WhirledView

Singapore Then and Now

by Patricia H. Kushlis

Last summer the Santa Fe Opera staged the World Premiere of Somerset Maugham’s “The Letter,” a compelling short story set in Singapore. Or mostly set in Singapore because this tale of murder on a rubber plantation begins, well, on a rubber plantation somewhere in the then British colony of Malaysia before the action moves south to the city of Singapore at the base of the tri-ethnic Malaysian peninsula. I meant to write about the opera much earlier – not to critique it because I’m not a music critic – but simply as I saw it from an audience point of view as well as to put it in a Southeast Asian context since I spent portions of my Foreign Service career serving in the region. (Photo top left of Patricia Racette (Leslie Crosbie)and Robert Maddalena (Howard Joyce) in court in Singapore in "The Letter" at the Santa Fe Opera 2009. Photo by Ken Howard courtesy of the Santa Fe Opera.)

But then other things intervened – including a month long trip to East Asia. As it turned out my trip included two segments of several days each in Singapore – a predominately Chinese city which has – ever since I’ve known it beginning with my first visit in 1973 – been on Southeast Asia’s economic cutting edge. This is not to say, that Singapore is a model democracy.

A Model Democracy Singapore is not.

Nevertheless, I think the autocratic rule of the aging Lee Kuan Yew, incorrigible Minister Mentor since 1991, has moderated some under the prime ministership of his son Goh Chok Tong and for what it's worth, the city has a new parliament building. However, this city-state on the Singapore Straits has done a lot right over the years for the economic betterment of many of its peoples although the Gini coefficient of rich to poor is even larger than in the US and may be at an all time high. This is because of Singapore’s frenetic construction boom and the need to import unskilled labor to provide the needed brawn. Yet Singapore is light years away from the sleepy provincial colonial capital of the days when Maugham wiled away his time on the veranda of the venerable Raffles Hotel spinning his sultry, but far from sleepy, Southeast Asian tales.

Mulling over the Credit Crunch

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

In America today, you must borrow money, even if you don’t need to, to get a “credit record,” which is a ticket to borrowing more money, a vicious circle for many people.  Meanwhile, interest paid is money wasted, money that could have earned interest or dividends or capital gains.  Given the miracle of compounding, the less you buy or borrow the faster and larger your nest egg grows.  Then you can pay cash, even for big things.  But financial prudence, aka living within your means and saving regularly, horrifies bankers who dole out mortgages. Savers, in America today, are not creditworthy.  Savers are worthless. 

Buy, Baby, Buy

Why?  People who save present an existential challenge to elements of the banking system. Why didn’t you buy more stuff?  Why didn’t you finance your cars?  Why have you cheated us out of interest all these years?  But the bankers can get their revenge; they can refuse a mortgage if you have no credit record (as defined by those very banks). At the very least they can make you sweat—and they will.  They’ll drown you in paperwork as you try, anxiously, to prove you won’t be a deadbeat now that they’ve finally got you in their clutches.

In fact, I know a case in point, now pending.  This person went the saving route.  Bought nothing on time.  Paid credit card balances down to zero every month.  Saved enough for a 20% down payment without shrinking the remaining nest egg all that much.  Had a secure job with a good salary, so any monthly payments would be comfortably affordable.  But the bank said—Hmm, is this guy a risk or what? 

Is something crazy here or what?  I mean we taxpayers just gave these banks and mortgage companies billions for the express purpose of unclogging the credit pipeline. Solid small businesses are also having trouble obtaining the routine loans they need to maintain workable inventories.  Many are going out of business as a consequence.

The Borderline Blues

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Walls are always porous in one way or another, yet people keep building them because boundaries are frightening places where various sorts of intellectual and physical miscegenation occur.

The space between armies or warring states is traditionally a no man’s land, a place that’s safe for no one.  As one set of laws and customs meets another, a gap occurs where no writ applies, especially if that boundary coincides with mountains or jungles or pirate-ridden oceans or vast deserts, all of which have always symbolized the unbounded—the savage, the fantastic, the unowned, the undisciplined.  Walled or not, legal or not, borders are essentially arbitrary.  They break down.  They become bones of contention.  They make news.

