Is the air going out of the Obama balloon?---
Thinking out loud:
The reason Politicians try so hard to get re-elected is that they would 'hate' to have to make a living under the laws they've passed.
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I was in the six item express lane at the store quietly fuming. Completely ignoring the sign, the woman ahead of me had slipped into the check-out line pushing a cart piled high with groceries. Imagine my delight when the cashier beckoned the woman to come forward looked into the cart and asked sweetly, 'So which six items would you like to buy?'
Wouldn't it be great if that happened more often?
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A man goes to a shrink and says, 'Doctor, my wife is unfaithful to me. Every evening, she goes to Larry's bar and picks up men. In fact, she sleeps with anybody who asks her! I'm going crazy. What do you think I should do?'
'Relax,' says the Doctor, 'take a deep breath and calm down. Now, tell me, exactly where is Larry's bar?'
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John was on his deathbed and gasped pitifully. 'Give me one last request, dear,'he said.
'Of course, John,' his wife said softly.
'Six months after I die,' he said, 'I want you to marry George.'
'But I thought you hated George,' she said.
With his last breath John said, 'I do!'
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This from my State Senator. Interesting information pertaining to "Obamascare." (See 1 below.)
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Harlem Obama supporters were asked if they supported Obama and they said yes. Then they were asked why they did not like McCain and they explained. Then they were told what Obama supported (it was what McCain supported) and they agreed. Even to the point that they liked Sara Palin as Obama's V.P.
See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woBC5b3Ti0M&feature=related
There you have it folks!
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I have been listening to some of the interviews of those protesting all over the country. Obviously some are just ding bats, some are radical and want to destroy what we have and others are thoughtful but have not thought through their commentary because they do not understand economics and cannot reason.
I understand their angst and agree that when executives started making disparate sums, and were paid even more for failure, it would eventually boomerang because it would stick out like a sore thumb. However, that neither justifies what these misguided kids are saying. For many I guess they took the soft curriculum path and too many the wrong college courses, ran up huge debts and now are unqualified to get a job or simply want to complain that they are entitled to a free ride.
Obviously, their educational deficiency began with their public school education as well. You can't build on a weak foundation.
They are directing their comments towards Capitalism and Wall Street when they really have benefited from Capitalism and Wall Street. They should protest against our unresponsive political structure.
Their movement may spread and have some impact but the consequences may not be healthy and could cause knee jerk political reaction. Nancy Pelosi comes to mind as does Sen. Durbin. Two of the dumbest Senators I have ever seen. Time will tell.
Obama and the Democrats helped build the bonfire and it may consume us all before it is over. Russia, Iran et al should be gloating.
When I have the time I will lay out a case for where corporate America went off the track because of having to respond to government regulations and because of needing to avoid them.
See: Journalist 2.0: OccupyDC Emails Show MSM, Dylan Ratigan, Working With Protesters To Craft Message
http://bigjournalism.com/dloesch/2011/10/16/journolist-2-0-occupydc-emails-show-msm-dylan-ratigan-working-with-protesters-to-craft-message/
Come the Revolution?
There are those who believe what is happening is bad for Democrats. I am among them and they are probably correct. However, I suspect this fits right in with Obama's thinking considering his many radical associates like Alinsky etc. (See 2 below.)
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Some cogent editorials and op eds on some topical issues.
There is nothing this nation cannot solve if we pull together, put the nation's broader interests first and have leadership. We lack a leader and have a divider so the prospect of our nation healing itself is unlikely until Obama is sent packing.
A Democracy without solid leadership is a ship without a rudder. That is why our ship of state is floundering.(See 3, 3a and 3b below.)
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Is Netanyahu correct in the deal he made with Hamas? I tend to think not as does Caroline Glick. (See 4 below.)
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Is Obama is our greatest nightmare and/or is Iran's his? (See 5 below.)
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Dick
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1)Some very interesting comments about a law which is trying to take our freedom (of healthcare decisions) away from us:
National Healthcare, ObamaCare, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act(PPACA)- whatever you refer to it as- the historic legislation passed by Congress in 2010 revolutionizing the American health care system is now law.
Or is it?
On September 28th of this year, Georgia joined 25 other states asking the U. S. Supreme Court to rule on the constitutionality of the federal healthcare law that is the cornerstone of President Barack Obama’s administration.
The primary argument that Georgia and the other states are making is that it is unconstitutional for individual citizens to be required by the federal government to have insurance.
Both sides sight Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause, a clause that gives Congress the power to regulate commerce between states.
Opponents of the law say that this requirement exceeds Congress’s power since not having insurance should be up to the individual and in not doing so would be considered inactivity. Defenders of the law say that requiring individuals to buy insurance is within Congress’s power since having or not having health insurance qualifies as activity.
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case during the term it began in late September but its final ruling, which could have obvious political ramifications, is not expected to be issued until after next fall’s Presidential elections.
It is also important to note that the Supreme Court, similar to some lower courts, could find the individual mandate to require insurance unconstitutional but leave other parts of the law in place. While this is somewhat of a common practice of the Supreme Court, it leaves states like Georgia in somewhat of a quandary.
The PPACA is setup to be implemented in increments over a period of years. Some portions of the law, such as requiring insurance policies to cover dependents up to 26 years of age, have already been enacted and are in place today. Other portions will have to be implemented before the Supreme Court ruling or certain actions will be taken by the federal government.
One such example is the health insurance exchange which, while not required to be in place until 2013 after the Supreme Court decision, would require legislation during the 2012 Georgia legislative session if the state decides to establish their own.
An exchange is intended to increase competition and consumer choice among health insurance policies by allowing companies to bid for similar coverage. States can either receive federal funding to begin planning their own exchanges that meet their individual needs or opt not to start their own exchange in which case the federal government will set up the exchange for them.
