Thursday, January 28, 2010
Howard Zinn: Mourn and Organize http://howardzinn.org/default/
"Howard had a genius for the shape of public morality and for articulating the great alternative vision of peace as more than a dream," said James Carroll a columnist for the Globe's opinion pages whose friendship with Dr. Zinn dates to when Carroll was a Catholic chaplain at BU. "But above all, he had a genius for the practical meaning of love. That is what drew legions of the young to him and what made the wide circle of his friends so constantly amazed and grateful." http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2010/01/howard_zinn_his.html
Bernanke Survives: Not a surprise, though the votes against him were unusual for such a nomination
The Senate on Thursday confirmed Ben S. Bernanke for a second term as Federal Reserve chairman, but he scraped by with the narrowest margin in the history of the position and his weakened political standing could weigh on the central bank's ability to maneuver for years to come.
The Senate voted 70 to 30 to give Bernanke four more years as the nation's most powerful economic policymaker, after a sometimes heated debate in which members of both parties -- including some who eventually voted in his favor -- assailed the Fed's actions under his leadership.
While Bernanke won a majority of both Democrats and Republicans, he received more "no" votes than any Fed chairman before, topping Paul A. Volcker, who was confirmed 84 to 16 in 1983.
That congressional anger at the Fed -- and at Bernanke himself -- will color Bernanke's second term. The Fed is designed to be insulated from politics so that its leaders can take a long-term view, especially in setting interest rates. But the Fed is now under greater pressure than at any time in recent history. And after his relatively close call on confirmation, Bernanke may not have the political clout to fend off attacks on the central bank, said people who study the Fed.
"He's coming out of this with less political capital," said Brian Gardner, a Washington analyst for the investment bank Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. "How does he go back to ask senators who stuck their neck out for him to stick with him again? This leaves him in a weakened state."
Congress is considering stripping the Fed of its power to regulate banks, which Bernanke considers central to the Fed's mission. He views a separate congressional effort to initiate audits of the Fed's monetary policy to be a dangerous threat to the central bank's independence.
And the pressures on Bernanke could mount further when, at some point in his new term, the Fed will inevitably raise interest rates -- never a popular action. The Fed is now pulling out all the stops to support the economy, including keeping a key target interest rate near zero. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/28/AR2010012800103_pf.html
Israel: Settlements Stay, Protests Must Stop Out of the spotlight, hope for a Middle East settlement has faded in the face of Netanyahu’s intransigence.
For more than a year, this village has been a focus of weekly protests against the Israeli security barrier, which cuts through its lands. Now, the village appears to be at the center of an intensifying Israeli arrest campaign.
Apparently concerned that the protests could spread, the Israeli Army and security forces have recently begun clamping down, arresting scores of local organizers and activists here and conducting nighttime raids on the homes of others.
Muhammad Amira, a schoolteacher and a member of Nilin’s popular committee, the group that organizes the protests, said his home was raided by the army in the early hours of Jan. 10. The soldiers checked his identity papers, poked around the house and looked in on his sleeping children, Mr. Amira said.
He added, “They came to say, ‘We know who you are.’ ”
Each Friday for the last five years, Palestinians have demonstrated against the barrier, bolstered by Israeli sympathizers and foreign volunteers who document the ensuing clashes with video cameras, often posting the most dramatic footage on YouTube.
Israel says the barrier, under construction since 2002, is essential to prevent suicide bombers from reaching its cities; the Palestinians oppose it on grounds that much of it runs through the territory of the West Bank. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/29/world/middleeast/29palestine.html?ref=global-home&pagewanted=print
State of the Union Speech (SOTU) A political success for Obama. While progressives may cringe at his emphasis on small initiatives and the aggregate spending freeze, he successfully frustrated and marginalized the GOP (and Alito). He did make a reference to (eventually) increasing taxes on more comfortable Americans (above 250K), other Bush tax cuts and the Reagan tax cuts remained intact.
He should take note of the Oregon results: You can tax the wealthy.
Oregon has set aside its history of shooting down tax increases on statewide ballots, with voters endorsing higher taxes on businesses and the rich amid a brutal economic slump.
Democrats in the Oregon Legislature made it as easy as they could for the voters to raise taxes on somebody else, and the electorate responded Tuesday by approving Measures 66 and 67.
The increases approved Tuesday will hit people with taxable income upward of $125,000 – estimated at fewer than 3 percent of filers. Many businesses who had been paying an annual $10 minimum will see that rise to at least $150.
With 91 percent of the vote counted, the vote was 54-46 on Measure 66 and 53-47 on Measure 67.
