The historian Victor Davis Hanson is something else again, a magpie of misplaced, forced analogies from ancient to post-modern events. Hanson conscripts his studies of ancient Greek wars to the service of the Bush national-security agenda, which he'd love to revive. Now he's done it again in Makers of Ancient Strategy, an anthology I've just reviewed for the new, fall issue of Democracy journal. And Hanson, true to form, is ranting about the review.
Sorry, Victor, but the main reason people stop attacking you is that you discredit yourself without their having to bother. No sooner had Hanson submitted his counter-attack to Democracy, than he posted it, twice, perhaps expecting that this shock-and-awe approach would silence criticism.
It certainly pleased his site's ditto-heads, but Hanson had no choice but to link the review he was attacking, and I invite anyone who can read without moving his or her lips to compare it to Hanson's rant. The review shows that the man can't separate his historiography of ancient wars from his Vulcan ideology. He can't help trying to draft his scholarship -- and, yes, some of history's enduring truths -- into his efforts to promote and then justify misadventures like ours in Iraq.
These are hard times for would-be warriors like Hanson, Charles Hill, and Martin Peretz, all of whom are scurrying to burnish their dubious scholarly credentials to cover their real-world blunders. But although I've caught Hanson trying to do that in his new anthology, some of its contributors -- and, he now tells us defensively, its Princeton University Press readers -- have higher standards than he does and didn't let him get away with it entirely.
The result, as I explain in the review, is an anthology that makes Victor Davis Hanson look better than he is despite his efforts to make himself look worse and to sanitize his war-mongering through scholarship. It's all in the review; enjoy!
I don't mean to underestimate the importance of this moment. The issue of settlements has become symbolic of whether or not Netanyahu, bowing to American diplomacy, and the looming threat of economic isolation, will be prepared to move from the status quo. Nor should anyone doubt that the status quo works in favor of the settlers and their supporters, freeze or no freeze. But as I have said in this space before, the issue itself, at least as it is posed most commonly, is overblown and even a little misleading.
]]> THE REAL QUESTION is whether Abbas and Netanyahu can quickly get to an agreement in principle on a new border, since various negotiations over the past 10 years have gotten everyone used to the idea that the major settlement blocs around Jerusalem and Gush Etzion will be incorporated into Israel; and that a future Palestinian state will be compensated, one-for-one, with territory that is now part of Israel.Moreover, we are talking about two city-states that are--I know I have said this often, but we can't hear it enough--about the size of greater Los Angeles: one business ecosystem, commercial relations built on networks and knowledge, not agriculture; and urban planning that will be building up, not out. (Read what Salaam Fayyad says about this at this year's Clinton forum.) This means that once we finally get to a border, nobody will much care where it is. It will have importance in determining where you vote; it will have little importance in determining how you live.
The big a stumbling block, however, is the town of Ariel. Unlike the various settlements scattered across what Greater Israel types like to call "Samaria," this is a town of about 15,000 people, and Israeli leaders have simply not prepared the Israeli public for its evacuation. Even the handing over of the neighborhoods of East Jerusalem to a Palestinian state poses less of a problem. When I spoke with former Prime Minister Olmert about where his own talks with Abbas broke down in 2007, he confirmed that the issue of Jerusalem could be resolved with various formulas for internationalizing the Holy Basin, but that "no Israeli Prime Minister could return Ariel."
The Palestinians, for their part, could never be expected to live with it. The problem is not just territorial contiguity. Ariel is a serious potential disruption of the kind of urban planning people like Fayyad would have to undertake to resettle hundreds of thousands of refugees and build infrastructure (rail, telecom, water, etc.) for a future economy. The Israeli government would expect to send forces to Ariel to protect its residents, say, from the periodic attacks that would surely come from radicals who are not reconciled to peace. This means that the territory from Israel to Ariel, like the current Area C, could not be consolidated under the control of Palestinian police. Indeed, this isolated town disrupts the only transportation corridor Palestine has from Jenin and Nablus to Ramallah.
Make no mistake, nothing particularly exotic is going on behind closed doors. The positioning, on the Israeli side, is political: Netanyahu's ideological blinkers, which may or may not be falling away; or the fear of inflaming settlers who simply don't want to be moved; or the grotesque but common strategic assumption that, if Israel can get Palestinians to swallow a certain unfairness, this means that regional "deterrence" is working.
In any case, we're going to be hearing more and more about Ariel over the next several months, and wondering where the poor benighted town came from. Just remember, this is an ectopic pregnancy of a town, with no commercial hinterland or proximate cultural neighbors, the ultimate hubris of Ariel Sharon, who expanded it greatly by dumping a few thousand Russian immigrants here straight from the airport--a town with a "university" whose accreditation most Israeli academics question, and a large performing arts center where hundreds of Israeli artists refuse to perform. Still, ectopic pregnancies can be fatal when they are not dealt with early.
