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Barack Obama Domestic issues Financial Crisis The Opinionsphere Videos

Obama’s Grand Bargain

[digg-reddit-me]From Obama’s Inaugural Address:

There are some who question the scale of our ambitions — who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage.

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them — that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account — to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day — because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.

This brings to mind what George Stephanopoulos was so excited about last Sunday on This Week:

(Yes, I need to work on improving my DVR to computer quality.)

It seems that Obama is preparing to bet his presidency on a Grand Bargain – that will allow him (and us) to rewrite the social contract in a more extensive way than any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Even during Obama’s campaign, he spoke of tackling the challenges that were necessary – and not putting off hard discussions about our country’s long-term stability. But the financial crisis – which at first prompted the endlessly parroted conventional wisdom that whoever won would need to cut all of their projects and focus narrowly on the crisis itself – has instead proved to be an opportunity.

The amount of spending needed to stimulate the economy is enormous – with the numbers being thrown around today dwarfing that of any previous government intervention (save perhaps for our major wars). What Obama understands is that this type of spending, while necessary in the short-term, poses a serious long-term threat. Which is why he is now speaking of the second step – after the financial crisis has passed – of tackling entitlement reform and tax reform, and finally putting America on sound financial footing after years of prolifigacy.

None of these insights are exceptional. What is exceptional is how Obama is already shaping the arch of his first term, using this crisis to set up his next objective, and shaping the conventional wisdom.

The problem I see though is that the Obama administration has not done a good job of conveying to the public the place this stimulus bill has within Obama’s agenda. The word is that in the next week or so, Tim Geithner will present “a ‘comprehensive’ plan that [he] hope[s] will command market confidence.” My hope is that this comprehensive plan will lay out a broad legislative agenda based on Obama’s campaign. Based on the campaign plans and signals sent during the transition, here’s what I see:

Step 1 (The First 100 Days)

  • Release the rest of the funds from TARP.
  • A large stimulus package to demonstrate the government’s commitment to addressing the crisis, especially in alleviating it’s effects on the majority of Americans.
  • A banking and mortgage bill that takes whatever steps are necessary to shore up these sectors of the economy, including new regulations, new oversight, and possibly additional funds.
  • An infrastructure bill that would create a National Infrastructure Bank.
  • Health care reforms that would extend health care benefits and attempt to control the escalating health care costs.
  • A combination of a cap-and-trade program and funding for green energy.

The goal of this first period would be to begin to make both short-term and long-term investments into those sectors that will lead to long-term growth – which will stimulate the economy in the short-term. This is the spending stage. After this burst of legislating, Obama would be able to focus on tinkering with education programs and seeing what works, as well as addressing the simmering foreign policy issues which are constantly threatening to take over the agenda.

Step 2 (Post-Crisis)

  • Entitlement reform (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.) Everything is on the table.
  • Tax reform. Not much has been said about this. This will certainly be a wild card – but Obama has criticized our corporate tax rate for its irrationality. It’s very high – but due to the enormous number of exemptions and credits, the effective rate for those businesses able to lobby for benefits, it is very low. This should be rationalized.
  • Universal health care.
  • Education reform.

This is the “cutting back” stage and consolidation stage. The goal of this second stage would be to put America on a solid financial footing again – to eliminate the unsustainable domestic policies that undermine our stability and power.

This is obviously an enormous agenda. And it’s far from clear that Obama can accomplish this. But if he does not lay out the vision – which I have pieced together from numerous statements – then it’s hard to see how he can accomplish it. Of course, Geithner was just confirmed last week – and Obama’s only been in office for two weeks – so he does have a bit more time to lay this out. But he doesn’t have long.

Continue reading “Obama’s Grand Bargain”
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Economics Financial Crisis Humor The Opinionsphere

Banksters

The BBC proposes reintroducing a word from the 1930s into the current lexicon: bankster.

Readers of the blog – and friends of mine – know that I have a deep and abiding hatred of the Bank of America. Of course, this hatred was based on my own personal experience with that sorry institution. I did not know the back story – of a poor immigrant who used his bank to build a community, who financed the Golden Gate Bridge and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, who refused pay increases or bonuses, who helped rebuild San Francisco after the great earthquake of 1906. This only makes me despise even more the institution that grew from this good bank – which perverted the bank Amadeo Peter Giannini founded.