Oregon voters have consistently rebuffed legislative attempts to take more in tax revenue – such as a cigarette tax to pay for health insurance for children three years ago, two previous income tax measures that would have hit most Oregonians and nine sales tax measures over the decades. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/27/oregon-tax-hike-on-wealth_n_438040.html
The spending freeze would not include the military. That’s par for the course. But, why not cut the military budget? Apart from the wars, there’s other spending that is always off limits. Shouldn’t be.
Fred Kaplan makes the case:
There is no good reason to exempt the Pentagon's budget from this discipline.
Of course, there are plenty of good reasons to exempt parts of the defense budget from a strict spending freeze. For instance, there should be no arbitrary freeze on spending to support overseas conflicts, for instance in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the broader war on terrorism. There is no way to know now how things will be going in these fights, and how much our forces will need to carry out their missions, in 2011. Because of this, the Pentagon requests much of this money in emergency supplementals to the budget, and these requests should be evaluated on their own terms.
Last year, to his credit, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates put a good chunk of this war-related spending into the baseline military budget. He noticed an unhealthy chasm between the nation's soldiers and the Pentagon's institutional bureaucracy. By putting some of the soldiers' traditionally unfunded needs into the Pentagon's budget, he hoped to give those needs some institutional grounding—and to give the bureaucrats a reason to fight for those needs.
In the fiscal year 2010 budget, which was passed last year, that portion of the budget amounted to $170 billion. This included military pay. In the past 10 years, U.S. servicemen and servicewomen have received a cumulative 65 percent pay raise—and, with an all-volunteer military, in an age of multiple wars, they deserve it. So exempt this from a freeze.
However, the total military budget for FY10—not including the emergency supplementals for fighting wars—amounted to $534 billion. The Congressional Budget Office estimates, in a recent analysis, that cost overruns and other unanticipated hikes will boost this sum to $552 billion.
Deduct $170 billion—the hands-off portion—from the $552 billion amount, and that leaves $382 billion. This $382 billion has nothing directly to do with the wars we're fighting right now. That doesn't mean it's unnecessary or unjustified; maybe some of it is, maybe some of it isn't. But it's not the stuff of life and death, like the other parts of the budget—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—that Obama wants to exclude from the freeze. It should be subject to the same discipline—the same line-by-line, page-by-page analysis—as the rest of the budget.
Most of this $382 billion consists of weapons systems—combatant ships, fighter jets, submarines, heavy armored vehicles—that the individual branches of the military have been cranking out for decades. If some Rip Van Winkle had fallen asleep in 1982, woken up in 2009, and looked at the U.S. military budget as an indicator of what was going on in the world, he would assume that the Cold War were still raging. http://www.slate.com/id/2242790/
As for Alito, he’s known to badmouth Democrats at social functions (e.g. Biden, 1/09) and presidents- and other politicians- have routinely criticized Supreme Court decisions, most commonly Roe v Wade. This time his head shake and mouthing of “(that’s) not true” was, according to some, an obvious breach of etiquette.
Glenn Greenwald comments:
On a night when both tradition and the Court's role dictate that he sit silent and inexpressive, he instead turned himself into a partisan sideshow -- a conservative Republican judge departing from protocol to openly criticize a Democratic President -- with Republicans predictably defending him and Democrats doing the opposite. Alito is now a political (rather than judicial) hero to Republicans and a political enemy of Democrats, which is exactly the role a Supreme Court Justice should not occupy. http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/01/28/alito/index.html
Dahlia Lithwick disagrees:
Both the president and the justices are political actors, and all are entitled to screw up their faces and grumble in public as they see fit. Anyone who’s watched Alito at oral argument at the high court knows that he screws up his face and mutters to himself all the time. The suggestion that he was showboating or grandstanding last night is spectacularly unfair. Unlike several of his colleagues, Alito is meticulously polite, balanced, and measured on the bench, and goes out of his way to shun big drama. I’m sure if Alito could take it back this morning he would. I’m equally sure that if he attends the next SOTU at all, he won’t move so much as a muscle. http://www.doublex.com/blog/xxfactor/leave-alito-alone
Right-wing Highlights: They are not, contrary to many media reports, gaining strength. Apart from their alienating behavior at the SOTU speech, their “approval” marks have at best remained flat… and low. Specifics:
* Bob McDonnell, new governor of Virginia who did the Republican response to the SOTU speech did so in front of carefully placed white woman, black woman, Asian man, soldier. The content: ‘cut the deficit, talking point, talking point.’
* The talking point post-speech was that Obama was “arrogant.” A few also noted, “punk.” Lovely.
* The Tea Party is fracturing big time. The actual activists are battling the exploiters / astroturfers, and their National Tea Party Convention this coming week has many dropping out, not only because of the hundreds demanded for both admission and the dinner.
* The GOP continues its internal battles. McCain faces a very conservative primary opponent, and Sarah Palin has endorsed McCain, infuriating the Tea Party folk
-R
