Mullah-ing It Over [UPDATED]
Based on last night’s conversation on Twitter, Ed Morrissey is naïve to suggest that our president’s saying something in their support would help Iranian protesters topple the mullahs.
We’ve written repeatedly that Mirhossein Mousavi is no real reformer; he’s the mullah-approved version of a reformer, and a Mousavi “administration” would not differ much from Ahmadinejad’s, except in tone. Getting excited over a Mousavi win would be akin to cheering on Kim Jong-Il’s son to take over for Dear Leader sooner rather than later.
However, and this is the point that Obama and others miss, the Iranian protests have the potential to go beyond Mousavi — which is why the mullahs want to suppress them. The Iranian people have begun to awaken to the fact that they can be more powerful than the mullahcracy that has oppressed them for 30 years. If the protests continue to grow in number, Mousavi will eventually become a footnote as Iran frees itself from tyranny and grasps self-determination.
No one is cheering on Mousavi — we’re cheering the Iranian people. And we’re frankly puzzled why the leader of the free world has yet to do so.
Sheesh! Before that comes anywhere near happening, there will be a bloody Tiananmen for sure! The protesters’ only hope is a split among the mullahs themselves.
So watch Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri (“reformist cleric in Qom, and once the designated successor to Khomeini”). His statement yesterday was nothing short of astonishing. It suggests that there is dissent and dissatisfaction within the inner sanctum of Iran’s ruling clerics. But I don’t have time to go read and find out how influential, or not, he is, or what allies he may have or be gaining. If you do, please pitch in.
Here’s the New York Times archive on him. Right away you’ll see that he’s 87 years old and was placed under house arrest for five years starting in 1997, for opposing Khamenei. (It’s pretty funny, hearing people on Twitter say Newt is “too old” to run for president. This guy is pushing 90 and still a playa.)
UPDATED: I should have added, however, that the protesters potentially give a dissenting mullah a power base; and in that sense, the brave people in the streets are a real contributing factor to some kind of eventual regime change in Iran. It’s an alliance, in which neither the people nor a mullah could act alone.
Big
Thinking about the last post and the comments unfolding there, it strikes me that now that we count ourselves in the hundreds of millions or billions and manage life on a mass scale, the most important thing any two entities can have in common is bigness. Bigness reconciles a multitude of differences. Thus, for example, a Wall Street-K Street alliance is natural, because big entities understand each other, and are motivated to get together to become even bigger. Rick Warren (big) could be invited to speak at the inauguration of Obama (big). You can think of dozens of other examples. The big marry each other and do mergers. Ideology is much less influential than size.
I hear the title “Big” (the Tom Hanks movie) in counterpoint with another: “An Army of Davids” (the Instapundit book). That’s a happy notion, but the fact is that today, to be small is to be helpless, nonexistent. Even David needs a Goliath in his corner, and most Davids dream of incredible-hulking into Goliath-Godzillas who will finally loom above the mass and be seen. Goliaths make more Goliaths, like chess masters queening pawns or Olympians immortalizing their favorite boy- and girl toys: Oprah elevates James Frey, McCain uplifts Joe the Plumber, Instapundit queens Althouse. Yes, in the blogosphere Insty is Goliath himself.
In a democracy, in a marketplace, little guys have only one form of bigness: their numbers. And so they are courted and manipulated instead of brutalized. It’s the very best a little guy can hope for.
ABC’s Obamacare “Infomercial”
I’m an independent, not a conservative. I’ve been scoffing at the hysterical hyperbole of those on the right who throw around the word “tyrant” (wannabe) in regard to President Obama. This, however, really scares me.
I know. It’s Drudge. Find me a source that disputes the essential facts of the matter, or that presents a plausible argument in favor of a major broadcast network setting up in the White House, giving the administration lavish air time to pitch a legislative initiative that will profoundly affect all Americans, without opposition voices other than those preselected by the network. In consultation with the administration? That would be an assumption, but a fair one.
It’s as if the major media are voluntarily nationalizing themselves. It makes me feel disoriented. Someone will say “Just go watch Fox News!” Well, I suppose I could, and then try to split the difference. The point is, everyone has an agenda. No one can be trusted to tell it like it is. Or: how you tell it is how it is. (This reminds me of an article I linked a couple of years ago on AmbivaBlog about how the right, too, now acts on the principle that there’s no “reality” outside of how you spin it. And here it is! Biased, so read it with irony.) Has it always been that way? Is it just some sort of geezer nostalgia to think that a David Brinkley stood loftily above the fray? [added] And far worse than just having left media and right media (which is bad enough), a supposedly independent arm of the press is now coupling itself to the power of the state.
