Arizona Immigration Law Overturned (somewhat)

 Judge Bolton’s ruling reminded us all of the unacceptable price of the Arizona way: an incoherent immigration system, squandered law enforcement resources, diminished public safety, the awful sight of a nation of immigrants turning on itself. Mr. Obama took a big risk when he filed suit against the Arizona law, and deserves credit for that. We hope he goes on to make clear to all the states that the Arizona way is not the American way.

NY Times Editorial 7-29-10

Nijinsky's Sacre de Printemps

Ambition in arts, heaven forbid

small-scale hurrying past horrors

old age, fame, the hit parade

intrinsic stardom that lives

in an unscreened dance scene--

Your name on high, clever

romancing of biways,

clodhopper ruins scolded warrior

town dumbfounded by excess

morbidity--who the hell

do you think keeps us sinking

in the flotsam figuroa, spent

long-lasting erect bodies

What the hell a recreation

Stravinsky's Sacre de Printemps

choreographed by Vasily N.

given shape in reconstruction

Robert Joffrey ballet

--Bill Pearlman

(from a filmed recreation of the three performance run of this strange rendition)

Krugman on how the Republicans can run on Bush's miserable record and get away with it...From a rational perspective it is inane, but here we are. Read it and weep...

 

But they have a problem: how can they embrace President Bush’s policies, given his record? After all, Mr. Bush’s two signature initiatives were tax cuts and the invasion of Iraq; both, in the eyes of the public, were abject failures. Tax cuts never yielded the promised prosperity, but along with other policies — especially the unfunded war in Iraq — they converted a budget surplus into a persistent deficit. Meanwhile, the W.M.D. we invaded Iraq to eliminate turned out not to exist, and by 2008 a majority of the public believed not just that the invasion was a mistake but that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into war. What’s a Republican to do?

You know the answer. There’s now a concerted effort under way to rehabilitate Mr. Bush’s image on at least three fronts: the economy, the deficit and the war.

On the economy: Last week Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, declared that “there’s no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue, because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy.” So now the word is that the Bush-era economy was characterized by “vibrancy.”

I guess it depends on the meaning of the word “vibrant.” The actual record of the Bush years was (i) two and half years of declining employment, followed by (ii) four and a half years of modest job growth, at a pace significantly below the eight-year average under Bill Clinton, followed by (iii) a year of economic catastrophe. In 2007, at the height of the “Bush boom,” such as it was, median household income, adjusted for inflation, was still lower than it had been in 2000.

But the Bush apologists hope that you won’t remember all that. And they also have a theory, which I’ve been hearing more and more — namely, that President Obama, though not yet in office or even elected, caused the 2008 slump. You see, people were worried in advance about his future policies, and that’s what caused the economy to tank. Seriously.

On the deficit: Republicans are now claiming that the Bush administration was actually a paragon of fiscal responsibility, and that the deficit is Mr. Obama’s fault. “The last year of the Bush administration,” said Mr. McConnell recently, “the deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product was 3.2 percent, well within the range of what most economists think is manageable. A year and a half later, it’s almost 10 percent.”

But that 3.2 percent figure, it turns out, is for fiscal 2008 — which wasn’t the last year of the Bush administration, because it ended in September of 2008. In other words, it ended just as the failure of Lehman Brothers — on Mr. Bush’s watch — was triggering a broad financial and economic collapse. This collapse caused the deficit to soar: By the first quarter of 2009 — with only a trickle of stimulus funds flowing — federal borrowing had already reached almost 9 percent of G.D.P. To some of us, this says that the economic crisis that began under Mr. Bush is responsible for the great bulk of our current deficit. But the Republican Party is having none of it.

Finally, on the war: For most Americans, the whole debate about the war is old if painful news — but not for those obsessed with refurbishing the Bush image. Karl Rove now claims that his biggest mistake was letting Democrats get away with the “shameful” claim that the Bush administration hyped the case for invading Iraq. Let the whitewashing begin!

Again, Republicans aren’t trying to rescue George W. Bush’s reputation for sentimental reasons; they’re trying to clear the way for a return to Bush policies. And this carries a message for anyone hoping that the next time Republicans are in power, they’ll behave differently. If you believe that they’ve learned something — say, about fiscal prudence or the importance of effective regulation — you’re kidding yourself. You might as well face it: they’re addicted to Bush.

