Editorial Roundup
Excerpts from recent editorials in newspapers in the United States and abroad:
Oct. 2
The New York Times, on visa-recapture bill:
... Every year Congress authorizes a certain number of permanent-resident visas, or green cards, for immigrants to come to work in the United States or to rejoin their families. And every year bureaucratic delays prevent a certain portion of those visas from being claimed.
The result? Every year thousands of potential green cards vanish, like unused cell phone minutes. ...
Teachers, nurses, engineers, researchers and other aspiring immigrants who follow the rules, file their paperwork, pay their fees and wait _ and wait _ get the chilly message that they are not wanted. Some of them feel great pressure to go illegally around the immigration system, instead of through it, as their wait to rejoin their loved ones becomes intolerable.
A House bill that could recapture an estimated 550,000 lost visas, sponsored by Representative Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, has been moving slowly through the committee process despite the best efforts of members like Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, to sabotage it with ridiculously restrictive amendments. One would have granted green cards only to people younger than 40 with college degrees. Another would have eliminated an entire category of family visas, for siblings of citizens. ...
It seems unlikely that a visa-recapture bill would make it through this year. But don't blame Congress's focus on the economic mess for that. Recapturing visas is a modest fix that should have been made a long time ago. The country needs to build a smoother path to legal entry and citizenship. The blame for its failure to do that lies squarely with the hard-liners who rage against illegal immigrants, but are strangely uninterested in helping people who "play by the rules" and "wait in line."
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Oct. 2
The Star-Ledger, Newark, N.J., on food label legislation:
Federal legislation prompted by a spate of food safety scares, some of them deadly, took effect recently. ... It will require labels identifying the country of origin of fresh fruit, vegetables, nuts, meats and frozen produce. Seafood origin has been labeled since 2005. ...
While this law is a good beginning, more can be done.
Food and other goods from some countries have been the source of so many incidents that the mere mention of the country's name can cause alarm, as in the case of China.
While the country-of-origin label might unfairly taint some harmless goods, consumers have a right to know where food was produced and then decide for themselves. ...
Given a choice between apples grown in China, which produces 35 percent of the world's supply, and those grown in upstate New York, many consumers might prefer the latter, even if they have to pay more for them.
The labeling law is not perfect, and it doesn't cover everything. ...
Ultimately, the goal must be to improve food safety worldwide. Education, tighter food handling rules and other precautions are needed to prevent food-borne illnesses. ... To do so would require expanding the role of the Food and Drug Administration, which often finds itself reacting to deadly outbreaks instead of having the tools to prevent them. ...
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Oct. 3
The News-Gazette, Champaign, Ill., on term limits:
... New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has reached an interesting conclusion about his tenure as the leader of the nation's largest city: he is indispensable.
That's why Bloomberg, who has served two terms but is barred by law from seeking a third, is asking his city council to extend the limit on years in municipal office from 8 years to 12 years.
Bloomberg maintains his continued leadership of New York City is vital because of the ongoing financial crisis that is affecting the city's financial services industry. Apparently no one else is capable of handling that challenge. ...
Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who rescued the city from crime and degradation, was forced from office by term limits not long after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on the city. An indisputably great mayor, Guiliani felt he was indispensable to helping the city recover and sought an extension of his term of office from state legislators.
But Giuliani's request was denied, and he was followed in office by Bloomberg, who now is claiming that he's even more indispensable than Giuliani thought he was. ...
Bloomberg's request may ultimately be granted. ... But no one should vote for it on the grounds that Bloomberg or any other egotistical politician has to remain in office for the city to survive.
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Oct. 4
The Cincinnati Enquirer, on the economic rescue package:
It's not pretty and it is certainly not perfect, but the $700 billion economic rescue package approved by the House Friday is a necessary evil to keep the economy moving.
This bill did not pass to bail out a bunch of greedy Wall Street fat cats. All the rhetoric to deny such people "golden parachutes" was meant to soothe any voters who clogged the Congressional phone lines. The real purpose of this bill is to safeguard the jobs and capital of millions of companies and employees about to be left in the cold by an unyielding credit freeze.
That's what all the sound bites about Wall Street vs. Main Street were all about. Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Miami Township, who changed her early no vote to help pass Friday's version of the bill in the House by a 263-171 vote, said she heard from "all the CEOs on Fourth Street, and I mean the one in Cincinnati, not New York." All told her stories about the credit crunch and warned their companies would not be able get the loans their businesses depend on if Congress didn't act, she said. ...
House Republican Leader John Boehner, of West Chester, supported the bill early in the week and again on Friday. Like the others, he despised having to pass the bill, but warned that further delay risked another precipitous decline in the stock market, which would cause far more long term pain for millions of Americans. ...
We agree. Seeking a perfect solution could not be allowed to defeat what was possible, and necessary.
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Oct. 5
The Tuscaloosa (Ala.) News, on the bailout plan:
It's typical that the Bush administration was caught by surprise when the markets crashed.