Let’s say you fully support President Obama’s vision of health care reform. You’d even be glad if it was speeding us along the path to a single-payer system. You believe health care is a basic human right that should be made available to all, not a commercial good to be traded for profit. You are convinced that a public option is at least a step in the right direction.
Does that justify ramming it down the throats of your countrymen without a full public debate?
Do you like seeing the media divided into the propaganda arm of the party in power and the propaganda arm of the opposition? Should I be grateful that at least there are still two voices?
It’s a Heartache
Something fun from the Wellington International Ukulele Orchestra.
(There’s a message in there somewhere, too ;-)
A Few Notes on Cooperatives
Amba brought up Kent Conrad’s alternative to the so-called “public option” in healthcare reform, which is to have the government charter a large healthcare insurance co-operative that might compete with the private insurance market. Having read a few articles now, I think the most helpful thing I can do is offer a few resources and clarifications as to what this would actually mean.
First, it is essential to understand that at root, a cooperative is an alternative approach to financing a business. Every business is financed through some combination of equity and debt, with the equity provided by the owners and the debt provided by lenders. Lenders receive regular interest payments in return for their financing of the business; in the case of bankruptcy, they also usually get their money back before equity holders do (and therefore get more of it back)*. Owners have a right to the residual profits of the company, i.e. profits after all interest and taxes have been paid. They also can exert control over the company’s decisions through shareholder vote, with each owner enjoying a vote in proportion to his or her shares.
In a cooperative, every owner receives one vote regardless of how many shares they own. This is the core difference between cooperatives and other business forms, and it leads to many other differences. First, it generally leads to a much more equitable distribution of ownership shares, as there is no incentive to purchase more than the minimum number. Second, it means that a co-op is generally going to have less financing than an equivalent private or public enterprise, because a) wealthy investors who could invest more in a co-op have no reason to do so, and b) co-op shares cannot be traded to increase their value through speculation, as that would inevitably erode the one person – one vote rule at the heart of the model.
A corollary implication is that to be viable, co-ops need to make up in numbers what they lack in dollars. So even a very small co-op, such as the one where I used to work ($7 million in annual revenues), will have a large number of shareholders (in that case, over 3000). This means that that their products have to have broad appeal and that they have to be built on business models that are clearly understandable to most people (i.e., meet the Warren Buffet test). Hence, co-ops tend to focus mostly on providing highly essential and universally desired products or services, such as agricultural goods, electricity, banking, or healthcare insurance.
The main criticism of the cooperative model is that it doesn’t facilitate growth, because it offers no incentives for wealthy investors to pony up. Which is true, but it’s worth noting that there are some pretty large co-ops around the world. The main argument in favor of the co-op model is that it is more democratic than other models; the barriers to investing in a co-op are very, very low, and compared to other models the level of shareholder involvement tends to be fairly broad. But that can be overstated: most co-ops see voter participation levels between 10-20 percent, which is about on par with public companies.**
Now, one way that a co-op can scale up on the level of a large corporate entity is through government intervention, which is what the Conrad proposal would accomplish. I would expect this to be the main point of contention coming from conservatives over the co-op, if it indeed turns out to be the compromise of choice. The numbers I’ve seen floated around for this year’s healthcare reform bill have been around $600 billion or so; that would constitute some pretty significant seed funding for any organization. I am skeptical whether such an entity could even be fairly called a co-op.
If denied such levels of funding the organization could be troubled by adverse selection problems, with the people most eager for membership being those people whose healthcare would probably cost the most. If that is the case, the co-op could find itself unable to actually compete on cost – supposedly its entire reason for being. It’s worth noting that in many ways this co-op idea resembles Obama’s campaign proposal of a public option without mandated use.
Finally, it has frequently been argued that the “public option” would amount to single-payer by stealth, especially if it were funded by said $600 billion or so. Well, a “co-op option” could potentially amount to the same thing if it were large and competitive enough; in fact, Canada’s system of single-payer health insurance very much grew out of the efforts of a number of large, regional co-operatives there (PDF). The northern Italian province of Emilia-Romagna – once a Communist bastion and still very Leftist – has a local economy dominated by cooperatives, including many social service cooperatives. Interestingly, in recent years it has also been one of the economically robust regions in all of Europe, although I don’t know how the recent downturn has changed things there.