Borders have been much in the news this week.  The Berlin Wall came down 20 years ago.  That erasure of ideological boundaries was celebrated this week.  Meanwhile, India and China were at odds over the Dali Lama’s visit to Tawang because the two countries cannot agree on where their Eastern boundary runs. Here at home, the U.S. Supreme Court has to decide whether there is an inviolable line to be drawn between adulthood and adolescence when it comes to punishment for violent crime.  Many of the issues in play during the current period of economic recovery have to do with the boundaries between government and private enterprise in our economic lives. The American doctrine of the separation of church and state is also a border issue—as is the application of Sharia Law.  

Dragons and Diplomacy

So far as China is concerned, the dragon has been breathing heavily, in hopes of controlling people and events far from its physical borders.   The Frankfurt Book Fair erupted in controversy when China attempted to dictate which writers of Chinese origin could be featured during the Fair.   Because of its intense concern about its internal boundaries, China breathes heavily on countries that allow Uighur nationalists to speak more freely outside China than they may within Chinese borders; ditto for Tibetans.    As I wrote last week, China’s baleful influence even reached into the White House, preventing President Obama from meeting with the  Dali Lama.  Sanctions and financial manipulations are other ways to achieve, more or less subtly or successfully, cross border influence.

Thus, there are so many ways in which countries attempt to control events beyond their  formal boundaries.  War is one.  The threat of war is almost as effective.  Diplomacy is another way to achieve influence across borders, as is its hand-maiden public diplomacy, which characteristically attempts to distinguish itself from propaganda. The latter is no small debate.  It concerns the borders to be respected when attempting to influence.  At one end of the spectrum is rational persuasion through information and facts; at the other end is emotional manipulation—or worse.  At what point does legitimate persuasion turn into fraud, deceit, duplicity, conning?  All of the latter are usually considered to be immoral and/or illegal, however effective they may be in achieving the manipulator’s ends.  And how about this one—when does psychological pressure or physical discomfort turn into torture?  In domestic politics, a related boundary question is this: when does an inspiring speech turn into demagoguery?  Indeed, much of the debate over health care reform has crossed the border from informed debate to scare-mongering.

What We Really Have to Fear about Health Care

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

We’ve been ruthlessly conditioned  to be afraid—to be absolutely terrified—of medical decision-making by government bureaucrats.  But we’ve got much worse instead:  employees rigorously trained by insurance companies to deny as many requests for care as they can get away with.  The less care you and I get for our  premium money, the happier (which is to say, the more profitable)  the private insurance companies are.

The Balance Sheet

SO:  You thought you would die but you didn’t.  Much as your insurance company tried to deny you access to testing, surgery and recuperative services, to say nothing of the precise drugs your doctor wanted you to have, you won the battle.  You got the care you needed and you are on your feet again.  You rejoice!  Your family rejoices.  Your friends rejoice.  Your employer rejoices.  Your doctor is happy.  Even a few drug companies are happy; you will be taking their products for x amount of time.  And, of course, your dog wags its tail, madly.

Meanwhile, your insurance company makes an entry in red, in the loss column. This year you are  a red blot on the balance sheet.  Next year there will be more red.  Ditto from now on, perhaps. You have been a mere profit or loss center for the company all along.  Now you are an out and out liability.  No matter how long you have been paying premiums to your insurance company, you would be better off dead, from its point of view, and it will drop you as soon as possible—or raise your rates until you are forced to drop out.

In short, those scarey death panels exist.  They obey your private health insurance company.  And people die every day because care has been denied.  Not just granny, folks.  People in every age bracket.

Alaskans: Beware of the Shell Game

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

A letter to the NYT editor by the President of the Shell Oil Company complains that Shell's plans for Alaska are being “held up by unnecessary litigation and unreasonable federal permitting delays.”

