Import Brains to Stimulate the Economy

I don't usually talk about the economy but I just have to put this here because ... well ... it's Thomas Friedman. I do like economics but I didn't create this blog because I needed to vent on economic issues.

Before I talk further about Friedman's article, I want to make a few comments on the man. Friedman is perhaps the most influential writer on my foreign policy and economic views. We are both interested about the Middle East, Economics, and Green Technology (or just innovative technology in general). A lot of people think that he is writing about subjects that he has no expertise about. Perhaps, he's not an economist, a foreign policy maker, or a businessman. But he is a journalist and the greatest tool he has which many of us lack is insight. When he writes about something, he goes there. Whether it is about the West Bank or India, he is there to talk with experts in their respective fields. He is not afraid to talk to people. He understands what drives people. If you haven't read From Beirut to Jerusalem yet, do it.

Here are a few excerpts from his latest column with my comments in between -

“All you need to do is grant visas to two million Indians, Chinese and Koreans,” said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express newspaper. “We will buy up all the subprime homes. We will work 18 hours a day to pay for them. We will immediately improve your savings rate — no Indian bank today has more than 2 percent nonperforming loans because not paying your mortgage is considered shameful here. And we will start new companies to create our own jobs and jobs for more Americans.”

Indians and Asians in general truly are some of the hardest people. They've seen the slums. Those that make it to America know how lucky they are to be here. They have the drive and ambition to help the American economic wheels working. There are plenty of engineers and PhDs in Asia that would love to come to America and achieve the American Dream. They just don't have the visas to do so.

Perhaps new immigrants would make the melting pot better money managers.

“Dear America, please remember how you got to be the wealthiest country in history. It wasn’t through protectionism, or state-owned banks or fearing free trade. No, the formula was very simple: build this really flexible, really open economy, tolerate creative destruction so dead capital is quickly redeployed to better ideas and companies, pour into it the most diverse, smart and energetic immigrants from every corner of the world and then stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat.”

What put America ahead of Europe? In America, the will of your heat and sweat and the merit of your cause. It was a land of opportunities where immigrants could help themselves and help America at the same time. It was and still can be for many generations to come.

In conclusion, if you want a more innovative work force, there are two ways of going about. Either raise it (educating children to become engineers and the like) or import it (educated immigrants).

I just took a couple snippets from the column. To read the rest, go here.

Political Decision Taken on the Back of Patients

I just read an article by Ethan Bronner of the NYTimes and it is a very sad story. Here it is in its entirety:

February 10, 2009

Palestinians Stop Paying Israeli Hospitals for Gaza and West Bank Patients

By ETHAN BRONNER

JERUSALEM — Scores of Palestinian patients being treated in Israeli hospitals, a rare bright spot of coexistence here, are being sent home because the Palestinian Authority has stopped paying for their treatment, partly in anger over the war in Gaza.

Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem says that for the past week, no payments have come in and Palestinians whose children it is treating have been instructed by Palestinian health officials to place them in facilities in the West Bank, Jordan or Egypt.

“Suddenly we have had 57 patients dropped from our rolls,” said Dr. Michael Weintraub, director of pediatric hematology, oncology and bone marrow transplantation at Hadassah. “We have been bombarded by frantic parents. This is a political decision taken on the backs of patients.”

The Palestinian health minister, Fathi Abu Moghli, said he was examining the entire referral procedure because he was tired of adding to what he called Israel’s “oil well,” meaning the payments for Palestinian patient care. In particular, he said, he had no desire to see the wounded from the Gaza war receive Israeli care.

“We already pay $7 million a month to Israeli hospitals,” he said in a telephone interview. “Since the first day of the Gaza aggression, I said that I will not send to my occupier my injured people in order for him to make propaganda at my expense, and then pay him for it.”

An Israeli clinic set up with great fanfare on the Israeli-Gaza border the day the war ended, Jan. 18, has already closed, since both Hamas, which governs Gaza, and the Palestinian Authority essentially boycotted it. The Palestinian Authority pays for much of its citizens’ care in Israel from its budget.

Israel has long pointed to its medical care of Palestinians as an example of its advanced skills and humanitarianism. Palestinians generally are eager to gain the benefit, but are also resentful. As relations have chilled, each side has accused the other of political manipulation.

Dr. Abu Moghli said that with 24 hospitals in Gaza and the West Bank, there was no reason for so many Palestinian patients to go automatically to Israeli facilities, which he said were much more expensive and contributed to a culture of dependency.

“We can’t pay our government salaries this month, but at the same time I have to pay Israeli hospitals so much,” he said. “The Israelis have refused to reduce their costs.”

Israeli doctors and nonprofit groups support having the Palestinians provide more care for their own people, but say that the gap with Israel in quality remains huge, and that the Palestinian Authority is making a mistake that could cost lives.

“Cutting it in one day makes no sense,” said Ron Pundak, director general of the Peres Center for Peace, which sponsors care for 1,000 Palestinian children a year in Israeli hospitals and training for 40 Palestinian doctors. “Such a move needs to be coordinated, but dialogue with the Palestinian Authority has been much harder since the war.”

Anan Dahmi, a salesman from the West Bank city of Tulkarm, said he had been told by the Palestinian Health Ministry last week that his 4-year-old son, Aous, had to stop going to Hadassah Hospital for follow-up treatments after a bone marrow transplant there a year ago, and should be taken instead to a Palestinian or Jordanian hospital.

Mr. Dahmi said that his 6-year-old daughter had died from the same disorder because he had not gotten her to Hadassah quickly enough, and that now he was deeply worried about his son.

