada is president of Sociologists without Borders/Sociólogos Sin Fronteras and Vice-President of UNESCO-Valencia. He has degrees in law, sociology, and education, and is the author of over 30 books in Spanish, including three on Hispanics in the U. S.