All Articles and Op-Eds

Population Bombing

Ron Tang — Mon, 19 May 2008 08:46:00 -0400

In the 20th century, a global network of colluding activists, institutions, and governments sought to engineer solutions to various real and perceived social problems by, as Matthew Connelly puts it in his new book, planning "other people's families." In its most egregious expression, this movement led to the forced sterilization of millions of people around the world, including many thousands in the U.S., on the grounds that they were -- genetically or otherwise -- unfit. California alone had sterilized 7,500 people by 1931, and the practice continued in other states up until the 1970s.

This movement also, through philanthropies and government-directed… more

The War Over the War (cont.)

Ron Tang — Mon, 19 May 2008 08:05:00 -0400

There's the war in Iraq and then there is the war over the war in Iraq. The first is about gaining ground against the sectarian militias and terrorists who plague that country. The second is about storytelling.

Advocates of staying and fighting in Iraq are at a distinct disadvantage in the second war. The burden of the Iraq fighting falls on such a small number of military families that it is easy to portray the troops in the field as victims. This has proved an effective strategy for Virginia's junior senator, Jim Webb, a staunch opponent of the surge. Once seen… more

Bin Laden And Palestine

Ron Tang — Fri, 16 May 2008 11:04:00 -0400

Less than a day after Republican presidential candidate John McCain promised that if he won the presidency Osama bin Laden would be captured or killed by 2013, a message from al Qaeda’s leader appeared on jihadist websites reminding the world that he is alive and well.

Bin Laden’s audiotape message commented on the recent 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel; promised that he would fight for the liberation of Palestine, and told his Muslim listeners that they have a duty to help in that effort.

Was the audiotape an attempt by bin Laden to remain relevant by pushing… more

Our Urban Future

Ron Tang — Wed, 14 May 2008 06:45:00 -0400

Half of the world’s population now lives in cities, a number that will climb to 75% by the middle of the century. This development marks a radical break in human history, for humanity has until recently been overwhelmingly rural, concerned first and foremost with brute survival.

In “The Communist Manifesto,” Karl Marx referred to “the idiocy of rural life” -- or so the mistranslation goes -- as an enduring problem. In fact, Marx wasn’t talking about “idiocy” at all. Rather, he was referring to the isolation and stasis of rural life, and how it had long stymied creativity and the diffusion… more

Crossroads in Quality

adminn — Tue, 13 May 2008 11:43:00 -0400

Expanding insurance coverage is a critical step in health reform, but we argue that to be successful, reforms must also address the underlying problems of quality and cost. We identify five fundamental building blocks for a high-performance health system and urge action to create a national center for effectiveness research, develop models of accountable health care entities capable of providing integrated and coordinated care, develop payment models to reward high-value care, develop a national strategy for performance measurement, and pursue a multistakeholder approach to improving population health.

* * *

For the full text of this essay, please see the… more

The Long Road To Health Reform Requires Bipartisan Leadership

adminn — Tue, 13 May 2008 09:27:00 -0400

The United States appears headed toward another national debate about health system reform. Worry about access and health system deficiencies has reached critical mass, and polls indicate that health care leads the domestic agenda for the 2008 elections. This debate, like previous debates, will succeed or fail in Congress. We highlight key elements of recent sagas in health legislation and offer advice to the next president and Congress for improving the likelihood of a successful outcome in 2009-10:

make health reform a top legislative priority; be leaders, not partisans; and develop broad policy consensus but leave the policy details to Congress. more

Switch To Español

Ron Tang — Sun, 11 May 2008 05:52:00 -0400

Amid all the national debate over immigration, at least one firm consensus has emerged: Newcomers to the United States should learn English because it remains the lingua franca of our civic life. All three remaining presidential contenders say that the ability to speak English should be a requirement of U.S. citizenship. And last year, the immigrant governor of California told a convention of Latino journalists that immigrants should watch only English-language TV so they can understand the language and news of their home state. "You've got to turn off the Spanish television set," Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger advised the… more

Go For the Bitter Bloc

Ron Tang — Fri, 09 May 2008 10:17:00 -0400

Last week's Pennsylvania primary demonstrated that Barack Obama is not unbeatable. This might sound a strange way to put it. Hasn't it always been true that Obama is beatable?

