Fixing health care law without destroying it

One way the U.S. Congress could respond to Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling on the individual insurance mandate would be to yank the debate over health care policy back to square one. Simply overturn the law and start from scratch, as the Republican chorus is calling for. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has promised a vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act as soon as next week, and Mitt Romney has underlined his pledge, if elected president, to dispense with it on his first day in office. What

July 4, 2012

Obama and Romney given some explaining to do

Shortly after the Supreme Court’s historic health care decision, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney appeared before the cameras to offer their spin. Neither took questions. For weeks, both men methodically calibrated their response to what was the most eagerly anticipated pre-election high court decision ever. The ruling settles the law, not the politics. The outcome poses challenges for both presidential contenders. Obama’s claim that it means the country “can’t refight” the law is a pipedream. Romne

July 4, 2012

Regulate unfair, unpaid internships in the U.S.

Some 1.78 million students in the United States will graduate from colleges this summer and try to squeeze into the weak labor market. Meanwhile, millions of graduates to-be hope to gain some real-work experience to add to their resumes.Jia Fei, a Chinese international student in the U.S., is one of this year’s summer interns. He recorded his road trip on his micro blog. After driving for four days, the communications major at Washington State University arrived in Los Angeles, where he rented a

July 4, 2012

Next hot market puts capitalism’s ethos to test

In a world of turmoil and gloom, Aung San Suu Kyi is a beacon of optimism. Lately, though, the Burmese pro-democracy icon is sounding like a killjoy. Suu Kyi cautions markets and executives against “reckless optimism” about Myanmar’s prospects, a position at odds with her impoverished nation’s efforts to court them. Fellow Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz speaks for the economic intelligentsia when he calls her “excessively pessimistic.” Yet there’s an element to her concerns that isn’t getting en

July 3, 2012

Putting patents in their place

Congress rewrote patent law last year to reduce the number of unwarranted patents and curb abusive lawsuits by “patent trolls,” but the federal courts have done significantly more than lawmakers to strike a better balance among innovators, consumers and patent owners. A good example is a ruling issued last week that rejected attempts by Apple and Motorola to stop the sale of each other’s smartphones. It was a welcome rebuke to companies that have been tying up the courts with patent infringement

July 3, 2012

A ranger’s inspiration

My dad always worked. He worked his day. He worked at his small publishing business when he got home. He worked on weekends and birthdays. He worked through the Lord’s Season, reveling blasphemous through holidays. When I think of him, work is the first image in my mind. I see him unloading boxes of books, mashing saddle-stitched staplers. I see him in the kitchen frying fish for his brood of children, mixing cornbread from scratch. I see him whacking kids, quashing our brief rebellions.We were

July 3, 2012

China’s extreme birth control strategies

Now that Chen Guangcheng, the blind Chinese dissident, is settling into a new life in the United States after decades of persecution by China’s venal, autocratic government, he is receiving a hero’s welcome he never anticipated and now does not appear to appreciate.Chen had dedicated much of his life to campaigning against involuntary abortions, sterilizations, tubal ligations and other means to forcibly prevent women from having a second child.Well, in the U.S., right-to-life advocates in Ameri

July 2, 2012

A health care victory for all Americans

With a historic and just decision from the U.S. Supreme Court, the nation Thursday moved a giant step closer to a health care system that will work for all Americans.By ruling the individual insurance mandate constitutional under the taxing authority of Congress, the court preserved the delicately balanced structure of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.In order to make medical insurance accessible to the sick, Congress needed to ensure that plenty of healthy people were paying into

July 2, 2012

Moscow helps Kim Jong-un to consolidate power

Russia claims it is willing to link divided Korea with energy pipelines and electricity grids. But its economic relations with North Korea indicate a return to the Cold War politics of the past. In 1948 Stalin sponsored the creation of the DPRK in the northern half of the Korean peninsula. The following year, Prime Minister Kim Il-sung travelled to Moscow to collect a 2 percent interest loan of 212 million Soviet Rubles. Some of this money was allocated to build the centrally-planned economy, bu

July 2, 2012

A win for Obama, a political issue for Romney

The Supreme Court’s dramatic decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act gives President Barack Obama a major political victory. But the controversial measure now becomes a major election issue and its future will remain in doubt at least until voters render their verdict this November.That’s because presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney has pledged to scrap the plan Obama hopes will become his lasting political legacy, something he would be in position to do if he unseats the incumbent and

July 1, 2012

Choice of ‘Asian values’ or universal human rights?

In the “caring and sharing community” that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations aims to be, hundreds of thousands of the Rohingya minority are stateless. Resisting deportation back to Myanmar, their “boatpeople” shuttle dangerously back and forth across the seas. Meanwhile, Indonesians protest the treatment of undocumented migrants in Malaysia, while Thailand’s neighbors fear spillover of that nation’s armed conflict in the south. At home, Papuans still report fears of extrajudicial killin

July 1, 2012

How Iran killed its future

Imagine where the U.S. economy would be today if John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie or any of the magnates who helped turn America into an industrialized society had been gunned down by a revolutionary firing squad. In 1979, that is what happened in Iran to my grandfather, Habib Elghanian, Iran’s most prominent Jewish industrialist and philanthropist. My grandfather’s execution was not only a personal loss but a turning point for Iran.His execution and the subsequent fleeing

July 1, 2012