9-11 - El Roto The
Obama administration has proposed regulatory changes, but even their
backers say they face a difficult road in Congress. For now, banks
still sell and trade unregulated derivatives, despite their role in
last fall's chaos. Radical changes like pay caps or restrictions on
bank size face overwhelming resistance. Even minor changes, like
requiring banks to disclose more about the derivatives they own, are
far from certain. New York Times(H)ealth
care reform, while an overdue imperative, still is overshadowed in
existential urgency by the legacies of the two devastating cataclysms
of the Bush years, 9/11 and 9/15, both of whose anniversaries we now
mark. The crucial matters left unresolved in the wake of New York's two
demolished capitalist icons, the World Trade Center and Lehman
Brothers, are most likely to determine both this president's and our
country's fate in the next few years. Both have been left to smolder in
the silly summer of '09. Frank Rich - New York Times
(T)here
is still a mammoth, gaping hole at Ground Zero. Bureaucratic gridlock,
partisan bickering, old-fashioned greed and failed leadership have all
been blended together perfectly in one big pot to create a colossal,
historic stew of inaction. Paul Rieckhoff - Huffington Post
President
Obama made clear during last year's presidential campaign that
Afghanistan would be his war if he was elected. Since being sworn in,
true to his word, he has made the Afghan war a national security
imperative because that's where al Qaeda is. At least, that's where Mr.
Obama thinks it is. But nothing is less certain. Arnaud de Borchgrave - Washington Times
He has decided to expand the current system, not fix it. David Brooks - NYT
I
have have held off commenting on the president's health care speech to
congress in order to read the opinions of better qualified analysts:
the general opinion seems to be that it was a very fine speech, but
that no one is really that sure what he said. By now it seems pretty
clear that whatever comes out of it this process will resemble what
other developed western countries consider universal health coverage to
the degree that a spavined camel resembles a racehorse.As
important as health care is (and what in a "serious" country could be
more important?) the real story today is paralysis and this paralysis
is, if nothing else, bipartisan. And it is bipartisan because it is
systemic, something that has been brewing since the end of the Second
World War and which now is coming to a head. Neither party has either
the ideas nor the power to fix it and I am of the opinion that even if
they fell into each other's arms and took a blood oath of mutual
fealty; that even together, they wouldn't have either the ideas nor the
power to fix it.That is the reason why I was quite
lukewarm about a Democrat -- any Democrat -- taking the White House at
this moment. I have a very strong feeling that this president -- any
president -- is set to preside over what many will see as the collapse
of America's "empire" and whichever party is in the White House when
this happens will take the blame for it... I would have preferred --
call me sentimental -- that the Republicans had taken the historic
hit... I was hoping (not really believing) that the Democrats would be
the ones to try to put Humpty Dumpty together again... it was not to be.What will this collapse of "America's empire" look like?It will look very similar to the collapse of Spain's empire and will feature some of the same players.South America is going south...
again.
The
United States is so deeply entangled in and obsessed by the Middle East
and Af-Pak that it has taken its eyes and energies off its proverbial
back yard, Latin America. Because of its dependence on oil and the
power of the Israel lobby it will find it impossible to refocus in
time. There are simply not enough resources to control the Middle East
and Southwest Asia and project power in South America at the same time.
As professor Andrew Bacevich puts it, "we haven't got the money and we
haven't got the troops".Latin
America gained its "first" independence at the beginning of the 19th
century, when a prostrate Spain, exhausted from the Napoleonic wars,
relaxed its grip. And now with a distracted and overburdened America
relaxing its grip, Latin America is poised to gain its "second" and perhaps definitive independence.Latin
America and the United States have much in common, it is the
proportions of the components that differ the most. All of us are great
producers of raw materials and commodities, where not too much is
manufactured (anymore). To understand the political mix of most of
Latin America excluding lily white Argentina, Uruguay and Chile, known
as the "Southern Cone," the USA will serve us a good model.Imagine
that instead of 12% and 1.5% of the population respectively, African
and Native- Americans represented in varying proportions, 70 to 80+
percentage of the US population. Imagine that the distribution of
wealth was similar to what it is right now. Here is how the sociology
department of the University of Southern California, Santa Cruz describes it: In
the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few
hands. As of 2004, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned
34.3% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial,
professional, and small business stratum) had 50.3%, which means that
just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 85%, leaving only 15% of the
wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers). In terms of
financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one's home), the
top 1% of households had an even greater share: 42.2%.
Now
imagine that all the people with the money were of European descent and
all the people without money were of color (not too difficult, is it?)
now imagine that a series of political figures that combined the
qualities of Doctor Martin Luther King and Sitting Bull appeared...
That is what is happening in Latin America right now, while the United
States faces the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan and quite probably Iran,
and has no marines left over to send.President
Barack Obama -- it could have (sigh) been McCain -- will have the
dubious privilege of sitting by helplessly while the United States of
America gets ridden out of Latin America on a rail.
