When tiny Fisker Automotive Inc. hit a financing glitch last year,
threatening its plan to build a fancy gasoline-electric hybrid car in
Finland, it turned to the U.S. Department of Energy.
The DOE had a bolder idea. Why not also step up the company's plans
to develop a less-expensive model, and assemble it in a closed U.S.
auto plant?
Within months, Vice President Joe Biden, the former senator from
Delaware, was helping lure the embryonic car company to a shuttered
General Motors Co. factory four miles from his house in Wilmington,
right across the tracks from Biden Park. Soon, Fisker Automotive, a
two-year-old business that has yet to sell a car, won loans from the
federal government totaling $528 million.
Fisker had joined a flock of other businesses seeking cash from the biggest venture capitalist of all, the U.S. government.
The DOE hopes to lend or give out more than $40 billion to
businesses working on "clean technology," everything from electric cars
and novel batteries to wind turbines and solar panels. In the first
nine months of 2009, the DOE doled out $13 billion in loans and grants
to such firms. By contrast, venture-capital firms -- which have long
been the chief funders of fledgling tech firms, taking equity stakes in
the start-ups that will pay off if they go public -- poured just $2.68
billion into the sector in that time, according to data tracker
Cleantech Group.
Thus, while much attention has been focused on the federal
government's involvement in banking, Washington also is gaining sway in
another swath of the economy. By financing clean-tech ventures on a
large scale, the government has become a kingmaker in one of
technology's hottest sectors.
Some young companies are tailoring their business plans to win DOE
cash. Private investors, meanwhile, are often pulling back, waiting to
see which projects the government blesses. Success in winning federal
funds can attract a flood of private capital, companies say, while
conversely, bad luck in Washington can sour their chances with private
investors. The result is an intertwining of public and private-sector
interests in an arena where politics is never far from the surface ...
At the DOE, Matthew Rogers, who helps oversee the department's
loans, said proposals are vetted by "deal teams" insulated as much as
possible from outside pressure. "Lots of people can call the [energy]
secretary, but that doesn't mean that any of that necessarily flows
down to the deal-team level," he said.
An official summary of the plan from WhiteHouse.gov that helps boil away the fluff in the speech and the spin in the subsequent commentary. The way it ends is interesting too:
The main points of President Obama’s plan for Afghanistan as delivered
on December 1, 2009 at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of lobbyists are likely to be ejected from
federal advisory panels as part of a little-noticed initiative by the
Obama administration to curb K Street's influence in Washington,
according to White House officials and lobbying experts.
The new policy -- issued with little fanfare this fall by the White
House ethics counsel -- may turn out to be the most far-reaching
lobbying rule change so far from President Obama, who also has sought
to restrict the ability of lobbyists to get jobs in his administration
and to negotiate over stimulus contracts.
The initiative is aimed at a system of advisory committees so vast
that federal officials don't have exact numbers for its size; the most
recent estimates tally nearly 1,000 panels with total membership
exceeding 60,000 people.
Under the policy, which is being phased in over the coming months,
none of the more than 13,000 lobbyists in Washington would be able to
hold seats on the committees, which advise agencies on trade rules,
troop levels, environmental regulations, consumer protections and
thousands of other government policies.
"Some folks have developed a comfortable Beltway perch sitting on
these boards while at the same time working as lobbyists to influence
the government," said White House ethics counsel Norm Eisen, who
disclosed the policy in a September blog posting on the White House Web
site. "That is just the kind of special interest access that the
president objects to."
But lobbyists and many of the businesses they
represent say K Street is being unfairly demonized by a White House
intent on scoring political points with scandal-weary voters. They warn
that the latest policy will severely handicap federal regulators, who
rely heavily on advisory boards for technical advice and to serve as
liaisons between government and industry ...
According to the most recent estimates from the General Services
Administration, 52 government agencies use 915 advisory committees
organized under the law, with a total membership of more than 60,000.
Other estimates put the figure at about 1,000 panels. Federal officials
say they do not know how many panel members are lobbyists.
Most committee members receive no pay for their participation. They
often are urged to take part by companies, trade groups or advocacy
organizations that hope to sway government decisions to their
advantage. While their operations vary, the panels tend to hold open
meetings and issue reports and recommendations, and they often wield
significant influence with policymakers because of their expertise in
arcane subjects, from nuclear plant safety to wild burro management.
Administration lawyers determined that they couldn't ban lobbyists
from advisory committees directly because most of the panels are
overseen by individual agencies rather than the White House; so Eisen
encouraged -- rather than ordered -- the prohibition. Nonetheless,
administration officials said, most Cabinet secretaries have
implemented the recommendation, usually by barring renewals or new
appointments for lobbyists.
Lobbyists up in arms
The reaction from the lobbying community has been swift and
overwhelmingly negative. Some of the loudest criticism has come from
the Industry Trade Advisory Committees (ITACs), a collection of more
than a dozen panels that provide policy advice and technical assistance
to the Commerce Department and the U.S. Trade Representative ...
The panel on automotive equipment and capital goods, for example,
stands to lose at least seven of its two dozen members, including
lobbyists for the National Association of Manufacturers and the auto
supplier Delphi, when the committee is reconstituted early next year ...
Administration officials remain sanguine, saying the criticism is
overblown and arguing that top corporate officers are free to sit on
advisory panels as long as they aren't lobbyists. Eisen, in a response
letter to the ITAC leaders last month, wrote that "arguments that only
lobbyists can bring requisite experience to provide wise counsel . . .
are unconvincing on their face."
And though lobbyists are unhappy, some good-government advocates say the policy is sound.
"You may lose a lot of expertise, but these people are also paid to
have a point of view; they have an agenda," said Mary Boyle, a vice
president at Common Cause. "We support what the administration is doing
to get deep-seated special interests out of the business of running our
government, so this seems like a step in the right direction."
Over the past few weeks, Barack Obama has been criticized for the
following: He didn't go to Berlin for the 20th anniversary of the
Wall's coming down. He didn't make a forceful enough statement on the
30th anniversary of the U.S. diplomats' being taken hostage in Iran. He
didn't show sufficient mournfulness, at first, when the Fort Hood
shootings took place, and he was namby-pamby about the possibility that
the shootings were an act of jihad. He has spent too little time
focusing on unemployment. He bowed too deeply before the Japanese
Emperor. He allowed the Chinese to block the broadcast of his Shanghai
town-hall meeting. He allowed the Chinese President to bar questions at
their joint press conference ...
He didn't come back with any diplomatic victories from Asia. He allowed
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other 9/11 plotters to be tried in the
U.S. criminal-justice system rather than by the military. He has
dithered too long on Afghanistan. He has devoted too much attention to
— and given congressional Democrats too much control over — health care
reform, an issue that is peripheral to a majority of Americans.
And all this has led to a dangerous slippage in the polls, it is said, a sense that his presidential authority is ebbing.
As a fully licensed pundit, I have the authority to weigh in here
... but I demur. Oh, I could sling opinions about every one of the
events cited above — some were unfortunate — but it would
matter only if I could discern a pattern that illuminates Obama's
presidency. The most obvious pattern, however, is the media's tendency
to get overwrought about almost anything.
Why, for example, is the 20th
anniversary of the Berlin Wall demolition so crucial that it requires a
President's presence? Which recent U.S. President has gotten the
Chinese to agree to anything big? (In fact, Obama has secured
significant diplomatic cooperation from the Chinese on North Korea,
Afghanistan and Pakistan.) Was his deep bow indicative of anything
other than his physical fitness? ...
Stepping back a bit, I do see a metapattern that extends over the 40
years since Richard Nixon's Southern strategy began the drift toward
more ideological political parties: Democrats have tough first years in
the presidency. Of the past seven Presidents, the two Bushes rank at
the top in popularity after one year, while Obama and Bill Clinton rank
at the bottom, with Jimmy Carter close by. There is a reason for that.
Democrats come to office eager to govern the heck out of the country.
They take on impossible issues, like budget-balancing and health care
reform. They run into roadblocks — from their own unruly ranks as well
as from Republicans. They get lost in the details. A tax cut is much
easier to explain than a tax increase. A foreign policy based in
bluster — railing against an "axis of evil" — is easier to sell than a
foreign policy based in nuance. Of course, external events count a lot:
the ratings of Bushes I and II were bolstered, respectively, by the
disintegration of the Soviet Union and the flattening of the World
Trade Center. Reagan's rating — 53% and headed south — was dampened by
a deepening recession.
So it is way too early to make pronouncements on Obama's fate. One
pattern that can be limned from the recent overseas controversies is
that this President has a tendency to err in the direction of respect
toward other countries. This is a witting reaction to the Bush
Administration's tendency to diss our allies and insult — or invade —
our enemies. It is a long game, which will yield results, or not, over
time. After a first year spent demonstrating a new comity, Obama has
gained the global credibility to get tough — on Iran, for example — in
his second year. But the real evaluation of Obama's debut must wait for
the results of the two biggest problems he's tackling: his decision on
Afghanistan and the congressional attempt to pass health care reform.
And even here, it will be difficult to render judgment immediately — as
difficult as it was to judge Clinton's decision to spend his political
capital on deficit reduction in his 1993 economic plan, a triumph that
didn't become apparent for nearly five years.
The
Norwegian Nobel Committee
has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to
President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen
international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee
has attached special importance to Obama's vision of and work for a
world without nuclear weapons.
Obama has as President
created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy
has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the
United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue
and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the
most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from
nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control
negotiations. Thanks to Obama's initiative, the USA is now playing a
more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the
world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.
Only
very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the
world's attention and given its people hope for a better future. His
diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the
world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared
by the majority of the world's population.
