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10 Sunday, March 31, 2013 Opinion ESTABLISHED SEPTEMBER 3, 2006 HAMAD BIN SUHAIM AL THANI CHAIRMAN ADEL ALI BIN ALI MANAGING DIRECTOR DR HASSAN MOHAMMED AL ANSARI EDITOR-IN-CHIEF PRINTED AT ALI BIN ALI PRINTING PRESS Obstruction In The Senate Many of Obama nominees have been filibustered by the Republicans, causing delay in filling of vacancies EARLIER this month, during one of his new across-the-aisle good-will tours, President Barack Obama pleaded with Senate Republicans to ease up on their record number of filibusters of his nominees. He might as well have been talking to one of the statues in the Capitol. Republicans have made it clear that erecting hurdles for Obama is, if anything, their overriding legislative goal. There is no historical precedent for the number of Cabinet-level nominees that Republicans have blocked or delayed in the Obama administration. Chuck Hagel became the first defence secretary nominee ever filibustered. John Brennan, the CIA director, was the subject of an epic filibuster by Senator Rand Paul. Kathleen Sebelius and John Bryson, the secretaries of health and human services and commerce, were subjected to 60-vote confirmation margins instead of simple majorities. Susan Rice surely would have been filibustered and thus was not nominated to be secretary of state. Jacob Lew, the Treasury secretary, was barraged with 444 written questions, mostly from Republicans, more than the previous seven nominees for that position combined. Many were ridiculous and had nothing to do with Lew’s fitness for office, such as a demand to explain the Treasury’s social media policies or questioning an infographic on the department’s blog eight months ago. Gina McCarthy, the nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, is being blocked by Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri until he gets the answers he wants on a local levee project. And Thomas Perez, nominated to be labour secretary, is being held up by Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, who is angry about the Justice Department’s enforcement of voting rights laws. By comparison, there were four filibusters of Cabinet-level positions during George W Bush’s two terms, and one under President Ronald Reagan. There have also been several impediments to executive-branch nominees beneath the cabinet level, the most troubling being that of Richard Cordray, whom Obama has renominated to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Because the bureau cannot properly run without a full-time director, Republicans intend to nullify many of its powers by blocking Cordray for the second time. Obama’s judicial nominees are also waiting for exceptionally long periods to be confirmed. The average wait for circuit and district judges under Obama has been 227 days, compared with 175 days under Bush. Last week, the Senate confirmed Richard Taranto as an appellate judge 484 days after his first nomination. (Republicans refused to confirm him in an election year.) The next appellate judge to come up, Patty Shwartz, has been waiting a year for a vote. Last week, Caitlin Halligan, another appeals court nominee, had to withdraw from consideration after Republicans filibustered her for the second time, on the flimsy pretext that she was a legal activist. Republicans clearly don’t want any of Obama’s judges on the important US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to which she was nominated, and the president needs to be more aggressive about filling the four vacancies on the court. Republicans clearly have no interest in dropping their favourite pastime, but Democrats could put a stop to this malicious behaviour by changing the Senate rules and prohibiting, at long last, all filibusters on nominations. Newtown Massacre & Donations (NYT) (NYT) NO ONE should envy the civic leaders of Newtown, Connecticut, as they attempt to bring order and transparency to distributing most of the $15 million in donations that has poured into town since the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre of 20 children and six adults last December. The money was given through 40 ad hoc groups, many of them pursuing separate causes from helping families to building a local memorial, even an angel atop the town flagpole. Town officials have wisely been listening to warnings from veterans of earlier tragedies that there will be no easy way to please everyone. “They all said, ‘You need thickskinned people, because this will be a thankless job,”’ Newtown’s second selectman, William Rodgers, said. The goal is to assure that money is distributed under a transparent protocol focused on wounded families, so that money is not diverted to extraneous causes. In the past, the heartbreak of lives lost has been compounded by public quarrelling over donations. Outside adjudicators have been asked to play Solomon in such complex issues as the price of stress disorders stretching across years. The Newtown foundation aims to emphasise local input and the advice of a distribution committee dedicated to public disclosure. Rodgers promises a “measured and incremental” approach. But he’s been warned that the fight to return to normalcy is “never over,” in the words of Frank DeAngelis, still the Columbine High School principal. “Newtown and Sandy Hook will have to redefine what normal is.” The Next Cyprus? Europe will never emerge from this state of crisis until a fully