"hope and faith are more powerful than bombs and bullets"

Dalai Lama leads a better protest
By LISA VAN DUSEN

Saturday, 29 November, 2008

The carnage in Mumbai, no matter which group was responsible, was a bloody, unnecessary reminder of the lengths to which some non-state actors will go to try to force new political realities or destabilize existing ones.

One week earlier, elsewhere in India, there was an equally powerful example of how other non-state actors go about seeking change. In this case, instead of bombs and bullets they used the Internet, open dialogue and the basic tools of democracy to make a statement.

The Dalai Lama's open call for members of the Tibetan diaspora to meet Nov. 17-22 in Dharamsala, where the Tibetan government-in-exile is based, produced three results.

The first was an endorsement of the 73-year-old spiritual leader's moderate, "Middle Way" approach to dealing with China, which invaded the region in 1951 and keeps a firm lock on what it now slyly calls the Tibetan Autonomous Region.

That included backing of the Dalai Lama's decision to pull his envoys out of negotiations with Beijing, a process that has produced nothing but talk and a lot of overwrought finger-pointing about the "Dalai clique" and the "evil intent" of the benign Buddhist leader by Chinese officials.

The second was a qualifier stating, for the first time, if the approach fails to produce meaningful autonomy the international Tibetan community will launch a full-blown independence movement.

The third was a promise that the Tibetan people remain totally committed to a non-violent struggle for freedom.

In response, the government of China, which has been emboldened in its anti-Tibet stance since the economic meltdown enhanced its economic leverage over the west, cancelled an EU-China trade summit in Lyon, France, because French President Nicolas Sarkozy has a date with the spiritual leader in Poland Dec. 6. The EU's trade deficit with China was $207 billion last year, an imbalance that was to be addressed in Lyon.

China's demonization of the Dalai Lama isn't swallowed outside its own controlled propaganda environment, but it has allowed the Chinese government to pay lip service to negotiations over Tibet's political status, cultural protections and human rights because no other country has had the leverage or the courage to force legitimacy on the process.

During the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, when world attention was focused on Tibet through the Olympic torch protests and China's crackdown in Lhasa, Western leaders were unwilling or unable to leverage anything but an agreement from China to resume talks, the last round of which failed Nov. 11.

What the Dharamsala meeting showed was Tibetan exiles worldwide are getting more, not less, organized largely thanks to an active online community that is thriving despite China's efforts.

For the United States, whose influence is make or break in such conflicts, Tibet has been one of the few issues on which political leaders from both the right and the left agree.

In their farewell meeting at the APEC summit in Peru, President George W. Bush urged Chinese President Hu Jintao to resume talks with the Dalai Lama which, in the current economic context, was actually a bold diplomatic move.

The next day in Dharamsala, Karma Chophel, speaker of the Tibetan parliament-in-exile, asked in his closing remarks to the exiles meeting that the Chinese government stop "making baseless allegations against His Holiness the Dalai Lama" because it "hurts the feelings the all those people who have respect and love for His Holiness the Dalai Lama and his untiring work for world peace and universal responsibility."

Not exactly the talk of radicals.

As incoming president, Barack Obama may not have any more big-stick leverage with China but he may have an overriding interest in using softer persuasion with Beijing toward a legitimate process of establishing and protecting enough basic rights and freedoms in Tibet to counterbalance the process begun in Dharamsala.

It might also be a way to show the world that hope and faith are more powerful than bombs and bullets.

President Elect Obama's Thanksgiving Message

Welcome to America, the only industrialized nation without universal health care

It's situation critical
Sun, November 23, 2008 | Lisa Van Dusen | Sun Media

On the morning of last June 19, in the waiting room of the psychiatric ward of King's County Hospital in Brooklyn, Esmin Green slumped from her chair to the floor. She lay there for almost an hour, ignored by other patients and staff, before dying of causes still undetermined.

The hospital's closed circuit security cameras produced a video so disturbing (www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA29VwnZ4cE), that when it was released two weeks later it got worldwide attention.

Green was a 49-year-old mother of six. In the days before her death, she lost her job in a day care centre, then lost her apartment: One version of a story that will happen more and more as the economic meltdown trickles down every Main Street.

That the video of Green's death surfaced in the middle of the presidential campaign seemed like a cry for help from a system that works for fewer and fewer people at higher and higher costs.

The United States health care system is a spaghetti junction full of toll booths set up by private insurance companies that provide coverage for care in the form of HMOs (health maintenance organizations), PPOs (preferred provider organizations) and POS (point of service) programs. Most Americans (60%) get health coverage from these companies through their employers.

There are government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid for people without private insurance but roughly 15% of Americans remain uninsured. The ones who are insured interface with doctors and hospitals using a business lexicon of deductibles and co-payments and non-network treatment and paperwork unfathomable in both volume and content.

The system costs more per capita than any other on earth and represents a greater chunk of GDP (15%) than any other UN member except the Marshall Islands. The United States is the only wealthy industrialized nation that doesn't have universal health care.

When I moved to the U.S. in the early 1990s, I spent a lot of time explaining that the Canadian health care system wasn't a choice-less socialist nightmare of back-alley quacks and deadly wait times to people who couldn't believe universal health care could be so straightforward.

The most rattling culture shock then was getting used to a health care system that had the same creative accounting scandals, advertising schemes and class divides as any other business. The amount of money floating around it -- from liability insurance and personal injury attorneys to $500 bedpan suppliers to fly-by-night providers who post hand-scrawled ads on utility poles -- is staggering.

The horrors of the system chronicled in news accounts about people such as Green and by Michael Moore in the documentary Sicko happen every day and will be happening more and more a the economy worsens.

Money question

But Americans make decisions involving health coverage all the time that you never think of when it all comes down to one card in your wallet: Career choices, personal choices, where to live, what to do on a Saturday afternoon with your kids, whether to go to an emergency room.

The Canadian system has been strained in the past decade and we're a lot less self-righteous about it now, but when Canadians talk about the merits of changing it, the bottom line isn't so much the bottom line as a consensus on the value of fairness.

U.S. polls conducted before the economy dwarfed all other issues showed that most Americans share that view.

Fifteen years ago, when the Clintons tried to overhaul the U.S. health care system, resistance from the insurance lobby proved fatal.

Now, even the health insurers are admitting that change is needed (last week, two insurance lobby groups agreed to cover sick people as well as healthy ones, if they really have to) and that health care is becoming a huge economic problem.

New presidents can only focus on so many priorities and Barack Obama is a new president at a time when the things that need fixing seem outnumbered only by the obstacles to fixing them. But his reported choice of former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, who wrote the book, Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis, as Secretary of Health and Human Services, means this is a priority.

While the economy, energy, education and climate change need fixing, people aren't dying in classrooms or in gas stations because of a system that seems based on the very un-American idea that some lives are worth more than others.