For 108 years,
the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that
international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the
world's leading spokesman. The Committee endorses Obama's appeal that
"Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for
a global response to global challenges."
President Obama said Friday he will make public an ongoing list of
visitors to the White House, reversing a policy embraced and defended
by previous presidents of both parties.
Under the new policy, the names of visitors to the White House, from
tourists to business leaders, will be made public for the first time.
Obama's decision opens a window on efforts by some of those visitors
to shape policy at the very top of the federal government. But the new
rule has notable exceptions, including people who come for
"particularly sensitive" meetings such as interviews for top jobs;
personal guests of the first family; and visitors whose known presence
at the White House would pose a national security risk.
The White House characterized the move as evidence of Obama's commitment to foster "an open and transparent government."
"For the first time in history, records of White House visitors will
be made available on an ongoing basis," Obama said in a statement. "We
will achieve our goal of making this administration the most open and
transparent administration in history, not only by opening the doors of
the White House to more Americans, but by shining a light on the
business conducted inside. Americans have a right to know whose voices
are being heard in the policy-making process."
The policy will take effect Sept. 15, and as soon as December the
Obama administration will begin posting online the names of White House
visitors from the previous 90 to 120 days. Officials said 70,000 to
100,000 people visit the White House each month ...
Officials also released the names of visitors to the White House under
President George W. Bush. Those names included prominent Christian
conservative leaders such as James Dobson, founder of Focus on the
Family; the Rev. Jerry Falwell, president of Liberty University; and
the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, chairman of the Traditional Values
Coalition.
Stephen Payne, a lobbyist who was videotaped by the Times of London
allegedly offering meetings with senior Bush administration officials
in exchange for large contributions to Bush's presidential library
foundation, visited the White House 53 times, according to a tally by
CREW.
"The Obama administration has proven its pledge to usher in a new
era of government transparency was more than just a campaign promise.
The Bush administration fought tooth and nail to keep secret the
identities of those who visited the White House," said Melanie Sloan,
CREW's executive director.
You can read Arlen Specter's statement here. Below are selected reactions to the bombshell news.
A Blue View (the GOP has finally fallen off the cliff):
The range of political ideology in the Senate (and the country) did not change yesterday, nor did the "depth" (e.g., the popularity of any position along that spectrum). All that happened was that a Senator on the center right part of the spectrum changed his colors from red to blue. The Democratic Party now encompasses an even wider ideological range and so Obama's legislative strategy will now involve more inter-party than intra-party negotiating. Obama is now going to have to convince Democratic Senator Specter to support a bill instead of Republican Senator Specter (true, he'll have a few more buttons to push but Specter's ideological positions will not be fundamentally changed by his switch).
Nonetheless, yesterday's announcment was profound. As ABV readers well know, a consistent metaphor I've been using ever since I started this blog has been the GOP heading towards the cliff (data points: a historic low of only 21% party ID, losing that Republican seat in NY State, Obama's poll number ascendency, demography being destiny, etc, etc, etc).
With the switch and, importantly, the ignorant, not-seeing-the-writing-on-the-wall reaction from the "leaders" of the GOP, they fell off the cliff (see many of the reactions below). This willful self-destruction of the GOP as a national political force, not the theoretical attainment of a filibuster-proof Senate, is the real milestone attained yesterday.
Lincoln Chafee (the GOP will not remain a viable national party):
The tides are still moving in a Democratic direction. Pennsylvania voters are swept up in those tides, and Specter is trying desperately to follow. The Democrats I saw on Capitol Hill were experiencing the joy you feel when your team, already up by four touchdowns, scores yet another. Let’s call it the joy of pulverization.
For Republicans this was demoralization piled on top of demoralization. Many Republicans I speak to are apathetic about their own party unless they are paid to care. It’s like how you feel about your favorite team at the end of a losing season. They’re still your team. You just don’t care about them. (I am male — must use sports metaphors.)
The Drive-By Media template is: "How can the GOP claim to be a national party if it cannot keep a moderate Senator like Senator Specter in the party?" He's not a moderate. He is a liberal Republican, and this is a natural winnowing process that is taking place out of necessity. Defeats have a tendency to do this. Within the Republican Party, people who are not really Republicans are now leaving. People who are not really conservatives are now really leaving. So it's going to be not much smaller, but it's going to be a little bit more focused a party and a base, and this may cause some ripples elsewhere with others making similar moves.
But, as I say: If this is to be the order of the day, next to go could be Senator McCain and his daughter, Meghan. Get them officially moved over and it just facilitates reality
I would rather have 30 Republicans in the Senate who really believe in principles of limited government, free markets, free people, than to have 60 that don’t have a set of beliefs.
As for the idea that reducing the GOP to a rump of true believers (whatever that might actually mean: there are plenty on the right who interpret the terms "limited government" and "free people" in very different ways) is the essential first step in a Republican restoration, it is, I am afraid, a bad mistake. Wildernesses are, almost always, for losers.
Senator Specter indicated that his decision was based on the political situation in Pennsylvania, where he faced a tough primary battle. In my view, the political environment that has made it inhospitable for a moderate Republican in Pennsylvania is a microcosm of a deeper, more pervasive problem that places our party in jeopardy nationwide ...
There is no plausible scenario under which Republicans can grow into a majority while shrinking our ideological confines and continuing to retract into a regional party. Ideological purity is not the ticket back to the promised land of governing majorities — indeed, it was when we began to emphasize social issues to the detriment of some of our basic tenets as a party that we encountered an electoral backlash.
It is for this reason that we should heed the words of President Ronald Reagan, who urged, “We should emphasize the things that unite us and make these the only ‘litmus test’ of what constitutes a Republican: our belief in restraining government spending, pro-growth policies, tax reduction, sound national defense, and maximum individual liberty.” He continued, “As to the other issues that draw on the deep springs of morality and emotion, let us decide that we can disagree among ourselves as Republicans and tolerate the disagreement.”
I couldn’t agree more. We can’t continue to fold our philosophical tent into an umbrella under which only a select few are worthy to stand. Rather, we should view an expansion of diversity within the party as a triumph that will broaden our appeal. That is the political road map we must follow to victory.
Some in the Republican Party are happy about this. I am not. Let's be honest-Senator Specter didn't leave the GOP based on principles of any kind. He left to further his personal political interests because he knew that he was going to lose a Republican primary due to his left-wing voting record. Republicans look forward to beating Sen. Specter in 2010, assuming the Democrats don't do it first.
Republicans shouldn't follow South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint and welcome Mr. Specter's defection as an ideological cleansing. "I would rather have 30 Republicans in the Senate who really believe in principles of limited government, free markets, free people, than to have 60 that don't have a set of beliefs," Mr. DeMint said yesterday.
We believe in all of those things, but 30 Senate votes merely gets you the same fate as the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, without the glory. A minority party that wants to become a majority needs convictions, but it also needs coalition builders.
My big question is how long the Democrats can refrain from becoming appalling. When the Republicans took control in 1994, even those of us who were saddened about what the change would do to the Clinton agenda had to admit the Democrats had it coming. They’d been in power most of the time since the New Deal, and had become way too arrogant and inward-looking. They didn’t believe the public would punish them, either for corruption or for ignoring the voters’ complaints and concerns.
What surprised me was how fast the Republicans became worse. The bloom was off the rose before you could say Tom DeLay.
Now the question is whether the Democrats can remember how hard they had to fight to get where they are right now. There have been a few signs of reform — the House has made it somewhat harder to pile up those dreaded earmarks. But on the other hand, there are several prominent Democratic chairmen who are way overdue for an ethics investigation.
I think the Democrats have a problem here. They obviously want the Specter switch to go well -- if nothing else, to maintain their credibility when inducing future party switches. But there is a wide-open opportunity for whoever challenges Specter in the Democratic primary. Commercials like the one above are not going to play well with a Democratic primary electorate, and it's no doubt just the tip of the iceberg of opposition research that's going to pop up.
Specter and the Democratic leadership understand that there's a lot of cynicism in politics. Specter said and did a lot of things he didn't believe in as a Republican in service of what he saw as a larger end -- and which also served his career -- and now he's going to do the same as a Democrat. But that reality is something that politicians don't share with the voters. You need some kind of public conceit to maintain the appearance of principle. It's going to be much harder for Specter to pull this off than people think. Political elites are underrating the difficulty of the task because they've assimilated the phoniness and moral trade-offs in politics to a degree that the general public hasn't. Voters may think that Congressmen in general are dishonest, but they like to think that their member of Congress is a stand-up guy. Specter may have all the money and endorsements in 2010, but he'll have huge vulnerabilities on both character and ideology.
Specter is not a leading indicator. His conversion is the culmination of an inexorable trend. In a sense, Specter's departure is a victory for conservatives who, since the days of Barry Goldwater, have been intent on purging liberals from the GOP ... Conservatives had once hoped that creating an ideologically pure party would put them on the path to a majority. But they must now worry that the Republicans' continued rightward drift is putting the party at odds with a moderate to liberal mood that pervades the country almost everywhere outside the Deep South ...
A politician always ready to surprise and confound his political adversaries, Specter now finds the party of Obama as appealing as he long ago found the party of John F. Kennedy. And Specter could not resist paraphrasing Kennedy in declaring that "sometimes party asks too much." His decision reflects his own personal needs, but it also stands as a warning to the party he once embraced and has now abandoned.
Recognizing the good and bad news in this is important for both parties. Equally important is President Obama's recognition that he takes 60 votes for granted at his own political peril.
With super majorities come super challenges. Arlen Specter's new caucus address and the expected seating of Al Franken brings more hype than promises. The challenge of reaching 60 votes to prevent filibusters of significant legislation is changing; the strategic function goes from peeling off one of theirs to holding one of ours.
