Monthly Archives: September 2009

Shocking News Break: Saudi Arabia Still Doesn’t Like Israel

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The Export Administration Regulations (“EAR”) prohibit U.S. persons from cooperating in any boycotts of foreign states that the U.S. does not support. The primary purpose of these regs is to attack the Arab League’s boycott of Israel.

The Jerusalem Post recently came out with an article showing that, despite these antiboycott provisions, attempts by Saudi Arabia to gain compliance from American businesses with it boycott activities are on the rise.

A review of US Commerce Department data conducted by the Post found that the number of boycott-related and restrictive trade-practice requests received by American companies from Saudi Arabia has increased in each of the past two years, rising from 42 in 2006 to 65 in 2007 to 74 in 2008, signifying a jump of more than 76 percent.

In addition to being a violation of domestic U.S. law by American businesses, this is also pretty clearly a violation of Saudi Arabia’s commitments to the WTO:

In November 2005, the desert kingdom pledged to abandon the boycott after Washington conditioned Saudi Arabia’s entry into the World Trade Organization on such a move. A month later, on December 11, Saudi Arabia was granted WTO membership.

The WTO, which aims to promote free trade, prohibits members from engaging in discriminatory practices such as boycotts or embargoes.

It looks like the Jerusalem Post article might be spurring Congressional action:

[Democrat and Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Howard] Berman declared that he would take action on the issue.

“I intend to pursue this matter with the administration,” he said.
Across the aisle, Congressman Mike Pence of Indiana, who chairs the House Republican Conference, also criticized Riyadh for its duplicity.

“Saudi Arabia’s disregard of its 2005 pledge to end the boycott against Israel is unacceptable,” Pence told the Post.

“Congress and the administration must hold Saudi Arabia accountable. The United States cannot stand by and continue to witness this mistreatment towards the peace-loving people of Israel,” he said.

Over at International Trade Law News, there’s a graph up showing boycott activity among Arab League nations in 2008. Saudi Arabia ranked fifth among boycott requests, while Jordan remained alone in having no reported boycott activity.

-Susan

Unleashing The Inner Child

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I’ve recently been reading Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole by Benjamin Barber.*  The book basically expands on a premise first put forth by Marx: market economies, in an effort to encourage consumption, breed artificial “needs”.  Barber suggests that adults are infantilized to make them more receptive to child-like products (and make them more malleable purchasers), while children are made into adults so that they can become little consumers.  I’m still trying to figure out how much of his argument I buy, but clearly Barber is a progressive who thinks the market is eeeeeeeeevil (*said with sinister voice*).

I hadn’t really seen much in other sources about this supposedly pervasive infantilization.  But, as it turns out, there’s also a conservative infantilization movement that points out all the devolving tendencies that Barber does, but instead blames it on the government.  Now even one of my favorite economists, Thomas Sowell, is trying to sell this argument:

The most childish of all the things being said in the august setting of a joint session of Congress last week was that millions of people can be added to the government’s health insurance plan without increasing the federal deficit at all.

. . .

What is equally childish is the notion that the great majority of Americans, who have medical insurance and who say they are satisfied with it, should be panicked and stampeded into supporting vast increases in the arbitrary power of Washington bureaucrats to take medical decisions out of the hands of their doctors – all ostensibly because a minority of Americans do not have medical insurance.

But I just want to step back and ask, before we launch into a great debate about our devolving society (a la Idiocracy): are people really acting more childish?  I recognize that we’re engaging in a few more child-like activities, many of which are pointed out by Barber.  (Barber’s favorite example is video games! video games! video games!)  Even so, we’ve also advanced in some important ways.  One could argue that adults are more informed about goings-on throughout the world, as technology makes access to news almost instantaneous.  Our economy has shifted from one focused on manufacturing and agriculture (i.e., a brute force eoconomy) to one focused on the provision of complicated services, like information technology and financial services.  Those who decry the lack of civility in today’s world forget that men were once beaten on the floor of the Senate.  Children and adults have become adept at using technological tools that our grandparents never even dreamed of.