There are two types of exchanges, one to serve individual consumers (American Health Benefits Exchange, or AHBE) and one to serve small businesses (Small Business Health Options Program, or SHOP). Georgia could design these as separate exchanges or as a consolidated exchange.
This is part of the dilemma that Georgia faces. If we move forward with setting up our own state exchange, it could be construed by some as an endorsement of PPACA by a state that is challenging the law before the Supreme Court.
On the other hand if we don’t set up our own exchange, we face the reality that the federal government will set up an exchange for us. By doing this, we could potentially leave our state’s health insurance markets vulnerable to even more federal interference and disruption.
Over the years, some believe that our state has made great strides in requiring certain mandatory coverage, such as tests for colorectal cancer and mammograms and child wellness services, within our health insurance policies. Would the federal exchange include this mandatory coverage or would they be excluded?
Still others believe that our state has gone too far and eliminating some of these mandatory requirements would yield more affordable health insurance.
Another consideration is that regardless of how the Supreme Court rules, having an exchange where insurance companies are forced to compete on a level playing field would help our citizens and particularly our small businesses.
In response to this very important decision, Governor Nathan Deal created the Georgia Health Insurance Exchange Advisory Committee that has been meeting on this issue and will issue their final report and recommendations in December of this year.
Mandatory health insurance for all- it is the law.
Or is it?
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2)The Revolutionaries' Revenge
By Sally Zelikovsky
The media are mistakenly characterizing the Occupy Wall Street movement as unemployed Millennials with a legitimate gripe against Wall Street consistent with the Tea Party, or as a rag-tag group of unemployed stoners with no coherent message, not to be taken too seriously. After spending hours interviewing protesters in Oakland, California, both characterizations are way off base. If either scenario were apt, these folks would be marching on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and storming Congress. Instead, they're taking on Wall Street and storming the homes of the wealthy and the buildings of large corporations.
It's Mourning in America, friends. Wake up to the fetid smell of Marxism taking over Main Street, intent on crushing Wall Street.
Each person interviewed in Oakland had the same story to tell, and if you listen carefully to the video from the main stream press, it's this: capitalism is the root of all evil.
According to the Occupiers, Big Business has corrupted our government, corporations exploit workers, the rich control everything, the top 1% own somewhere between 30% and 60% of all wealth, the disparity between the rich and the remaining 99% is growing and the property-owning bourgeoisie is responsible for that. The workers need to take control of the means of production and mount a revolution to overthrow capitalism by expropriating property from the bourgeoisie. The workers need to rise up (fist pump), redistribute capital more equitably and establish a Marxist paradise -- slaying the neo-liberalism dragon and enthroning the worker, all in the name of "economic justice."
We can pretend this isn't the case by sticking our heads in the sand, but facts are facts. When thousands say they want to overthrow capitalism and redistribute property, take them at their word, especially when their chants, signs, words, actions, websites and blogs all support that. And when they are as highly-organized, highly-funded, highly-networked, highly-mobilized and highly-motivated as the Wall Street Occupiers are, then we need to be afraid, be very afraid.
How grassroots can this movement be when a simple scroll through the internet reveals that Big Labor and Big Community Organization are openly supporting it, organizing it, taking donations for it and drafting petitions for it? Some of those organizations are MoveOn, SEIU, AFL-CIO, National Nurses United, Working Families Party, Van Jones' Rebuild the Dream, Adbusters, US Day of Rage, Take the Square, October 2011, We are the 99%, Progressive Change Campaign Committee, CREDO and MoveOn's very own Avaaz.org -- the international progenitor of the Arab Spring.
A cornucopia of America's pop culture glitterati have thrust themselves into the midst of the Occupation with calls for revolution from Danny Glover; shouts of solidarity from Van Jones; cheers from Al Gore that OWSers are "pointing out the flaws in our system"; and professions from Michael Moore (whose latest agitprop was presciently entitled "Capitalism: A Love Story") that "There's a shared feeling among people down there that this economic system that we have is unfair."
All of the people interviewed at Occupy Oakland spoke with one voice: we must get rid of the system. And they didn't hold back when probed: the system we must dismantle is capitalism.
It's no coincidence that three of the most progressive members of Congress have thrown their support behind the Occupation. Congressman Keith Ellison cast the issue as one of class warfare -- pitting the "overwhelming majority of Americans" against the "super wealthy." Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky marched-shoulder-to-shoulder with fellow travelers at Occupy Chicago. And, in contrast with her hateful rants about the Tea Party, Nancy Pelosi invoked G-d and blessed the Occupiers while prognosticating that they are going "to be effective."
The most revealing endorsement for the Occupation came from the White House itself, as President Obama expressed sympathy for the protesters who demonstrated a "broad-based frustration about how our financial system [capitalism] works." But the Occupation Revolution cannot come as any surprise to Obama given that he has been fomenting class warfare, redistribution and fundamental change since he happened upon the political scene.
Emails from MoveOn.org have consistently focused on demands for income equality and forcing corporations and the wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes. The Bay of Rage website unabashedly explains that they are "an anti-capitalist initiative" that will "function during this period of austerity" as a "clearing house" for information and action. At the bottom of the home page, the stakes are clearly laid out: "austerity or civil war."
Still don't believe me? From the Bay of Rage website:
This Friday, Oct 14th, the 5th day of Occupy Oakland, an anti-capitalist bloc led the first march out of Oscar Grant Plaza (Frank Ogawa Plaza). A diverse crowd of at least 200 chanted "Fuck the police, we don't need 'em. All we want is total freedom", "Burn the Banks", and " 1, 2, 3, 4 - organize for social war" throughout the demonstration.