I suggest you acquaint yourself with Ariel, and all the facts on the ground in the Palestinian West Bank, by means of this marvelous app just released by Peace Now. Start by looking at Ariel, its size and location as compared to other settlements, and in relation to the rest of Palestine. Breathe deeply, zoom in, then look again.
]]>Robert Reich's new book, "Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future" is now out. See the original post here.
]]>As of today, insurance companies can no longer drop people from coverage when they get sick because they made clerical mistakes on their applications.
As of today, insurance companies will no longer be allowed to drop children from their parents' health insurance plans after they reach 21 or graduate from college, unless they are offered coverage at work. About 1.6 million young adults between 21 and 26 will go onto their parents' policies.
As of today, insurance companies will be prohibited from placing lifetime caps on health coverage.
As of today, insurance companies will be restricted in their use of annual limits on coverage and will be banned completely in 2014.
As of today, insurance companies are required to cover recommended preventive services with no out-of-pocket cost for patients and with preventive services exempt from deductibles.
As of today, employer-sponsored health plans can no longer establishing any eligibility rules for coverage that discriminate against lower- and middle-income employees.
Other parts of the law have already kicked in. For those without health insurance because of pre-existing conditions, the government created a high-risk pool to provide insurance until state-based health insurance exchanges are up and running in 2014. For 2010, the law provides tax credits of up to 35% of employer premium contributions for qualified small businesses that offer coverage to their employees - a provision that will increase to 50% in 2014.
For seniors, the new law eliminated co-payments for preventive services under Medicare and exempted preventive services from deductibles. And the law already protects the insurance coverage of early retirees (aged 55 to 64) by creating a temporary re‐insurance program.
Some additional provisions will kick in next January 1. All health insurance plans must meet standards for the share of your premiums that are spent on patient care rather than profits and CEO pay and administration. The "medical loss ratio" floors require plans to spend 80% to 85% of premiums on medical services.
The new law also increases funding for Community Health Centers, which will double the number of patients served over the next five years. It increases funding for doctors and nurses providing basic care in their communities, and it holds insurance companies accountable for unreasonable rate hikes.
And beginning in 2014, insurance companies will no longer be allowed to discriminate against adults with pre-existing conditions, or require women to pay higher premiums than men for the same health coverage.
Is this everything that many Americans hoped for? No. The health-care-industry lobby -- particularly the insurance industry, drug companies, and the hospital chains -- chipped away at reform with all the political firepower they could muster. They forged an unholy alliance with the conservative echo chamber (Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and the right-wing blogosphere), the Republican Party, and the Tea Party movement. Even some moderate Democrats were held hostage by medical-industry clout. In 2009 and 2010, the health care industry spent $184 million in campaign contributions and $1.05 billion on federal lobbying, hoping to thwart the reform of the nation's costly and inefficient health care system.
During the health reform debate, it appeared at times that the health care industry lobby would prevail, since almost every Republican and some Democrats seemed to cringe at the thought of offending their corporate donors. There were times when it looked as if Obama was wavering, concerned that he couldn't overcome the political muscle of the health industry lobby.
Fortunately, Health Care for America Now (HCAN) -- a broad coalition of more than a thousand labor, consumer, civil-rights, anti-poverty, community, netroots, and religious groups -- played a very important role in rallying the base, smoking out the destructive role of the industry, and making it difficult politically for the administration to strike a premature compromise and indulge its fantasies of a bipartisan deal. HCAN and other grassroots activists drew public attention to the insurance industry's outrageous profits, abuse of consumers, and outsized political influence.
HCAN released reports about industry abuses, profits, and CEO compensation, held press conferences with consumers victimized by insurance company practices, and organized more than 200 increasingly feisty protest events in 46 states. On one day in September, for example, HCAN affiliates in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Indianapolis organized protest events at the homes of the CEOs of the three largest health-insurance corporations -- CIGNA, United Health, and WellPoint. A week later, HCAN staked out the scenes of the crime -- insurance-company headquarters in more than 50 cities -- armed with signs, personal stories, crime-scene tape, and chalk to tell the CEOs, "It's a crime to deny our care." In some cities, protesters engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience and were arrested.
All this activity kept health care reform on the front-burner and kept the momentum for reform alive, giving Obama and pro-reform Democrats in Congress more room for maneuver.
The law passed in March is not the end of the fight, but a steppingstone toward more comprehensive reform. For example, the medical loss ratio provisions need to be watched closely. Reform advocates think that Congress should put tough limits on drug prices, which are a major reason for rising health care costs. The bill left several million working Americans without insurance. And there is still a need for a "public option" to compete with the private insurance companies, hold them accountable, and give consumers a choice.
Most Americans, however, are still unsure what is in the health care bill passed six months ago. According to an Associated Press survey, "more than half of Americans mistakenly believe the overhaul will raise taxes for most people this year." About one-fourth of Americans still believe, wrongly, that the law sets up panels of bureaucrats - which Tea Party crusaders and their political allies called "death panels" -- to make decisions about seniors' care. A whopping 81% of respondents mistakenly believe that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that the legislation would increase the government's debt, when it actually found that it would reduce the federal deficit.