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's bailout plan is hastily thrown together. It fuels suspicions that Bush was as ill-prepared for the financial crisis as he was when the situation in Iraq began to grow sour in the hours after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
Bush and his advisers clearly expected Iraqis to welcome American troops as liberators. They were viewed instead as occupiers. It took Bush years to revise his playbook for Iraq, at the cost of thousands of lives and billions of dollars.
The Wall Street crisis has strong parallels. Despite months of advance warnings that there was a growing problem with bad mortgages and a looming credit crunch, administration figures insisted that the economy was sound. Things would work themselves out. There would be no need for a bailout.
There's a pattern here. Bush has ignored warnings on global warming. He disregarded reports on the frailty of the levees in New Orleans. Like his father, he doesn't get "the vision thing."
He reacts and too often when he does it's inadequate.
So it is with the bailout.
As Republican U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby of Tuscaloosa said after voting with a small minority not to accept the plan last week, "The choice we faced was between pursuing an informed response or panic, and I think we chose panic." ...
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On the Net:
http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/section/opinion
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Oct. 5
Houston Chronicle, on Medicare and preventable medical errors:
Horror stories of instruments left in a patient's body after surgery or the wrong leg being amputated may sometimes be apocryphal, but there are enough instances of "never events" in hospitals so called because they should never happen that, as of Oct. 1, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), no longer pays hospitals for additional care resulting from "reasonably preventable" errors.
The actual savings to Medicare will be about $21 million, enough to provide coverage for about 44.8 million elderly and disabled Americans this year. That's a small fraction of the estimated $29 billion cost of medical errors, but it is already shifting the focus, both in hospitals and with insurance payers, to rewarding quality, rather than quantity, of care. ...
If a condition is not present when the patient is admitted, but is acquired during the hospital stay, Medicare will no longer pay the additional cost of the hospitalization, nor will the patient be responsible for the additional cost. ...
By the same token, neither patients nor taxpayers should have to pay for treating patients who have been injured by the hospital whose function it was to heal them.
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Oct. 6
The Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel, on how the state should be more involved in the deals between universities and credit card companies:
Each time a Florida State University student uses his official FSU credit card, he goes a little deeper into debt, while the Seminole Boosters get a little richer.
Why? Because Seminole Boosters has a credit-card deal with Bank of America. The company gets to market its cards to students through mail and telephone lists provided by the boosters, and during face-to-face promotions on campus. In exchange, the contract calls for Seminole Boosters, FSU's fund-raising arm, to get a fee for every card that's issued, as well as a percentage from every purchase the student makes.
The university's complicity in getting students hooked on credit cards is unseemly, but not at all unusual. Universities throughout the state and the nation cut similar deals with credit-card providers, either directly or through alumni or booster groups that serve as middlemen. ...
Florida's Board of Governors, which oversees the state universities, cannot cast a blind eye on this problem. It needs to establish guidelines for these deals. ... There also should be low credit limits to ensure that students don't get in too far over their heads with a university-sanctioned credit card. That seems a better way to educate students about using credit cards responsibly than offering kids a foam beverage cooler if they sign up for a card. ...
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On the Net:
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/
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Oct. 7
The (Nashville) Tennessean, on recently approved cold case program:
... (It) was with guarded optimism that victims' families heard FBI Director Robert Mueller announce in February 2007 an initiative to redouble efforts to investigate unsolved murders from the civil rights era.
Mueller was accompanied at the press conference by then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and that, perhaps, should have given a signal that this effort would not go as advertised. ...
He and Mueller pointed to a "partnership" with groups including the NAACP and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Leaders of both groups now question the government's motives, The Associated Press reported last month, because not a single case has been prosecuted in the 18 months since that announcement.
As many as 95 cases had previously been identified by the FBI as warranting further investigation. The killings occurred mostly in the South, and some cases are as much as 60 years old. ...
Before the FBI announced the Cold Case Initiative, there had been some highly publicized successes. ...
But there were many equally egregious cases that had been overshadowed and overlooked. So certainly, the FBI and Justice Department appeared to be taking the next logical step _ except a closer look reveals that the FBI did not commit any funds to the initiative; their agents sent cases to the Justice Department for "prosecutorial analyses" that never took place; and the "partnership" Mueller alluded to was news to the civil rights groups mentioned. ...
A bill to allocate $10 million annually to pursue the civil rights era cases was held up in the Senate for two years by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., because he said lawmakers had not spelled out how to pay for it. ...
Congress finally approved the $10 million program two weeks ago, but the funding must be appropriated. Lawmakers might do well to then send the money directly to state and local agencies that have demonstrated a commitment to solving these crimes while witnesses and potential suspects yet live.
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Oct. 8
The Times, London, on Iceland's economy:
Iceland's wealth has long been a mystery. For centuries the volcanic, windswept island clung to the edge of Europe, scraping a hard living from the barren land and the cold seas. ...
By the start of the millennium, however, Iceland had become extraordinarily rich, with a living standard measured in 2007 by the United Nations Development Report as the world's highest. ...