Paul Krugman

NY Times 7-23-10

Paul Krugman gets to the point about the slow downward trend in Obama's actual situation regarding the upcoming midterms. People are hurting and in need of jobs or a way to think positively about economic prospects. And the Republican opposition to everything the Dems have attempted is seemingly working. That is a sorry state of affairs and leads to a despair for the country...

 

There’s no point berating voters for their ignorance: people have bills to pay and children to raise, and most don’t spend their free time studying fact sheets. Instead, they react to what they see in their own lives and the lives of people they know. Given the realities of a bleak employment picture, Americans are unhappy — and they’re set to punish those in office.

What should Mr. Obama have done? Some political analysts, like Charlie Cook, say that he made a mistake by pursuing health reform, that he should have focused on the economy. As far as I can tell, however, these analysts aren’t talking about pursuing different policies — they’re saying that he should have talked more about the subject. But what matters is actual economic results.

The best way for Mr. Obama to have avoided an electoral setback this fall would have been enacting a stimulus that matched the scale of the economic crisis. Obviously, he didn’t do that. Maybe he couldn’t have passed an adequate-sized plan, but the fact is that he didn’t even try. True, senior economic officials reportedly downplayed the need for a really big effort, in effect overruling their staff; but it’s also clear that political advisers believed that a smaller package would get more friendly headlines, and that the administration would look better if it won its first big Congressional test.

In short, it looks as if the administration itself was taken in by the pundit delusion, focusing on how its policies would play in the news rather than on their actual impact on the economy.

Republicans, by the way, seem less susceptible to this delusion. Since Mr. Obama took office, they have engaged in relentless obstruction, obviously unworried about how their actions would look or be reported. And it’s working: by blocking Democratic efforts to alleviate the economy’s woes, the G.O.P. is helping its chances of a big victory in November.

Can Mr. Obama do anything in the time that remains? Midterm elections, where turnout is crucial, aren’t quite like presidential elections, where the economy is all. Mr. Obama’s best hope at this point is to close the “enthusiasm gap” by taking strong stands that motivate Democrats to come out and vote. But I don’t expect to see that happen.

What I expect, instead, if and when the midterms go badly, is that the usual suspects will say that it was because Mr. Obama was too liberal — when his real mistake was doing too little to create jobs.

Paul Krugman,

NY Times 7-19-2010

 

 

There´s something about puffers like Mitch McConnell gasbagging about government takeovers when in fact this reform is nothing but driven by the same conditions that almost destroyed an economy and a country. These Republican blowhards should be given a ticket out of Washington. Obama and the Dems made some useful progress on this most pressing of issues and we applaud them, loud and clear.

As was the case with last year’s economic stimulus and this year’s health care overhaul, Republican opposition to the bill was primarily an attempt to drag down Mr. Obama by killing any legislative accomplishment.

When that effort was headed for failure, Republican leaders disparaged the bill on ideological grounds. On Thursday, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, lashed out at what he called a “government-driven solution,” while the senior Republican on the banking committee, Richard Shelby of Alabama, bemoaned “vast new bureaucracies.”

Those are convenient and time-tested bugaboos to campaign by, but they ignore the urgent needs the bill addresses, and its achievements. Those include resolution procedures to help ensure that shareholders and creditors — not taxpayers — bear the losses when big financial institutions fail; new capital requirements for banks and other curbs to help quell speculative excess, including the regulation of derivatives and restrictions on proprietary trading.

To get all that, the bill had to withstand a lobbying juggernaut. Since January 2009, the financial sector has spent nearly $600 million to weaken reform, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The lobbyists notched some victories, to be sure, mainly in the defeat of reforms that would have broken up large banks and done more to constrain risk-taking throughout the financial system.

But they also lost, especially on consumer protection. The new consumer financial protection bureau established in the bill is a milestone, not only for its intent and power to rectify lending abuses, but because it will institutionalize the insight that the safety and soundness of banks cannot — and should not — be measured by profitability alone, but by the impact that bank practices ultimately may have on consumers.