From MoveOr.org emails:
They're called "the 99%," because they stand for all of us left behind by the massive concentration of wealth among the richest 1%. The protesters' unrelenting campaign against the corporate takeover of our democracy is being fought in the best traditions of nonviolent resistance.
The signs, placards, and chants focus on standing up for what the protesters are calling "the 99%" of us who are suffering while Wall Street bankers grow richer by the day.
Peruse the sites: references to the Arab Spring, calls for an American Fall (pun intended with all seriousness) and envy for uprisings in Egypt, Greece and London are ubiquitous, as are demands for revolution, resistance and the abolition of capitalism.
Marxist rhetoric plays like a broken record: bourgeoisie, oppressed workers, inequality, redistribution, capitalism and solidarity. Fortunately, MoveOn is there to define for us the "oppressed":
"The 99% protesters represent all of us who are being left behind: union workers, public servants, the poor, the unemployed, seniors, the disabled, young people graduating off a cliff to no jobs."
Does this list truly represent 99% of the US population? If 1% includes millionaires and billionaires, wouldn't the 99% have to include all of those mid-level executives, professionals and small business owners, etc.? Yes. But for purposes of this Marxist Revolution, if you have money in the bank or own property -- be it a hot dog stand or beauty salon -- then you are part of the bourgeoisie. The 99% have lumped bourgeois property owners (who really make up the vast majority of the middle) together with the 1% of millionaires and billionaires. To any rational mind this doesn't make sense, but it doesn't matter. The property, hard work and success of Main Street and the American Dream have been targeted by the so-called 99%.
And just when "social justice" and "capitalist pig" have become part of the American vernacular, we have to acquaint ourselves with new buzz words parroted by Marxist retreads form the 60s and their "useful idiot" Occupiers: "economic justice" is the latest moniker for economic parity among all of G-d's creatures and "neo-liberalism" is the latest in a string of dirty words blaming corporations for just about everything.
None of this is being done in secret. It's all out in the open. We just choose to look the other way.
America has to wake up to this new reality: the Cold War battle between communism and capitalism is back, only this time it's on our front porch. It went underground in the 70s, got an education, put on a suit, bought a house and had a couple of kids. Then it used the schools to educate new foot soldiers and manipulated the pop culture to indoctrinate the next generation of fellow travelers who seek to create a new world order in the image of old world Marxism. Bill Ayers and his allieshave been very busy -- and successful. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, this bona fide fifth column has patiently been marking time, waiting for the right moment to pounce on an oblivious, comfortable middle class, re-cast it as the wealthy ruling class, and take it down with a series of fatal bites to the jugular. Gramsci told Marxists generations ago that they had to take over education and the culture to bring about the revolution. The smart ones listened and acted.
TV personalities like Geraldo Rivera can label this description of the Occupation as "harsh, paranoid or delusional," but I base my conclusions on the up-close-and-personal interviews I conducted at Occupy Oakland.
Pretending this is something different than it is, is a dangerous game. In his Iron Curtain speech, Churchill lamented: "Last time I saw it all coming and I cried aloud to my own fellow-countrymen and to the world, but no one paid any attention."
And in Elie Wiesel's Night, the townspeople were as incredulous as Geraldo in heeding the warnings of Moshe the Beadle, who, left for dead in a Nazi massacre, miraculously found his way home. Although Moshe tried to warn his landsmen about the atrocities he witnessed and knew were destined for them all, "the people not only refused to believe his tales, they refused to listen. Some even insinuated that he only wanted their pity, that he was imagining things. Others flatly said that he had gone mad." Geraldo, America, are you listening?
Think of the suffering and treasure that might have been spared if the comfortable masses had taken seriously the warnings of Churchill or Europe's real Moshes.
I am no Churchill but I admonish my fellow countrymen: don't shrug this off as bunch of unsettled kids. Don't wait for the Iron Curtain of oppression to fall while you go about your daily life, business as usual. It's anything but.
Take a moment to surf the net, attend a MoveOn meeting or talk to a few occupiers. "There's something happening here." "There's battle lines being drawn." "Young people speaking their minds". "A thousand people in the street." We better stop and ask "hey, what's that sound, everybody look what's going down."
It's your country and the Marxists aren't coming -- they're here.
"Working men of all countries, unite!" Marx, 1847
"People of the world unite!" Mao, 1970
"It's time for us to unite. It's time for them to listen. People of the world, rise up on October 15th!" www.15october.net, 2011
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3)ObamaCare Starts to Unravel
The real story behind the Class program failure, and what to do now.
Now that one of ObamaCare's major new benefit programs has been scrapped, liberals are trying to make stone soup by claiming that the Obama Administration merely committed an act of "good government." They claim that when this long-term care insurance program proved to be unworkable, the Administration conceded as much, and now it's gone. So let's review the evidence, not least because it so perfectly illustrates the recklessness that produced the Affordable Care Act.
When Democrats were pasting it together in 2009 and 2010, the immediate attraction of the program known by the acronym Class was that its finances could be gamed to create the illusion that a new entitlement would reduce the deficit. Ending the complicated Class budget gimmick erases the better part of ObamaCare's purported "savings," but it's also worth focusing on the program's long-run political goals.
For decades Democrats have been trying to put government on the hook for middle-class costs like home health services ($1,800 a month on average) and nursing homes ($70,000 to $80,000 per year). On paper, Class was supposed to be like normal insurance, funding benefits through premiums with no subsidy. But since the budget gimmick and the program's larger structure meant that premiums could never cover benefits, Democrats were trying to force a future Congress to prevent a Class bankruptcy using taxpayer dollars.