The public's misinformation about the law has undetermined their support for the new legislation. According to the AP, 30% of respondents said they favored the law, 40% said they opposed it, and 30% were neutral. Among Democrats and independents, the more accurate their knowledge of the bill, the more they liked it.
Some of the public's uncertainty is Obama's fault. He's been a lousy salesman for his own product. But there's still time for him to go out into swing states and Congressional districts and put a human face on this breakthrough leglslation. In every city, suburban and small town, there are Americans who have benefited from this new law. Obama needs to give them a voice. Not statistics from politicians and policy experts, but ordinary people for whom the health care system was broken, and is now fixed. These are the people that Americans can identify with. They represent the tens of millions of Americans who the law helps, even if they don't yet know it.
Because the health care reform is so misunderstood, the Tea Party and its allies in the right-wing media and in Congress have been able to mislead the public about its specifics, and even use the bill as a weapon in their arsenal to defeat Democrats in November, even threatening to repeal the law if the GOP wins a majority in the House and Senate. This would be a tragedy. We can't allow the big insurance corporations, drug companies, hospital chains, and their right wing friends in Congress and on Fox News to hijack the most important piece of social legislation America has adopted in more than a generation.
Peter Dreier teaches politics and chairs the Urban & Environmental Policy program at Occidental College.
Hmmm? Last time I looked, you and I and every other U.S. taxpayer owned a majority of GM. That means some of the money we're earning as GM owners is being used to influence how we vote in the upcoming mid-term election.
To put it another way, we taxpayers are paying some people (GM executives) to tell us how we should vote for another group of people (House and Senate candidates) who will decide how our taxes will be used in the future.
]]> GM spokesman Greg Martin justifies the expenditure as a competitive necessity. "We're not going to sit on the sidelines as our competitors and other industries who have PACS are participating in the political process," he told the Wall Street Journal.In other words, now that we taxpayers own GM, it's in our interest that GM use our money to affect how we vote, lest we mistakenly decide to support candidates who, once in office, enact legislation that helps GM's competitors and not GM.
Wait a moment. I smell hypocrisy. Didn't we help GM (and Chrysler) with a big bailout, and not help competitors Ford, Nissan, Honda, or Toyota or any other automaker that builds cars in the U.S.?
Moreover, the circularity of GM's logic leads to some strange places. It would presumably allow any big corporation to get tax deductions (in effect, tax subsidies from the rest of us) for outlays for lobbyists, political ads, and political donations to members of congress - so long as these expenditures help the company relative to its competitors.
Problem is, the tax laws don't allow this.
Nor does the law allow taxpayer-supported entities to use taxpayer dollars to influence elections. And yet this is exactly what GM is doing.
Since TARP, suspicions about big government in cahoots with big business have fueled angry tea partiers on the right and despairing cynics on the left. GM's crass disregard for the spirit if not the letter of the law continues to fuel them.
Robert Reich's new book, "Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future" is now out. Read the original post here.
]]>The Fed's decision today (Tuesday) to keep short-term interest rates near zero is no surprise. What's odd is its apparent decision not to boost the economy by buying hundreds of billions of bonds -- despite its acknowledgment that "the pace of recovery in output and employment has slowed in recent months," and that prices are rising too slowly for comfort (i.e., we might be facing deflation).
Every indicator suggests third-quarter growth will be as slow if not slower than in the second quarter. Consumer confidence is down. Retail sales are down. Housing sales are down. Commercial real estate is in trouble.
]]> A growth rate of 1.6 percent means even higher unemployment ahead. Maybe we're not in a double-dip but we might as well be in one. Growth this slow is the equivalent of heading downward, relative to the growth needed to get us out of the hole we're in.The Fed is deadlocked because it harbors hawks who worry near-zero interest rates will lead to another round of speculation, ending in an even bigger bust. Kansas City Fed President Thomas Hoenig, for example, is openly dissenting from the Fed's near-zero policy and I'm sure he resists doing anything more to stimulate borrowing.
I don't generally side with the hawks but they have a point.
Even though economy is heading downward, flooding it with more money may not help.
The problem isn't the cost of capital. Most businesses can get all the money they need. Big ones are still sitting on $1.8 trillion in cash.
The problem is consumers, who are 70 percent of the economy. They can't and won't buy enough to turn the economy around. Most don't qualify for more credit given how much they already owe (or have already defaulted on).
Without consumers, businesses have no reason to borrow more. Except to speculate by buying back their own stock and doing mergers and acquisitions, which is exactly what they're doing.
Ultimately, even if fiscal and monetary policy weren't deadlocked, we'd still face the same conundrum. Say the White House and Ben Bernanke got everything they wanted to boost the economy. At some point these boosts would have to end. The economy would have to be able to run on its own.
But it can't run on its own because consumers have reached the end of their ropes.