Well, consider an alternate reality in which Obama had won Pennsylvania. His people certainly thought long and deeply about this alternate reality -- why else spend a staggering $12 million on one state's primary? Hillary Clinton would have dropped out. Obama would have shown that he can win white working-class votes in a big, diverse, populous state. Way back after the Iowa caucuses, he playfully observed that everywhere he goes becomes Obama… more

Israel At 60

Ron Tang — Fri, 09 May 2008 08:53:00 -0400

I don't often, or ever really, write about my own relationship to Israel or how I ended up there, but I'll make an exception for its 60th anniversary.

My relationship with Israel started at the time of the ‘good' Iraq war. You remember, the Iraq war whose ambitions were limited to ensuring continued access to Kuwaiti oil -- not the contemporary trifecta effort to own the oil, change the regime, and transform the region.

In January of 1991 I was working in London as the political officer of the Union of Jewish Students, arguing Israel's case on campus (and attempting to do… more

Bin Laden Or Bust

Ron Tang — Thu, 08 May 2008 10:29:00 -0400

Dude! What a rad plan! Kicking back over drinks at Bungalow 8, the hard-to-get-into Manhattan nightclub, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock hatched the idea of a humorous documentary and book about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Your average auteur would wake up the next morning back in his Brooklyn crib, reach for the Advil and realize that searching for the largest mass murderer in U.S. history is about as funny as a pounding hangover.

But Spurlock is not an auteur easily deterred. He made his name with "Super Size Me," the 2004 documentary in which he ate nothing but Mickey D's, watched… more

Stealth Marketers

Ron Tang — Tue, 06 May 2008 07:11:00 -0400

A few weeks ago, devoted listeners of National Public Radio were treated to an episode of the award-winning radio series The Infinite Mind called "Prozac Nation: Revisited." The segment featured four prestigious medical experts discussing the controversial link between antidepressants and suicide. In their considered opinions, all four said that worries about the drugs have been overblown.

The radio show, which was broadcast nationwide and paid for in part by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, had the air of quiet, authoritative credibility. Host Dr. Fred Goodwin, a former director of the National Institute of… more

Winning Over the Values Voters

Ron Tang — Mon, 05 May 2008 14:32:00 -0400

In Barack Obama's now famous remarks to rich donors in San Francisco in early April, he attributed the fact that white Democrats in small towns were resisting his candidacy to their anger over their economic misfortune. "They get bitter," Obama said, "and cling to guns or religion... as a way to explain their frustration." Obama seemed to be implying that social conservatism is a toxic byproduct of economic distress -- and it may have hurt him in Pennsylvania last week, where he lost the primary contest to Hillary Clinton.

Yet the notion expressed by Obama is hardly new. Way back in… more

Dialogue Isn't the Last Word

Ron Tang — Mon, 05 May 2008 07:19:00 -0400

Barack Obama loves reconciliation, but it isn't all it's cracked up to be. Sometimes it isn't even possible, and let's be honest, it isn't always the point.

About six weeks ago, during his "More Perfect Union" speech on race that some heralded as the second coming of Abraham Lincoln, Obama had a choice between reconciliation and renunciation, and, true to form, he chose the former. He protested that he could "no more disown" the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. than he could disown "the black community" or his own (sometimes politically incorrect) white grandmother. Really?

Right about now, his much-heralded tutorial on… more

Schwarzenegger-Shriver: Protecting the Brand

Ron Tang — Sun, 04 May 2008 02:18:00 -0400

One afternoon early in his second year as governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger flew home from Sacramento to Los Angeles with a vexing political problem. He needed to cut $2 billion from the budget he was putting together, and any of his best options for doing it could get him into trouble.