I perfectly understand how some authors conclude that there is an insidious infantilization movement; I’m often shocked at my own generation’s frequent sense of entitlement, laziness, and lack of intellectual curiosity.  Even so, I suspect that generations of the past also carried these characteristics, even if they manifested themselves in different ways.  Perhaps we shouldn’t rush to diagnose the root of our society’s reversion to childhood until we’re certain that the “devolution” is not just our own sense of nostalgia for the good ‘ole days getting the better of us.

-Michael

*I’m not reviewing Consumed in this piece, but I have to say that I completely agree with this review on Amazon:

If there wasn’t a photo of him on the dust jacket, you would swear the author was a college freshman with a thesaurus writing his first serious essay. The writing is so pretentious, it makes the book hard to wade through. It’s a shame since Benjamin Barber has clearly given his subject considerable thought.

The Saga of the Arctic Sea Continues

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The Arctic Sea has gone missing again, though this time under Russian control and presumably heading for Russian port. Spain never let the ship into Las Palmas due to the presence of military personnel on board.

Meanwhile, although 11 of the 15 Russian crew members were eventually released, the remaining 4 are still on board the Arctic Sea — and according to their wives, being held captive there:

Captain Sergei Zaretsky and three crew members have not been allowed off the Arctic Sea more than a month after a Russian warship seized the vessel from eight suspected pirates.

Their wives appealed to the International Red Cross and the governments of Spain, Malta, Finland and Russia to intervene, saying that the men were in poor health two months after the Arctic Sea was supposedly boarded by an armed gang in the Baltic Sea.

I can’t figure out exactly what sort of help the crews’ wives are asking for, but at any rate they are very unlikely to receive it.

Back in Russia, the lawyers for the hijackers are now portraying this as some sort of National Lampoon’s Russian Spring Break. The hijackers — ecologists, in reality — got their boat swamped, and the Arctic Sea just happened to be passing by. The crew of the Arctic Sea offered them a lift, and they all then sailed down to Cape Verde, cavorting in the sun and playing in their pool. The poor ecologists had no idea the ship was missing or even that they were now off the coast of Africa, except that it was getting “warmer,” so they assumed they’d sailed south. Alleged hijacker Dmitry Bartenev, on crew-pirate relations:

“The crew were very friendly. When they realised we were Russians, they took us to the saloon bar and cracked open a bottle of vodka. There was a lot of booze on the Arctic Sea: whisky and strong alcohol of all kinds.”

-Susan

Update: Maybe Law School DOES Need a Warning Label

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Earlier this week, I wrote about a proposed reform from Professor Anita Bernstein, wherein law schools would teach students about the perils of practicing law.  One BigLaw firm chairman thinks that’s not enough; instead, students should avoid law school altogether.  In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal [sub. req.], K&L Gates chairman Peter Kalis sharply criticized the existing law school model, and warned students about taking on all that debt:

WSJ: In addition to layoffs, law firms have dramatically cut their hiring of law school graduates. Do you think many college graduates today should think twice before they head off to law school?

Mr. Kalis: Yes. The business model of the U.S. law school doesn’t quite make sense to me. Law schools will bring you in from college and educate you, but they will encumber you with six-figure indebtedness at a tender age.

The assumption was that there was no problem, because law firms like K&L Gates would pay that off for you. And that is where the wheels are falling off.

I’ve heard that law school applications are actually increasing. We will be pouring tens of thousands of young people into a market that I suspect is not going to be able to absorb them at the remuneration levels that would have justified them taking on that debt.

Is it too late to get my money back?  Although, I suppose things could be worse: I could still be in law school.  (Sounds like things aren’t going so well for those folks.)

-Michael

Update on the State Secrets Privilege

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Over on Volokh, there’s a much better forecast on what the actual results will be of the DOJ’s policy change regarding the state secrets privilege.