No doubt about it: Specter's decision to change parties is a point for Democrats. An unexpected boon to Democrats might be the absence of GOP attack against him. His Republican Senate colleagues, from his Northeastern neighbor Olympia Snowe to the Southern conservative Lindsey Graham, have admitted the divided state of their party ...
Some might assume that reaching the magic number of 60 frees the president and Senate leaders from the fear of filibuster and the need to marshal their caucus. Just the opposite may be true. A broader list of interests, concerns and even personal political agendas will make finding consensus and commitment more challenging.
His approach is not surprising at all to A Blue View readers, though the Wash Post writes as if it were unexpected:
... beyond his actions, it is the sharp change in tone and the willingness to cast the United States as a nation that bears much of the responsibility for a raft of global woes that have been most striking in Obama's excursion.
"I'm enormously proud of my country and its role and history in the world," Obama said here Saturday when asked whether he believed in the concept of "American exceptionalism." ". . . So I see no contradiction between believing that America has a continued extraordinary role in leading the world towards peace and prosperity and recognizing that that leadership is incumbent, depends on, our ability to create partnerships because we can't solve these problems alone."
Jeremy Shapiro, director of research for the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, said that "the tone of the messages he is giving is a specific and intended sharp break with the past."
At the same time, Shapiro noted that on the "hard edge of policy" in Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where unlike some European allies Obama has not signaled a willingness to talk to the armed Islamist group Hamas, the president's policy and goals have not changed much from those of his predecessor.
"Europeans are hungry for American leadership but tired of American arrogance," Shapiro said. "And he's managing to display both."
Nile Gardiner, director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation, said the approach is not without risks. Obama, he said, "has embarked on a new course that projects humility and an overbearing desire to apologize for America's past behavior."
"This is a high-risk strategy that could well backfire," Gardiner said. "There's a real danger that the United States will be seen as a soft touch, both by European partners as well as by America's biggest enemies, from al-Qaeda to the mullahs of Tehran."
The outreach has not yielded the results Obama has sought in some important areas. The administration failed to persuade European leaders to begin a new round of fiscal stimulus spending. France ruled out additional combat troop deployments to Afghanistan, and Germany has been noncommittal on what new support it would offer there. Seeking assistance in relocating Guantanamo detainees, Obama has secured help only from France, which said it will take one Algerian held there.
Obama's tone and demeanor, however, have been welcomed effusively. In a joint appearance here, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said, "It feels really good to work with a U.S. president . . . who understands that the world doesn't boil down to simply American frontiers and borders." ...
Within the Bush administration, the Pentagon and the State Department disagreed over whether the European Union should be seen as a potential economic and even military rival. Then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld divided the continent into "old Europe" -- France and Germany, specifically -- and the Eastern European countries more supportive of U.S. policy in Iraq.
"That debate has now been effectively resolved in favor of a federal Europe," Gardiner said. "The new administration seems to value its ties to continental Europe as much as its traditional relationship with the United Kingdom. And this is a major change."
A provocative article worth reading from Jim Bourg in this month's Atlantic. An excerpt:
In its depth and suddenness, the U.S. economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets): South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia and Argentina (time and again) ... Just as in emerging-market crises, the weakness in the banking system has quickly rippled out into the rest of the economy, causing a severe economic contraction and hardship for millions of people.
But there’s a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.
Top investment bankers and government officials like to lay the blame for the current crisis on the lowering of U.S. interest rates after the dotcom bust or, even better—in a “buck stops somewhere else” sort of way—on the flow of savings out of China. Some on the right like to complain about Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, or even about longer-standing efforts to promote broader homeownership. And, of course, it is axiomatic to everyone that the regulators responsible for “safety and soundness” were fast asleep at the wheel.
But these various policies—lightweight regulation, cheap money, the unwritten Chinese-American economic alliance, the promotion of homeownership—had something in common. Even though some are traditionally associated with Democrats and some with Republicans, they allbenefited the financial sector. Policy changes that might have forestalled the crisis but would have limited the financial sector’s profits—such as Brooksley Born’s now-famous attempts to regulate credit-default swaps at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in 1998—were ignored or swept aside ...
Instead, the American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital—a belief system. Once, perhaps, what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence, it did not have to buy favors the way, for example, the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America’s position in the world ...
A whole generation of policy makers has been mesmerized by Wall Street, always and utterly convinced that whatever the banks said was true. Alan Greenspan’s pronouncements in favor of unregulated financial markets are well known. Yet Greenspan was hardly alone. This is what Ben Bernanke, the man who succeeded him, said in 2006: “The management of market risk and credit risk has become increasingly sophisticated. … Banking organizations of all sizes have made substantial strides over the past two decades in their ability to measure and manage risks.”
Of course, this was mostly an illusion. Regulators, legislators, and academics almost all assumed that the managers of these banks knew what they were doing. In retrospect, they didn’t.
When a vaccine designed to protect girls against a sexually transmitted virus arrived three years ago, the debate centered on one question: Would the shots make young girls more likely to have sex?
Now the vaccine's maker is trying to get approval to sell the vaccine for boys, and the debate is focusing on something else entirely: Is it worth the money, and is it safe and effective enough?
"We are still more worried about the promiscuity of girls than the promiscuity of boys," said Susan M. Reverby, a professor of women's studies and medical history at Wellesley College. "There's still that double standard."
The shift in the discussion about Gardasil illustrates the complex interplay of political, economic, scientific, regulatory and social factors that increasingly influence decisions about new types of medical care. For the vaccine, the new dynamic reflects a strategic tack by Gardasil's critics, growing concern about health-care costs, fears about whether medical treatments are being vetted adequately and stubborn biases about gender, experts say. <Continue reading ...>
After eight weeks in office, Mr. Obama has managed to satisfy or
outrage nearly everyone on the ideological spectrum. But his once-murky
governing philosophy is coming into sharper focus as he pivots from the
opening days of his presidency to lay out a broader agenda for the rest
of his term.
Obamaism, as it is shaping up, appears to be an
amalgam of philosophies — a strong belief in the role of an activist
government in shaping the economy and redistributing wealth, and a more
centrist view of national security and at least some cultural issues.
Mr. Obama has advanced the most expansive spending programs of any
president in generations while moderating, but not wholly dismantling,
the wartime policies of his predecessor and speaking to some of the
values often embraced by conservatives.
The complex blend of
ideas and instincts has proved advantageous in electoral politics,
helping him win the presidency by blurring differences and appealing
across lines. But now in office, it may force him to build different
legislative coalitions depending on the issue, a tricky challenge given
the scope of his ambition.
He has rallied liberals behind efforts to overhaul health care, tackle climate change
and raise taxes on the rich. But he has challenged liberal orthodoxy on
issues like linking teacher pay to performance and has won Republican
support for sending 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan and pulling out
of Iraq more gradually than the left wanted.
“The answer is yes,
he is all of those things, but none of them in toto,” said Michael
Berman, a longtime Democratic strategist. “I would likely describe him
as a moderate who is instinctively comfortable with a variety of
progressive positions. He is very hard to label. And my guess is that
that is the way he likes it.” ...
Mr.
Obama, with only two years in the Senate before starting his
presidential campaign, arrived as something of a cipher — a “Rorschach
test,” as he once put it — who often seemed to be whatever people
wanted to him to be. While compiling a reliably liberal record, he made
enough nods toward the other side that he put moderates and some
conservatives at ease.
Just before his inauguration, 40 percent
of Americans surveyed by The New York Times and CBS News considered Mr.
Obama a liberal, while 34 percent called him a moderate and 13 percent
a conservative. Even now, aides point to high approval ratings to argue
that Americans are comfortable with his approach and that his critics
are out of step.
“He’s not an ideologue,” said David Axelrod,
his senior White House adviser. “He’s a pragmatist. He’s someone who’s
interested in ideas that will work. Some may have their roots in one
doctrine; some may have roots in another. But he’s not concerned about
that. He’s less concerned about how he’s described than what he can
accomplish.”
From the Wash Post (this post's headline is theirs too):
The Employee Free Choice Act seemed destined to be a relatively narrow
clash between unions and employers. But amid the economic downturn, it
is turning into a debate over fundamental questions of American
capitalism.
After years of girding for this fight, labor supporters and business
groups are scrambling after the bill's reintroduction last week to
adapt their long-established arguments to suit the crisis. For those
opposed to the bill, which would make it easier to form unions, the new
message was that it would be a disaster for businesses reeling from the
recession.
"In a time when we have an economy that's already struggling, we can't put more burdensome regulations on employers," said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.). "This is a job killer for our economy when we really don't need it."
The bill's supporters are pointing to the downturn as the ultimate
proof of their arguments that labor's decline has helped put the
economy out of balance and that only by restoring workers' purchasing
power can the nation return to broadly shared prosperity.
"In 1935, we passed the Wagner Act that promoted unionization and
allowed unions to flourish, and at the time we were at around 20
percent unemployment. So tell me again why we can't do this in a
recession?" said Sen. Tom Harkin
(D-Iowa), invoking the pro-labor changes of the New Deal. "This is the
time to do it. This is exactly the time we should be insisting on a
fairer playing field for people to organize themselves."
The bill, first introduced in 2003, gives workers the choice of
whether they want to organize by getting a majority of workers to sign
pro-union cards, instead of having to hold secret-ballot elections. As
it stands, it is up to employers to decide which method is used, and
most require elections. The bill increases the penalties for employers
who retaliate against employees and mandates binding arbitration when
employers do not agree to a contract within three months after a union
election.