Marvin Odum claims that Shell "is a leader in environmentally superior operations" and asserts that his company  has "prepared one of the most environmentally sensitive and responsible exploration plans ever for offshore Alaska."  Considering the highly insensitive operations of many oil companies, that's not saying much, but Shell's own record suggests that extreme caution is in order.

As one who worked in Nigeria, where Shell’s record is as deplorable as it gets, environmentally and from the point of view of human rights, I urge Alaskans and the federal regulators involved to be extremely careful about working with this company.  Get everything in writing, in detail.  Inspect operations rigorously.  Watch everything and everyone every minute.   Your land could be in danger.  Your water could be in danger.  Your wildlife could be in danger.  And anyone who protests a spill would do well to think twice.

Prominent Nigerian writer and environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa led his Ogoni people in protest against Shell’s ruin of their Niger delta homeland.  Operations were sloppy, and there was at best laughable reparation made to people whose lives were being changed forever.  Instead of taking Shell to task, an oil-corrupted government in Lagos found a way to silence Saro-wiwa and fellow environmental leaders.  They were hanged in Port Harcourt on November 5, 1995.  Finally, in June of this year, and only because a high visibility trial was about to open, the Shell Oil company paid a settlement of $15.5 million to the heirs of those victims, claiming in the process that the company was shelling out purely from the goodness of its corporate heart.  This article gives an idea of the sorts of damning documents that would have got wide circulation had the case actually gone to trial.  Conviction was not unlikely.

As for Nigeria today, militant pirates spawned by oil companies’ corporate greed and negligence continue to plague remaining oil pumping operations in the Niger delta and vast areas of Ogoni land remain infertile due to seepage from supposedly capped oil wells.  

The solution to the “hypocrisy of relying on other countries’ resources” for fuel and energy isn’t to ravage Alaska  and keep on pumping the pet.  The solution is to promote major reductions in energy consumption and to replace as much petroleum-based energy as quickly as possible with clean and renewable energy. 

Meanwhile, should there be excruciatingly careful scrutiny of Shell's plans for Alaska?  Absolutely.

The American Way of Medicine: Shirking Responsibility; Profiteering on Illness and Accident

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

My friend’s general practitioner, who was on vacation when my friend went to the hospital with a broken leg and got more than she bargained for, exclaimed: “This is the worst story I’ve ever heard!”

A hospital resident, no less horrified, confided, “I can’t believe this happened to you.”

But it did.  And neither hospital nor insurers want to take responsibility. 

On May 1 a healthy substitute teacher was admitted to a  hospital with a broken leg. She had suffered a very nasty compound fracture on the playground, and by the time the right bone man could be found to pin all the bones together, it was too late to send her home.  She definitely had to stay the night—and then, because her leg was so fragile and attendant dangers were so imminent, doctors judged that she should be kept under observation longer, through healing and rehab.  Look at the scar on her left leg.  The incision was huge, more than 12 inches long.  You can’t see the whole cut, but you can imagine why careful follow up was needed. 

So far, so good.  Then the horrors begin.

Two insurers are involved in this story: a Medicare Advantage plan and New Mexico’s Workman’s Compensation program.  Neither insurer disputes claims for costs directly related to treating the break itself.  But that's almost the least of it, and after that, the fights begin.  The hospital doesn’t want to take responsibility for complications clearly growing out of  the conditions under which the break was treated;  the insurers don’t want to pay for the cost of treating the complications.  Here is a an excerpt from a letter to New Mexico’s Workman’s Compensation program, which has been trying to shove the costs onto Medicare.  Medicare will pay, if necessary.  (This is one reason why selfish seniors are happy with the present medical system—which is pretty nice, for seniors.)  In the letter my friend is arguing that all costs arising from the break and its consequences should be covered.

I found myself in a double room with a patient who defecated on her bed, herself, and the floor next to me three times during the night.  The next morning I told the nurse that I didn’t feel “safe” in this room and that it was not sanitary.  It was one-two days later [my itals.] that I was moved to another room, and subsequently to the inpatient rehab unit. 