Having earned this victory, the Obama White House and the bill’s Congressional supporters still have another fight ahead of them — over implementing the bill. The legislation requires regulators to write hundreds of rules and conduct dozens of studies, a process that occurs largely outside of public view.

Complicating public trust in the process is the fact that some of the regulatory bodies — the Federal Reserve comes most prominently to mind — are still run by the same people who were blind-eyed as the financial crisis developed. And because the implementation phase is labor- and resource-intensive, public-interest groups, including consumer and investor advocates, will be outmatched by the financial lobby. Congress will have to be unceasingly vigilant during the rule-making to ensure that resulting regulations reflect lawmakers’ intent and the public’s needs.

The administration also must supply top-level fire power, and use the president’s bully pulpit, to guarantee that the bill’s promise is fulfilled.

Supporters of this much-needed financial reform bill took a well-earned bow on Thursday. Now they have to get back to work.

              NY Times Editorial 7-1510

Bob Herbert in today's NY Times and the growing distance between those who are hurting and the usual suspects who are doing just fine, thank you...Not a pretty picture...

The fattest of the fat cats live in a perpetual heads-I-win, tails-you-lose environment. But if you step outside the Wall Street casino, you’ll notice that things aren’t going too well in the rest of the country. More than 14 million Americans are out of work, and nearly half of them have been jobless for six months or longer. The unemployment rate for black Americans is 15.4 percent.

School districts across the country are taking drastic steps to cope with collapsing budgets: firing personnel, increasing class sizes, cutting kindergarten and summer-school programs and, in some cases, moving to a four-day school week. The Associated Press, in a demoralizing report, recently noted: “As the school budget crisis deepens, administrators across the nation have started to view school libraries as luxuries that can be axed rather than places where kids learn to love reading and do research.”

What a country. We’ll do whatever it takes to make sure the bankers keep living the high life and swilling that Champagne while at the same time we’re taking books out of the hands of schoolchildren trying to get an education.

I’m no friend of the deficit hawks, but the staggering amounts of money we’ve been spending for the past several years have not benefited the people most in need of help and have not laid the foundation for a more secure economy going forward. We’ve handed over unconscionable tax breaks to the very rich (you can see the Prada paraders high-stepping along Fifth Avenue in their million-dollar flip-flops) and countless billions to the private contractors brazenly feeding off the agony of the endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

(Sunday’s paper also had an article about six more American G.I.’s killed in Afghanistan.)

What’s needed is the same sense of urgency about helping struggling families and putting people back to work as the Bush and Obama crowds showed when the banks were about to go bust. That sense of urgency is always missing when it’s ordinary people who are in trouble.

Millions of Americans are stuck in an economic depression. Several million have either lost their homes to foreclosure during the recession or are in imminent danger of losing them. The long-term unemployed are facing painful daily choices on such basic matters as whether to buy food or refill needed prescription medication or pay electric bills to keep the lights on.

Back in February, The Times’s Peter Goodman wrote about the new poor, “people long accustomed to the comforts of middle-class life who are now relying on public assistance for the first time in their lives — potentially for years to come.”

There can be no real national recovery with so many millions of people in such deep economic distress. We can pretend that we’re locked in some kind of crisis of confidence, that if only people felt better about themselves and the economy then they’d start spending again. This is a variation on the “mental recession” lunacy spouted by Phil Gramm, John McCain’s top economic adviser during the presidential campaign.

People who are out of work and deeply in debt don’t have any money to spend. The only way to get real money back into their wallets and bank accounts (and thus back into the economy) is to get them back to work.

Bob Herbert 7-13-2010

NY Times

Just spent a couple weeks in New Mexico. Saw a great Impressionist show at Albuquerque Museum--Turner, Cezanne, Van Gogh, August John. Augustus John has some great portraits of women. Old friends Neil and Sonia put me up at their daughter's home near Old Town. We had a wail of a bash on July 4th up at Blade's place near where Tawapa used to be. Good to be back among the old group I hung out with for decades. Everyone getting on in time, lots of complaints about health. I tried to deal with some kind of nerve problem in left hand where two fingers are numb. Have tried acupuncture, chiropractic and various medical responses. Seems there is some kind of pinched nerve. Old friend Bob and I went to lunch yesterday at Dim Sum place downtown Albuquerque and he told me of his battle with rheumatoid arthritis. Very rough stuff, and he said there were weeks in winter he couldn't get out of bed.

