Citizen Cartwright

Putin on 'strange' Western elites

In a nearly four-hour speech and question-and-answer session at an annual foreign policy conference outside Moscow, the Russian president seemed to be trying to win over political conservatives overseas, says The New York Times.

 

“There are at least two Wests,” he said. One is a West of “traditional, mainly Christian values” for which Russians feel kinship. But, he said, “there’s another West — aggressive, cosmopolitan, neocolonial, acting as the weapon of the neoliberal elite,” and trying to impose its “pretty strange” values on everyone else. He remarks included references to “dozens of genders” and “gay parades.”

 

“In the United States, there’s a very strong part of the public who maintain traditional values, and they’re with us,” Putin said.

 

Putin again portrayed Russia as threatened by the possible expansion of NATO — and the values of its liberal democracies — to countries like Ukraine that once were part of the Soviet Union.

He denied that Russia was preparing to use nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine: “We have no need to do this. There’s no sense for us, neither political nor military.”

 

Tatiana Stanovaya, a Russian political analyst, says, "His goal is to show that escalation is the product of Western policies. There’s now a sense that he is building an anti-Western coalition on a global scale."

 

“I always believed, and believe, in the power of common sense,” Putin said. “I am therefore convinced that sooner or later, the new centers of the multipolar world order and the West will have to start a conversation of equals.”

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Private equity firms see opportunity in oil, gas, coal

My thanks to my husband, John Dineen, for this item on the role of private equity in the energy sector:

 

Reports that private equity firms are buying up oil wells and coal mines may raise eyebrows among those who have watched the impact of private money on newspapers, senior care, and health care.

Private equity has invested more than $1 trillion in the energy industry since 2010, according to the Private Equity Stakeholder Project. The trend is driven by the shift toward green technologies, which is leading publicly traded companies to rid themselves of problematic assets.

“Public investors like mutual funds, hedge funds, university endowments, pension funds — they are actively shifting away from fossil fuels,” says Pavel Molchanov, managing director of renewable energy and clean technology at Raymond James, a financial services firm. “As public investors are divesting fossil fuels, someone’s buying it. They’re not disappearing into thin air.”

Privately held companies are, by definition, less transparent than publicly traded firms. As a result, they are insulated from some of the pressure from investors that public companies face.

Critics fear that private firms will operate the fossil fuel assets, which contribute to climate change, beyond the time a publicly traded company would. And they fear an increased risk of the wells being abandoned — adding to the million-plus abandoned, uncapped wells that can pollute groundwater as well as emit harmful chemicals into the atmosphere.

(John Dineen is a former senior congressional staffer and media executive and founder of briefing.center, a news and information service.)

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Fetterman, Oz Senate debate is a lesson in strokes

More than five months after a stroke, Pennsylvania Democrat John Fetterman struggled at times to explain his positions and often spoke haltingly throughout a highly anticipated debate Tuesday against Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz, media report.

 

Above the moderators were two 70-inch monitors to show the text of what was being said in close to real time, for both questions and answers, says The New York Times. It was part of an agreed-on accommodation for Fetterman, who's publicly discussed his lingering auditory processing issues after the stroke.

Oz, a former television personality, showed a sharpness and comfort honed by years in front of the camera, the Times says. And from the opening minutes, he seized the chance to tack to the political center, casting himself as a problem-fixing surgeon and repeatedly labeling Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, as a radical.

 

The stakes of the race to succeed retiring GOP Sen. Pat Toomey are huge, says The Associated Press. It's Democrats’ best chance to flip a Senate seat this year and could determine party control of the Senate and the future of President Biden’s agenda.

 

A Times opinion article by neuroscientist and stroke survivor Jill Bolte Taylor — whose TED talk about her stroke is one of TED’s most popular, having been been viewed more than 28 million times — focuses on Fetterman’s stroke recovery.

 

"It would behoove our society to better understand strokes, including how someone can be slow to recover certain abilities and yet remain cognitively intact,” she says.

