Amitai Etzioni Notes

Lawsuit against 20 major drug companies

Wisconsin Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager filed a lawsuit against 20 major drug companies, including Pfizer Inc., Johnson & Johnson, and Bayer Corp. Drug companies are accused of inflating wholesale prices and driving up the costs for health care programs for the poor and other drug buyers. The suit seeks to force the companies to stop the practice and set up a restitution program for citizens. The lawsuit is just another step taken by the state to stop the skyrocketing costs of prescription drugs.

(Source: Associated Press, 6/3/04)

In a fair society, corporations make a good profit but are also good citizens.

Good parenting....

"Just wait until your nanny gets here."

(Source: New Yorker, 5/31/04)

The Ugly Facts

Jeffrey Goldberg writes:

"Many Israelis believe that evacuation of many settlements--even all of the settlements--would not satisfy the Palestinians. The Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, even while negotiating with Israel in the frameword of the Oslo accords of the nineteen-nineties, never prepared his people for compromise. Palestinian schools continued to teach about the evils not only of occupation but of the very idea of Israel. Arafat refused to recognize any historical Jewish connection to Palestine, and, in the climactic negotiations at Camp David in 2000, he rejected Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's offer of the entire Gaza Strip, nearly all of the West Bank, and capital in East Jerusalem, and abandoned the talks. Many of Barak's critics accused the Prime Minister of mishandling the negotiations and of making miserly concessions that were impossible for Arafat to accept. But the dispositive fact of Camp David is this: Barak made an offer, and Arafat walked out without making a counter-offer."

(Source: New Yorker, 5/31/04)

More kind words

Lee H. Hamilton, Vice Chair of the 9-11 Commission, had the following to say about my latest book From Empire to Community:

"From Empire to Community is a sweeping and thought-provoking blueprint that gets at many of the key issues of our time. Etzioni’s communitarian approach adds a fresh dimension to the dialogue on international relations."

Terrorism and the Law of the Sea....

This may seem like a somewhat esoteric issue, but given the danger of lose nukes, it deserves wider attention:

"European support for President Bush's initiative to stop international trade in weapons of mass destruction may be seriously weakened if the Senate doesn't ratify a controversial sea treaty this year, treaty supporters said.

Several European allies have warned the administration that Bush's Proliferation Security Initiative, known as PSI, could suffer if the United States doesn't ratify the United Nations' Convention on Law of the Sea before the end of the year."

(Source: Scripps Howard, 5/27/04)

For the rest of the article, click here.

Defining Down Democracy

. . . is not good for us, for them, and especially not for democracy.

Democracy = Elections?

In a recent editorial titled “Democracy Now”, Robert Kagan and William Kristol discuss the Iraqi situation and the need to accelerate the elections in Iraq, which is a key element of the just released Bush plan. Yet next to no mention is made of any of the other factors necessary for democracy. To accelerate elections is meaningless without these other factors. After all, elections were conducted by Saddam, just as they were in the Soviet Union and now in Iran and North Korea.

(Source: Weekly Standard, 5/17/04)

Book Signing

Politics and Prose Bookstore

Presents

Amitai Etzioni

Author of

From Empire to Community: A New Approach to International Relations

Sunday, June 27, 5 p.m.

5015 Connecticut Avenue, NW * Washington, DC
(At Nebraska Avenue, Free Parking Behind Store)

Terrorists 90 percent ready?

Attorney General John Ashcroft announced last week that we should be on the lookout for terrorists because they are “90 percent of the way” towards launching an attack. Several questions have been raised as to whether this alert was politically motivated, allegations which by and large are hard to verify.

But one thing is clear. There is no way on earth for Ashcroft to know if the terrorists are 90 percent ready, 65 percent ready, etc., without knowing where they are about to strike, what means they have assembled, and much more. As he himself has repeatedly stated, there is no knowledge of specific threats, which leads me to believe that this figure is clearly a fake one.

Actually, given how comparatively little harm terrorists have caused worldwide—much less than traffic accidents, and indeed much less than expected—the war against terrorism is beginning to look like the Cold War. In retrospect, we now realize that the USSR was much weaker than the CIA and various presidential administrations claimed.

If you agree—pass the word so that we can all rest a bit better.

(Source of quote: The Times, 5/29/04)

Criticism is so much easier than a cure

In the latest issue of the Hastings Center Report, Angela Fagerlin and Carl E. Schneider argue:

“A notable but neglected psychological literature always provided arresting reasons to expect the policy of living wills to misfire. Given their alluring potential, perhaps they were worth trying. But a crescendoing empirical literature and persistent clinical disappointments reveal that the rewards of the campaign to promote living wills do not justify its costs. Nor can any degree of tinkering ever make the living will an effective instrument of social policy.”

After a scathing and powerful critique of the failure of living wills, the authors finally come to a section entitled “What Is To Be Done”—in which they continue their criticism but suggest nothing that could or should replace living wills.

Punishing anti-social behavior

We recently asked:

In response to a sharp rise in anti-social incidents ranging from public drunkenness to vandalism to verbal abuse, Britain recently passed a new set of measures that empower officials to crack down on citizens accused of repeated anti-social behavior. Does punishing transgressions in behavior further stigmatize already marginalized people who are often themselves victims of family breakdown, drug abuse, etc? Or should local law enforcement be permitted to use creative solutions including banning offenders from certain neighborhoods, prohibiting chronic shoplifters from entering shopping districts, or even preventing former partners in petty crime from coming into contact with one another? What other kinds of solutions exist to deal with “neighbors from hell?” To read the story, click here.

Here are the responses we received. To read the complete responses, see our website:

"The British response to anti-social behavior is the least bad measure that government can take. It will not solve the problem. It will not prevent further anti-social behavior on the part of the individuals subject to these prohibitions. It will not prevent the development of such behavior patterns in other people. But the British response will contain the problem through two mechanisms: (1) It will provide some limits beyond which offenders believe that they cannot go and (2) it will give decent people the feeling that organized society is attempting to cope with the problem. It is a contemporary version of the James Q. Wilson-George Kelling "broken window" approach to preventing the further disorganization of a community."

Jackson Toby
Professor of Sociology Emeritus
Rutgers University
New Jersey

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