By voluntarily checking its own assertion of the privilege, the Administration may have slowed the momentum by these other two branches to establish greater restrictions on executive use of the privilege. For those, like myself, who are concerned about the privilege’s abuse in the hands of any executive, the new policy is a mixed blessing. Yes, I am happy to see the Administration voluntarily establish constraints on its use of the privilege, but I am hesitant to leave the privilege completely to the executive’s discretion. Ironically, then, the very policy shift that limits the privilege today may be the one that prevents courts and Congress from limiting abuse of the privilege in the future.

This seems very right to me. I do think the ultimate effect will be just this, that the Executive branch gave up a little ground today in order to fortify its position for tomorrow — and ultimately, it will retain a state secrets privilege of greater scope than it would if have had it not been publicly seen to retreat a few steps now.

-Susan

Acronym Evolution

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Via language log, the internet has claimed another victim — the Wisconsin Tourism Federation. Compare the old and new logos below.

It’s really a pity that the Southern Tenant Farmers Union no longer exists. Otherwise we’d get more great lines like the one from this book, “Communist efforts to capture the STFU,” or this one, “Without the STFU, these people may not have dared to exercise these rights of citizenship.”

-Susan

Quick Hits

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• Can the greater embrace of free market principles in the United States as opposed to Europe be traced back to differences between the philosophies of the English enlightenment and the Continental enlightenment?

• It’s better to beg forgiveness than offer money: “You might think that if the apology is costless then customers would ignore it as nothing but cheap talk – which is what it is. But this research shows apologies really do influence customers’ behaviour – surprisingly, much more so than a cash sweetener.” However, I doubt these results would carry over to businesses outside of the eBay sales that this study followed. On eBay, most transactions involve no human interaction at all, but rather merely clicking a series of buttons. When things go wrong, receiving an apology from a real live person can do a lot to make you feel as if you weren’t deliberately ripped off by a computer scam, but rather were the victim of a common human screw up.

And saying sorry apparently doesn’t have any sort of magical effect if you happen to be a doctor: “Apologizing for a medical error in full and accepting responsibility may boost patients’ perceptions of physicians but may not stop them from suing[.]“

• Meet the Asgarda: a tribe of Amazons in the Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine.

• The rent-seeking behaviors of law schools and law professors: Law schools are notorious for their attempts to climb up the US News rankings by gaming the system — “Aside from hiring their own graduates to up the employment level, they all employ squads of people whose jobs are to create social costs (of course, most lawyers do the same thing), produce huge glossy magazines that go straight to the trash, weasel around with who is a first year student as opposed to a transfer student or a part time student, [and] select students with an eye to increasing one rating or another.”

This sort of rent seeking behavior occurs in all industries, but there’s something even more disquieting about it when all that effort is wasted pursuing the nebulous goals of legal academia. “Very little of [law school rent seeking] seems designed to produce new wealth. If fact, think of the actual welfare-producing activities that could be undertaken with the same levels of energy — smaller classes, more sections of needed courses, possibly even research into areas that are risky in terms of self promotion but could pay off big if something new or insightful were discovered or said. But this is the part that puzzles me. Whether the thief in Tullock’s case or monopolist in Posner’s, the prize is clear. What is the prize for law professors? Are these social costs expended to acquire rents that really do not exist or are only imagined? What are the rents law professors seek?”

-Susan

It’s Just A Flesh Wound

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Why do we rely so much on doctors? A good friend of mine is currently in med school up here in D.C. (hi there, Travis), and we frequently get into fights enthusiastic discussions about whether or not the U.S. health care system could be improved by expanding the practice areas of health care providers who are not MDs. My view: Of course we should. It doesn’t take seven years of schooling to diagnose simple ailments or put in stitches. His view: Having procedures be performed by non-doctors will result in subpar quality of care and therefore is not ultimately more efficient.