 

"Those of us who study the brain immediately recognize that Mr.  Fetterman’s cognitive competence appears to be just fine. It may take a few months before Mr. Fetterman feels up to the scrutiny of the public and forgoes closed captioning, but the neuroplasticity of the brain is an ongoing process and will continue to repair and help him heal.”

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Can you and I successfully dispute an ER bill?

The description of an article on KHN’s website reads:

 

"A medical billing specialist investigated her husband’s ER bill. Her sleuthing took over a year but knocked thousands of dollars off the hospital’s charges — and provides a playbook for other consumers.”

 

But can you and I actually use this playbook?

 

At issue was a $10,563.49 bill after the husband broke his arm. The ER service involved "only an exam, X-rays, pain relief, and an arm splint."

 

The husband with the ER bill is a doctor. His medical specialist wife is the office manager of his practice, and her job includes overseeing billing. At one point, "It almost didn’t seem worth the hassle” to continue to pursue the issue, but a KHN reporter responded to the couple's request for help.

 

The process took more than a year, involved having the bill sent to collections, and led the wife to complain to the state attorney general. It turned out that the hospital charged nearly $7,000 for a procedure that never was performed.

 

It seems to me that if it was this difficult for these people, with their savvy, to get this result, there’s little reason to imagine that the rest of us could do it.

 

As you know, I don’t want to take political positions in this blog.

 

But this affects everybody. And public outrage about surprise medical bills led Congress, despite its deep polarization and the pushback of firms backed by private equity, to enact legislation in 2020 to protect consumers.

 

A 2020 Brookings report reads: “Health care is one of the largest categories of consumer spending. A well-functioning health-care sector is therefore a prerequisite for a well-functioning economy. Unfortunately, the problems with U.S. health care are substantial. The United States spends more than other countries without obtaining better health outcomes.”

 

"The upper end of the distribution of out-of-pocket costs dwarfs the liquid resources of many U.S. households, meaning that many people faced with a negative health shock may also find themselves in financial trouble,” the report says. "Negative health shocks tend to be associated with loss of income, thereby compounding the problem. Unexpected health costs can generate bankruptcies and ongoing financial hardship."

 

Like most of our human problems, we created this ourselves. And we can fix it. If we want.

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Chinese President Xi’s tightened control

The world faces the prospect of more tension with China over trade, security and human rights after Xi Jinping, the country’s most powerful leader in decades, awarded himself another five-year term as leader of the ruling Communist Party on Sunday, says The Associated Press.

 

While Xi’s third term was expected, "even seasoned observers who thought that they had taken the full measure of Mr. Xi have been astonished by how thoroughly he shook up the party’s top tiers,” says The New York Times.

 

"Xi has stacked the Politburo Standing Committee, the party’s top body, with his loyalists,” the Times says. "He has also appointed to the broader leadership a number of domestic security officials, military commanders, ideologues, engineers and technocrats, underscoring his ambition of accelerating China’s rise as a military and technological superpower — while keeping it under unyielding Communist Party control.”

 

Xi made clear he was deeply involved in choosing the new cohort of officials, says the Times. A top criterion for selection was loyalty to Xi, according to an official account of the selection process that was published over the weekend. Rising officials, it said, must be in lock step with him “in thinking, politics and action.”

 

"But investing so much power in Mr. Xi is a profound gamble,” the Times says. "History is replete with examples of autocrats blinded by hubris and overreach after they surrounded themselves with subordinates afraid to report bad news.”

 

Xi says “the world system is broken and China has answers,” says William Callahan of the London School of Economics. “More and more, Xi Jinping is talking about the Chinese style as a universal model of the world order, which goes back to a Cold War kind of conflict.”

 

The AP article includes summaries of Xi’s plans, domestically and internationally.

 

And here, also from AP, is chronology of the life of Xi, the son of a communist revolutionary leader and victim of the Cultural Revolution who became a provincial chief during China’s economic boom before ascending to the very top a decade ago.

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