After three decades of flat wages during which almost all the gains of growth have gone to the very top, the middle class no longer has the buying power to keep the economy going. It can't send more spouses into paid work, can't work more hours, can't borrow any more. All the coping mechanisms are exhausted.
Anyone who thinks China will get us out of this fix and make up for the shortfall in demand is blind to reality.
So what's the answer? Reorganizing the economy to make sure the vast middle class has a larger share of its benefits. Remaking the basic bargain linking pay to per-capita productivity.
Let me end with a brief commercial. My new book, "Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future" is out today. In it, I explain this in detail.
Read the original post here.
]]>Peretz's supporters, some of them his former students, seem determined not to notice what he has become in recent years. And Harvard seems determined not to notice what his battening himself onto a college he literally worships actually portends for its soul.
What's really appalling -- but what no one seems to want to face -- is the rise of people like this who, whatever their past ideals and pretensions, haven't kept faith with liberal education (let alone scholarship) yet are buying themselves more presence and prestige on campuses. That is skewing undergraduate education in ways few understand. Peretz isn't the worst villain, but he is a vivid example of what's wrong.
A few years ago, when Little, Brown canceled a $500,000, two-novel deal with Kaavya Viswanathan -- a Harvard sophomore whose authorial voice, like her application to Harvard, had been packaged by pricey handlers -- I noted in the Boston Globe that "today's Harvard is no more likely to help her find an inner moral compass than Tiffany & Co. is to improve its customers' morality. Students contemplate with self-recognition her fall from what one, in the Harvard Crimson, called 'the same rickety tower of meritocracy that so many of us built on our way to our Harvard admission.'"
Peretz and his supporters don't approve of this, of course. They just happen to be part of it -- in more ways than they've reckoned with. They've grown soft on what really counts in liberal education. They've forgotten Allan Bloom's warning that liberal education must resist both ''whatever is most powerful'' and the ''worship of vulgar success.''
True openness, Bloom said, ''means closedness to all the charms that make us comfortable with the present.'' He disdained professors who strive to become counselors to the king and forget that ''the intellectual, who attempts to influence . . . ends up in the power of the would-be influenced.'' And he lamented the emergence of new academic departments like mass communications and business management, which ''wandered in recently to perform some job that was demanded of the university.'' Such departments or institutes or centers -- like Yale's new Jackson Institute for Global Affairs -- are reorienting undergraduate education in ways that demand careful watching and criticism.
Harvard's Social Studies program has been both an oasis and a vibrant center for what's best in liberal education, in ways I won't reprise here but which Peretz's supporters recall. Somehow, they've failed to contrast their memories of Social Studies with Peretz's public performances of the past decade.
Colleges that want to train national and global leaders must indeed strike a difficult, delicate balance between humanist Truth seeking and republican Power-wielding. And, yes, they are therefore right to let people with "real world" wisdom who can meet liberal education standards -- including Marty Peretz, and, for that matter, me -- teach a course or two, as leavens in the campus mix.
But, as I say in today's Harvard Crimson, that's is no reason to load any of us up with academic honors and institutional sway, especially because of our (I mean Peretz's) worldly wealth and "connections."
That is exactly what Allan Bloom rightly wanted liberal education to resist. But it is exactly what colleges are especially vulnerable to these days, under duress as they are fiscally and ideologically (more from the right now than from the left). Turning liberal education into a game of money, power, and public relations only makes matters worse.
Why have Peretz's supporters lost sight of this? Some have fond memories of him in his younger years. Some of them feel indebted to him for the support and direction he gave them back then. Some, like the columnist E.J. Dionne, have become captives of Beltway Comity Syndrome, in which you treat every fellow pundit as a hale fellow well met.
Dionne has been egregious at this, blurbing everyone's book, no matter what it says, serving as moderator or panelist at everyone's conference, and moving about the capital as if he were the bishop in Ulysses, dispensing beneficent smiles and benedictions to virtually everyone. The circle of Washington punditry is E.J.'s diocese, but this is not Christian charity, it is a conceit about power that's beginning to remind me of the false felicity of Hapsburg Vienna in 1914.
I sketched another example of Beltway Comity Syndrome here a couple of years ago when George Packer took it upon himself, in the New Yorker, to assist David Brooks in an attempted (and ongoing) political makeover, only to make them both look like monkeys grooming each other in the Chattering Classes Zoo.
Memo to E.J. Dionne: What we need in Washington now is more comity among politicians and less comity among pundits, especially between you and Peretz. I mean not that more savants should shout past one another but that more of them should be forthright in challenging one another to explain themselves - and then listen when they do, and respond, with the public's interest foremost.
Memo to Harvard: Re-read your former college dean Harry Lewis' Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education.
I would guess the two ads cost J Street a few hundred thousand dollars which clearly demonstrates that J Street is going, as we Jews like to say, "from strength to strength."
Of course, the terrain on the Hill has barely changed (liberal Democrats like Anthony Weiner, Chris Van Hollen, Alan Grayson, Steny Hoyer, and Chuck Schumer make sure it doesn't).