As the costs to the federal fisc continued to climb, the Democratic gambit was that Class would gradually morph into another part of Medicare. Insurance depends on younger, healthier people signing up to cross-subsidize the older and sicker, but under the Class program as written almost all of its enrollees would soon also be beneficiaries.
So to fix this "adverse selection," the plan was for Congress to eventually make participation mandatory, with the so-called premiums converted into another payroll tax and the benefits into another entitlement. Former White House budget director Peter Orszag has been writing that the long-term care insurance market can't function without a mandate, while HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius declined to rule one out at a Senate hearing in February. Now they tell us.
The only reason the Health and Human Services Department pre-emptively called off this scheme is that former New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg succeeded in inserting a proviso that required the Class program's reality to match Democratic promises as a matter of law. If HHS couldn't provide "an actuarial analysis of the 75-year costs of the program that ensures solvency throughout such 75-year period," it couldn't be legally implemented.
In other words, HHS had to prove that the Class program wouldn't go broke the way it was designed to—and actuarial analysis is a matter of math, not politics. In a 48-page report that HHS submitted to Congress Friday, the department concedes that it is literally impossible to create any kind of long-term care program under the law's statutory text in which revenues match expenditures. Such a plan would cost as much as $3,000 per month, which no one would ever buy.
The HHS gnomes even considered "features deviating from or going beyond a plain reading of the statutory language" that its lawyers didn't think could pass legal muster, and they still couldn't avoid violating the known laws of mathematics despite 19 months of trying. HHS lawyers also said the government would have to warn enrollees that the promised benefits weren't contracts and could be abrogated to "dispel any claims that the Class program had misled the public or had encouraged reliance on its programs under false pretenses."
Those pretenses have been obvious all along, with outside analysts and internal Administration experts saying Class wasn't viable. President Obama was a mask of indifference with no response when Paul Ryan took Class apart at the 2010 White House health summit. Democrats included it anyway, but now that the Administration itself has vindicated its critics, Republicans have a new political opportunity to make real health-care legislative progress.
***
At a minimum the GOP could begin by repealing the Class program altogether, since its legal authority is still intact. "One should never leave a partly loaded gun on the table, even if most of the chambers are empty or just house blanks," writes the American Enterprise Institute's Tom Miller. He also suggests attaching a few of the more destructive provisions and forcing Democrats to defend them, such as Mr. Orszag's Independent Payment Advisory Board of 15 political appointees who have broad unaccountable powers to control health-care markets and health care.
Our suggestion is for a Gregg-like amendment that applies to the entire health law and not simply Class. If reality can't match the rhetoric that accompanied the bill—about fiscal responsibility, bending the cost curve, keeping your health care if you like your health care and all the other false promises—then, legally, it should be repealed like Class. Call it a truth-in-advertising clause. ObamaCare would collapse in a heartbeat.
3a)Three Policies That Gave Us the Jobs Economy
Capital gains tax cuts, deregulation to allow easier investment in growth companies, and the protection of intellectual property created a boom↓
By AMITY SHLAES
Sometimes two separate news events turn out to be related. That's the case with the Wall Street protesters and the extraordinary mourning at the death of Steve Jobs.
Some protesters have praised Jobs as the billionaire who was different—unlike the callous Wall Streeters, he was "beneficial to society." There's a second connection. More than anything else, the Wall Street protesters feel powerless, mere individuals against great banks. Maybe the mourning over the Apple founder is so intense precisely because Jobs gave individuals power. It's hard to think of a gift more empowering than your own personal computer.
Also fueling the grief is a more general suspicion that another Jobs won't come along soon. He was a creature of his times, the late 1970s, the 1980s and 1990s. There wasn't merely Jobs; there was also that economy in which he and other venture-capital recipients operated. Americans fear that the opportunities Jobs enjoyed won't come again.
It's worthwhile therefore to go back and look at what happened in those years, and then to look at how policy changes may have affected innovating firms that received venture capital.
The era didn't start well. The mid-1970s were a dead period. Then suddenly, from 1977 to 1978, new private capital devoted to venture capital increased by 15 times, to $570 million in 1978 from $39 million the year before.
In 1977, public underwritings of firms with a net worth of less than $5 million amounted to a meager $75 million. By 1980 that figure was $822 million, as Michael K. Evans, founder of Chase Econometrics, points out. The venture-capital boom continued down the decades, serving computing, technology, biotech and many other areas.
Over time, what we might call the Jobs Economy led to a jobs economy. In the past quarter-century, Apple and innovative companies like it yielded employment for a whole region, Silicon Valley; an improvement in America's standard of living with the creation of personal computing; and productivity gains throughout the economy.
But what caused this boom? Three policy changes. The first was a tax cut for which this newspaper campaigned.
In the late 1960s, Congress had raised the tax rate on capital gains dramatically, to 49%. The received wisdom behind the increase was that mainly wealthy people realized capital gains, and that, a la Warren Buffett, the wealthy ought to pay a larger share of social programs for lower earners. But venture capital dried up so much that by 1977-78 even the Carter administration nursed doubts about high rates.
Voices advocating a rate cut soon grew louder. The idea found a champion in 40-year-old Rep. William Steiger, whom Time magazine profiled as "a baby-faced Wisconsin Republican who has the gung-ho style of a JayCee president." Time worriedly reminded readers that in Steiger's capital gains tax-cut plan "the benefits go to people with incomes of $100,000 or more"—back then, the rich.
Steiger nonetheless found dozens of co-sponsors. He succeeded in getting Congress to pass the Steiger Amendment, which halved the capital gains rate, to an effective 25%.
Many wealthy people did indeed make more money as a result, including some of those less-lovable billionaires on Wall Street. But they then invested in companies like Apple. The revenues from the rich-man's rate cut were stronger than expected, so the federal government got more money to spend—more money than expected for those social programs.