Problem of time, of ageing, of coming toward the end of the line...Still, the young are around as well, and they seem to be holding up the world at this time...

RAMIFIED KINGDOM

She stood apart in a ramified kingdom

and death came to the fore, cooked

in a ravaged pot, holed up

in ashcans or remedials,

stumped in our guiding motions,

in our upbeat strained articulations

but could you survive the losses

keep coming in our time,

the old dependent furies, the quaking

shaped for an old variation

come into sharp focal

rigid merriments untoward

and the listening frequencies

                               **

 4th of July Momentum

Full-mob, a kaleidescope

of meanings, woman's body

at last in the opening, strike

the lunging feel, the way

it comes to the force field

and I see you and vice-versa

Your strange beauty ignites

all that memory, that wilderness

where you've lived & breathed

an enormity of feeling--

This was a destined hour

and you came to me openly

and we shone the light fantastic

instantly ('the feeling's mutual')

and we got into time & memory

and we guided the moment forever

Strength that wanders full-soul

the effort of long days' wonder

and the lift on seeing you

so deep in the eye, the formidable

carrier of such longing, such

open places of our hunger

and you who give so much

But beauty brightens bedrock

stimulus of stretched lids

the way a brow breaks a smile

and the whole package alerting

a response in mid-air, plummet

of defense for a reprieve

that gets us further forward--

the dance the conjures destiny

Paul Krugman in today's NYTimes talks about the heartless, clueless and confused responses to the decision not to extend unemployment insurance for the vast numbers of folks out of work. What a world...

Today, American workers face the worst job market since the Great Depression, with five job seekers for every job opening, with the average spell of unemployment now at 35 weeks. Yet the Senate went home for the holiday weekend without extending benefits. How was that possible?

The answer is that we’re facing a coalition of the heartless, the clueless and the confused. Nothing can be done about the first group, and probably not much about the second. But maybe it’s possible to clear up some of the confusion.

By the heartless, I mean Republicans who have made the cynical calculation that blocking anything President Obama tries to do — including, or perhaps especially, anything that might alleviate the nation’s economic pain — improves their chances in the midterm elections. Don’t pretend to be shocked: you know they’re out there, and make up a large share of the G.O.P. caucus.

By the clueless I mean people like Sharron Angle, the Republican candidate for senator from Nevada, who has repeatedly insisted that the unemployed are deliberately choosing to stay jobless, so that they can keep collecting benefits. A sample remark: “You can make more money on unemployment than you can going down and getting one of those jobs that is an honest job but it doesn’t pay as much. We’ve put in so much entitlement into our government that we really have spoiled our citizenry.”

Now, I don’t have the impression that unemployed Americans are spoiled; desperate seems more like it. One doubts, however, that any amount of evidence could change Ms. Angle’s view of the world — and there are, unfortunately, a lot of people in our political class just like her.

But there are also, one hopes, at least a few political players who are honestly misinformed about what unemployment benefits do — who believe, for example, that Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, was making sense when he declared that extending benefits would make unemployment worse, because “continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work.” So let’s talk about why that belief is dead wrong.

Do unemployment benefits reduce the incentive to seek work? Yes: workers receiving unemployment benefits aren’t quite as desperate as workers without benefits, and are likely to be slightly more choosy about accepting new jobs. The operative word here is “slightly”: recent economic research suggests that the effect of unemployment benefits on worker behavior is much weaker than was previously believed. Still, it’s a real effect when the economy is doing well.

But it’s an effect that is completely irrelevant to our current situation. When the economy is booming, and lack of sufficient willing workers is limiting growth, generous unemployment benefits may keep employment lower than it would have been otherwise. But as you may have noticed, right now the economy isn’t booming — again, there are five unemployed workers for every job opening. Cutting off benefits to the unemployed will make them even more desperate for work — but they can’t take jobs that aren’t there.

Paul Krugman

NY Times 5July10