But the President seems determined to push for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement and, when it is sewed up (not this round, I expect), J Street will help Obama put it over. It helps that it is the first pro-peace Jewish group that actually is not underfunded!
]]> This is a strange struggle. The J Street side may win and the United States, Israel and the Palestinians will all be infinitely better off.But, whether it wins or not, the tide is running against the lobby and the traditional "pro-Israel" crowd. (I do not consider the lobby to be pro-Israel because the policies it supports are destructive to Israel).
Major newspaper, mostly dying, are rightwing on Israel. The blogosphere, booming, is indifferent at best. Same with the smart Jewish kids. Ethnic "pride" is not exactly flourishing among the Generation Y'ers. (Jewish Voice For Peace just started up a chapter at Brandeis).
The only hope Israel has to maintain its standing in this country is that Israeli-Palestinian peace is established, and J Street and other left groups win out over AIPAC et al. Otherwise "supporting Israel" will seem even more retro than it is now.
Ask your favorite 24 year old. Only the outliers would even imagine dedicating themselves to a rightwing Israel. Even fewer will when the political wind shifts.
Once the AIPAC stamp of approval is not a career booster, the exodus from AIPAC by ambitious 22-year olds will be a mad rush. (These kids will still take free trips to Israel. Or Russia. Or New Zealand or anywhere they can go for free).
J Street Rules....Or Will Soon.
]]>We at TPM think OpenID has legs. We think many more sites are going to adopt this standard in the coming months and years, so we decided to adopt OpenID as well.
Who owns OpenID? The standard is maintained and advanced by the OpenID foundation, a non-profit organization with hundreds of companies as members.
Is it safe to store a user name and password with OpenID? In a nutshell, we think so. Our OpenID implementation (called MyOpenID) asks for minimal information from you: just a user name, password and email address. It does not ask you for identifying information like first and last name, real-world address, phone numbers or any of that. We have no idea who you are in real life. What's more, we cannot track what you do with your OpenID identity outside TPM. Say you register an OpenID account through us but decide to use it to log into Yahoo. We would have no way of knowing you logged into Yahoo or what you did on that network. Likewise, Yahoo would have absolutely no way of knowing what you do on TPM.
What was wrong with the old TPM-only registration system? The short answer is, maintaining a robust and safe registration system is not easy. It takes a lot of computational resources and geeks to keep the system running well. Our old system, unfortunately, had deteriorated badly and we could not spend the time and money to fix it. So we decided to base our new system on off-the-shelf -- yet secure -- technologies like OpenID and OAuth. We realize the switch caused inconvenience or raised concerns for many of you -- for that we apologize. But in return we built a system that's stable, secure and safe.
]]>He noted he still hasn't been able to end the practice of taxing some hedge fund and private-equity earnings at the capital-gains rates rather than the higher income-tax rates. "The notion that somehow me saying maybe you should be taxed more like your secretary when you're pulling home a billion dollars...a year I don't think is me being extremist or anti-business."
Good as far as he went. But that's as far as he was willing to go. It was a golden opportunity for Obama to connect the dots -- to make the case that
(1) super-rich financiers on Wall Street and top corporate executives have grown even richer than they were before the Great Recession, even though most Americans are getting poorer or losing their jobs and homes and savings, and more Americans are in poverty.
(2) Yet the lobbyists for the financiers and top corporate executives, and their Republican allies have blocked or tried to block every effort of the Administration to widen the circle of prosperity, including enacting a major jobs program, providing major relief for mortgage holders who are under water, helping working families afford college for their kids, making sure states and cities have enough money to pay our classroom teachers, and cutting taxes on average working people.
(3) They almost scuttled the effort to make sure health care would be affordable to average Americans.
(4) The super-rich say the nation can't afford any of this because of budget deficits. Yet at the same time their platoons of lobbyists are fighting off efforts to treat their income as taxable earnings rather than capital gains. So last year the 400 richest families in America, with an average income of $300 million each, were taxed at an average rate of only 17 percent. That's the same tax rate paid by a family earning $30,000.
(5) And they're fighting off efforts to end the temporary Bush tax cuts. If they're successful, the richest 1 percent of Americans will get a windfall of $36 billion next year. Millionaire families will avoid paying $31 billion in taxes. Over ten years, they'd avoid paying $700 billion.
(6) And they're fighting off efforts to restore the estate tax, which only applies to the top 2 percent of Americans, and which has been in effect since Abraham Lincoln introduced it to help finance the Civil War. How do we afford national defense if the richest and most privileged Americans won't pay their fair share?
(7) Wealth and power in this country are so distorted that the top 25 hedge-fund managers each earned an average of $1 billion last year. $1 billion would support 20,000 classroom teachers. Yet who contributes more to this country -- a hedge-fund manager or a teacher?
But he didn't.
Instead, he challenged tea-party activists to come up with specific spending cuts. "It's not enough just to say, 'Get control of spending.' I think it's important for you to say, you know, I'm willing to cut veterans' benefits, or I'm willing to cut Medicare or Social Security benefits, or I'm willing to see taxes go up."