A second policy change came in pension law. In 1974, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, known as Erisa, codified the common law prudent-man principle by warning pension investors that they might be neglecting their fiduciary responsibilities if they invested in risky projects like Apple. The pension funds and portfolio investors duly stayed away. That changed when the definitions were relaxed later in the 1970s, as Josh Lerner and Paul Alan Gompers have noted in "The Money of Invention." Pension funds could again tell themselves and their clients that they were acting responsibly when they invested in start-ups. The funds began to put more cash into venture capital.
A third factor, and one that ensured the boom would continue, was a law passed in 1980. Sponsored by Sens. Birch Bayh of Indiana and Bob Dole of Kansas, the measure clarified murky intellectual property rights so that universities and professors, especially, knew they owned their own ideas and could sell them. That knowledge gave professors and lab teams an enormous incentive to put to commercial use plans and ideas for inventions that they had long ago shelved in their minds and offices.
To these three advantages one might add a fourth. The advantage of a disadvantage: the poor performance and reduced expectations of the 1970s. New technology (telephones that showed the face of the person you were calling, linked networks of computers) had been around for years, but they languished in those university offices or in museum displays.
The demand for this new technology, frustrated as it was, built and built. It meant that when someone like Jobs finally did deliver a gizmo, his market was a whole impatient generation of would-be gadget handlers, people who were delighted to have new technology and delighted to find new applications for it.
"Personal Computers are Becoming More Useful to Many Investors," wrote Journal editors in wonderment in 1980. It's not inconceivable that similar changes in policy today might yield a similar boom. When it comes to taxes, the 1970s takeaway is that taxes on capital should always be lowered, and dramatically. Cutting a rich man's tax can serve the lowliest citizens.
The second takeaway is that an administration's choices matter when editing, interpreting or enforcing statutes and regulation. The Erisas of today are Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley; subtle clarifications in their rules can affect the overall gross domestic product. A third is that property rights matter; today's Bayh-Dole should be patent reform.
But last of all there's the silver lining to our current cloud. It is that the economic mediocrity of the recent years constitutes someone's advantage. And that someone is young innovators. All this time, demand has once again been building. As soon as the economy feels reliable, people will go out and make the 2015 equivalent of the early PC.
Miss Shlaes, author of the forthcoming "Coolidge" (HarperCollins), joined the George W. Bush Institute this week as director of its economic growth project.
3b)The Exasperation of the Democratic Billionaire Real-estate and newspaper mogul Mortimer Zuckerman voted for Obama but began seeing trouble as soon as the stimulus went into the pockets of municipal unions.
By JAMES FREEMAN
'It's as if he doesn't like people," says real-estate mogul and New York Daily News owner Mortimer Zuckerman of the president of the United States. Barack Obama doesn't seem to care for individuals, elaborates Mr. Zuckerman, though the president enjoys addressing millions of them on television.
The Boston Properties CEO is trying to understand why Mr. Obama has made little effort to build relationships on Capitol Hill or negotiate a bipartisan economic plan. A longtime supporter of the Democratic Party, Mr. Zuckerman wrote in these pages two months ago that the entire business community was "pleading for some kind of adult supervision" in Washington and "desperate for strong leadership." Writing soon after the historic downgrade of U.S. Treasury debt by Standard & Poor's, he wrote, "I long for a triple-A president to run a triple-A country."
His words struck a chord. When I visit Mr. Zuckerman this week in his midtown Manhattan office, he reports that three people approached him at dinner the previous evening to discuss his August op-ed. Among business executives who supported Barack Obama in 2008, he says, "there is enormously widespread anxiety over the political leadership of the country." Mr. Zuckerman reports that among Democrats, "The sense is that the policies of this government have failed. . . . What they say about [Mr. Obama] when he's not in the room, so to speak, is astonishing."
We are sitting on the 18th floor of a skyscraper the day after protesters have marched on the homes of other Manhattan billionaires. It may seem odd that most of the targeted rich people had nothing to do with creating the financial crisis. But as Mr. Zuckerman ponders the Occupy Wall Street movement, he concludes that "the door to it was opened by the Obama administration, going after the 'millionaires and billionaires' as if everybody is a millionaire and a billionaire and they didn't earn it. . . . To fan that flame of populist anger I think is very divisive and very dangerous for this country."
This doesn't mean that Mr. Zuckerman opposes the protesters or questions their motives. When pressed, he concedes that the crowd in Lower Manhattan may include some full-time radicals, but he argues that the protesters are people with a legitimate grievance, as the country suffers high unemployment and stagnant middle-class incomes.
It is a subject he has obviously studied at length, and he explains how the real unemployment rate is actually well above the official level of 9.1%, which only measures people who have applied for a job within the previous four weeks. In fact, he says, unemployment has even surged beyond the Department of Labor's "U-6" number of 16.5% that has received increasing attention lately because it includes people who have given up looking for work within the past year, plus people who have been cut back from full-time employees to part-timers.
Mr. Zuckerman says that when you also consider the labor-force participation rate and the so-called "birth-death series" that measures business starts and failures, the real U.S. unemployment rate is now 20%. His voice rising with equal parts anger and sadness, he exclaims, "That's not America!"
It certainly isn't the America that Mr. Zuckerman discovered when he moved south from Canada to study at Wharton and Harvard Law School, graduating from both in the early 1960s. He reports feeling immediately at home and says he never considered returning "because of the sheer openness and energy of life in America."
The U.S. "has fundamentally great qualities," he says. "It's a society that welcomes talent, nourishes talent, admires talent . . . and rewards talent." But he sees "potentially catastrophic" political and fiscal problems. Mr. Zuckerman reports that when he was a young man, 50% of the top quartile of graduates from Canadian universities moved to the U.S. Now, he says, "I don't want my daughter telling me, 'Dad, I want to move back to Canada because that's the land of opportunity.'"