Unions say the bill is needed because employers intimidate or retaliate
against workers before elections, making the votes something less than
true democracy; and because employers often merely go through the
motions of negotiating, nearly half of new unions fail to get a first
contract. Employers say that forming unions without secret ballots
violates American notions of democracy and exposes workers to union
coercion. Mandatory arbitration, they assert, is an intolerable
intervention.
But the environment in which the bill is being debated has further
ratcheted up the rhetoric, revealing a divide as wide as that on any
other major issue on President Obama's agenda. The two sides put forth
starkly different versions of both history and present-day reality,
making it hard to imagine how the two sides could compromise.
A strong populist twist to today's Weekly "Radio" Address on food safety.
"We are a nation built on the strength of individual initiative. But there are certain things that we can't do on our own. There are certain things that only a government can do. And one of those things is ensuring that the foods we eat, and the medicines we take, are safe and don't cause us harm."
President Obama's endorsement of climate legislation to clamp down on
greenhouse gases has set off a lobbying rush in Congress and made the
air thick with rival proposals.
Coal companies, utilities, economists and environmentalists are
vying to shape legislation that could rechannel hundreds of billions of
dollars from one part of the economy to others. The sense of urgency
has been heightened by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman's push to have a bill ready by the end of May; the California Democrat plans to circulate a draft in about two weeks.
Because of regional differences in energy sources, the political lines
are blurred, potentially uniting Democrats and Republicans from states
heavily dependent on coal plants against other parts of the nation
looking for alternatives.
Most lawmakers and climate activists embrace an approach to limiting
greenhouse gas emissions known as cap-and-trade, which would set and
gradually lower a limit on nationwide emissions while letting companies
buy and sell rationing allowances. But some economists have lined up
with big oil companies such as Exxon Mobil, which has endorsed a carbon
tax instead. Seven House Democrats, including House Democratic Caucus
Chairman John B. Larson (Conn.), introduced a carbon tax measure this week.
Either way, climate legislation will aim to reduce emissions by putting
a price on carbon, raising the cost of everything from gasoline to
plastics to electricity.
Opposing sides are striving to either frighten or woo voters with talk
of whether climate legislation should be viewed as a big ill-timed tax
or whether it will unlock new industries and technologies to make the
economy more efficient and less dependent on foreign oil. On Tuesday,
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs called it "a market-based solution
that will drive us to energy independence and create . . . an even more
robust market for alternative fuels." Earlier, House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (Ohio) said " 'cap-and-trade' is code for increasing taxes, killing American jobs and raising energy costs for consumers."
Even companies are divided. The owners of nuclear power generators,
which don't emit carbon dioxide, are at odds with utilities that rely
on coal. And the emerging wind and solar industries are gaining a
powerful voice as well.
"There's no end of the political fault lines and there's going to be
a heavy burden for the White House," said Philip Sharp, president of
Resources for the Future and a former House member.
Don't folks remember how he ridiculed John McCain when McCain said he wouldn't attend their debate because of the economic crisis? Given the stupidity of this new, he's-doing-too-much-meme, I guess not. This NY Times article: on the subject also reminds me that the best advocate for Barack Obama's policies is Barack Obama.
President Obama rejected on Thursday criticism that he is trying to do too much at once by advancing ambitious plans on health care, energy and education at the same time that he is struggling with perhaps the worst economic crisis in generations.
As many in both parties question his approach, Mr. Obama insisted that the only way to build a strong economy that will truly last was to address underlying problems in American society like unaffordable health care, dependence on foreign oil and underperforming schools.
“I’m not choosing to address these additional challenges just because I feel like it or because I’m a glutton for punishment,” he told a gathering of corporate leaders. “I’m doing so because they’re fundamental to our economic growth and ensuring that we don’t have more crises like this in the future. You see, we cannot go back to endless cycles of bubble and bust.” ...
In his speech and in answer to questions from preselected corporate executives, Mr. Obama said critics were overreacting, because many of these plans would take years to put in place.
“When we issued the budget,” the president said, “they said, ‘Boy, these Obama people, they’re really ambitious. They’re taking on health care. They’re taking on energy. They’re taking on education. Don’t they know that there’s this bank crisis right now? We’ve got to do one thing at a time.’ ”
But the budget, he noted, is a 10-year plan. “We don’t anticipate that every piece of health care is done this year,” he said. “We think that we’ve got to get the process and get in place a structure and a framework and a funding approach, and work out a lot of these details, but it’s going to be implemented over time.”
He also defended his decision not to send a detailed blueprint to Congress, letting lawmakers figure out the specifics themselves.
“Part of the reason that we did not simply design our own plan and try to jam it down the throats of Congress is we want them to see some of the contradictions in their own positions and, over time, you know, sort through some of those tensions, make some tough choices, working with us,” he said.
When President Obama lifts restrictions on funding for human embryonic stem cell research today, he will also issue a presidential memorandum aimed at insulating scientific decisions across the federal government from political influence, officials said yesterday.
"The president believes that it's particularly important to sign this memorandum so that we can put science and technology back at the heart of pursuing a broad range of national goals," Melody C. Barnes, director of Obama's Domestic Policy Council, told reporters during a telephone briefing yesterday.
Although officials would not go into details, the memorandum will order the Office of Science and Technology Policy to "assure a number of effective standards and practices that will help our society feel that we have the highest-quality individuals carrying out scientific jobs and that information is shared with the public," said Harold Varmus, who co-chairs Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology ...
"We view what happened with stem cell research in the last administration as one manifestation of failure to think carefully about how federal support of science and the use of scientific advice occurs," Varmus said. "This is consistent with the president's determination to use sound scientific practice, responsible practice of science and evidence, instead of dogma in developing federal policy."
The memorandum will ensure that "people who are appointed to federal positions in science have strong credentials and that the vetting process for evaluating scientific information doesn't lead to any undermining of the scientific opinion," he said.
It is interesting to note how this news--not opinion--story was so Krugmen-esque. Are his views becoming more mainstream?
Analysts increasingly view the administration's actions so far as
insufficient given the scope of the problem. The stimulus package was
designed to "save or create" 3.5 million jobs, according to the
administration. But the nation has already lost 4.4 million jobs since
the start of the recession. Many banks and other financial
institutions, whose health is critical to the economy, are teetering,
and the Treasury Department has yet to finalize the details of its
plans to remove from their balance sheets the toxic assets dragging
them down ...
"It's premature to say we need another stimulus, but the economy is
performing much worse than when [the law] was signed, and the odds are
increasing that we'll need a bigger policy response," said Mark Zandi
of Moody's Economy.com, who has advised Democratic lawmakers. "What
we've learned is policy has been a step behind this whole downturn.
It's important to get a step ahead."...
Economists are now calling into question whether the intricate suite of
policies crafted by Congress, the Obama administration and the Federal
Reserve are bold enough to deal with the scope of the economic damage.
Given what we're going to need to do, these warning signs from the NY Times are scary:
The Republican-led blockade of overdue spending bills in the Senate is providing Congressional Democrats a quick and humbling lesson in the limits of their new power.
Despite significant electoral gains in both the House and the Senate, the Democrats have been stymied by Republicans and a few Democratic defectors in what began as a fairly routine push to enact the leftover measures, needed to finance spending in the current fiscal year and tethered together into one $410 billion catchall bill.
As a result, Congress had to pass an emergency five-day stopgap on Friday to prevent an embarrassing shutdown of the government in the opening weeks of the Obama administration.
The failure left Democrats fretting about how they would perform when dealing with more contentious and complex legislation sought by President Obama on health care, energy, taxes and education.
“What does this mean for the Obama agenda?” said the chairwoman of the House Rules Committee, Representative Louise M. Slaughter, Democrat of New York. “We need to get this straightened out.” ...
This year was supposed to be different. Senate Democrats gained seven seats in November, with one more waiting in the wings, moving well beyond the narrow 51-to-49 divide that had hindered them for two years. And a handful of Republicans were willing to side with them in the current spending fight.
The new administration was not eager to take a stand on the legal issues surrounding Marri, 43, a Qatari national. Bush officials said Marri was part of a sleeper al-Qaeda cell intent on mass murder and disrupting the banking system, but they lacked the kind of evidence against him that a federal court would require.
Just before Marri was to be tried on fraud charges in 2003, President George W. Bush ordered him transferred to military custody, and he has been in the Navy brig in South Carolina since.
Last summer, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in Richmond agreed with the Bush administration that after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Congress gave the president the power to indefinitely hold terrorism suspects under military guard, even if they were in the country legally.
But after the Supreme Court accepted Marri's case for review, the Justice Department decided last week to move Marri to the purview of the federal courts, and he was charged with conspiracy and providing material support to terrorists.
Marri's attorneys asked the justices to hear the case anyway, saying it was important for them to decide that neither the congressional resolution nor the Constitution gives the president such powers.
But the government said the issues were now hypothetical. To prove that it was not trying to "preserve its victory while evading review," it said it would not object to the court wiping out the 4th Circuit's decision. That is what the court did yesterday, without elaboration or recorded dissent.
Marri's attorneys accepted the half-loaf.
Although they would have preferred a ruling reversing the lower court, "the Supreme Court nonetheless took an important step today" by vacating the decision, said Jonathan Hafetz, a staff lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security Project and lead counsel in Marri's case.
"We trust that the Obama administration will not repeat the abuses of the Bush administration having now chosen to prosecute Mr. al-Marri in federal court rather than defend the Bush administration's actions in this case," he said.
With Marri's indictment, there is now no one held as an enemy combatant in the United States. And despite the attention and court battles that the issue has garnered, only two others have been so designated since the 2001 attacks.