Some days thereafter, she writes,

I got severe diarrhea and a fever and was diagnosed with a  c. diff. infection. After a week and a half [in an isolation ward], the requisite 3 stool samples tested negative.  I was discharged...with a prescription for three additional days of antibiotics.

That was May 26, nearly a month after she’d been admitted for a broken leg.  By June 5th, she was back in the hospital. The c. difficile had recurred.  Recurrence is common, evidently, but no one had prepared her for that.  Soon after readmission,  “the c. diff. infection went septic,” another not infrequent complication.  She underwent an emergency tracheotomy and spent nearly a week in a virtually comatose condition.

A tracheotomy!  That means a scar on her throat for the rest of her life.  Well, she lived.  For that she can be grateful.  But without the broken leg and the ensuing c. difficile complications, there would have been no life-threatening sepsis, no hole in her neck, no scar. This chain reaction, so obvious to anyone with half a brain, seems to escape the profit-seeking, Scrooge-like  logic of of those who had her life in their hands and made a mess of it.

During her three-times-in-all hospitalizations, my friend had to spend many many days in intensive care and isolation wards.  Such treatment is extremely expensive.  Neither insurer wants to pay for it.  Each argues that the other is primary, as the lingo goes.  Worse, both hospital and Workman’s Comp have argued that c. difficile  exists in ordinary dirt.  Thus, those horrendously unsatisfactory hospital sanitary practices and conditions notwithstanding, the hospital should be off the ethical hook and Workman's Comp off the financial hook. 

As if my friend had suffered from the runs when she’d presented herself to the emergency room with a broken leg!  As if she had been gardening during those few days at home when she could barely move around her apartment with a walker.  She’d been to church once during that interlude, when home care was provided by a Workman’s Comp contractor.  She’d been once to visit her orthopedic surgeon.  But anything to avoid paying a patient's bills! 

Big Cheezy Swiss Bites Out of the African Economy

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

President Barak Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have sung the same song in Africa: you can’t have the prosperity Africans need and deserve without good governance; you won’t have good governance or development when your leaders are stealing you blind. 

So better leadership is needed, yet corrupt leaders wouldn’t have much incentive if there were nothing to embezzle in Africa’s poorly run countries.  In fact, there’s plenty to steal.  Also, once greedy leaders have got their hands on what doesn’t properly belong to them, they have a problem.  They need a safe place to hide it, to stash it.  For this they need enablers—and they get them.  At every stage of the wealth-siphoning process, foreigners tend to be complicit.  Ordinary Africans are cheated.  Foreigners profit.

Here a key passage from President Obama’s speech in Accra, Ghana:

...too many [African] nations, even those that have elections, are plagued by problems that condemn their people to poverty.  No country is going to crate wealth if its leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves–(applause)–or if police can be bought off by drug traffickers. (Applause.) No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top–(applause)—or the head of the Port Authority is corrupt.  No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery.

And this version is from the Secretary of State’s address in Nairobi:

True economic progress—(applause)—depends not only on the hard work of millions of people who get up every day and do the best they can, often under overwhelming circumstances; it also depends on responsible governments that reject corruption, enforce the rule of law, and deliver results for their people.  This is not just about good governance; this is about good business.  Investors will be attracted to states that do this, and they will not be attracted to states with failed or weak leadership, or crime and civil unrest or corruption that taints every transaction and decision.

Ordinary people, including many parliamentarians and middle class meritocrats, applauded during these speeches, because they, as well as service-starved subsistence farmers, need the fruits of better governance.  Practically everyone’s standard of living suffers while the kleptocrats, who get a cut from sales of natural resources to foreign companies, who skim as much as they can from international aid packages, whose greed inflates the cost of imports, live lavishly and still have plenty left for luxury living when the rainy days come.  It used to be that African despots could count on “retiring” to a villa in southern France.  The Francophones could, anyway. Anything to get rid of them!  And then their successors, often elected as “reformers,” proved to be no better.  The cycle was discouraging and debilitating to those who dreamed of an Africa that could hold its head up (so to speak) in the world.