The wealth, however, was built not simply on hard work, initiative and valuable catches of cod. It was also built on a massive inflow of funds into the country's banks and highly leveraged raids on the riches of Western Europe. By the start of this year, Iceland's three banks had foreign liabilities of more than $100 billion _ dwarfing the country's gross domestic product of $14 billion. Now, suddenly, everything may be gone, the economy wiped out with the same cataclysmic devastation that was regularly visited on the land by the eruptions and plagues of earlier centuries.
The mood in Reykjavik today is grim. There is no panic. But the Prime Minister has spoken dramatically of returning to Iceland's fishing and farming roots, rebuilding by simple hard work what may have been lost. ... There is a palpable sense that a nation of such proudly independent people has betrayed its own heritage in becoming so dependent on the vagaries of international capital.
Iceland's crisis is not only a morality tale of global concern, given the number of foreign, especially British, investors; it also lays the country open to predators ready to seize this prize. Russia has offered to bail out Iceland to the tune of euro4 billion ... If we are not careful, Iceland will signal the ominous start of a new round of mergers and acquisitions _ not of companies, but of whole countries.
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Oct. 8
Khaleej Times, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on the nation's future:
Dubai drives at only one speed: full throttle. That it continues to do so amidst the widening global financial turmoil speaks volumes for the city's ambition to become the tourism, financial and logistics centrum for the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia region.
But to many among the mosaic of nationalities living here, there are concerns of rising costs across the board fuelled by inflation and the acute lack of affordable middle-income homes.
To accelerate its turbo-charged ambition, Dubai will need a whole lot more than just architectural marvels that reach for the skies. True, there's an agile administration in place, a first-rate infrastructure _ that's now groaning under its own weight _ and an enviable services industry, but the strains are clearly beginning to show. The traffic chaos triggered by Cityscape, the region's biggest property show, is an indication that the frightening pace at which the city is growing could have a serious impact on transportation and this is one critical area that will have to be looked into.
Another would be power. Both are essential for the exponential growth of this city as massive changes continue to take place. ... Dubai is going to have to cope with multiple responsibilities and rapid change. According to reports, $35 billion will be required to fund the much-needed power projects in the Gulf.
But Dubai _ and the UAE _ since the property boom began, proved that it is more than qualified to do so. ... Anticipating the twists and turns ahead and being ready for them may be the only way to ensure Dubai's growth at full throttle.
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Oct. 8
Korea Times, Seoul, South Korea, on police treatment of protesters:
Amid the financial turmoil sweeping the world, the candlelight vigils that protested against U.S. beef imports here seem almost forgotten. ...
Amnesty International's report on this matter ... is therefore a timely reminder of how the law enforcement officers of a self-claimed advanced democracy should have acted in those situations _ and how the Korean police failed to do so.
The report called for police to "refrain from excessive use of force" and improve rules regarding the riot police's allocation, training and use of force to meet international standards.
This seems to be a correct observation, considering there have been controversies on the police's use of water cannons, liquefied tear gas and undue physical force, which led to the fractured bones and broken noses of demonstrators, including women. ...
Government officials are refuting, not without reasons, the AI report as one-sided and favoring protesters, while failing to look at the harm caused on ordinary citizens and police. But justice in this regard has already been fully meted _ if not overly done _ with the police and prosecution investigating all organizations and individuals thought to have led the rallies, including civic groups, Web site operators, army reservists, teenagers in school uniforms and even women pushing baby carriages. ...
This is no time for settling scores with anti-government protesters, nor to attempt to track down dissidents on- and off-line. Rather it is time to make the nation into one, with all-embracing moves and gestures if for no other purpose than tiding over the economic difficulties. ...
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Oct. 9
The Age, Melbourne, Australia, on the second presidential debate:
In the second presidential debate, "that one", Barack Obama, has emerged as more credible than the other one, John McCain.
Ultimately, any debate comes down to style as well as substance _ and both were firmly in evidence in the second of the three presidential debates between Democratic contender Barack Obama and his Republican rival, John McCain, held on Tuesday night in Nashville, Tennessee. ...
Overall, the debate has refocused, as it should have, public attention on the main event after last week's one and only vice-presidential encounter, which was more a didn't-Sarah-Palin-do-well exercise than genuine cut-and-thrust argument. At its outset, Tuesday's debate, not surprisingly, concentrated on the economy. While Senator McCain proposed a buy-out of mortgages for struggling families, Senator Obama's proposal of a rescue package that includes tax cuts for households making less than $250,000 a year seems more sensible and equitable. But any development of these proposals was not forthcoming. Mostly, each candidate used the questions as an excuse to take swipes or to rebut them, rather than presenting or advancing proper arguments. ...
It is clear that Senator Obama has more of what he called "the nerve to move in a new direction." Certainly, his policies to combat the financial crisis and deal with the imperatives of energy and terrorism are consistent with the views of this newspaper. With four weeks left in the campaign, John McCain cannot yet be discounted, but this debate is likely to consolidate Senator Obama's lead in the polls.
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On the Net:
The Associated Press | October 8, 2008 02:45 PM EST |