MOSCOW – An AIDS outbreak at two children’s hospitals in Uzbekistan has killed at least 14 children and left 133 infected with HIV, according to a documentary posted on a respected Central Asian news Web site on Monday psychology degree online.
The editor of Ferghana.ru said the 2007 outbreak was first reported in an official documentary produced by Uzbek prosecutors for government television.
But, he said, the video never aired because authorities had second thoughts about broadcasting it, fearing that it would provoke a public outcry and unfavorable international publicity.
The documentary posted on Ferghana.ru reported that 12 doctors and nurses at two hospitals in the eastern city of Namangan were convicted of treating the children with contaminated medical equipment.
According to the narrator, the health workers were sentenced to prison terms of from five years to eight years and eight months.
Uzbek officials, including prosecutors, did not return repeated phone calls from The Associated Press seeking comment.
The AP could not verify the authenticity of the documentary, which would be the first official confirmation of the long-rumored outbreak, but a former Uzbek television producer said it appeared authentic.
Daniil Kislov, editor of Ferghana.ru, said his site obtained the video from an Uzbek health official after authorities canceled plans to broadcast it.
Government officials keep a tight grip on the media in Uzbekistan, where President Islam Karimov has ruled for more than 20 years.
Several outbreaks of hospital-transmitted HIV have been reported among children in Central Asia in recent years. Doctors in the region have sometimes prescribed transfusions for routine illnesses.
Similar incidents in Kazakhstan in 2006 and Kyrgyzstan in 2007 left dozens of children infected.
The Uzbek documentary shows a series of men and women, identified as health workers, confessing and saying they deserved harsh sentences. All the interviewees spoke into a microphone with the logo of Uzbek state television.
“I am 1,00 Hot News: MEA TV airing Kan Ya Makan Music Video by Ridha Ibrahim
Germany, as I noted in an earlier post, shows that it is possible for a nation to maintain a high material standard of living while still competing successfully in the global arena.
Germany is the world’s second-largest exporting nation, behind China, and for many years was number one, and it has the world’s third-largest trade surplus, behind China and Japan. Be it noted that there are about 60 million Germans and more than 1 billion Chinese. At the same time German workers get six-week vacations, generous old age pensions and guaranteed health insurance.
Thomas Geoghegan, a Chicago labor lawyer, has an excellent article about this in the March 2010 issue of Harper’s magazine. He attributes Germany’s superior economic performance to its system of worker participation in corporate governance which, ironically, was imposed on Germany by the victorious allies after World War Two.
Workers have equal representation on the boards of directors of large corporations with shareholders, although the shareholders have the deciding vote in case of a tie. The important thing from the workers’ perspective is that they know what’s going on. They know the financial situation of the corporation, and they know its plans. If a company is considering moving a manufacturing operation to Asia or eastern Europe, the union can make a counter-proposal to make it economically feasible to stay in Germany.
I don’t think that is the whole story, but I do think it is a great advantage to Germany to avoid the kind of class warfare we have in the United States. Workers can suggest improvements in efficiency without fearing they will jeopardize their own jobs.
In the 1950s, Walter Reuther, the head of the United Auto Workers, reportedly urged General Motors, Ford and Chrysler to make a line of fuel-efficient cars; the companies reportedly reacted with outrage at this infringement of management prerogatives, and told Reuther to restrict himself for bargaining for pay and benefits. (I don’t have a historical reference for this, but I find it believable.)
Even if you don’t think worker participation is the cause of Germany’s economic success, the facts show that it hasn’t prevented that success.
You may say that this is all very well for Germany, but its institutions can’t possibly be transplanted to the United States. But the United States has a long history of adopting good ideas from Germany. The Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. armed forces are modeled on the Prussian General Staff. U.S. corporate research laboratories and research universities were inspired by Germany models. The U.S. interstate highway system is modeled on the German autobahn. The secret of success is to take other people’s good ideas and improve upon them.
Geoghegan’s article is not available on-line, so you would have to buy a copy or read it in a public library.
I’m sitting in front of my TV, like so many of you, watching the post-HCR vote speechifying, grinning like a fool and tearing up here and there.
James Clyburn just said that Nancy Pelosi got it done through tenacity and compassion. I’ll have more to say about this later, but I think that this combination – which I’ll call radical compassion – is what we need to move forward, and not just in the healthcare arena.
(And speaking of hope: My miniature iris is up, too.)