If he raised taxes, he'd anger his fellow Republicans. Break a promise to increase education funding and he'd alienate the top Democratic interest group, the California Teachers Assn. Option 3: Cut health and human services, the next biggest category in the budget. He didn't like the idea, but some of his… more

The Perils Of Unconditional Engagement

Ron Tang — Fri, 02 May 2008 09:38:00 -0400

The issue of whether or not to engage Hamas boils down to the following question: would such engagement help moderate the organization, or would it simply improve Hamas’ chances of dominating the Palestinian political scene and encourage extremism throughout the Middle East? For now, any engagement that goes beyond achieving de-escalation in Gaza would serve to bolster Hamas at the expense of those working toward a two-state solution.

Those who argue that engagement would bring about a significant change in Hamas’ policies proceed from a faulty assumption regarding the way the organization thinks. Hamas does not reject the two-state solution and… more

Can Technology Save Intellectual Property Without Crippling Our Culture?

adminn — Thu, 01 May 2008 21:16:00 -0400

The easy knock on Tarleton Gillespie's Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture is that it seems dated. In walking the reader through the many issues and arguments of digital copyright, Gillespie focuses on three seminal attempts at Digital Rights Management -- the Recording Industry Association of America's failed Secure Digital Music Initiative, moviemakers' somewhat more successful efforts to lock down DVDs, and the major television networks' push to require "broadcast flags" on digital television signals. All three battles, while important, were waged years ago; more recent, equally relevant examples are touched on briefly or not at… more

Here Comes the Second World

Ron Tang — Thu, 01 May 2008 09:42:00 -0400

This article is adapted from Parag Khanna's book The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order.

The term "second world" has fallen out of use. It used to mean countries of the socialist world; today I use the phrase to refer to those countries in eastern Europe and central Asia, Latin America, the middle east and southeast Asia which are both rich and poor, developed and underdeveloped, postmodern and pre-modern, cosmopolitan and tribal -- all at the same time. This is not a temporary state between third world and first, but a permanent condition in which… more

Wilson and the Founders: The Roots of Liberal Foreign Policy

Ron Tang — Thu, 01 May 2008 06:39:00 -0400

This article is adapted from Widmer’s January 2008 presentation at “The Liberal Foreign Policy Tradition,” a conference cosponsored by CIS, the Woodrow Wilson Center, and the History and Democracy Project.

We can't do much better than reclaiming the Declaration of Independence as a fundamental foreign policy document in American history. We have a tendency to read it in a simplistic way, and to think of it only as a sort of airy declaration of what were then human rights, and a declaration of separation from England. But, in fact, the founders had a fairly well-articulated sense of what they… more

The U.S. Senate: Stalling Hemispheric Arms Control

Ron Tang — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 12:31:00 -0400

In 1997, President Bill Clinton, standing beside Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo in the Organization of American States’ flag-bedecked Hall of the Americas, declared: “Gun trafficking is an issue of national security for our governments, and a matter of neighborhood security for all of us in the Americas.” The presidents had joined together to sign an OAS treaty known as the Firearms Convention, or by its Spanish initials as CIFTA, designed to end the illicit manufacture and trafficking of guns, ammunition, explosives, and related materials. It requires that ratifying nations create laws (if they do not already exist) that establish procedures… more

It's No Longer 1968 For Dems

Ron Tang — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 06:58:00 -0400

In May 2004, as the presidential campaign was beginning to gather steam, an unnamed senior Bush administration official was asked to comment on the dilemma John F. Kerry faced in criticizing the handling of the war in Iraq. His response: “It’s never stopped being 1968” for Democrats.

A more telling description of Democratic vulnerability on national security issues is difficult to imagine. The year 1968 is shorthand for the 40-year political caricature of Democrats as “soft” and “weak” on military affairs. In the late ’60s, Democrats were “dirty hippies”; in the ’70s, they were peacenik McGovernites; in 1984, they were “blame… more