Mr. Zuckerman's bearish outlook since 2006 has been good for his business. That's when he decided that there was a bubble in commercial real estate and his publicly traded real estate investment trust needed to sell some of its office buildings.
'We've had a strategy in our business of trying to have 'A' assets in 'A' locations. I think we had 126 buildings at that point and we came to the conclusion that 16 of them were either A assets in B locations or B assets in A locations, like 280 Park [Avenue in New York]—it was a great address but not a good building. So we sold. We got through 15 of the 16 and we raised in the range of four and a half billion dollars," he says.
Once the downturn began, that cash pile helped him buy some famous properties at depressed prices, such as the General Motors building in New York and the John Hancock Tower in Boston. But he says his firm is still prepared for possible rough economic times ahead. "We're keeping it very liquid," he says, "because I don't know where this is going."
Mr. Zuckerman maintains that America will solve its problems over the long haul—"I am not somebody who's pessimistic about this country. I have had a life that's been better than my fantasies," he says—but he's certainly pessimistic about the current administration. That began shortly after inauguration day in 2009.
At that time he supported Mr. Obama's call for heavy spending on infrastructure. "But if you look at the make-up of the stimulus program," says Mr. Zuckerman, "roughly half of it went to state and local municipalities, which is in effect to the municipal unions which are at the core of the Democratic Party." He adds that "the Republicans understood this" and it diminished the chances for bipartisan legislating.
Then there was health-care reform: "Eighty percent of the country wanted them to get costs under control, not to extend the coverage. They used all their political capital to extend the coverage. I always had the feeling the country looked at that bill and said, 'Well, he may be doing it because he wants to be a transformational president, but I want to get my costs down!'"
Mr. Zuckerman recalls reports of Mr. Obama consulting various historians on the qualities of a transformational president. "But remember, transformations can go up and they can go down."
Now comes the latest fight over Mr. Obama's jobs plan, which has as its centerpiece a tax increase on the wealthy with obvious populist appeal. Mr. Zuckerman supports raising taxes on the rich but says such a proposal cannot be taken seriously unless it's paired with other measures to grow the economy and restrain deficit spending. He also wonders why, if the president wanted to get a plan enacted, he didn't begin with private bipartisan discussions with House and Senate leaders, instead of another address to a joint session of Congress.
"Even if you want to do this to revive your support in the base, to revive your credibility on the issues of the economy and jobs, which has fallen off the table, this isn't going to accomplish it. Another speech from this guy? The country knows this is just another speech. They understand it almost instantaneously, and his numbers have continued to go down for that reason. What the country wanted was some way of coming up with a solution."
The only solution Mr. Zuckerman sees now to juice the economy "is to broaden the tax base and simplify and lower tax [rates]. To me that will be as close to revenue-neutral as you're going to have so it isn't going to be seen as a budget buster." He views GOP candidate Herman Cain's "9-9-9 plan" as a "little bit simple-minded," but he says that a reform that closes loopholes and reduces compliance costs will stimulate both business and consumer spending.
Mr. Zuckerman sees a need for a cooperative effort like that of President Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Thomas "Tip" O'Neill when they reformed Social Security in 1983. That wasn't a permanent solution, of course, as Social Security needs more significant changes now, but Mr. Zuckerman sees it as a model of bipartisan progress.
Unprompted, he spends much of our discussion reminiscing about the Reagan presidency. Mr. Zuckerman has for years owned U.S. News and World Report, and in 1986 its Moscow correspondent Nicholas Daniloff was seized without warning by the KGB.
Mr. Zuckerman immediately flew to Russia but returned home when Soviet officials refused to release their new prisoner. "I worked in the White House for the next four weeks virtually every day and through that I met Reagan," says Mr. Zuckerman. Reagan secured Mr. Daniloff's release in a swap that included a Soviet spy held in the U.S.
"Reagan surprised me," says Mr. Zuckerman. "He got the point of every argument. . . . He was very decisive. And everybody loved working for him. They followed his lead because they really respected his decisiveness and his instincts."
'I was not a Republican and I was not an admirer of his before I knew him," continues Mr. Zuckerman. "And you know, Harry Truman had a wonderful definition for the presidency. He said the president has to be someone who can persuade the American people to do what they don't want to do and to like it. And that's what you have to do. Somebody like Reagan had that authority. He was liked so much and he had a kind of moral authority. That's what this president has lost."
"Democracy does not work without the right leadership," he says later, "and you can't play politics." The smile inspired by Reagan memories is gone now and Mr. Zuckerman is pounding his circular conference table. "The country has got to come to the conclusion at some point that what you're doing is not just because of an ideology or politics but for the interests of the country."
Mr. Freeman is assistant editor of the Journal's editorial page
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4)A pact signed in Jewish blood
By Caroline B. Glick
At best, Netanyahu comes out of this deal looking like a weak leader. At worst, he comes out as a morally challenged, irresponsible, opportunistic politician
No one denies the long suffering of the Schalit family. Noam and Aviva Schalit and their relatives have endured five years and four months of uninterrupted anguish since their son St.-Sgt. Gilad Schalit was abducted from his army post by Palestinian terrorists and spirited to Gaza in June 2006. Since then, aside from one letter and one videotaped message, they have received no signs of life from their soldier son.
There is not a Jewish household in Israel that doesn't empathize with their suffering. It isn't simply that most Israelis serve in the IDF and expect their children to serve in the IDF.
It isn't just that it could happen to any of our families.
As Jews, the concept of mutual responsibility, that we are all a big family and share a common fate, is ingrained in our collective consciousness. And so, at a deep level, the Schalit family's suffering is our collective suffering.