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Barack Obama The Web and Technology

A Question About “E-Mail to the Chief”

Peter Baker reporting in The New York Times:

To minimize the risk, the government technology gurus have made it impossible to forward e-mail messages from the president or to send him attachments, people informed about the precautions say.

I can see how to set up a system to prevent the sending of attachments. But how do you make an email impossible to forward? Wouldn’t that require protocols existing within all email clients allowing this? I’m not an expert on this – so please educate me if this isn’t the technical issue I think it is.

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Economics Financial Crisis Politics The Opinionsphere

The Highlights From Davos

[digg-reddit-me]Now that the World Economic Forum 2009 meeting in Davos, Switzerland has concluded, let me present some highlights.

The number one highlight, of course, is the Turkish Prime Minister, Tayyip Erdogan, storming off the stage after not being allowed to finish addressing Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres on the issue of Gaza:

Keep in mind that the “spirit of Davos” is supposed to be international cooperation and civil discussion between the business and political elites and the journalists who so eagerly report on them- and that Turkey and Israel are allies rather than enemies. Dr. George Friedman of the Stratfor Institute saw this as the clearest demonstration yet of Turkey’s increasingly prominent role as the leader of the Muslim world – and certainly Erdogan is being lionized for standing up to the Western media and the Israeli prime minister.

But the immediate buzz in the hall wasn’t about the global significance of this fit, but about breakdown of the spirit of Davos. For journalists, Davos is a kind of ideal as William Lewis of London’s the Telegraph described it:

The beauty of Davos is that one can meet large numbers of the world’s most important/interesting/powerful/egotistical people in the space of four days. Interviews that would otherwise take months to arrange, and hours to travel to, take place in a small Swiss ski resort. It’s a journalist’s dream…

More significantly, Lewis noted that this year, for the first time in many years, Americans did not dominate. Barack Obama only sent his advisor Valerie Jarrett. The most prominent American present was Bill Clinton. More on him later. Instead, Davos was dominated by the Chinese premier and Russian prime minister, each of whom confronted America and blamed it for the crises in their countries in a different manner. Joe Conanson of Salon described the mood:

Accustomed to flattering themselves and each other as benevolent masters of the globalizing world, they now confront an unprecedented crisis – actually a conglomeration of crises – that has diminished their financial worth and moral credibility.

What roused the global elitists from their glum torpor was the opportunity to lay blame for the economic catastrophe that has befallen the world. There was one obvious target: the United States of America, whose stupid and criminal bankers have inflicted so much harm on the whole of humanity. It is an undeniable fact that the Russian and Chinese leaders explored with great relish at every opportunity.

The Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, in a characteristic manner, did not directly name America as the cause of the financial crisis, but elliptically described it as “attributable to inappropriate macroeconomic policies of some economies and their unsustainable model of development characterized by prolonged low savings and high consumption; excessive expansion of financial institutions in blind pursuit of profit,” etcetera. It was clear to everyone who he was talking about. Wen’s speech was warmly received – but his private remarks to a meeting of Western business leaders demonstrated his real political skill – as he charmed the gathered free market capitalists by referencing such touchstones as the work of Adam Smith (which he had recently re-read.)

Then, there were Vladimir Putin’s remarks on the “perfect storm” that is the current financial crisis. The theory of the perfect storm – “the simultaneous occurrence of weather events which, taken individually, would be far less powerful than the storm resulting of their chance combination” – seems to be a rather apt metaphor for the confluence of events shaking the global system. Putin placed the blame directly on America though, in part no doubt due to his honest assessment, and in part to deflect responsibility. While he was giving this speech, violent protests calling on him to step down were being put down back in Russia as many blamed his financial mismanagement as he bet Russia’s economy on strong commodities prices.

Finally, there was former president Bill Clinton. Clinton addressed the assembled world political and economic leaders:

This is not a time for denial or delay. Do something. Give people confidence by showing confidence. Don’t give up. Don’t bet against yourself. Don’t bet against your country. This is still a good time to be alive.

Described as “the lone American to whom anyone at Davos might actually listen as he attempted to uphold the name of his country,” Clinton not only tried to rally the world leaders from their sour mood, but also responded more specifically to Putin in response to a question:

Later, Clinton met with Putin privately for an hour and a half, seemingly with the consent of the State Department and White House.