functioning banking union is put into place GUY VERHOFTSTADT | IHT-NYT SYNDICATE NOW that the crisis in Cyprus has been temporarily resolved, the unspoken question is: Who’s next? Perhaps Malta, which has an even bigger banking sector than Cyprus relative to GDP, much of it highly reliant on offshore depositors. Or maybe Latvia, fast becoming the destination of choice for Russian funds flowing out of Cyprus and now on course to join the eurozone. Even Spain or Italy could be vulnerable to a similar bailout, now that the Dutch finance minister, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, who is president of the Euro Group of finance ministers, has hinted that Cyprus could provide a model for the resolution of future banking crises. And while eurozone leaders eventually backed down from targeting depositors with less than €100,000, a dangerous precedent has been set. The rights spelled out in the European Union’s deposit guarantee laws should never have been put into doubt, and the spectre of future runs on banks looms large across the periphery of the eurozone. The inconvenient truth for eurozone leaders is that we will never emerge from this state of crisis until a fully functioning banking union is put into place. For this to work, there must be a European banking resolution mechanism to recapitalise banks and provide a backstop for a eurozone-wide deposit guarantee scheme. Such a mechanism should be funded by the banks, with contributions relative to their risk profile, rather than taxpayers or depositors. Without such a common fund, investors and depositors will have little trust in the eurozone’s banking system, and the risk of bank runs in countries with vulnerable financial systems will remain. As economists have been stressing for years, there must also be a solution to the high interest rates being paid by the countries of the south. We cannot continue to ask for severe structural adjustments in these countries when billions of euros each year are spent on interest payments rather than investing in economic growth. The intergovernmental method, focused always on how to win the next election rather than how to avoid the next crisis, must be replaced by a strong and accountable form of economic governance at the European level. Chancellor Angela Merkel must not keep pretending to her electorate in Germany that the euro is going to survive when such high interest rates still need to be paid. To this end, the eurozone’s core members must accept that a partial mutualisation of existing debt is essential in order to allow countries on the periphery to benefit from lower interest rates. This concerns not just Italy and Spain; Slovenia is also a victim. While broadly respecting the stability pact, Slovenia is faced with a lack of liquidity due to its small bond market and interest rates of nearly 5.7 percent. Eurozone leaders cannot continue to pursue the same approach, based on last-minute, short-sighted deals, agreed behind closed doors at arduous all-nighter summit meetings. The Cyprus deal struck two weeks ago was typically absurd, with the European Central Bank and the German and Cypriot governments all blaming one another for the disastrous decision to target small depositors. It was also no secret that the Cypriot banking sector, flooded with Greek bonds, faced an impending crisis following the 2012 haircut of Greece’s sovereign debt. Yet the situation was allowed to fester, with one catastrophe temporarily averted while another lurked just around the corner. This has got to end. The intergovernmental method, focused always on how to win the next election rather than how to avoid the next crisis, must be replaced by a strong and accountable form of economic governance at the European level. We are no longer simply facing a debt crisis, concerned only with market confidence or the views of credit rating agencies. At stake is the trust of ordinary EU citizens in the European project as a whole. Unless steps are taken to restore this trust, we risk seeing the disintegration of the eurozone and the European Union as we know it. (Guy Verhoftstadt, a former prime minister of Belgium, is the leader of the Liberal Group in the European Parliament.) Antibiotics And The Meat We Eat Feeding antibiotics to healthy livestock may cause breeding of antibiotic-resistant diseases which will infect people SCIENTISTS at the Food and Drug Administration systematically monitor the meat and poultry sold in supermarkets around the country for the presence of disease-causing bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics. These food products are bellwethers that tell us how bad the crisis of antibiotic resistance is getting. And they’re telling us it’s getting worse. But this is only part of the story. While the FDA can see what kinds of antibioticresistant bacteria are coming out of livestock facilities, the agency doesn’t know enough about the antibiotics that are being fed to these animals. This is a major public health problem, because giving healthy livestock these drugs breeds superbugs that can infect people. We need to know more about the use of antibiotics in the production of our meat and poultry. The results could be a matter of life and death. In 2011, drugmakers sold nearly 30 million pounds of antibiotics for livestock – the largest amount yet recorded and about 80 percent of all reported antibiotic sales that year. The rest was for human health care. We don’t know much more