Read the original post here.
]]>I mean the danger that liberal education, beleaguered ideologically and strapped fiscally, is being bought into and bought off by many people who, like Peretz, crave academic prestige and felicity in hopes that it can cleanse their blunders and sins.
A month ago here, I showed how some failed, aging neo-cons and Vulcans have been flocking to Yale for this purpose, cheapening American higher-education's freedoms and accomplishments in the name of the hoary cause of affirming the "relevance" of their star-crossed careers to the "real world."
No one seems to understand or care that 1) Self-righteous condemnations of "bigotry" can end up serving the enemies of academic freedom (Yes, children, such things can happen, as Orwell understood when no one else would); and that 2) Exposing and excoriating the bigotry of people like Peretz often serves to distract attention from racial idiocies of the left that always need to be exposed, from a civic-republican perspective, alongside those on the right - as I showed in at some length, and to some effect, in the 1990s in.... The New Republic.
Barack Obama understood this. Shouldn't we?
'...Marty owned a magazine that pioneered the military and marriage debate that transformed a civil rights movement; or race, where his insistence on airing the really tough issues helped shift the debate, in my view, for the better. TNR's brave pioneering of welfare reform made a huge difference.'
"....Andrew may well be thinking of Peretz' assent to his stewardship of the infamous "Bell Curve" cover questioning the innate intellectual aptitude of African-Americans. He could also be thinking of Ruth Shalit's 1995 story which asserted that affirmative action was degrading the quality of The Washington Post...
But I suspect that Andrew was also thinking about pieces he edited and published that Ta-Nehisi doesn't mention, pieces that said things about race that really did need to be said.
It was a long, hard, slog to persuade the left that something is wrong with racial election districting.
It was a long, hard slot to persuade many on the left that "civil rights activists" such as Al Sharpton were consistent, loathsome misogynists as well political operatives little different from the old white-ethnic backroom bosses.
It was a long, hard slog to explain that black mayors around the country were losing elections to centrist whites like Richard Riordan in Los Angeles, Ed Rendell in Philadelphia, and Richard Daley the Younger in Chicago, even as their electorates became increasingly non-white - because something had gone wrong in racial "rainbow" politics.
It was a long, hard slog to persuade liberal bien-pensants that, just as the murderers of abortion doctors were not just deranged loners but bellwethers of a deeper, darker storm, so, too, were "deranged loners" like Long Island Rail Road gunman Colin Ferguson, who massacred whites on a commuter train in 1993, riding a wave of black demagoguery indulged by powerful people.
And on and on. Let's not now allow our warm bath in progressive goodthink and groupthink about the sorry Peretz to submerge these important points. Let's not let truths that have been told about liberal racism disappear into an Orwellian memory hole.
In writing these and a dozen other pieces, I had many a Trojan Horse experience, as opportunistic neo-cons and some racist conservatives climbed aboard, hoping to ride my remonstrances into the citadel of left-liberal politics on order to discredit and demolish it.
Martin Peretz has become one of these riders as his Jewish nationalism and preternatural insecurities have become the pivot around which his old principles are whirling in an ever-widening gyre.
Moreover, unlike other donors with dubious public records, Peretz has remained intimately involved in the life of Harvard, both personally and via his New Republic, which ran interference for Lawrence Summers throughout his battle to keep the presidency of the university. The irony there is that Peretz wrongly accused Summers' opponents of doing what I righty accuse Peretz's opponents of doing - trying to hang him on 'bigotry' charges alone, when actually both men's offenses against liberal education are more far-reaching.
That is a civic-republican tragedy. Not only shouldn't he be honored at Harvard; he should be asked to leave "his" New Republic, where even his diminished profile as cranky uncle in the cyber-attic harms the magazine's credibility as a sayer of things that need to be said.
In Liberal Racism, I drew myself up and drew some necessary distinctions between what I was doing and what the opportunists and closet racists who applauded me were doing. Anyone who does anything serious in politics always has to do draw such distinctions: Decades ago, democratic, anti-Communist socialists such as Irving Howe and other founders of Dissent had to struggle to distinguish themselves from right-wing anti-Communists.
So it goes; Peretz has long-since forfeited his right to be honored or, indeed, taken seriously, but the same has been true of certain "civil rights leaders" and other once-noble crusaders of every stripe and color. Let's escort them gently off the stage without also rushing to re-write history in order to bury everything they enabled before losing themselves to their ethno-racial or revolutionary delusions. People who neglect to draw such distinctions and to honor what remains to be honored always end up following their targets' sorry examples. Politics, unlike pontificating, demands something better.
On the Palestinian side, reality is a mix between frustration, despair, disunity and betrayal. The Palestinian negotiating team claims to be a legitimate leadership but there is not one functioning institutional body that can claim to be the source of their self-defined legitimacy. This quasi-leadership understands its legitimacy crisis so well that only a few months ago they were forced to cancel legally-required municipal elections out of concern of losing, even though Hamas was boycotting the elections--so much for Palestinian democracy.