And yet, and yet, freedom exacts its price. The cause of freedom for the Jewish people as a whole exacts a greater sacrifice from some families than from others.
Sometimes, that sacrifice is made willingly, as in the case of the Netanyahu family. Prof. Benzion and Tzilla Netanyahu raised their three sons to be warriors in the fight for Jewish liberty. And all three of their sons served in an elite commando unit. Their eldest son Yonatan had the privilege of commanding the unit and of leading Israeli commandos in the heroic raid to free Jewish hostages held by the PLO in Entebbe.
There, on July 4, 1976, Yonatan and his family made the ultimate sacrifice for the freedom of the Jewish people. Yonatan was killed in action. His parents and brothers were left to mourn and miss him for the rest of their lives. And yet, the Netanyahu family's sacrifice was a product of a previous decision to fight on the front lines of the war to preserve Jewish freedom.
Sometimes, the sacrifice is made less willingly.
Since Israel allowed the PLO and its terror armies to move their bases from Tunis to Judea, Samaria and Gaza in 1994, nearly 2,000 Israeli families have involuntarily paid the ultimate price for the freedom of the Jewish people. Our freedom angers our Palestinian neighbors so much that they have decided that all Israelis should die.
For instance Ruth Peled, 56, and her 14- month-old granddaughter Sinai Keinan did not volunteer to make the ultimate sacrifice for the freedom of the Jewish people when they were murdered by a Palestinian suicide bomber as they sat in an ice cream parlor in Petah Tikva in May 2002.
And five-year-old Gal Eisenman and her grandmother Noa Alon, 60, weren't planning on giving their lives for the greater good when they, together with five others, were blown to smithereens by Palestinian terrorists in June 2002 while they were waiting for a bus in Jerusalem.
Their mothers and daughters, Chen Keinan and Pnina Eisenman, had not signed up for the prospect of watching their mothers and daughters incinerated before their eyes. They did not volunteer to become bereaved mothers and orphaned daughters simultaneously.
The lives of the victims of Arab terror were stolen from their families simply because they lived and were Jews in Israel. And in the cases of the Keinan, Peled, Alon and Eisenman families, as in thousands of others, the murderers were the direct and indirect beneficiaries of terrorists-for-hostages swaps like the deal that Yonatan Netanyahu's brother, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, made this week with Hamas to secure the release of Gilad Schalit.
The deal that Netanyahu has agreed to is signed with the blood of the past victims and future victims of the terrorists he is letting go. No amount of rationalization by Netanyahu, his cheerleaders in the demented mass media, and by the defeatist, apparently incompetent heads of the Shin Bet, Mossad and IDF can dent the facts.
IT IS a statistical certainty that the release of 1,027 terrorists for Schalit will lead to the murder of untold numbers of Israelis. It has happened every single time that these blood ransoms have been paid. It will happen now.
Untold numbers of Israelis who are now sitting in their succas and celebrating Jewish freedom, who are driving in their cars, who are standing on line at the bank, who are sitting in their nursery school classrooms painting pictures of Torah scrolls for Simhat Torah will be killed for being Jewish while in Israel because Netanyahu has made this deal. The unrelenting pain of their families, left to cope with their absence, will be unimaginable.
This is a simple fact and it is beyond dispute.
It is also beyond dispute that untold numbers of IDF soldiers and officers will be abducted and held hostage. Soldiers now training for war or scrubbing the floors of their barracks, or sitting at a pub with their friends on holiday leave will one day find themselves in a dungeon in Gaza or Sinai or Lebanon undergoing unspeakable mental and physical torture for years. Their families will suffer inhuman agony.
The only thing we don't know about these future victims is their names. But we know what will become of them as surely as we know that night follows day.
Netanyahu has proven once again that taking IDF soldiers hostage is a sure bet for our Palestinian neighbors. They can murder the next batch of Sinais and Gals, Noas and Ruths. They can kill thousands of them. And they can do so knowing all along that all they need to do to win immunity for their killers is kidnap a single IDF soldier.
There is no downside to this situation for those who believe all Jews should die.
In his public statement on the Schalit deal Tuesday night, Netanyahu, like his newfound groupies in the media, invoked the Jewish tradition of pidyon shevuim, or the redemption of captives. But the Talmudic writ is not unconditional. The rabbinic sages were very clear. The ransom to be paid cannot involve the murder of other Jews.
This deal - like its predecessors - is not in line with Jewish tradition. It stands in opposition to Jewish tradition. Even in our darkest hours of powerlessness in the ghettos and the pales of exile, our leaders did not agree to pay for a life with other life. Judaism has always rejected human sacrifice.
The real question here is after five years and four months in which Schalit has been held hostage and two-and-a-half years into Netanyahu's current tenure as prime minister, why has the deal been concluded now? What has changed? The answer is that very little has changed on Netanyahu's part. After assuming office, Netanyahu essentially accepted the contours of the abysmal agreement he has now signed in Jewish blood.
Initially, there was a political rationale for his morally and strategically perverse position.
He had Defense Minister Ehud Barak and the Labor Party to consider.
Supporting this deal was one of the many abject prices that Netanyahu was expected to pay to keep Labor and Barak in his coalition.
But this rationale ended with Barak's resignation from the Labor Party in January.
Since then, Barak and his colleagues who joined him in leaving Labor have had no political leverage over Netanyahu.
They have nowhere to go. Their political life is wholly dependent on their membership in Netanyahu's government. He doesn't need to pay any price for their loyalty.
So Netanyahu's decision to sign the deal with Hamas lacks any political rationale.
