Cars Do Not Kill- Drunks Driving Them Do!

Ne'eman on the Israeli election and The Labor Party's long term prospects of helping to close Israel's social gap.

What I find disheartening is that capitalism is blamed for far too many ills. Cars do not kill, drunks driving them do. Even capitalism in the hands of drunken politicians (read quest for power) can be dangerous. (See 1 below.)

Tomorrow will be a monumental day as our nation lurches further to the left in all probability. The lead editorial of The Wall Street Journal pretty much sets forth the case for the leap we are about to take.

It seems clear to me regardless of who wins, two things are assured:

a) The cost of living will rise. Goods and services will cost more and eventually the return of inflation will erode one's buying power. Longer term the dollar should continue to lose value as federal deficits mount.

b) The government will grow and its cost will be paid for through higher taxes and diminished benefits - retirement stretched, etc..

I find it ironic when liberals recoil at the fear of having their privacy scrutinized in order to protect our nation yet, are non-plus when government takes more of the fruit of their hard work. They seem not to equate increased taxation as a restraint on their freedom of economic choice.

Most Americans cannot perceive weaning themselves off government's endless udders and thus government will grow in an amoebic fashion and will continue to intrude upon a more regulated private sector. The consequence will be less competitiveness and increased inefficiency. As the ranks of those who benefit from government largess grows they will have no incentive to restrain the growth of government. Initially for the wealth transferees it will be a free lunch but eventually they too will be presented a painful bill.

We will surely have a broader health care system, government pressure on drug pricing will melt drug company profitability and thus reduced spending on research seems inevitable. Consequently, perhaps fewer medical breakthroughs. Life expectancy in our country has already leveled off and we no longer lead in the reduced mortality category.

Secondary education should continue to be mangled as it gets caught in a vise between excessive government regulatory authority and the demand for more funding which will be unavailable.

Hard to tell how the military comes out but I suspect the Pentagon will experience some lean years as program after program is stretched and/or canceled. The result - concomitant higher procurement costs for a smaller number of baubles.

An Obama Administration should prove fascinating as it unfolds because if he is to succeed he will do so by renouncing most of what he campaigned on to get elected and the question is whether Pelosi, Reid, unions and Obama's various constituents will stand idle.

In the unlikely case McCain wins he won't have much of a chance at accomplishing anything so he will spend four years compromising with a Congress controlled by those in opposition to his campaign promises unless a radical Congressional shift takes place in the last two years of his term.

Most presidents find events generally drive them in directions they neither foresaw nor could predict. This was true of Kennedy's short lived time in office. Johnson was overwhelmed and chose not to seek a second term. Carter was crippled from the git go. Reagan rode fairly high in the saddle during his first term but the horse pretty much took over in his second term. Bush elder came through the Gulf War smelling like a rose but moved his lips. Clinton was tracking nicely but then could not control his appetite for the opposite sex. GW had the wind at his back after 9/11 but poor appointments, inability to resolve the inner conflict between the views of Powell and Cheney-Rumsfeld, his own inarticulateness and mishandling of the Iraq War, post the initial military victory, and the more recent economic crash has now become his epitaph.

So we shall probably elect an audacious person, keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best - and so it goes in Disney East! (See 2 below.)

Dick


1) 2009 Elections – Labor to the Opposition
By Yisrael Ne'eman

After the failure of Kadima faction Chairwoman Tsipi Livni's attempts at building a coalition to replace Ehud Olmert's government it is imperative that elections be called. It is expected that Feb. 10, 2009 will be the date. But of course electioneering has already begun. It is not only a question of which party will gain the most seats of the 120 in the Knesset up for grabs but who will form the coalition.

According to the recent polls Linvi's Kadima is leading former PM Benyamin Netanyahu's Likud by a few percentage points. Together they grab close to 60 seats and would need the support of one more political party to form a coalition. Should this remain the case the choice will come down to two, either the leftist Labor Party led by the present defense minister Ehud Barak or the Yisrael Beitainu faction led by Avigdor Leiberman.