The fear is that the Palestinian negotiating team is in their final round in the game of political survival. If these current talks do not reach an agreement--any agreement--the only way for Mahmoud Abbas and his cohorts to remain in office will be by way of the barrel of a gun, similar to how most other Arab states exist today.
However, the Palestinian people are not your average Arab population; they understand that their demise was not served up at the hands of the Palestinian leadership, legitimate or otherwise. First to blame is Israel for its dispossession of Palestinians and what is commonly referred to as military occupation. The 1948 dispossession took place in broad daylight for all to see, although many preferred blindness. Israel was created on the remains--both living and dead--of Palestinians, leaving some 5 million refugees dwelling in squalid refugee camps for over 60 years and many others displaced in their own homeland. It is no wonder that Israel fears for its security.
The military occupation part of Israel's crimes against humanity began in 1967 and is becoming less and less recognizable with every new Israeli settlement and violation of the Fourth Geneva Conventions. International law defines military occupation as a state of affairs which is temporary by nature. After forty-three years it is becoming much harder to classify Israel's occupation as temporary. As a matter of fact, the occupier, Israel, has dumped volumes of professional media spin over the past four decades to convince the world that the lands in question are in fact "disputed" and not militarily occupied. If the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip are not occupied, then what are they? Are the negotiations launched in Washington D.C. aimed at ending an internationally-recognized (and U.S. recognized) military occupation or are they rearranging some other reality which is yet unnamed?
If we view the facts on the ground in Israel-Palestine for what they are today, then only one word applies: apartheid. Realizing this reality as apartheid is not new. President Jimmy Carter referred to it in his recent book title; past Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Israeli Minister of Defense Ehud Barak both spoke the "A" word as being the direction in which Israel is heading.
True, apartheid is best known for its application in South Africa and for its ultimate collapse there. However, the system of apartheid did not stop with its failure, it moved on to be defined in international law for what it was: a crime. The 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defined the crime of apartheid as inhumane acts of a character similar to other crimes against humanity "committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime." If this definition does not reflect what Israel is doing to Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Israel proper, then blindness reigns supreme.
Thus, if these current direct talks are aiming to produce an agreement that ignores or attempts to coexist with the unrelenting, slow-motion, ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that Israel continues to this day, then it will be worthy of merely a few photo-ops that will be forgotten before the negotiating teams return to their respective homes. Even the creative idea floating around of using a failure in the talks to get the UN to admit Palestine as a state--if it does not remove the underlying system of apartheid--would merely be rearranging the legal status to serve the continuation of Israel's crimes against humanity.
The most dignified failure these talks can hope for is that the international community finally come to its senses, preferably with the U.S., and passes a UN resolution with specific punitive actions that identifies the status in Israel-Palestine, all of historic Palestine, for what it is: the crime of apartheid.
Only when the definition of the problem is crystal clear can we formulate an appropriate solution and have renewed faith in the international community's ability to act on what it knows very well to be reality: that Israeli actions over the last six decades have nullified the two-state solution. A new model of co-existence must be envisioned, a model built not on racism, separation and exceptionalism, but on mutual and equal human and civil rights across all of Palestine and Israel.
If the current peace talks surprise the world and result in a true sovereign Palestine, free of Israeli control and domination, then I'd be happy to be mistaken; if not however, it's time for the world to at least call reality for what it is. Anything less is an insult to our collective intelligence.
Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American business consultant living in the Palestinian city of Al-Bireh in the West Bank. He is co-author of HOMELAND: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians (1994).
]]>Not a bad issue for Democrats to run on this fall, or in 2012.
Republicans are hell bent on demanding an extension of the Bush tax cut for their patrons at the top, or else they'll pull the plug on tax cuts for the middle class. This is a gift for the Democrats.
But before this can be a defining election issue in the midterms, Democrats have to bring it to a vote. And they've got to do it in the next few weeks, not wait until a lame-duck session after Election Day.
]]> Plus, they have to stick together (Ben Nelson, are you hearing me? House blue-dogs, do you read me? Peter Orszag, will you get some sense?)Not only is this smart politics. It's smart economics.
The rich spend a far smaller portion of their money than anyone else because, hey, they're rich. That means continuing the Bush tax cut for them wouldn't stimulate much demand or create many jobs.
But it would blow a giant hole in the budget -- $36 billion next year, $700 billion over ten years. Millionaire households would get a windfall of $31 billion next year alone.
And the Republican charge that restoring the Clinton tax rates for the rich would hurt the economy -- because it would reduce the "incentives" of the rich (including the richest small business owners) to create jobs -- is ludicrous.
Under Bill Clinton and his tax rates, the economy roared. It created 22 million jobs.
By contrast, during George Bush's 8 years, commencing with his big 2001 tax cut, the economy created only 8 million jobs. And as the new Census data show, nothing trickled down. In fact, the middle class families did far worse after the Bush tax cut. Between 2001 and 2007 -- even before we were plunged into the Great Recession -- the median wage dropped.