The overall lesson of this year’s Davos seems to be a reinforcement of the consensus view of the foreign policy establishment: We are now living in a nonpolar world in which, though America retains great power and is the most powerful single force, it will not hold the same leverage that it once did. We can no longer act as the world’s only superpower – but instead can take our place as the first among equals.

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Israel

Holocaust Survivors for the Legalization of Marijuana

[digg-reddit-me]I have no idea what to make of these ads:

(H/t Andrew Sullivan.)

But it’s not a parody. It’s apparently a real ad for the upcoming elections in Israel on February 10 resulting from the political alliance between the Holocaust Survivors Party and the Green Leaf Graduates party. The older party wanted to reach out to younger Israelis and the pro-marijuana party wanted to be taken seriously. The fact that I’m writing about it demonstrates that it’s created a significant amount of buzz.

The best line:

For us, the Holocaust survivors, our obligation is to legalize it [marijuana].

I don’t follow the logic, even if I support the cause.

Continue reading “Holocaust Survivors for the Legalization of Marijuana”
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National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The War on Terrorism

Torture, Plain and Simple

David J. Morris, a former Marine, attended the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program whose purpose was to train US soldiers to withstand torture but whose techniques migrated to interrogation of prisoners after the Bush administration pushed for “enhanced interrogation.” Morris writes of his experience being subjected to these techniques:

I was incarcerated at SERE for only a few days, but my mind quickly disintegrated. I became convinced that I was being held in an actual prisoner of war camp. Training had stopped, from my point of view. We had crossed over into some murky shadow land where the regulations no longer applied.

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History Humor Videos

41 Tells a Joke

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The Opinionsphere

Science’s A Priori Assumptions

Dennis Overbye in The New York Times:

[Science] requires no metaphysical commitment to a God or any conception of human origin or nature to join in this game, just the hypothesis that nature can be interrogated and that nature is the final arbiter. Jews, Catholics, Muslims, atheists, Buddhists and Hindus have all been working side by side building the Large Hadron Collider and its detectors these last few years.

The main reason I mention this is Overbye’s implicit acceptance that science has a priori assumptions – an argument I’ve had many times before. Of course, Overbye misses a few of science’s a priori assumptions – from cause-and-effect to Occam’s razor to the rules of mathematics. But he admits my point.

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Barack Obama Criticism Foreign Policy National Security Pakistan The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

The Populist Party Blog

On what seems to be the official Populist Party website, they are taking “Oh Bomb Uh” to task for launching a war without consent of Congress:

Even though he swore the oath twice, Barack Obama is in violation of the Constitution of the United States of America, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 which states that only Congress can declare War.

What they are referring to is the launching of military strikes against what they would call “alleged” Al Qaeda bases in Pakistan. What confuses me of course is that he starts out by quoting Ron Paul saying that to use the word, “War” in regards to attacking terrorism has no meaning – and that “You can’t have a War against a Tactic.” But if that’s the case, then how is what Obama doing a war?

And for that matter, Congress has not formally declared war since World War I. Which would make any military action – in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Somalia – seemingly anywhere – also contrary to the Constitution. Of course this is a unique reading of the Constitution, but this is how the Populist Party can claim to represent “the people” – they know as much about the Constitution as the least of all people.

Choose a side and stick to it Populists!

N.B. Can anyone at all make sense of how any of this evidence backs up the initial claim in this paragraph. For the life of me, it just doesn’t make sense. The evidence he cites is interesting – but does nothing to prove his point:

Although it is sacrilegious, some commentators are even claiming that Al-Qaeda does not exist. Their evidence? Just well-documented interviews with a key Oh-Bomb-Ah foreign policy advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and footage of him extolling a bunch of muhajideen to fight for their god before the Soviets even invaded Afghanistan.

Overall, it’s nice to see the Populist Party has a blog. But they should work on the content a bit.

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Barack Obama Domestic issues Economics Financial Crisis Politics The Opinionsphere

Fair-Minded Yglesias

Matt Yglesias points out the inconsistency in Republican opponents of the stimulus bill claiming:

we can’t afford large new temporary deficit spending but can afford large new permanent tax cuts.

And then Yglesias points to “a Republican worth listening to,” Rep. John L. Mica.

It’s the fair-mindedness that keeps me reading Yglesias’s stuff.