At it’s most basic level, government is a willing agreement entered into by a group of people to give up some individual liberty for the preservation of the group in general. Cicero called it a “partnership in justice.”
For example, I have consented to be governed by the laws of my city, state and nation, even though that means I can’t do everything I may want to do whenever I want to. I may not agree with every law, but by not rebelling, it proves my tacit consent.
Naturally, then, in government leaders will emerge. We need to pick sheriffs, judges, mayors, presidents, legislators, etc. But does it really matter what kind of people they are? I think it does.
We have recently heard of all kinds of votes being “bought” in order to pass the healthcare bill. A Utah Congressman’s brother is getting appointed to a judgeship in exchange for the Congressman’s vote for Obamacare. The Hill newspaper reports on some of the goodies, including $300 million in extra funding for Sen. Landrieu’s home state of Louisiana, and millions in extra Medicaid dollars for Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson. The public doesn’t want the bill to pass, so the Dems have to make these hidden deals in order to get it passed. Outside of Obamacare, the New Jersey government has been caught in corrupt contract scandals, awarding contracts and taking a cut of the money. Many state and national politicians are caught in sexual scandals. Our government leaders have been convicted of embezzlement, lying, and tax-fraud; implicated in the disappearance of interns, campaign fraud, and abuse of intelligence to rationalize war; and unconscionable waste of taxpayers money – basically robbing us, the citizens. It’s more like reading about pirates plundering a nation than its leaders preserving it!
Polybius, a Greek from around 200BC, watched the downfall of his native Greece and the emergence of Rome as the dominating power of the era. He wrote many books on Rome’s emergence and its history. He compares Rome to other contemporary nation-states like Greece, Carthage, etc. He says in The Histories, volume III that
“But the quality in which he Roman commonwealth is most distinctly superior is in my opinion the nature of their religious convictions. The consequence is that among the Greeks, (where belief in religion was deemed foolish) apart from other things, members of the government, if they are entrusted with no more than a talent, (a piece of money) though they have 10 copyists and as many seals and twice as many witnesses, cannot keep their faith; whereas among the Romans those who as magistrates and legates are dealing with large sums of money maintain correct conduct just because they have pledged their faith by oath. Whereas elsewhere it is a rare thing to find a man who keeps his hands off public money, and whose record is clean in this respect, among the Romans one rarely comes across a man who has been detected in such conduct.”
Whether the moral code you adhere to comes from organized religion or not, Polybius makes clear that moral people — people who believe in and live in accordance to the natural principles of right vs. wrong; honesty is good, dishonesty is bad; fidelity and integrity are good; etc. — these are the people that make the best public servants and leaders in government.
A generation later, the Roman Cicero said that leaders that follow these moral codes are the only ones fit to govern.
Another generation or two later, approximately 160AD, Marcus Aurelius was Emperor of Rome. In his Meditations he lauds a moral character that works for the public interest in a manner that befits a ruler.
My point is that the morality question has very little to do with the Religious Right of the current political landscape. Oh sure they get their boxers in a bunch about it nowadays, just in time for the next one to fall from within their own ranks due to yet another “indiscretion.” We don’t need to look to these punters for direction, or assume when they fall that the belief in a moral code is incorrect. We have the writings and lessons of history before us. Some Roman guys from a long time ago set-up a mixed government system with an Executive Branch, a Senate, a legislative (popular assembly) body, and judges. Sound familiar? They were the world’s super power for centuries, and their system worked for over 500 years. America, by paltry comparison, is just above the 200+ years mark.
So it’s not like we haven’t been pointed the way.
James Burgh, involved in the creation of this great nation, wrote in 1774 that,
“When we elect persons to represent us we must not be supposed to depart from the smallest right which we have deposited with them. We make a lodgment, not a gift; we entrust, but part with nothing. We have, therefore, a right to know what they are saying and doing. And should they contradict our sense, or swerve from our interests, we have a right to remonstrate, inform, and direct them. By which means, we become the regulators of our own conduct, and the institutors of our own laws, and nothing material can be done but by our authority and consent.”
Compare this with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and her behavior around the healthcare bill. Not only does the American public not know what is in this bill, she is deliberately trying to keep it this way as it says on her own website. The hidden deals, millions of dollars for buying votes, and strong-arm tactics is exactly the opposite of how the representative system is supposed to work!