It's an issue that could also be used to expose the giant chasm that's opened between the rich and everyone else -- aided and abetted by Republican policies. As I've noted before, in the late 1970s, the top 1 percent got 9 percent of total national income. By 2007, the top 1 percent got almost a quarter of total national income.
These figures don't even count in taxes. The $1.3 trillion Bush tax cut of 2001 was a huge windfall for people earning over $500,000 a year. They got about 40 percent of its benefits. The Bush tax cut of 2003 was even better for high rollers. Those with net incomes of about $1 million got an average tax cut of $90,000 a year. Yet taxes on the typical middle-income family dropped just $217. Many lower-income families, who still paid payroll taxes, got nothing back at all.
And, again, nothing trickled down.
As I've emphasized, the U.S. economy has suffered mightily from the middle class's lack of purchasing power, while most of the economic gains have gone to the top. (The crisis was masked for years by women moving into paid work, everyone working longer hours, and, more recently, the middle class going into deep debt -- but all those coping mechanisms are now exhausted.) The great challenge ahead is to widen the circle of prosperity so the middle class once again has the capacity to keep the economy going.
In other words, this is the right issue. It's the right time. It allows Democrats to explain what the Bush tax cuts really did, why supply-side economic is bogus, and the economic challenge ahead.
Even if Democrats feel they have to respond to the Republican charge that taxes shouldn't be raised on anyone when the employment rate is 9.6 percent, they have a powerful fallback: Extend the Bush tax cuts for everyone through 2011, then end them for the rich while making them permanent for the middle class.
Get it, Democrats? Please don't blow it this time.
Read the original post here.
]]>2. In a separate report, the Labor Department said real average weekly earnings were unchanged in August from July, as both the average work week and hourly earnings were flat.
3. The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan September reading of consumer confidence shows consumers more pessimistic in September than in August. In fact, consumer sentiment is the lowest since August 2009.
Put the three together and you have what could be a recipe for deflation: Flat consumer prices, weekly earnings, and hours, coupled with increased pessimism about where the economy is heading.
Consumers aren't buying. They're acting rationally. Their debt load is still huge, they're worried about keeping their jobs, they know they have to tighten belts, and they're justifiably worried about the future.
But for the nation as a whole, it spells even more trouble. If consumers hold back even more, prices will start dropping. When and if they do, consumers will hold back even more in anticipation of still lower prices. That means more layoffs and less hiring.
It's a vicious cycle. And once deflation sets in, it's hard to reverse. Just ask Japan.
Read the original post here.
]]>Republicans are being fueled by a so-called "enthusiasm gap" but their biggest worry leading up to the midterms should be the "crackpot gap."
In Delaware, Palin-endorsed tea partier Christine O'Donnell is so far right she's called "delusional" by Delaware's GOP leader. In Kentucky, Palin-favored Rand Paul says the Civil Rights Act of 1964 shouldn't apply to businesses. In Colorado, tea partier Ken Buck talks of getting rid of the 17th amendment, which provides for the direct election of senators. In Nevada, Palin-favored Sharon Angle has called for "2nd Amendment remedies" if Congress doesn't change hands.
]]> Many Americans these days don't like Congress and are cynical about government. The lousy economy has made almost all incumbents targets of the public's anger and anxiety.But if there's one thing Americans like even less it's people pretending to be legitimate politicians whose views are so far removed from those of ordinary Americans that they pose a danger to our system of governance.
In the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, a third of undecided voters had a negative view of the tea party movement. 13 percent of those who said they prefer Republicans to win control of Congress this fall also reported a negative view of the tea-partiers.
The latest CBS poll shows that 40 percent of voters viewed Sarah Palin negatively in August; today, 46 percent do.
When Newt Gingrich, who has all but declared his candidacy for president in 2012, says President Obama exhibits "Kenyan anti-colonial" behavior, and that allowing an Islamic center near New York's Ground Zero is tantamount to permitting Nazi's near the Holocost Museum, he doesn't sound like an ordinary American. He sounds like a hate-mongering crackpot.
We're not dealing with "extremism in defense of liberty," as Barry Goldwater put it in 1964 (and even then, a large majority of Americans decided against him). We're dealing with extremism that defies the principles undergirding our Constitution.
Some Democrats think all this is wonderful because it boosts the odds of Democratic wins, not only in the midterms but also in 2012 when the Republicans put up Palin, Gingrich, or someone equally bizarre. Even voters who are are unenthusiastic about Democrats will be motivated to turn out if they fear that crackpots will otherwise take over our government.
I'm not as sanguine about what's happening. Political discourse in America is important. What candidates say can legitimize hateful or divisive views that would otherwise never see the light of day.
We're in the midst of an ongoing economic emergency that requires clear thinking, intense work, and practical ideas. It also requires that we join together rather than be pushed apart. The loonies who are taking over the GOP pose a real and present danger.
Read the original post here.
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