For too long there have been too many excuses for Africa’s degradation.  We naive, well-meaning foreigners bought them, because African history was full of terrible chapters our own ancestors had played an unsavory role in.  The slave trade depopulated Africa.  Colonialism exploited Africa.  Raw capitalism drained its resources.  All of these things happened, and even if there was a certain amount of African complicity at each stage, Africa was more sinned against than sinning.  Thus, we in the West were  paralyzed by shame.  We must make up for our crimes and sins, we cried.  Give!  Give!  Give!

Reality, of course, was not so simple. As Barak Obama noted of his father’s country, “Countries like Kenya had a per capital economy larger than South Korea’s when I was born.  They have been badly outpaced.”  Yes.  Outpaced not only by South Korea, but by other Asian tigers, most of them seen as hopeless basket cases when their racist European colonial masters were forced to exit.  When I first went to Africa, Nairobi was admired as the city that worked.  Journalists covering the whole continent worked out of Nairobi.  Unfortunately, Kenya caught the corruption disease and dissolved into bloody tribal warfare during last year’s elections.  

Minorities, Part Four: The Maoists in Eastern India

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

These masks are used by Chhau dancers in the tribal areas of West Bengal.  Chhau is a very acrobatic dance form which also, often, tells tales from the great Indian epics.  When I made an official visit to Purulia and was invited to see Chhau in situ, we visitors also had to watch out for two off-stage threats: insurgents and/or elephants.  In the midst of a very dramatic after-dark Chhau performance, the news arrived that a small herd of elephants was going to cut me and my party off from the guesthouse where we were to sleep.  We left in a flash—very frustrating!—and never saw the least shadow of an elephant in the teak forest.  No insurgents either.

Hostages for Jharkhand

Later I actually was kidnapped (aka involuntarily detained) by tribals.  It was in 2000.  A big strike for the creation of a new state to be called Jharkhand was underway.  The experience didn’t last more than half a day, and I never told the Consul General, because I knew I’d lose the little freedom of movement I’d retained since he’d arrived to embody, arrogantly, aggressively, the State Department takeover of U.S.I.A.   So far as he was concerned, we public diplomacy people were no longer of any significance to the mission.  (Note to all bosses: if you want to be well informed, treat people with respect.)

What happened that day is this:  I needed to travel from Kolkata in West Bengal to Bhubaneshwar in Orissa, where we were opening an impressive exhibit of photos by an American photographer.  I’d decided to drive—a matter of 5 or 6 hours, as I remember—so I could familiarize myself with a part of the country I’d never set foot on.  Then the strike was called and a road closure was announced, on a portion of the national highway I’d have to traverse.  What to do?  I had to reach Bhubaneshwar, but it was too late to obtain train or air tickets.  “Let’s go,” I said to my driver, who spoke Hindi, Oriya and Bengali as well as English.  “We have Consular Corps plates.  No one will stop a diplomat.”  My driver was game.  Off we drove.

How wrong I was.  We were waved off the road and forced to park in a large muddy area that fronted a cluster of shops, eateries, mechanics, etc., all the usual commercial necessities for travelers.  Several other cars had also been pulled off the road.  My driver explained, in all his languages, the usual rules for diplomats.  Useless.  I looked around to get a better idea of who might be in charge.  No principle of organization was obvious or made known to us.  Some young demonstrators seemed more like university nerds than radicals. Others carried bows and arrows that did not look like toys—or like the archery equipment used in modern competitions.  These were tribal weapons and dangerous.  Machetes were also in evidence.  A noisy procession came along.  We appealed to the woman politician who appeared to be leading it.  All she could think of was the new state.  She couldn’t care less about hostages.  The procession disappeared.  Hours passed.  The experience was fascinating, at first, but  boring as time wore on.  We kept appealing. " I’m a diplomat.  We have to get to Bhubaneshwar, etc."  We didn’t dare to start the car and make a dash for it because I didn’t want to run over anyone and cause a diplomatic incident.  Besides the road was still blocked in both directions.  I wasn’t sure the car could blast through.