The latter is considered quite to the right and has often been labeled a "racist". He advocates a territorial compromise with the Palestinian Authority based on geographical regions of Jewish and Arab residency, meaning that he would annex areas of Jewish development in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) in return for handing over Israeli-Arab population centers bordering the West Bank. He sees demography as an extremely important aspect in nation state development and stability. He further believes most Israeli Arabs and especially their leadership to be anti-Israel, anti-Jewish and a threat to the continued existence of the Jewish State. He does not mince words and often accuses them of betraying the State of Israel whether from the Knesset podium, in interviews or just off the cuff. Yisrael Beitainu is expected to get close to ten seats and could certainly be a member of a right of center, secular government not to include the National Religious Party/National Union, or the haredi (ultra-orthodox) Ashkenazi United Torah Judaism or Sepharedi Shas whose coalition demands are often considered less legitimate by the general non-religious public.

Labor (19 seats at present) is expected to obtain only eleven mandates in what would be a crushing defeat. Should they join such a coalition in place of Yisrael Beitainu the government would shift towards the center while Barak and a few others would become ministers. But Labor influence would be minimal since the Likud and Kadima support virtually identical economic capital incentive programs (yes, Netanyahu is speaking about state sponsored industrial and infrastructure development) being that Kadima is a split off from the Likud and in the economic sphere both see themselves as following their ideological founder Zeev Jabotinsky.

Many Laborites erroneously believe they need to be in government to ensure "the peace process". They need to be reminded that hard line Likud PM Menachem Begin signed a peace agreement with Egypt including the Framework for Peace in the Middle East in 1979 and withdrew from the entire Sinai Peninsula as a result. In 1998 Netanyahu himself signed the Wye Accords with Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasir Arafat thereby agreeing to relinquish another 14% or so of the West Bank to the Palestinians. Such a right of center government does not need Labor to make peace. Israel (including most in the Likud) wants a two-state solution and if a Palestinian partner with the desire and ability to enforce such an arrangement agrees, Labor can have the great honor of supporting the government from the opposition benches. They did so in 1979 when Begin was PM and they can do so again. Labor is of no use in the next government.

Labor can best serve the state, the people and their own bygone ideology by leading the opposition and building a social democratic faction like those in Europe. That means dumping the capitalist Ehud Barak as party chairman. Labor should lead the charge to ensure workers' rights (which was began last year by assuring a pension for all workers), constructing an alternative program of state capital investment in water, transport and energy infrastructure while planning and funding educational development in our high schools and universities. The grand old party of the Left which routinely gained between 40 – 50 seats in the Knesset until the 1996 elections, will need to regroup its strength in the opposition for four years. Having betrayed their ideals while seeking power for the sake of power, both ideals and public support were lost.

After a stint in the opposition for four years or less, Israel might actually have a social democratic alternative to the present capitalist economic policies which have awarded us one of the largest social gaps in the Western world. By heading back to basics Labor can rebuild their strength and return to the principles of social justice which were so significant in building the modern Jewish State. Should the job be done correctly Labor could triple its 10% popular support in less than a decade.

2)Leap of Hope
Sometimes the gambles pay off, sometimes they don't.
Every vote for a non-incumbent Presidential candidate is in some sense a risk, given the power and complications of the job. But in both his lack of experience and the contradictions between his rhetoric and his agenda, Barack Obama presents a particular leap of hope. It is a sign of how fed up Americans are with Republicans that millions are ready to take that leap even in dangerous times.

To his supporters, such as Colin Powell, the first-term Senator has the chance to be "transformational," the kind of gauzy concept that testifies to Mr. Obama's unusual appeal. His candidacy is certainly historic, and that isn't simply a reference to his Kenyan father and American mother. One secret to Mr. Obama's success is how little his campaign has been marked by race, at least not by the traditional politics of racial grievance. He has run instead on a rhetorical theme of national unity, a shrewd appeal to voters weary of the polarizing debate over Iraq and the Bush Presidency.
[Review & Outlook] Getty Images

Mr. Obama has also understood the political moment better than his opponents in either party. In the primaries, he used his inexperience to advantage by offering himself as a liberal alternative to what seemed like an inevitable, and dispiriting, Clinton replay. He then turned around in the general election to project sober reassurance amid the financial crisis, which was the moment when his poll numbers began to climb above the margin of error against John McCain. His coolness reflects what seems to be a first-class temperament. And while community organizing may not be much of a credential for the Presidency, Mr. Obama's ability to organize a campaign speaks well of his potential to manage a government.