“I don’t know how I am going to manage,” he said by telephone. “I don’t want to lose my son the way I lost my daughter.”

Hadassah officials say that removing Aous from their care could endanger his life, because his medical requirements are strict and specific and there is not yet a pediatric oncology facility in the Palestinian areas (one in East Jerusalem is due to start functioning, with Israeli help, in the coming year).

They add that while the cost of care is much higher in Israel than in the West Bank, Palestinians are not charged the higher rates for foreigners but those for Israelis — which are much lower than rates in the United States or Western Europe. In addition, they say, there are subsidies from foreign governments, charities and the hospital itself.

“The cure rate for childhood cancer is about 80 percent, but only in the first world,” Dr. Weintraub, of Hadassah, said. “It costs between $50,000 and $100,000 here. It costs four times that in the U.S.”

He added that the relationship between an Israeli hospital in Jerusalem and patients in the West Bank was like that between a hospital in El Paso and patients on the Mexican side of the border.

“People in the third world want first-world care just like we do,” he said. “If they live in Malawi, they have no hope for it. But if they live 10 minutes from Hadassah, they will do everything they can to get admitted. And we are happy to take them. There are no politics in our wards. Twenty percent of our patients are Palestinians, and we have one common enemy: cancer. The rest is immaterial. The question now is how to get those patients back into our care.”

Hamas Returns Supplies to U.N.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) — The United Nations said Monday that Hamas had returned all of the aid supplies that it seized from the agency in the Gaza Strip last week.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency said the return of the supplies cleared the way for it to resume all of its operations in Gaza. The agency had suspended imports of goods on Friday after accusing Hamas of twice seizing aid supplies, which included food and blankets.

Poor patients and their families. Kudos for Israel for giving Palestinians Israeli rates.

A Lebanese Political Satirist With Hezbollah Among His Targets

In my previous post, I mentioned a Lebanese political satirist and his comment on Lebanese media freedom. The NYTimes has an interesting profile on him. Here is an excerpt from the very end of the article:

Mr. Khalil, who cites Woody Allen and Mel Brooks as two of his chief influences, concedes that satire is not a very powerful weapon in a country where politics is still largely a matter of feudal allegiance. But he seems willing to settle for making people laugh.

“When we first started, all this was new, and people resisted it,” he said. “But I discovered that people here are not so different from Europe and the United States. They accept political satire.”

I thought it was interesting that two of his big influences are American Jews.

The Dayton Mission

In Thomas Friedman's latest column, he tells the efforts of Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton to establish a security institution in the West Bank.

I accompanied him and his little team to Jenin — once the most violent city in the West Bank — to see their work. It was quite a scene: I watched a company of newly trained, proud and professional-looking Palestinian Authority troops, standing at attention, AK-47 assault rifles at their side, listening with obvious respect to the American general telling them: “What you’ve done has done more to advance the Palestinian national project than anything else ... You took care of your people at a difficult time. That is how the security forces of a country behave.”

One of the things I like about Friedman is that if he wants to write about the West Bank, he'll write from the West Bank.

General Dayton was addressing the Second Special Battalion of the Palestinian National Security Force, or N.S.F. It was trained by the Jordanian police in a program overseen by the U.S. Security Coordinator — a k a Dayton. He was originally assigned to help reform Palestinian security by the Bush team in 2005, but only got the funds to do so after Hamas took over Gaza in 2007. Some 1,600 Palestinian N.S.F. troops have since graduated, and 500 are now in training. Schooled in everything from riot control to human rights, the N.S.F. is the only truly professional force controlled by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.

The Israeli Army, originally dubious about the Dayton mission, has come to respect it and is now allowing it to expand to Hebron. What really got Israel’s attention was that during the three-week Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, the West Bank never blew up, largely because N.S.F. troops allowed widespread protests but kept Palestinian demonstrators from clashing with Israeli soldiers.

“General Dayton is our friend,” said Col. Radi Abu Asida of the N.S.F. “Now we have excellent training. Now we have professionalism in our security work. We told the people during the Gaza demonstrations, ‘You can protest, but you must do it in a modern way.’ ”

There are many in Israel who would never trust an Arab with a gun or with a ballot. They cite the 2006 Palestinian elections. They fear a Palestinian state which won't be able to stop Hezbollah or Hamas to establish launching pads around Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv. This is a reasonable fear. Just look at Lebanon - a country of elections. But the Lebanese Army can't stand up to the Iran backed Hezbollah, and political parties have militias. And the media outlets are each controlled by a different faction.

The NYTimes has a wonderful profile on Lebanese satirist Charbel Khalil.

Mr. Khalil shrugs it off. “We are completely free here [regarding the media] compared with other Arab countries,” he said, sitting at a desk in his cozy, wood-paneled studio office just north of Beirut. “Nothing is forbidden for satire except the president of the republic.”

Then he adds, with faint embarrassment, “and the army. And the judges, and religious leaders. And the presidents and kings of ‘sister and neighborly countries.’ ” All these are specifically protected from public ridicule under Lebanon’s media law, he says.

The reason the 2006 elections were a disaster for the Palestinians is that they didn't have the institutions in place to actually create a democratic state. There is more to democracy than elections. There needs to be a balance of power. Institutions that strengthens democracy such as a free media, labor unions, an independent security force, government transparency and accountability. None of these are just going to pop up or be easy to establish.

Defeating the enemy through sheer force is not the only way to establish security. One can also establish an environment which the enemy can't garner support and operate. Such an environment is one which has strong societal institutions such as those I talked about above.