Then the drinking began.  Behavior changed.   Respect for womankind disappeared.  A definitely tipsy yokel came up to the car and tried to touch my face.  That was the end of the boredom and the beginning of anxiety.  Drunk demonstrators are definitely not to be trusted.  Finally a couple of the student types in trousers and buttoned-down shirts approached us.  They, too, had noticed the change in mood.  They too were worried.  “Trust us,” they said.  They began shouting and pointing toward the jungle behind the shops.  Then they got into the car and told my driver to steer, not for the road, but into the forest, along a rutted dirt road.  I told the driver to obey.  It was our best hope, even though the potential for ending up in an even worse situation was not absent.  Several bumpy miles later, the young men told the driver to stop the car. They got out.  In two more miles, they said, the dirt road would rejoin the highway. The young men would not accept payment.  They were embarrassed, they said.  “You should not have been detained.”  And then they disappeared. 

California - Ghost of the Future of the U.S.?

By Guest Contributor Wendi Maxwell

Wendi Maxwell retired after 38 years in California state service. Currently, she is a consultant in adult literacy specializing in long range strategic planning and policy development.

The California Legislature recently enacted an $80 billion budget, cutting $23 billion from the previous year - a tricky process that attempted to save the state’s social safety net without raising taxes. After passage by the Legislature, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the budget and used his veto power to impose an additional $500 million in cuts. The budget relied on $8 billion in accounting maneuvers that some analysts call “kicking the problem down the road.” Mike Moritz, the British venture capitalist and former member of the Board of Directors of Google, Inc., called the state the “ghost of the future of the U.S.”

California’s budget balancing problem used to be a source of local embarrassment, an in-joke. This year, as the eight largest economy in the world teeters on the brink of insolvency with a 20 percent deficit – paying its bills with IOUs, laying off untold thousands of teachers, mandating state employees take three unpaid furlough days a month, and the majority leader walking out of budget talks – people outside the state started to notice.

How did California end up here? We went from being the Golden State to being the state that can’t pay its own way. Partisan politics certainly play a role in our current impasse, but there are structural problems that run much deeper and are more difficult to address. The current legislative impasse is a clear warning of what happens when good intentions go awry.

Europe Breaks the Microsoft Stranglehold; Time for America to Follow Suit

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Two fascinating stories on the business front this week.  Neither has terribly good new for Americans.  Here are the headlines:

    Dateline Berlin:  To Avoid a New Legal Battle, Microsoft Offers Europe a Choice of Browsers

    Dateline Washington, D.C.:  Antitrust Chief Hits Resistance in Crackdown

The European Union has long accused Microsoft of abusing its dominant position in the operating system market to foist its media players, browsers and other consumer software products on computer buyers, who might prefer other products, if they could be got to run on XP or Vista or any other Microsoft OS without endless annoying complications, thanks to the bundling process, which tangles up code so hopelessly that the non-nerd hasn’t a chance for independence and sticks, however resentfully, with Microsoft.  Result: smaller competitors haven't a hope of succeeding.  The Microsoft position today verges on monopoly, and the Europeans, thank goodness, object to that.  Under threat of a prodigious fine, Microsoft has reached an agreement with the EU.

From now on, computer buyers in Europe (but not in the U.S. or anywhere else outside Europe) will be presented with a ballot screen that will allow them to choose which browser they want to use.  Explorer will be one of the choices, but it will no longer be confusing and time consuming  to choose a non-Microsoft browser.

Microsoft has evidently also agreed to release “confidential technical information worldwide that would help competitors design software” that works more smoothly with Windows and other Microsoft products.  That’s good news for all of us.

I’ve been using Firefox for years and have been totally satisfied with everything about my choice, except the business of disabling MS Explorer and installing Firefox whenever I buy a new computer.  I have go through all sorts of  stupid rigamarole before I can get on the Web the way I want to get on the Web.  Even so, every so often, Explorer breaks through and tries to take over.  I am not amused.

When are U.S. anti-trust authorities going to have the guts to take on Microsoft so that we American computer users can enjoy the same freedom?