* Unless, of course, they are forced by intrusive government to give up their claim, as was recently the case with some of Chrysler’s debtholders.
** My own argument for the co-op model is this: it gives people of limited means a very low-risk investment option that can actually provide very good returns, especially if they are committed to actually using the service or product being financed.
Off The Cuff Thinking
Are there two distinct “political” or “worldview” tendencies based on biology?
The current Democratic and Republican parties do not define either liberalism or conservatism in terms other than the liklihood of re-election. The political parties exist only for their own self-interests, the public’s interest be damned.
The political parties are too self-centered to actually realize and put into play what might actually work in their interest because of the “public be damned” attitude of both.
The two party system has rendered “the house divided” a reality.
Both parties have doubled down on their ill-considered bets and the house will win.
But what is the house betting on? It’s safe to say the house is betting on both losing, but when the house wins, who wins? My guess is ultimately nobody because that is who the house ultimately represents… if all have placed their bets on one side or the other.
What happens to those who didn’t bet? These are the ultimate losers. Or, if some definition of political unity could be written, they would be the ultimate winners… and as such could lessen the penalty of the losses on the extremes.
So perhaps the middle — those who do not place a bet — are the ultimate winners. And because they are, those who did place a bet will not suffer the extreme punishment of winner take all.
Why and how could this be so? Precisely because the middle bet simultaneously that the extremes were both right and wrong. The only way is for one or the other of the extremes to be completely correct. How likely is that?
It’s not very likely because the extremes are, in reality, very similar. Let us take for example the extreme ID view that all reality was created at once and universal truths can therefore never change AND the opposite extreme view that reality is always changing and that there are no universal truths.
At least, I think these views are presented as opposite. Is that correct?Opposites are very unique things in that they have nothing in common and when combined yield something neutral. It is only by accepting grey as the outcome of all colors that opposites make sense.
Thus grey would be the color of utopia, would it not? It is, as well, the color of moderation. Therefore there might be a connection between moderation and utopia. Is it as much a fantasy to wish for a moderate world, accepting of all as it is to wish for one ruled by either liberal or conservative values? Which of the three would be the worst? The second worst?
Is the thing most wrong with the middle is that it lacks conviction and the fire of certainty? Is that lack what makes it appealing to some?
Posted by Donna B. in a haze of fuzziness and wonder.
Twitters from Brueghel
The landscape on Twitter today, with Iran’s opposition going down in flames while many of us watched ball games and ate and laughed, was this picture and the two poems written about it.
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by William Carlos Williams
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near
the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings’ wax
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
Musée Des Beaux Arts by W. H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
The Cooperative Option
Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota may just have headed off a looming congressional health-care stalemate by proposing a “third way” solution — private cooperatives. Ezra Klein lets Sen. Conrad speak for himself:
The G-11 group, which is the members of the Senate, Republicans and Democrats, chairmen and ranking members of the key committees, who’ve been given the overall responsibility to coordinate health care reform in the Senate, asked me 10 days ago to come up with something to bridge the divide […]
The co-op structure came to mind because it seems to fulfill at least some of the desires of both sides. In terms of those who want a public option because they hope to have a competitive delivery model able to take on the private insurance companies, a co-op model has attraction.
And for those against a public option because they fear government control, the co-op structure has some appeal because its not government control. It’s membership control, and membership ownership.
Also the co-op model has proven very effective across many different models. Ocean Spray in the cranberry business, and Land of Lakes in the dairy business, and Puget Sound in the health care business.
Read the whole thing for a lucid brief explanation of how health coops would work and the various options for organizing them so that their pools would be big enough to be viable and competitive.
Where did this idea come from? I’ve done a fair amount of health care reporting, and this is the first I’ve heard of it.
I guess it came out of conversations in my office after we were asked to see if we couldn’t come up with some way of bridging this chasm. Part of it is that we’re so used to cooperative structures in my state. They were begun by progressives, they came out of the progressive era. And they’re so successful in our state. So I can’t really say we came up with some brand new idea. We just thought about our own experience.
I hope Maxwell, who ran a cooperative for years, will come in on this post and take it from here.
Ambiance 