except that, rather than healing sick animals, these drugs are often fed to animals at low levels to make them grow faster and to suppress diseases that arise because they live in dangerously close quarters on top of one another’s waste. It may sound counterintuitive, but feeding antibiotics to livestock at low levels may do the most harm. When he accepted the Nobel Prize in 1945 for his discovery of penicillin, Alexander Fleming warned that “there is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant.” He probably could not have imagined that, one day, we would be doing this to billions of animals in factory-like facilities. The FDA started testing retail meat and poultry for antibiotic-resistant bacteria in 1996, shortly before my term as commissioner ended. The agency’s most DAVID A KESSLER | NYT SYNDICATE Alexander Fleming warned that ‘there is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant’. recent report on superbugs in our meat, released in February and covering retail purchases in 2011, was 82 pages long and broke down its results by four different kinds of meat and poultry products and dozens of species and strains of bacteria. It was not until 2008, however, that Congress required companies to tell the FDA the quantity of antibiotics they sold for use in agriculture. The agency’s latest report, on 2011 sales and also released in February, was just four pages long – including the cover and two pages of boilerplate. There was no information on how these drugs were administered or to which animals and why. We have more than enough scientific evidence to justify curbing the rampant use of antibiotics for livestock, yet the food and drug industries are not only fighting proposed legislation to reduce these practices, they also oppose collecting the data. Unfortunately, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, as well as the FDA, is aiding and abetting them. The Senate committee recently approved the Animal Drug User Fee Act, a bill that would authorise the FDA to collect fees from veterinary-drug makers to finance the agency’s review of their products. Public health experts had urged the committee to require drug companies to provide more detailed antibiotic sales data to the agency. Yet the FDA stood by silently as the committee declined to act, rejecting a modest proposal from Senators Kirsten E Gillibrand of New York and Dianne Feinstein of California, both Democrats, that required the agency to report data it already collects but does not disclose. Combating resistance requires monitoring both the prevalence of antibioticresistant bacteria in our food, as well as the use of antibiotics on livestock. In human medicine, hospitals increasingly track resistance rates and antibiotic prescription rates to understand how the use of these drugs affects resistance. We need to cover both sides of this equation in agriculture, too. I appreciate that not every lawmaker is as convinced as I am that feeding low-dose antibiotics to animals is a recipe for disaster. But most recognise that we are facing an antibiotic resistance crisis, as evidenced by last year’s bipartisan passage of a measure aimed at fighting superbugs by stimulating the development of new antibiotics that treat serious infections. Why are lawmakers so reluctant to find out how 80 percent of our antibiotics are used? THE VIEWS EXPRESSED ON THE OPINION AND ANALYSIS PAGES ARE THE AUTHORS’ OWN. QATAR TRIBUNE BEARS NO RESPONSIBILITY.
Analysis Sunday, March 31, 2013 11 The Empirical Kids The multiplicity of options invites relativism as a response to the insurmountable complexity Have your say Is there an issue you feel strongly about, or an article you want to comment on? QT will carry your voice to the public and to places where it matters. Write to us at ADDRESS: PO BOX 23493, DOHA, QATAR TELEPHONE: +974.44422077 FAX: +974.44416790 EMAIL: LETTERS@QATAR-TRIBUNE.COM Food haven The Way Forward DAVID BROOKS NYT NEWS SERVICE Today’s students harbour the anxiety that in the race for global accomplishment, they may no longer be the best competitors. Chinese students spend 12-hour days in school, while US scores are middle of the pack. TWELVE years ago, I wrote a piece for The Atlantic, called “The Organisation Kid,” about the smart, hard-working, pleasantbut-cautious achievatrons who thrive in elite universities. Occasionally, somebody asks me how students have changed since then. I haven’t been perceptive enough to give a good answer. But, this year, I’m teaching at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale, and one terrifically observant senior, Victoria Buhler, wrote a paper trying to capture how it feels to be in at least a segment of her age cohort. She’s given me permission to quote from it. Buhler points out that the college students of 12 years ago grew up with 1990s prosperity at home, and the democratic triumph in the Cold War abroad. They naturally had a tendency to believe deeply “in the American model of democratic capitalism, which created all men equal but allowed some to rise above others through competition.” Then came September 11. That was followed by the highly moralistic language of George W Bush’s war on terror: “Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.” But Bush’s effort to replicate the Reagan war on an evil empire lead to humiliation, not triumph. Americans, Buhler writes, “emerged from the experience both dismissive of foreign intervention as a tool of