More details are being revealed on the public-private "partnerships" the Obama Administration will be using to solve the credit crisis. As earlier posted, while the GOP crys socialism, Obama's solution is actually very capitalist, so much so, that I predict that many leftists will end up decrying it as a give away to the rich.
While I don't necessarily disagree with that analysis (just read this Wash Post report on how it will work) I do not think that the Federal government alone can solve the toxic asset crisis (it doesn't have enough money). The government therefore needs to induce private capital into the fix and given all the uncertainity and risk, it needs to offer very lucarative returns to do so.
Here's how a typical TALF deal would work: A hedge fund uses $1 million
of its own money and gets a $9 million loan from the Fed, payable after
three years, to buy a $10 million asset-backed security, which finances
consumer loans. Hoping that the market for these assets recovers, the
hedge fund would hold the asset for three years.
If the security rises in value to $11 million, the investor would
keep the profit, essentially doubling the initial investment. The
government, meanwhile, would consider the deal a success because
consumer lending was spurred.
If the value fell below $9 million, the hedge fund would lose its
down payment but nothing more. The Treasury, using bailout funds
approved by Congress, would cover the next set of losses, with the Fed
ultimately on the hook for anything more.
Steven Schwartzman, chief executive of private-equity giant Blackstone,
said the program is "highly attractive" because of the government
financing.
The TALF's primary aim is to get the "shadow banking system" running
again. A vast portion of the financing for loans issued in the United
States comes not from traditional banks but from other enterprises.
Some firms that issue consumer credit questioned the program's
limitations. Executives at one leading bank said restricting the
program to securities backed by only the highest-quality loans would be
too constraining.
For example, many loans taken out by auto dealerships to stock their
inventory do not have the highest ratings. Government officials, who
want to make sure dealers can get these loans, are considering
expanding the TALF to slightly lower-quality assets, sources said.
Some officials are concerned there may not be enough highly rated
loans that can be combined into securities to sell to investors.
Another matter of discussion among federal officials is whether to
lengthen the term of the financing extended by the government to
investors, sources said. With securities backed by auto loans, for
example, a relatively short period was deemed appropriate because these
loans mostly carry three-year terms. But when the TALF expands in the
coming months to aid other segments of the credit market, such as
commercial real estate loans, the Fed may have to lengthen the time
because such loans carry 10-year terms or longer.
If Fed and Treasury officials decide to extend the TALF model to the
purchase of toxic assets, this would require expanding the approach
from recently issued loans to those that are years old.
Each step away from the original target of the TALF -- recently
issued, highest-quality assets -- may force the government to protect
itself, which would involve offering less to private investors,
officials said. But if the government goes too far in shielding itself,
it may fail to generate interest by private investors. Striking the
right balance -- among lenders who issue loans, investors who buy them
and taxpayers who are facilitating the transactions -- has been one of
the greatest challenges in developing the program, officials said.
Obama clearly values competence over politics: yesterday he named an experienced Republican to head FEMA. From the Wash Post:
President Obama will nominate Florida emergency manager W. Craig Fugate to lead the Federal Emergency Management Agency, asking one of the nation's most experienced hurricane hands to direct the much-criticized U.S. disaster-response arm, the White House announced yesterday.
If confirmed by the Senate, Fugate, 49, would assume the politically sensitive job of heading a 4,400-worker bureaucracy that was widely blamed for the Bush administration's bungled response to Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. The agency has been reorganized repeatedly since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks ...
Fugate's selection was unusual in that he has no prior relationship or political connection with Obama. White House aides noted that Fugate served under two Republican governors of Florida, Jeb Bush and now Gov. Charlie Crist.
By contrast, Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush named political confidantes to the job. Clinton, a former Arkansas governor, brought his state's emergency manager, James Lee Witt, to Washington, while George W. Bush named campaign manager Joseph M. Allbaugh and later elevated Allbaugh's deputy, Michael D. Brown ...
Fugate easily meets Congress's requirement that FEMA's leader possess demonstrated experience in the field. As director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management since 2001, Fugate led hurricane responses in the nation's fourth most populous state, which experienced four major storms in both 2004 and 2005. He also spent 15 years as a paramedic and an emergency manager for Alachua County.
I am reposting this important NY Times story in its entirety because it reveals how far the Bush Administration went in repudiating the Constitution & the Bill of Rights. Read about John Yoo's "secret legal opinions" and think what kind of fascist country we would have if all these "opinions" were put into broad practice. Think about it, if there had been another attack in those first few years, this fascist state would have been America:
The secret legal opinions issued by Bush administration lawyers after the Sept. 11 attacks included assertions that the president could use the nation’s military within the United States to combat terrorism suspects and to conduct raids without obtaining search warrants.
That opinion was among nine that were disclosed publicly for the first time Monday by the Justice Department, in what the Obama administration portrayed as a step toward greater transparency.
The opinions reflected a broad interpretation of presidential authority, asserting as well that the president could unilaterally abrogate foreign treaties, ignore any guidance from Congress in dealing with detainees suspected of terrorism, and conduct a program of domestic eavesdropping without warrants.
Some of the positions had previously become known from statements of Bush administration officials in response to court challenges and Congressional inquiries. But taken together, the opinions disclosed Monday were the clearest illustration to date of the broad definition of presidential power approved by government lawyers in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks.
In a memorandum dated this Jan. 15, five days before President George W. Bush left office, a top Justice Department official wrote that those opinions had not been relied on since 2003. But the official, Steven G. Bradbury, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel, said it was important to acknowledge in writing “the doubtful nature of these propositions,” and he used the memo to repudiate them formally.
Mr. Bradbury said in his memo that the earlier ones had been a product of lawyers’ confronting “novel and complex questions in a time of great danger and under extraordinary time pressure.”
The story continues by going through the terrifying "opinions" one-by-one:
There is, in the environs of the center part of the center-left, a
certain wariness about Barack Obama that's been manifesting itself in
the form of Beltway back-chatter and the occasional opinion piece.
"Is he naive? Does he not understand the political challenge he is inviting?" asks David Broder. In simpler terms, Broder is asking: can he really, almost unilaterally, challenge the status quo ante by mere assertion and motive force?
"I
wonder if I simply cannot come to terms with the country's embrace of
the Democratic platform," a top Democratic fundraiser told me. "Growing
up during the 80s and 90s, when Democratic orthodoxy was a mess and not
popular with the majority of the country, I wonder if I'm being way too
hard on Obama, and that country is willing to embrace higher taxes on
$200k + earners, massive increases in government spending, this health
care "down payment."
There is absolutely a generational
component to the anxiety. Three generations of Democratic activists
view the possibility of Obama's election through different lenses; the
first came of age in the 60s and 70s before the flowering of modern
conservatism and the triumph of Nixonian resentment politics. The
second rose to power with the election of Bill Clinton, and today, they
approach politics with instincts as developed in the 1992 campaign and
refined by Clintoncare, the government shutdown and the Monica Lewinsky
affair -- careful, wily, programmatic, triangulatish, risk-averse,
incremental. The third generation rejects all of that, believing that
such caution kicked the legs out from under the Democratic Party. This
generation rejects baby steps in favor of bold, often populist action;
they reject the notion that the default liberal ideology cannot be
majoritarian.
Who's right? Well, the Reagan revolution is no
longer the dominant political environment. But did Americans really
know what they were voting for in 2008? Didn't Democrats win the last
two election's because the Republican party imploded, not because the
political pendulum swung to the left.
I actually have a position
on this one. I think the country is moving to the left. I think that
demography and globalization are providing the momentum, and I think
that, like the apparent retrogression of planets in orbit, there will
be inevitably some backsliding as the
American people adjust to the new equilibrium.
The argument
boils down to whether Americans knew that they were voting for the
Obama Synthesis. It's hard to make the opposite case, unless they just
completely ignored virtually everything Obama said in his speeches and
every commercial run by the McCain campaign. Of course the Republican
Party imploded. But the implosion wasn't inner directed, as if the
party were some atom bomb waiting for a booster. No -- the party
collapsed because it could not adapt to the intervention of major
external events.
Obama is solidly pro-choice. He made his views amply known during the election and he won resoundingly. Did the anti-abortion groups protesting his HHS nominee in this NY Times story think he'd appoint an anti-abortion Secretary? No, of course they didn't. It appears, therefore, that what we're seeing is an early instance of Bill Kristol's obstruct and delay strategy being put into action.
A two-term state insurance commissioner and second-term Democratic
governor in a reliably Republican state, Ms. Sebelius has a reputation
for bipartisanship ... In selecting Ms.
Sebelius, Mr. Obama has decided to risk running headlong into the
nation’s volatile abortion wars. Since Ms. Sebelius’s name emerged as a
leading candidate for the health job, anti-abortion groups have
assailed her record and vowed to fight her confirmation ...
Ms.
Sebelius, a Catholic, has repeatedly vetoed abortion regulations on
legal or policy grounds. “Personally, I believe abortion is wrong,” she
wrote in one veto message before explaining that she did not think the
bill would reduce late-term abortions.
Ms. Sebelius has
defended her record by pointing to adoption initiatives and falling
abortion rates in Kansas, but the archbishop of Kansas City last year
said she should not receive communion until repudiating her support for
abortion rights.
Anti-abortion leaders also criticize her for hosting a reception at the governor’s mansion in 2007 attended by George Tiller,
a prominent Wichita abortion provider. At the time, Dr. Tiller was
under investigation and now is about to go on trial for 19 misdemeanor
charges of violating state restrictions on late-term abortions,
according to news reports.