Pelosi and politicians like her are bad for America. Watch CNN say so HERE.
We need a way to get career politicians back into the real world – like thru term limits for Congress. And we need to be as vocal and vigilant as ever against her and politicians like her. The right to govern ourselves is a real and unalienable right that we have. When our elected representatives abuse it and take power unto themselves like Pelosi is doing – hiding the contents of a bill from the public and doing back room deals to get it put into law – we need to use our natural rights and get her and her cronies out of our government. She and politicians like her are working toward the decline of America. The history is before us.
Man, they do everything big in Texas, and they sure don’t use common sense in what they do.
No, I’m not talkin bout them thinkin bout seceding from the USA.
Worse. The Texas State Board of Education has taken it upon itself to write the textbooks on economics and history according to a conservative interpretation of US history and capitalism.
This wouldn’t be so bad ifn it weren’t for the fact that Texas is the second largest buyer of textbooks, which means the book publishers will abide by the wishes of the conservative members the State Board.
If the folks in Texas want their kids to read such distortion of economics and history, fine, but why should the rest of our kids have to accept such garbage?
Example of revisionist history: Thomas Jefferson is not considered one of the Founding Fathers.
You can read the story in the Washington Monthly (http://ww.washingtonmonthly.com/), dated March 13, 2010.
Jonathan Zimmerman, while not agreeing with the Texas State Board of Education, suggests in the Los Angels Times dated March 17, suggests students maybe should be given several points of view, which would show how we Americans often disagree about how our nation was formed. Then the students could on their own “sort out the differences.”
Now, that ain’t a bad idea. But it ain’t gonna fly cause both liberals and conservatives at the extreme edges just don’t want but one point of view on anything and that point of view must be theirs.
A friend and occasional Power Line contributor writes:
If [Obamacare] passes, the Dems will own every doctor complaint out there. Moreover, the complaints will multiply, and not just because care will deteriorate as demand increases and supply decreases. They are going to multiply because the care-seeking population is about to become the Baby Boomers — i.e., the most indulged, demanding and complaining generation in a hundred years, or maybe ever. The Dems are (apparently) fixing to take over medicine at exactly the time The Giant Complaining Horde shows up at the door.
Of course, the irony, as ever with these egalitarian programs, is that people with money will still come out ahead. One reason I found out about [my] liver cancer in time to do something about it was that, knowing I had a potential problem, I paid $4,000 out of my own pocket for an exotic annual physical exam beyond what insurance would reimburse.
What is actually going to happen is that there will spring up a quasi-underground medical practice for people who can pay their own bills and do not rely on Medicare or (what will become dwindling) private insurance. Indeed, this has already started to happen with boutique clinics like the one I used. If I were a shrewd businessman, I would figure out some way to franchise it, or something, and make a fortune.
The basic thing the Dems detest is inequality born of the fact that people who think about what they’re doing tend to come out ahead of people who don’t. Oh well.
And in other news, did I tell you that my doctor never returns my calls?
I recently mentioned a new paper by Sala-i-Martin and Pinkovskiy about poverty in Africa, and how the situation is much better than we tend to believe. Martin Ravallion – probably the world’s most prominent poverty expert – has now reacted. He agrees that African poverty has been decreasing over the last 15 years, but he is cautious:
We must first be clear about what we mean when we say “poverty is falling”. What many people mean is falling numbers of poor. However, Sala-i-Martin and Pinkovskiy refer solely to the poverty rate—the percentage of people who are poor. (There is no mention of this important distinction in their paper.)… Here we agree: aggregate poverty rates have fallen in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) since the mid-1990s. Shahoua Chen and I came to exactly the same conclusion in our research, for the World Bank’s global poverty monitoring effort, although our methods differ considerably and (no surprise) I prefer our methods. However, Chen and I also point out that the decline in the aggregate poverty rate has not been sufficient to reduce the number of poor, given population growth…
As we warn explicitly in our paper, this is not yet sufficient survey data to be confident about the (promising) downward trend for Africa’s aggregate poverty rate that Sala-i-Martin and Pinkovskiy have announced with such confidence.
Hopefully we will see a confirmation of the emerging downward trend for Africa in the years ahead, as more (genuine) data emerge. (source, source, source)
Again proof that poverty statistics may be tasty sausages but you wouldn’t want to see them made. And that’s not just the case for third world statistics. Even U.S. poverty statistics are a mess.