statecraft as well as wary of the moral language used to justify it.” Then came the financial crisis, the other formative event for today’s students. The root of the crisis was in the financial world. But the pain was felt outside that world. “The capitalist system, with its promise of positive-sum gains for all, appeared brutal and unpredictable.” Moreover, today’s students harbour the anxiety that in the race for global accomplishment, they may no longer be the best competitors. Chinese students spend 12-hour days in school, while US scores are middle of the pack. In sum, today’s graduates enter a harsher landscape. Immediate postgrad life, Buhler writes, will probably bear a depressing resemblance to Hannah Horvath’s world on “Girls.” The hit song “Thrift Shop” by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis “is less a fashion statement, more a looming financial reality.” Buhler argues that the group she calls Cynic Kids “don’t like the system – however, they are wary of other alternatives as well as dismissive of their ability to actually achieve the desired modifications. As such, the generation is very conservative in its appetite for change. Broadly speaking, Cynic Kids distrust the link between action and result.” A Brookings Institution survey found that only 10 percent of young people agree with the statement, “America should be more globally proactive.” The Occupy movement, Buhler notes, “launched more traffic jams than legislation.” The Arab Spring seemed like a popular awakening but has not fulfiled its promise. In what I think is an especially trenchant observation, Buhler suggests that these disillusioning events have led to a different epistemological framework. “We are deeply resistant to idealism. Rather, the Cynic Kids have embraced the policy revolution; they require hypothesis to be tested, substantiated, and then results replicated before they commit to any course of action.” Maybe this empirical mindset is a sign of maturity, but Buhler acknowledges that the “yearning for definitive ‘evidence’ ... can retard action. ... The multiplicity of options invites relativism as a response to the insurmountable complexity. Ever the policy buffs, we know we are unable to scientifically appraise different options, and so, given the information constraints, we stick with the evil we know.” She suggests calling this state of mind the Tinder Effect, referring to the app that lets you scroll through hundreds of potential romantic partners, but that rarely leads to a real-life encounter. Buhler’s most comprehensive disquiet is with the meritocratic system itself. It rewards an obsessive focus on individual improvement: “Time not spent investing in yourself carries an opportunity cost, rendering you at a competitive disadvantage as compared to others who maintained the priority of self.” She wonders if the educated class is beginning to look at the less-educated class – portrayed on TV in shows like “Teen Mom 2” and “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” – as a distant, dysfunctional spectacle. She also wonders if the mathematisation of public policy performs a gatekeeper function; only the elite can understand the formulas that govern most people’s lives. I had many reactions to Buhler’s dazzling paper, but I’d like to highlight one: that the harsh events of the past decade may have produced not a youth revolt but a reversion to an empiricist mindset, a tendency to think in demoralised economic phrases like “data analysis,” “opportunity costs” and “replicability,” and a tendency to dismiss other more ethical and idealistic vocabularies that seem fuzzy and, therefore, unreliable. After the hippie, the yuppie and the hipster, the cool people are now wonksters. And, yes, I gave her an A. THIS is with reference to the article, ‘Colour, gaiety mark opening of Fourth Edition of Food Fest’, published in Qatar Tribune on March 29. We rarely go to any restaurants in Doha. Most of the time, we eat at a fast-food joint or at a café. Even if we go to a restaurant, it’s always the same place like Applebees or Panderosa. That’s why I’m excited to attend the food festival here. According to your report, the festival has 40 food stalls featuring variety of foods – from snack, healthy foods to cuisines from different places. Where else can you find a place that serves different foods from different countries? It is good also for the cost-sensitive customers as the report says that some of the foods cost as little as QR5 or QR20. That’s as cheap as wafers sold here. The only sad thing about the festival is that it’s only for four days. I wish they extend it to a week because residents and tourists will definitely flock to this festival. We’ll definitely attend the festival and to sample most of the foods available there. F RUIZ DOHA “I was reading the newspaper this morning when I glanced at the top of the page to see what time it was. Too much reading on the iPad.” STEVE MARTIN Health is Wealth Bloggers’ Borough Should Short Boys Take Growth Hormone? AMY NORTON | HEALTHDAY | NYT PARENTS often worry when their child, especially a son, is much shorter than average. But as long as there is no medical cause, parents can rest easy, experts say. Two pediatric endocrinologists describe a scenario pediatricians see all the time: Parents bring in their 11-year-old son because he’s substantially shorter than his classmates, and his growth seems to have slowed in recent years. Their concern