After her possible nomination became
public, the Catholic League called her an “enemy of the unborn” and
promised to fight confirmation. “We have the specter of another
pro-abortion Catholic stiffing the Catholic Church,” Bill Donohue, the
league president, said in a statement. “This is setting up a
confrontation that pro-life Catholics will not walk away from.”
Within weeks of taking office, President Obama
has radically shifted the global equation,placing the United States at
the forefront of the international climate effort and raising hopes
that an effective international accord might be possible. Mr. Obama’s
chief climate negotiator, Todd Stern, said last week that the United
States would be involved in the negotiation of a new treaty — to be
signed in Copenhagen in December — “in a robust way.”
That
treaty, officials and climate experts involved in the negotiations say,
will significantly differ from the [Kyoto] agreement of a decade ago, reaching
beyond reducing greenhouse gas emissions and including financial
mechanisms and making good on longstanding promises to provide money
and technical assistance to help developing countries cope with climate
change.
The perception that the United States is now serious has
set off a flurry of diplomacy around the globe. “The lesson of Kyoto is
that if the U.S. isn’t taking it seriously there is no reason for
anyone else to,” said Bill McKibben, who runs the environmental organization www.350.org ...
But a global treaty still faces serious challenges
in Washington and abroad, and the negotiations will be a test of how
far the United States and other nations are prepared to go to address
climate change at a moment when economies around the world are
unspooling. The global recession itself is expected to result in a
reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, as manufacturing and other
polluting industries shrink, lessening the pressure on countries to
take action.
“The No. 1 thing will be for everyone to see that
the U.S. is on an urgent and transformational path to a low carbon
economy — that would have a galvanizing effect,” said John Ashton, the
British foreign secretary’s special representative for climate change.
The
Obama administration has said that it will push through federal
legislation this year to curb carbon dioxide emissions in the United
States — a promise that Mr. Obama reiterated Tuesday in his speech to
Congress ...
The Obama administration moved Friday to undo a last-minute Bush administration rule granting broad protections to health workers who refuse to take part in abortions or provide other health care that goes against their consciences.The Obama administration moved Friday to undo a last-minute Bush administration rule granting broad protections to health workers who refuse to take part in abortions or provide other health care that goes against their consciences.
The rule prohibits recipients of federal money from discriminating against health care workers who refuse to perform or assist in abortions or sterilization procedures because of their “religious beliefs or moral convictions.” Its supporters included the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Catholic Health Association, which represents Catholic hospitals ...
Opponents of the regulation, including the American Medical Association, the National Association of Chain Drug Stores and Planned Parenthood, said it could have voided state laws requiring insurance plans to cover contraceptives and requiring hospitals to offer emergency contraception to rape victims. It could also allow drugstore employees to refuse to fill prescriptions for contraceptives, critics of the regulation have said.
Moreover, opponents have said, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 already offers broad protection against discrimination based on religion, spelling out that an employer must make reasonable accommodations for an employee’s practices and beliefs.
This NY Times graphic and accompanying headline, "largest deficit since WWII" is fairly typical in showing how big the budget deficit will be if Obama's proposed 10 year budget is adopted ... pretty scary stuff right?
In comparison, I find the Wash Post graphic below to be far less fear mongering and far more intellectually useful as it compares the first two years of the budgetby department. Looking at the cost of everything the government does this way, an obvious question literally jumps off the page: why in the world do we need to continue to spend such astronomically outsized amounts of money on defense?
How out of proportion to the threats is our defense budget? Ismael Hossein-zadeh, an economics professor at Drake University in Iowa reports:
Using official budget figures, William D. Hartung, Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York, provides a number of helpful comparisons:
Proposed U.S. military spending for FY 2008 is larger than military spending by all of the other nations in the world combined.
At $141.7 billion, this year's proposed spending on the Iraq war is larger than the military budgets of China and Russia combined. Total U.S. military spending for FY2008 is roughly ten times the military budget of the second largest military spending country in the world, China.
Proposed U.S. military spending is larger than the combined gross domestic products (GDP) of all 47 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
The FY 2008 military budget proposal is more than 30 times higher than all spending on State Department operations and non-military foreign aid combined.
The FY 2008 military budget is over 120 times higher than the roughly $5 billion per year the U.S. government spends on combating global warming.
The FY 2008 military spending represents 58 cents out of every dollar spent by the U.S. government on discretionary programs: education, health, housing assistance, international affairs, natural resources and environment, justice, veterans’ benefits, science and space, transportation, training/employment and social services, economic development, and several more items
If, instead of spending more on defense than the rest of the world combined, we "only" spent more than the next 5 nations combined (which would include Russia & China) would we really be putting ourselves at increased risk?
Also, couldn't one consider (1) reducing our dependence on foreign oil, (2) creating a better educated populace & work force (3) lessening the potentially catastrophic effects of global warming and, for our suddenly deficit-obsessed Republican friends, (4) reducing the deficit, all equally important ways to strengthen and "defend" the United States in today's modern world? Wouldn't it be prudent to shift some resources away from tanks, planes and ships to confront these new risks to "our way of life"?
And while it might be hard to make a "defense" argument for reducing the number of people without health insurance (the Obama budget only makes a "down payment" on universal health care) there's no difficulty making the moral argument that it is the right thing to do.
It's plain as the graphic on the right: in a time of great needs everywhere we can no longer afford one need receiving such an outsized share of government resources. The Defense Department's budget should be redistributed.
There is one element of Obama's first budget that strikes me as genuinely courageous. According to today's Times:
The president will propose to tax the investment income of hedge fund and private equity partners at ordinary income tax rates, which are now as high as 35 percent and could return to 39.6 percent under his plans, instead of at the capital gains rate, which is 15 percent at most.
Senior Democrats in Congress joined with Republicans in 2007 to oppose that increase. But with Wall Street discredited and lucrative executive compensation a political target, the provision could prove more popular among lawmakers.
Now it's true, as the Times notes, that Wall Street is a fat target these days. On the other hand, lots of Obama's top supporters manage money and benefit from the loophole that lets them classify income as capital gains. I wasn't sure Obama had it in him to close the loophole and am delighted to see that he might. (We'll obviously have to wait and see if he fights for the measure, and if Congress signs on. But it's a good start.)
I've avoided commenting on the Rick Santelli rant now popular in the blogosphere before because (1) I've been generally unimpressed with Santelli's opinions and advice on CNBC and (2) a populist rant against helping generally poor to middle class struggling homeowners from the upper class bastion of the Chicago trading pits (one of the primary places that generates obscene wealth seemingly disconnected from the productive economy ... just ask John Henry) is so oxymoronic it seemed self-evidently worth ignoring.
But David Sirota has juxtaposed the Santelli video with the one I posted 3 days ago (Populist Anger Overwhelms Fox News) of Virg Bernero, the mayor of Lansing, Mich to make some points worth bringing to A Blue View reader's attention:
On one side, you have what Thomas Frank has called "Market Populism" - the portrayal of Wall Street's agenda as an impassioned mass-based populist movement. Check out this clip from CNBC, where the network's correspondent, Rick Santelli, is literally on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange surrounded by multimillionaire traders railing on the Obama administration for trying to help struggling homeowners, and berating people who are getting foreclosed on as "losers." Santelli is praised as a supposed "revolutionary" and the mob of financial elites around him is whooping and hollering, pretending to be a populist mob of regular Joes:
Now watch Virg Bernero, the mayor of Lansing, Michigan, presenting the antithesis of Market Populism - let's call it Grassroots Populism. Bernero demands to know how anyone can be calling for wage/benefit cuts for workers at a time the government is taking workers' tax money and handing it to the very speculators that Santelli is whooping it up with:
After watching these two clips, the question is the same question that's always been at the heart of economic politics: Which side are you on? And the answer, if you look at the hard data, is that most Americans are Grassroots Populists: those who think Wall Street and the government are colluding to rip off taxpayers, and who think the crumbs of aid for so-called "losers" that Santelli is ragging on is way too small - not way too much.
The gap, of course, is in the portrayal. If you watch television or read op-ed pages, the Market Populists get most of the attention. Indeed, Market Populism is portrayed as the "centrist" mainstream sentiment in the United States. Just look at David Brooks' New York Times column this morning. He non-sarcastically insists that Santelli's comments were "lustily" representative of mass popular anger at "these injustices" - not the injustices on Wall Street, mind you, but the supposed injustices of people now losing their homes. Meanwhile, Grassroots Populism - ie. seething populist anger at Corporate America - is depicted as the ideology only of a tiny fringe. It's as if the media is a funhouse mirror on society - a bizzaro world where up is down, black is white, and free market fundamentalism is portrayed as a mass-based movement.
When the macroeconomy was doing well, the disconnect between the media narrative and what's going on in the real world certainly caused regular people to lose confidence in the media, but it didn't incite outrage.
Now, though, with the economy in meltdown, I'm convinced that part of why the public is so angry is because what they see on television and in their newspapers is so fundamentally at odds with how they are feeling and what they are dealing with. As Santelli shows, large swaths of the media and political Establishment actively and publicly denigrate the people who are most hard hit by the downturn ...
This divide between the Market Populism people are fed through the media and people's own Grassroots Populism is a major catalyst that has turned the last two elections into backlash moments. And as bailouts and handouts now become daily news, and the Market Populists get ever more outrageous, that backlash is intensifying. Channeling it into something positive is the challenge of our time.
The plan, which could cost as much as $275 billion, will enable as many as five million homeowners who have little equity in their homes -- or even owe slightly more than their homes are worth -- to refinance loans through government-controlled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The administration set aside $200 billion in new backing for the pair, which will play a central role in the rescue.