None of this changes the fact that voters still know remarkably little about a man who is less than four years out of the Illinois state Senate. While he has already written two autobiographies, there are significant gaps in Mr. Obama's political resume. The nature of his relationship with onetime friend and political contributor Tony Rezko, a convicted felon, or with radicals Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright, not to mention Acorn, remains ambiguous or contradictory.

They were all early supporters or mentors, yet during this campaign Mr. Obama has eventually disavowed each one. This is perhaps testimony to a ruthless pragmatism, or maybe opportunism, but what do those relationships say about what he really believes? He is fortunate the media have been so incurious about them -- as opposed, say, to Sarah Palin's Wasilla church or Joe Wurzelbacher's plumbing business.

More importantly, it remains unclear how Mr. Obama intends to govern. As a political candidate, he has presented himself as a consensus-oriented bridge-builder. But for all his talk about reaching across the aisle, we can think of no major issue where he has disagreed with his party's dominant interest groups or broken with liberal orthodoxy. Not one. The main example he cites -- "ethics reform" -- is the kind of trivial Beltway compromise that changes nothing about the way Washington works.

Unlike Newark Democratic Mayor Cory Booker, Mr. Obama opposes school vouchers and would water down the accountability provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act. Unlike Bill Clinton, Mr. Obama is ambivalent at best about free trade. His promise to abrogate the North American Free Trade Agreement, if Canada and Mexico refuse to bargain, is a more breathtaking case of U.S. "unilateralism" than anything Mr. Bush has done. Nafta is a 15-year old pact enacted by a Democratic Congress and President. The Kyoto Protocol had never even been submitted to the Senate when Mr. Bush refused to support it.

If he is elected, Mr. Obama would immediately face the same kind of large, liberal Democratic majority on Capitol Hill that did so much to ruin Jimmy Carter and the first two years of the Clinton Presidency. Is there anything its liberal barons want that he'd oppose? He hasn't said so. On the contrary, Mr. Obama's voting record and agenda suggest that the "transformation" he may have in mind is a return to the pre-Reagan era of government expansion and liberal ascendancy.

Amid a recession, with the mortgage market already nationalized and the banking industry partly so, the next President needs to draw some lines against further politicization of our economy. Perhaps Mr. Obama will surprise by appointing Paul Volcker as his Treasury Secretary, or postponing his tax increases with the economy in distress. But those are further leaps of hope with little evidence of pragmatism to back them up.

On national security, Mr. Obama is an even greater man of mystery. Perhaps once in office he will take the course of prudent realism. He can certainly sound hawkish when he wants to, advocating unilateral military strikes inside Pakistan and promising the kind of open-ended commitment to the Afghan conflict that he claims we can't afford or sustain in Iraq. Yet he ran irresponsibly against the surge in Iraq and now has his lucky stars to thank that Mr. McCain prevailed in that debate, so Mr. Obama would inherit a far more stable Middle East. His belief that diplomacy can stop Tehran's nuclear ambitions is also naive, and we suspect would be shown to be so early in his Administration with an Iranian nuclear declaration, if not a test.

As Joe Biden recently said, an Obama Presidency would invite challenges from enemies who would tread more cautiously against a President McCain. Perhaps Mr. Obama will evolve into a Truman, or perhaps he'll prove merely to be another Jimmy Carter. Unlike Mr. McCain, he'll be making it up as he goes.

Perhaps this is the kind of leadership the American people want after the Presidential certitudes of the Bush years. Americans certainly are eager for fresh start, and it is typical of periods of economic panic that they may even be willing to reach for the kind of alluring but untested appeal that so marks Mr. Obama. Sometimes these gambles pay off, and sometimes they don't.