WHAT HAS really changed since the deal was first put on the table two years ago is Hamas's position. Since the Syrian people began to rise up against the regime of Hamas's patron and protector President Bashar Assad, Hamas's leaders, who have been headquartered in Syria since 1998, have been looking for a way to leave. Their Muslim Brotherhood brethren are leading forces in the Western-backed Syrian opposition.
Hamas's leaders do not want to be identified with the Brotherhood's oppressor.
With the Egyptian military junta now openly massacring Christians, and with the Muslim Brotherhood rapidly becoming the dominant political force in the country, Egypt has become a far more suitable home for Hamas.
But for the past several months, Hamas leaders in Damascus have faced a dilemma. If they stay in Syria, they lose credibility. If they leave, they expose themselves to Israel.
According to Channel 2, in exchange for Schalit, beyond releasing a thousand murderers, Netanyahu agreed to give safe passage to Hamas's leaders decamping to Egypt.
What this means is that this deal is even worse for Israel than it looks on the surface.
Not only is Israel guaranteeing a reinvigoration of the Palestinian terror war against its civilians by freeing the most experienced terrorists in Palestinian society, and doing so at a time when the terror war itself is gradually escalating. Israel is squandering the opportunity to either decapitate Hamas by killing its leaders in transit, or to weaken the group by forcing its leaders to go down with Assad in Syria.
At best, Netanyahu comes out of this deal looking like a weak leader who is manipulated by and beholden to Israel's radical, surrender-crazed media. To their eternal shame, the media have been waging a five-year campaign to force Israel's leaders to capitulate to Hamas.
At worst, this deal exposes Netanyahu as a morally challenged, strategically irresponsible and foolish, opportunistic politician.
What Israel needs is a leader with the courage of one writer's convictions. Back in 1995, that writer wrote: "The release of convicted terrorists before they have served their full sentences seems like an easy and tempting way of defusing blackmail situations in which innocent people may lose their lives, but its utility is momentary at best.
"Prisoner releases only embolden terrorists by giving them the feeling that even if they are caught, their punishment will be brief. Worse, by leading terrorists to think such demands are likely to be met, they encourage precisely the terrorist blackmail they are supposed to defuse."
The writer of those lines was then-opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu wrote those lines in his book, Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorists.
Israel needs that Netanyahu to lead it. But in the face of the current Netanyahu's abject surrender to terrorism, apparently he is gone.
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5)Obama's worst nightmare
By John Hughes
What would be the mother of all nightmares for Barack Obama before next year's presidential election? A nuclear-armed Iran.
President Obama has declared he will not allow Iran to develop a nuclear-weapons capability. But his options are limited.
A strike against Iran's nuclear installations? That would mean starting another war in the midst of the US election campaign. Unlikely.
Dissuade Israel from striking Iran — an attack that would necessarily involve US moral and practical support during campaign season? For Israel, a nuclear-armed Tehran is a death sentence. So reining in Israel is also unlikely.
Accepting the reality of an Iran with nuclear weapons, but publicly warning Tehran against using them? Possible, but dangerously weak-looking for a president up for reelection who promised not to let this happen.
I hope someone in the White House is working on this. I hope Iran is not able to do it.
Iran may have overcome the problem of the "Stuxnet worm," planted, probably by Israel, to cause its uranium-enriching centrifuges to run wild. Iranian nuclear scientists may have substantially accelerated their ability to make a type of nuclear fuel enabling them to produce bomb-grade material in a hurry. William Hague, the British foreign minister, speculated recently that when Iran has accumulated enough uranium enriched to the 20 percent level, it would take "only two or three months to convert this into weapons-grade material."
What better time for Iran to produce a nuclear weapon than the middle of the US presidential campaign, when the American president is hobbled in his options?
Could Iran be so foolishly provocative? Reason would say no. But can we count on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Mad Hatter of Iranian politics, currently embroiled in a shoving match with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei for power, to be rational?
Endless American and European negotiations with Iran to halt its suspected race to acquire nuclear weapons have gone nowhere. Tougher sanctions have caused some Iranian discomfort but no cessation of nuclear development.
Russia has proposed a new approach, but it involves no tougher sanctions and is unlikely to be fruitful. Russia has major economic interests in Iran. Indeed, the Russian plan curtails sanctions to reward Iran if it addresses international concerns about its nuclear program.
For a regime that seeks to impose its will on the Islamic world, Iran's leaders must be in a calculating mode. Iran is a lingering autocracy in the midst of upheaval in the Arab world. It is estranged from many of its own people, whose protest Green Movement may be dormant but not dead.
Syria, its most important ally, may be lost as a platform for projecting support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in Gaza. Iran is reportedly helping Syria repress social media networks and put down opposition demonstrations, but the outcome is uncertain.
As it takes stock of its role in the Islamic world, the Iranian regime must ponder how its friends and enemies in the region would react to its possession of nuclear weaponry. Saudi Arabia would be appalled and probably seek nuclear weapons itself. Syria, which has sought to develop a nuclear program, would presumably laud Iran as long as Bashar al-Assad's regime stays in control. An unfortunate consequence could be nuclear proliferation in the Middle East.
Although many Muslims deplore much about the Iranian regime, a surprising number, both inside and outside Iran, might laud a nuclear breakthrough. I remember how many strongly anticommunist Chinese throughout Southeast Asiacelebrated when Communist China joined the nuclear-weapons club. They were not celebrating communism. They were celebrating Chinese prowess.
Some Muslims might react similarly.
With the exception of his gutsy decision to take out Osama bin Laden, Obama — fairly or unfairly — has gained a reputation for being weak-kneed in foreign affairs. He should send a confidential message to Iran's leaders that he would react strongly in the event of an election-eve Iranian nuclear surprise. That way, he keeps his options open and Iran on notice
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