In addition, the government plans to spend $75 billion to encourage lenders to modify loan terms for people at risk of foreclosure or already in foreclosure proceedings. Lenders and the government would jointly lower monthly payments to 31% of homeowners' income. To encourage servicers, the plan includes incentives such as $1,000-a-year "pay for success" fees if a borrower stays current on the loan.
The plan drew praise for its use of incentives. But critics said it didn't do enough to address the difficulty of altering loans packaged into securities. It also will be harder for people to refinance their mortgages if they owe much more than the house is worth or the mortgages aren't owned or guaranteed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.
The plan is also notable for what it doesn't do, such as finding a way to spur demand ... Instead, it appears designed to aid homeowners who might lose their homes.
Mr. Obama said the plan won't help everyone, including investors and those already deep in trouble. He nodded to a potential backlash from diligent homeowners who have been making their payments, suggesting they'd benefit from stable neighborhoods with fewer vacant houses.
"If we act boldly and swiftly to arrest this downward spiral, then every American will benefit," Mr. Obama said in a speech in Mesa, Ariz., outside Phoenix.
In its effort to address the foreclosure crisis, the Obama administration is relying heavily on the carrot rather than the stick.
The administration's plan, announced Wednesday, tries to address one of the key weaknesses of previous voluntary efforts by providing financial incentives for mortgage servicers and investors to modify troubled loans ...
Housing counselors praised the administration's focus on making loan payments affordable, but say that interest-rate reductions alone may not be enough to help many borrowers. "For about half the clients that come in to us, an interest-rate reduction down to zero" isn't going to save them from onerous debt, said Michael van Zalingen, director of homeownership services at Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago. For the other half, he said, the Obama plan "could make a huge difference."
The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to act for the first time to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that scientists blame for the warming of the planet, according to top Obama administration officials.
The decision, which most likely would play out in stages over a period of months, would have a profound impact on transportation, manufacturing costs and how utilities generate power. It could accelerate the progress of energy and climate change legislation in Congress and form a basis for the United States’ negotiating position at United Nations climate talks set for December in Copenhagen.
The environmental agency is under order from the Supreme Court to make a determination whether carbon dioxide is a pollutant that endangers public health and welfare, an order that the Bush administration essentially ignored despite near-unanimous belief among agency experts that research points inexorably to such a finding.
Lisa P. Jackson, the new E.P.A. administrator, said in an interview that she had asked her staff to review the latest scientific evidence and prepare the documentation for a so-called endangerment finding. Ms. Jackson said she had not decided to issue such a finding but she pointedly noted that the second anniversary of the Supreme Court decision, Massachusetts v. E.P.A., is April 2, and there is the wide expectation that she will act by then.
“We here know how momentous that decision could be,” Ms. Jackson said. “We have to lay out a road map.” ...
If the environmental agency determines that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant to be regulated under the Clean Air Act, it would set off one of the most extensive regulatory rule makings in history. Ms. Jackson knows that she would be stepping into a minefield of Congressional and industry opposition and said that she was trying to devise a program that allayed these worries.
“We are poised to be specific on what we regulate and on what schedule,” Ms. Jackson said. “We don’t want people to spin that into a doomsday scenario.”
The bill, which President Obama is expected to sign on Tuesday, doubles federal spending on disadvantaged and disabled children, includes hefty increases in the main federal college scholarship program and for Head Start, and, for the first time, makes billions in federal dollars available for school renovation ...
Most of Mr. Duncan’s unusual power would come in disbursing a $54 billion stabilization fund intended to prevent public sector layoffs, mostly in schools. The bill sets aside $5 billion of that to reward states, districts and schools for setting high standards and narrowing achievement gaps between poor and affluent students. The law lets Mr. Duncan decide which states deserve awards and which programs merit special financing ...
“There’s going to be this extraordinary influx of resources,” he said in an interview. “So people say, ‘You’re going to be the most powerful secretary ever,’ but I have no interest in that. Power has never motivated me. What I love is opportunity, and this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do something special, to drive change, to make our schools better.”
Mr. Duncan said he intended to reward school districts, charter schools and nonprofit organizations that had demonstrated success at raising student achievement — “islands of excellence,” he called them. Programs that tie teacher pay to classroom performance will most likely receive money, as will other approaches intended to raise teacher quality, including training efforts that pair novice instructors with veteran mentors, and after-school and weekend tutoring programs.
The stimulus money will help states avert some, but most likely not all, of the education cutbacks for the 2009-10 school year resulting from state budget shortfalls that currently total some $132 billion. California, for instance, is facing a $41 billion budget shortfall, much of it in school spending, but will receive some $11 billion in education money from the stimulus, estimates the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union.
The positions of deputy secretary, under secretary and chief of staff and dozens of other senior posts at the Education Department remain unfilled, so Mr. Duncan is relying on help from career officers and consultants. He has appointed teams to develop procedures for distributing the stimulus billions quickly, and many aides, he said, have been working evenings and weekends to begin organizing the effort ...
Last year the Education Department distributed about $59 billion to states, school districts and colleges, most of it along well-worn financing paths mapped out by Congress.
“Congress usually spends two years debating the rules for how to spend $50 million,” said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, a research organization in Washington. “But this time they’re providing money without spelling out how it should be spent, so Arne Duncan and his staff are going to have to work out rules themselves in just weeks. He’s going to have his hands full.”
Congress has stipulated some rules, of course. To receive a share of the $54 billion stabilization fund, governors must make several “assurances” to Mr. Duncan, intended to drive school reforms: that they are developing statewide data systems that can allow schools to track individual students’ academic progress, that they are assigning experienced teachers fairly to rich and poor schools alike, and so on. Mr. Duncan has the ticklish job of ruling on whether the governors’ assurances are convincing.
And Congress has given him a $5 billion incentive fund that he can use to reward states that are raising student achievement and withhold money from states that are not. “We have states that tell the public that 90 percent of kids are meeting state standards,” Mr. Duncan said, “but when we look at how they’re doing on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, it’s nowhere close. I’m not going to reward that. I want to be transparent about the good, bad and the ugly.”
Some states and districts will get less than what they believe is their share, which could create powerful enemies.
“Secretary Duncan has a very challenging job,” said Joel Packer, a lobbyist for the National Education Association. “It’ll take a lot of effort to get this right.”
In such comments, and his remarks about his willingness to work with or without Republican support in Congress, Obama may be revealing much about his conception of leadership. He was insistent that a president's responsibility is to resist the daily (if not hourly) scorekeeping of the modern political and media system and keep his eye on the horizon. "My job is to help the country take the long view," he said. Obama portrayed himself as willing to consider a broad range of perspectives for responding to the country's daunting problems -- "We're going to... work with anybody who wants to work with us constructively," he said at one point -- and open to adjusting his own course to bring others along or simply to respond to evidence that his ideas aren't working. But repeatedly he declared that no one should interpret that to mean he lacks any clarity about his goals: "My consistent bottom line is: How do we make sure that the American people can work, have a decent income, look after their kids and we can grow the economy." Any compromises or course corrections, he argued, must serve those overriding priorities.
That's an elastic and responsive vision of the presidency which doesn't quite match the preferences of either the ideological warriors of left and right, or those who define consensus as simply the midpoint between each party's traditional answers. It contrasts markedly with the style of George W. Bush, who too often viewed rigidity as proof of resolve. Bill Clinton came closer to Obama's approach, but even he seemed more intent on proving certain fixed assumptions -- that opportunity could be balanced with responsibility, for instance, or government activism squared with fiscal discipline. Ronald Reagan likewise shared an instinct toward compromise, but he operated within a more constricting ideological framework than Obama.
Obama's determination to elevate ends over means could bring him closer in temperament to presidents like Franklin D. Roosevelt (who pledged "bold, persistent experimentation") and Abraham Lincoln, who often insisted, "My policy is to have no policy." That doesn't mean either man lacked identifiable goals, much less bedrock principles. It did mean they were willing to constantly recalibrate their course in service of those goals and principles -- as Lincoln once put it, like river boat pilots who "steer from point to point as they call it -- setting the course of the boat no farther than they can see."
Obama is a long way from matching the achievements of Lincoln and Roosevelt, of course. (If Obama, and the country, is lucky, he won't have to.) But his common inclination to "steer from point to point" may serve him and the country well, especially since Obama has inherited problems of a magnitude faced by few of his predecessors other than those two titans. Obama recognizes the obvious challenge those problems present, but also sees in them opportunity. "I think that there are certain moments in history when big change is possible... certain inflection points," he said. "And I think that those changes can be for the good or they can be for the ill. And leadership at those moments can help determine which direction that wave of change goes."
Is this one of those moments, he was asked. "Yes, I firmly believe that," he said, leaning in toward his audience. "Which is part of what makes it scary sometimes, but also is what should make people determined and excited, because I think that we can really solve some problems that have been there for a long time and we just couldn't get the collective focus to tackle them. Now may be one of those moments that we can." Indeed, in today's maelstrom, we may have no other choice.
Perhaps it was because the shorter speech he gave that day better fit the cable news' framework, but the speech Obama gave in Springfield in honor of Lincoln's birthday is undoubtedly his most important, historically resonant, little known speech.
Watch him (or better yet, read his transcript) provide a Lincolnesque, plain spoken refutation of the GOP's "the government is the problem" and you-are-on-your-own tax cuts are the only solution as he defends the role of government in American society.
And then pass this post on; more people need to see/read this speech.
He [Lincoln] recognized that while each of us must do our part, work as hard as we can, and be as responsible as we can - in the end, there are certain things we cannot do on our own. There are certain things we can only do together. There are certain things only a union can do.
Only a union could harness the courage of our pioneers to settle the American west, which is why he passed a Homestead Act giving a tract of land to anyone seeking a stake in our growing economy.
