Author: Lone Candle

The world’s largest democracy is collapsing before our eyes

Posted on by Lone Candle

“The easiest way to understand what Modi has done to India is to see it as kind of a mutually reinforcing cycle of two different agendas.

The first is using the powers of the premiership to spread Hindutva ideology and polarize the electorate along Hindu-versus-Muslim lines. The second is consolidating power in his hands and weakening countervailing authorities — including the judiciary, oversight commissions, the free press, and opposition parties.

The more the Hindu public is converted to his ideology, the more popular Modi becomes, providing him political cover to pursue attacks on judges, bureaucrats, and reporters. The more he controls India’s government and the press, the easier it is for him to spread Hindutva propaganda.”

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“Under Modi, the party has managed to significantly expand its demographic base among both lower-caste and poor Hindus (two groups that overlap to some degree but not fully) without losing its base. By 2019, poor Hindu voters were as likely as rich ones to vote for the BJP.”

The American doctor deserts

Posted on by Lone Candle

“in hundreds of communities, the doctor shortage isn’t a distant concern; it’s happening. America doesn’t have enough physicians practicing in certain parts of the country and in critical specialties. There are not enough primary care doctors in small towns and poor city neighborhoods alike. There are not enough obstetricians in rural practices. There are not enough psychiatrists almost anywhere.
The vast majority of rural America, 80 percent, is considered by the federal government to be medically underserved. About 20 percent of the US population lives in rural communities, but only 10 percent of doctors practice there.

These localized shortages — call them doctor deserts — are not inevitable. They are, in part, the result of policy choices. Doctors tend to spend their careers near the place they spent their residencies, several additional years of training they undergo after medical school. These residencies are paid for by the federal government, through Medicare, and virtually all are at big, academic medical centers, rather than in the places where people most need care right now.

If the US wants more doctors practicing in small towns, then it needs to put residencies there.”

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“The answer to “does America have enough doctors overall” is complicated and arguably somewhat unclear. The US has significantly fewer doctors per capita than some other wealthy nations, such as Germany and Sweden. But US numbers are actually about the same as a number of other developed countries — Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, France — that still generally rank better on measures of health care quality than the US does.
Groups like the Association of American Medical Colleges continue to project long-term workforce shortages. Demographic trends, including an aging patient population and boomer-generation doctors reaching retirement age, may lead to more overall pressure on the US health system’s capacity.

But the more acute shortages are already happening in individual communities and specialties.”

Why the US is selling India so many weapons

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Jets, drones, cyber capabilities, and more.
It’s a significant list, and builds on an expanding military partnership. The US has partnered with India more and more in response to China’s rise, seeing New Delhi as a valuable counterweight. This is happening as India advances grievous human rights abuses against minorities, against journalists, and against political critics — all in contradiction of America’s stated values.

And yet this week, the White House is promoting a “next generation defense partnership” with India. This includes the co-production of cutting-edge technologies like jet engines and semiconductors, the prospect of new arms sales, and agreements that would allow the US to have its navy ships repaired in India. The country will also purchase 31 advanced drones from General Atomics in a deal that will cost some $3 billion. And the Pentagon and the Indian Ministry of Defense have established a new military-tech incubator called INDUS-X.

Experts point out that India under Modi increasingly does not share American values, and some of the advanced military technologies that the US is providing the country could be used against dissidents or journalists.

“If we’re just going to go full-on countering China with India as a realist approach to things, that can come back and bite us,” says Derek Grossman, a defense analyst at the RAND Corporation. “Because, as we saw during the Cold War, a lot of the dictators or semi-authoritarian regimes that we cozied up with, they were not our friends in the long run.””

The Supreme Court may be running out of patience for Trump’s worst judges

Posted on by Lone Candle

“by sitting on this case, a Supreme Court dominated by conservative Republican appointees effectively let Tipton control ICE for more than a year.”

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“Texas’s lawsuit was rooted in a federal statute which states that the United States “shall take into custody any alien” who commits certain immigration offenses. In effect, they argued that the word “shall” is a mandatory command that forces ICE to make mass arrests.
But this argument runs afoul of 150 years of well-settled law. As far back as Railroad Company v. Hecht (1877), the Supreme Court held that “as against the government, the word ‘shall,’ when used in statutes, is to be construed as ‘may,’ unless a contrary intention is manifest.”

One reason for this strong presumption that federal laws do not impose arrest or prosecution mandates on law enforcement is that it is often literally impossible for a law enforcement agency to arrest every single person who violates a law — imagine the massive police state that would be required, for example, to pull over every single driver who violates a traffic law.

As the Justice Department explained in a 2014 memo, “there are approximately 11.3 million undocumented aliens in the country,” but Congress has only appropriated enough resources to “remove fewer than 400,000 such aliens each year.” That means that leaders of immigration agencies like ICE necessarily must set priorities, and make choices about which deportable immigrants will be targeted and which ones will effectively be tolerated within US borders.

Indeed, as Kavanaugh writes in his Texas opinion, this ability to set priorities and to decide when not to enforce the law has been a regular feature of federal immigration law across many administrations. “For the last 27 years since” the immigration statutes at issue in Texas “were enacted in their current form,” Kavanaugh writes, “all five Presidential administrations have determined that resource constraints necessitated prioritization in making immigration arrests.””