is reasonable, said Dr David Allen, co-author of the article and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison. In the vignette, Allen and Dr Leona Cuttler describe a boy whose height was in the third percentile at age 9 years. (That means he was shorter than 97 percent of boys his age.) But his growth rate slowed further, so that he is now in the first percentile for height. “When a child falls off the growth curve like that, it’s appropriate for parents to be concerned and have him evaluated,” Allen said. The potential medical causes include growth hormone deficiency, certain genetic disorders or an underactive thyroid gland. Fortunately, though, most short kids are healthy. The “conundrum,” Allen said, is that parents are often still worried, especially when that child is a boy. And, in the United States, human growth hormone is approved to treat so-called idiopathic short stature — that is, short stature with no known medical cause — when a child is below the first percentile for height. So parents may want costly treatment even if their child has a clean bill of health. Dr Patricia Vuguin, a pediatric endocrinologist at Cohen Children’s Medical Center, said some doctors will recommend doing nothing. And, “some will say, let’s try growth hormone,” she said. But both Vuguin and Allen said it’s important for parents to have realistic expectations of growth hormone. For short, healthy children, studies predict that growth hormone will deliver an extra 1 to 3 inches as an adult. And that’s the average; other factors come into play. The Delicate Art Of Giving Feedback ROBERT C POZEN | HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW TO BE an effective manager, you need to be skilled at giving out both praise and criticism. While praise is easy to give, it is far more challenging and unpleasant to criticise your employees. Yet the practice of management requires you to occasionally show employees where they need to improve. Thus, it is vital for managers to learn how and when to give negative feedback. The first thing to realise is that people generally respond more strongly to negative events than positive ones. In other words, we are usually more upset about losing $100 than we are happy about winning $100. In fact, in an influential book, John Gottman suggested that positive interactions must outnumber negative interactions by at least five to one in order for a marriage to succeed. This observation is also true in the workplace, as Professor Andrew Miner and colleagues discovered in a study published in 2005. They recorded employees’ moods several times each day and, each time, asked them if any events (such as a positive interaction with a co-worker) had occurred within the past few hours. Their results showed that employees reacted to a negative interaction with their boss six times more strongly than they reacted to a positive interaction with their boss. This suggests that negative feedback can have significant adverse effects on an employee’s well-being — and, presumably, their productivity. What does this observation mean for managers? Put simply, managers need to be cautious before criticising employees. To start with, you should avoid inadvertently criticising any of your employees. For instance, if an employee writes a first draft of a written document, some managers might want to suggest some minor revisions even if the draft was generally good. In these situations, managers should clearly communicate that their revisions are merely suggestions coming from a second pair of eyes — and that they aren’t criticising their employee’s performance. More generally, managers need to weigh the tradeoffs involved in making negative feedback. If you criticise your employees, you will likely provide some corrective information, but you will also put your employee in a bad mood. If an error is so inconsequential that the corrective value of criticism is low, it might make sense for you to keep that feedback to yourself. Of course, there are situations when a manager must provide negative feedback. On these occasions, don’t lose sight of your purpose for offering that feedback: to improve the employee’s performance going forward. As much as you might want to excoriate your employee for what you believe is a spectacularly awful performance, your business gains nothing from it. In fact, shaming your employee is likely to have substantial negative effects on your business. In research reported in HBR, Christine Porath and Christine Pearson found that many employees considered themselves to be on the receiving end of workplace incivility, such as overly harsh criticism from their boss. According to their research, nearly half of these employees decide to intentionally decrease their productivity. Instead, in order to obtain the desired corrective effects of negative feedback, you should take steps to soften the emotional blow. You want your employees to focus on the message that you’re trying to convey, rather than any intense negative emotions. At a bare minimum, make sure to deliver your criticism in private. There’s nothing more humiliating than being criticised in front of your co-workers. And it is critical to keep your tone collaborative. Make clear that your employee still has your support and your respect.
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Karzai hopeful of Taliban joining mainstream - Qatar Tribune

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