And to some extent we’re obviously both right. Non-doctors — such as nurse practitioners and physicians’ assistants — are cheaper to train and are more than adequate for most common health complaints that turn up in primary care. But in some patients, health problems that appear on the surface to be routine will in fact turn out to be more complicated issues, and having a doctor involved from the start would result in a better outcome. But I still think that for a lot primary care and urgent care situations — and particularly for the uninsured — being forced to see a doctor when a nurse would do just as adequately is a waste of resources. And while a good majority of doctors appear to be against the idea of allowing greater involvement by NP’s, I do wonder how much of this is due to a protectionist sentiment at play.

There is empirical evidence supporting the idea that the quality of care provided by both nurses and doctors is equivalent. Studies have found that “[i]n an ambulatory care situation in which patients were randomly assigned to either nurse practitioners or physicians, and where nurse practitioners had the same authority, responsibilities, productivity and administrative requirements, and patient population as primary care physicians, patients’ outcomes were comparable”, as well as that “[p]atients are more satisfied with care from a nurse practitioner than from a doctor, with no difference in health outcomes”. I’d caution that this doesn’t necessarily translate to cheaper in all cases; some studies find that even though patients experience increased satisfaction with their results when they receive care from mid-levels, they might not gain an additional benefit in the form of reduced costs, as “Even though using nurses may save salary costs, nurses may order more tests and use other services which may decrease the cost savings of using nurses instead of doctors.”

But even if mid-level health-care providers offered slightly lower quality of care, why are they banned from providing it all together? For those who are confident they have only a minor health issue, why not let them choose to pay less and go see a nurse rather than a doctor? It’s both a little paternalistic and a little suggestive of anti-competitive business practices for doctors to continue to lobby the government to set a floor on the supply of health care services in this way.

Still, even if we allow non-MDs to oversee more patients with routine problems or in need of only primary care services, this may do little to counteract the growing shortage of primary care physicians:

Mid-level [practitioners] are not immune to the vast incentives favoring practicing in a specialty environment. As Val Jones reported, when nurses were asked why more are not entering generalist practice, the reply was blunt: “We’re not suckers.”

Already, 42 percent of mid-level providers practice in specialty fields, and I fully expect this number to rise if the primary care environment continues to deteriorate, especially when contrasted to the salary and lifestyle offered to specialists.

Suggestions that we fill the primary care practitioner shortage with foreign medical graduates are equally lacking — many foreign doctors act as general practitioners in rural areas to fulfill visa requirements, and then switch to more lucrative positions as specialists in urban areas.

One small step towards increasing the number of GP’s might be a
re-branding effort:

By the way, I hate the term primary care. It makes it sound cheap. It makes it sound dumb. It makes it sound so superficial. What we do as internists, pediatricians and family medicine doctors is far more than the connotation of primary screening and evaluation. We manage many complicated patients with mulitorgan failure. And many doctors in rural America do it all alone. With no help at all. Some of the best doctors in the world are rural primary care physicians who must treat highly complex medical issues by themselves. Not because they want to but because they have to.

The name primary care has got to go. Perception is 4/5th of the equation.

Another blogger used the word comprehensive care once. I think that is perfect. And I use it often in my blogging.

-Susan

Attorney-Client Privilege [Apparently] Extends To Your Sketchy Roommate’s Bedroom

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One of my favorite places to find a good laugh is a website called Passive Aggressive Notes.  The site is exactly what you’d expect: a repository for insanely funny passive-aggressive notes.  Normally, that kind of thing doesn’t have anything to do with law, but I couldn’t help but post this gem. 

Apparently, one roommate planned to throw a party.  The other roommate planned to be out of town and was concerned someone would use his bed.  So, logically, the roommate posted a notice invoking attorney-client privilege, the Iowa constitution, Iowa statute, federal statute, and the U.S. Constitution.  Some highlights (and I’m not even going to try to insert [sic]s):

This room is protected as later defined from trespassing.  There is privileged information contained within. . . . If you feel the need to disrespect me, State Gov’t, and Federal Gov’t, as well as those person found on the classified documents, then you will be prosecuted.

. . .

I will not jeopardize my future law career and will therefore not be afraid to press charges for violations found herein.

-Michael