Only a union could foster the ingenuity of our farmers, which is why he set up land-grant colleges that taught them how to make the most of their land while giving their children an education that let them dream the American dream.
Only a union could speed our expansion and connect our coasts with a transcontinental railroad, and so, even in the midst of civil war, he built one. He fueled new enterprises with a national currency, spurred innovation, and ignited America's imagination with a national academy of sciences, believing we must, as he put it, add "the fuel of interest to the fire of genius in the discovery…of new and useful things." And on this day, that is also the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth, let us renew that commitment to science and innovation once more
Only a union could serve the hopes of every citizen - to knock down the barriers to opportunity and give each and every person the chance to pursue the American dream. Lincoln understood what Washington understood when he led farmers, craftsmen, and shopkeepers to rise up against an empire. What Roosevelt understood when he lifted us from Depression, built an arsenal of democracy, and created the largest middle-class in history with the GI Bill. It's what Kennedy understood when he sent us to the moon.
All these presidents recognized that America is - and always has been - more than a band of thirteen colonies, more than a bunch of Yankees and Confederates, more than a collection of Red States and Blue States. We are the United States of America and there isn't any dream beyond our reach, any obstacle that can stand in our way, when we recognize that our individual liberty is served, not negated, by a recognition of the common good ...
But in recent years, we've seen the pendulum swing too far in the opposite direction. It's a philosophy that says every problem can be solved if only government would step out of the way; that if government were just dismantled, divvied up into tax breaks, and handed out to the wealthiest among us, it would somehow benefit us all. Such knee-jerk disdain for government - this constant rejection of any common endeavor - cannot rebuild our levees or our roads or our bridges. It cannot refurbish our schools or modernize our health care system; lead to the next medical discovery or yield the research and technology that will spark a clean energy economy.
Only a nation can do these things. Only by coming together, all of us, and expressing that sense of shared sacrifice and responsibility - for ourselves and one another - can we do the work that must be done in this country. That is the very definition of being American.
Buried within this Wash Post story on the Treasury Secretary's Group of 7 meeting, were these illuminating paragraphs about the lack of details in the credit market plan Geithner released last week:
In hindsight Geithner could have managed expectations so that the public would have known beforehand that the Treasury Department was going to unveil only broad outlines of the plan, a source familiar with the matter said. On Tuesday, the stock markets plummeted minutes after Geithner began speaking.
Withholding critical details was a conscious choice by Geithner and his team, the official said in an interview. They wanted to avoid the mistakes of the Bush administration, which announced proposals before fully debating them and then quickly abandoned them when it realized they would not work.
Geithner and his staff also wanted to coordinate their proposals with lawmakers, the private sector and their counterparts overseas. This need for coordination is more than just rhetoric, officials said. If the United States develops a method to examine the books of banks and evaluate the real worth of their assets, it would likely affect financial firms around the world. Other countries would have to consider similar actions ...
Part of the reason expectations about the plan "got out of whack" was that the Treasury attempted to bring banking regulators into their strategy sessions, in an effort to muster a coordinated government response, a senior official said. The regulators advocated for particular ideas and leaked them to the news media. The markets, in turn, began to pin their hopes on such proposals. The core Treasury team, meanwhile, kept silent.
In coming weeks, a senior Treasury official said, the agency will release a timeline revealing when details will come about each provision in the rescue plan. The first announcement is set to come Wednesday when President Obama will unveil a foreclosure prevention plan. The official said the initiative, which is expected to spend $50 billion in rescue funds, will be "very detailed."
The Wash Post helps remind us of what has just been accomplished:
Twenty-four days into his presidency, Barack Obama recorded last night a legislative achievement of the sort that few of his predecessors achieved at any point in their tenure.
In size and scope, there is almost nothing in history to rival the economic stimulus legislation that Obama shepherded through Congress in just over three weeks. And the result -- produced largely without Republican participation -- was remarkably similar to the terms Obama's team outlined even before he was inaugurated: a package of tax cuts and spending totaling about $775 billion.
As Obama urged passage of the plan, he and his still-incomplete team demonstrated a single-mindedness that was familiar from the campaign trail. That intensity may have contributed to missteps in other areas, as the president's White House stumbled repeatedly in the vetting of his Cabinet and staff nominees. And high-minded promises of bipartisanship evaporated as Republicans accused the president and his Democratic allies in Congress of the same heavy-handed tactics that Obama, in his campaign, had often demanded be changed.
But even before the plan passed the Senate last night, the president's top advisers were crowing. "We've been in office, what, 2 1/2 , three weeks? We've passed the most major sweeping comprehensive legislation as relates to economic activity ever in a three-week period of time," White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said Thursday evening in the West Wing ...
The feat compares only with President Franklin D. Roosevelt's banking system overhaul in 1933, which cleared Congress within days of his inauguration ...
Long before the end of the 100 days that, since FDR's feat, have been used to measure the opening act of a presidency, Obama and his allies who control Congress can point to a major legislative victory earlier than most new administrations.
Compare what Obama has done in his first 24 days to Bill Clinton & George Bush's accomplishments during the same time period.
The GOP's real reasons for being so uniformly against the bill are it
Fundamentally changes the role of the federal government
Progressively & dramatically moves the country forward by funding important ideas that have languished for years.
#1 is the reason, for example, why they wanted to remove the $16 billion school construction funds from the bill: it wasn't to save the money (after all, builing a school is an example of the GOP's cherised infrastructure spending no different than building a road) it was because the Federal government had never before provided funding for local schools and they don't want this to be something the Feds become involved with.
As for #2, well, just look at these provisions (via the Wash Post):
Nearly $100 billion in new education funding, including $12 billion for special education, "boosting the federal share for education services to the highest level ever, according to the Senate Appropriations Committee".
Nearly $10 billion for public housing
Nearly $15 billion for clean-water and environmental protection projects
$9.3 billion to develop high-speed trains and to improve Amtrak
A significant down payment on Obama's health-care agenda:
Nearly $20 billion to adopt uniform medical-records technology.
For nine months after the loss of a job, the Feds will provide a 60 percent subsidy for the cost of Cobra. (however, the provision that would have allowed states to offer temporary Medicaid coverage to jobless individuals who did not qualify for Cobra coverage was eliminated.)
More than $40 billion for energy-efficiency programs and new energy technologies, including $11 billion to upgrade the national electricity grid.
A $20 billion increase in the food stamps program
$2.1 billion to expand Head Start
Broadband investment totaling $7.2 billion for poor and rural areas.
A two-year $400 credit to working individuals and $800 to working couples, distributed through a payroll tax deduction or claimed as a lump sum for the 2009 and 2010 tax years.
Social Security recipients would receive a one-time $250 payment.
Think about it. How excited would you have been if, under more normal circumstances, the Obama administration had ben able to provide $9.3 billion in new funding for high speed rail? Be honest, as a progressive you would have been ecstatic And that's true for most provisions in this bill (pinch me: $100 billion in new education spending?!)
So the excitement this plan generates in your is exactly why the GOP is unhappy. And in the same proportions.
The negotiations over the largest economic rescue plan since the New Deal offered a window into how the relationship between the White House and Congress will take shape over the next four years, with a West Wing filled with more alumni of the House and Senate than any recent administration. Not only are the president and vice president alumni of Congress, but so are their top aides and their top aides’ aides ...
By combining this intimate familiarity with Congress and its personalities with a speed-dial approach to negotiations, administration officials and lawmakers say they have achieved a series of rapid victories, putting them on the verge of winning approval of an economic plan that retains Mr. Obama’s original core principles. The president has already signed into law an expansion of children’s health care and a wage antidiscrimination law and avoided a showdown over bank bailout funds.
“In 21 days, we have gotten two major pieces of legislation and two pretty significant ones,” said Mr. Emanuel, who has been in the Capitol almost as much as when he served in the House.
In the first month of his presidency, Mr. Obama has demonstrated a hands-on approach in guiding the economic stimulus bill through complicated terrain. He met with lawmakers in the Capitol, made dozens of phone calls and held several private meetings with Republicans and Democrats in the Oval Office, the residence of the White House and aboard Air Force One ...
Some lawmakers believe it was a mistake for the administration to cede so much responsibility to House Democrats for putting the initial bill together. It resulted in a measure that came under fire from Republicans and even some Democrats for focusing too heavily on traditional Democratic spending priorities, and it had to be stripped of some initiatives like contraception and restoring the National Mall after critics highlighted the spending ...
But White House officials pointed to several reasons why they did not consider writing their own bill and sending it to Congress for fast-track approval by the Democratic majority.
Mr. Obama, they said, had not even taken office when the House began working on the legislation. Moreover, they said, if the new administration put a full plan on the table, it would inevitably have been picked apart by both parties. And Mr. Obama directed his staff members to set a respectful tone, keeping in mind that Republicans would be needed on future issues like energy and health care reform.
But after the House and the Senate each had worked through the bill, the White House stepped in aggressively this week and took control of the measure. In an Oval Office meeting, the president admonished his team to get the bill finished. Recognizing that they would have to assert more authority if they wanted to get the bill finished rapidly, administration officials carried the outlines of a compromise to Capitol Hill and pushed for its adoption ...
While Democrats are learning, they say that Republicans should be taking note as well, observing that while Mr. Obama is willing to reach out to them, he is also ready to try to put on political pressure as he has through his nationally televised news conference and appearances around the country.
“His hand is open,” Mr. Emanuel said, “but if you shake it, it has a very firm grip.”
Fisker had joined a flock of other businesses seeking cash from the biggest venture capitalist of all, the U.S. government.
Recent Comments