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America's Eva Peron? You decide.(See 1 below.)
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The Fed has an major advantage over states and citizens - they can print money. This money pays for excessive spending by politicians who refuse to exercise restraint, because, by doing so, they buy votes of constituencies with your and your children's future, and/or they philosophically believe by spending on government transfer of wealth programs they are making our nation secure and doing the work of God.
Consequences of this unabridged spending and money printing is inflation. This inflation is leading to the destruction of our currency and erosion of our buying power. Eventually, is history mean anything, it could end in riots, the unwillingness on the part of our creditors (read Chinese etc) to refuse funding our excessive spending, and for sure, the lowering of our standard of living. This is the historical consequence of excessive spending which ultimately saps productivity, destroys the character, morality and vitality of a nation's peoples because it has a loop feed back effect.
This is the evil consequence of ' NBF/F's' policies and this is why I am am unalterably opposed to him and them. Trees do not grow to the sky. Their root structure cannot sustain them and the higher they grow the more vulnerable they become to even milder breezes. We are about there and even this great Republic is vulnerable to nature and the principles of physics.(See 2 below.)
And what if any are the market implications? (See 2a below.)
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As I have often stated education is the way out of the trap of government policies. (See 3 below.)
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Obama's peace plan may come at a very high price but then he believes in everything that costs a lot. (See 4 below.)
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Islamism continues to win. (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1) 1)Michelle Obama and the Evolution of a First Lady
Damon Winter/The New York Times
Michelle Obama has been an anxious spouse, eager to help President Obama succeed.
By JODI KANTOR
In the days after the Democrats lost Edward Kennedy’s Senate seat in January 2010, Barack Obama was even-keeled as usual in meetings, refusing to dwell on the failure or lash out at his staff. The first lady, however, could not fathom how the White House had allowed the crucial seat, needed to help pass the president’s health care legislation and the rest of his agenda, to slip away, several current and former aides said.
To her, the loss was more evidence of what she had been saying for a long time: Mr. Obama’s advisers were too insular and not strategic enough. She cherished the idea of her husband as a transformational figure, but thanks in part to the health care deals the administration had cut, many voters were beginning to view him as an ordinary politician.
The first lady never confronted the advisers directly — that was not her way — but they found out about her displeasure from the president. “She feels as if our rudder isn’t set right,” Mr. Obama confided, according to aides.
Rahm Emanuel, then chief of staff, repeated the first lady’s criticisms to colleagues with indignation, according to three of them. Mr. Emanuel, in a brief interview, denied that he had grown frustrated with Mrs. Obama, but other advisers described a grim situation: a president whose agenda had hit the rocks, a first lady who disapproved of the turn the White House had taken, and a chief of staff who chafed against her influence.
The Michelle Obama of January 2012 is an expert motivator and charmer, a champion of safe causes like helping military families and ending childhood obesity, an increasingly canny political player eager to pour her popularity into her husband’s re-election campaign. But interviews with more than 30 current and former aides, as well as some of the first couple’s closest friends, conducted for “The Obamas,” a new book, show that she has been an unrecognized force in her husband’s administration and that her story has been one first of struggle, then turnaround and greater fulfillment.
Mrs. Obama is a supportive but often anxious spouse, suspicious of conventional political thinking, a groundbreaking figure who has acutely felt the pressures and possibilities of being the first African-American in her position and a first lady who has worked to make her role more meaningful.
Initially, she had considered postponing her move to the White House for months; after arriving, she bristled at its confinements and obligations — unable to walk her dog without risking being photographed, and monitored by her husband’s aides for everything from how she decorated the family’s private quarters to whether she took makeup artists on overseas trips.
New to the ways of Washington but impassioned about what her husband had been elected to do, she saw herself as a guardian of values. She was sometimes harder on her husband’s team than he was, eventually urging him to replace them, and the tensions grew so severe that one top adviser erupted in a meeting in 2010, cursing the absent first lady.
“She has very much got his back,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s longtime strategist, in an interview. “When she thinks things have been mishandled or when things are off the track,” he continued, “she’ll raise it, because she’s hugely invested in him and has a sense of how hard he’s working, and wants to make sure everybody is doing their work properly.”
Mrs. Obama’s difficulties illuminate some of the president’s central challenges in the White House, including how the Obamas’ freshness to political life, a selling point in 2008, became a liability in office. Her worries about his staff point to a chief executive with little management experience who clung to an inner circle less united than it appeared. (Mr. Emanuel’s relationship with the president grew so strained that the chief of staff secretly offered to resign in early 2010; Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, had a tense relationship with Mrs. Obama and with Valerie Jarrett, another adviser). She shared the president’s ambivalence about political chores and the back-patting and schmoozing that can help get things done in Washington.
Like many of the president’s supporters, Mrs. Obama was anxious about the gap between her vision of her husband’s presidency and the reality of what he could deliver. Her strains with the advisers were part of a continuing debate over what sort of president Mr. Obama should be, with Mrs. Obama reinforcing his instincts for ambitious but unpopular initiatives like the overhaul of health care and immigration laws, casting herself as a foil to aides more intent on preserving Congressional seats and poll numbers.
“She does think there are worse things than losing an election,” Susan S. Sher, the first lady’s former chief of staff, said shortly after the 2010 midterm elections. “Being true to yourself, for her, is definitely more important.” Back then, Mrs. Obama sometimes talked about what would happen if her husband lost in 2012. “I know we’ll be fine,” she told Ms. Sher.
Deep Frustrations
As Michelle Obama realized over the summer and fall of 2008 that she was likely to become first lady, she asked a question that probably would have surprised outsiders: could she and her children delay moving to the White House? Perhaps it was better, she told aides and friends, to remain in Chicago until the end of the school year, giving her children more time to adjust, rather than coming right at the inauguration. Her notion, though short-lived, was telling: she didn’t understand or care what sort of message it would send to a public enthralled by the new first family, and she had trepidations about life in the spotlight, let alone the prospect of residing in a monument-museum-office-military compound-terrorist target-home.
She ultimately decided to go to Washington immediately, not because of the obligations of office, but because of “wanting her family to be together,” Ms. Jarrett said.
Even as Mrs. Obama dazzled Americans with her warmth, glamour and hospitality early in the presidency, she was also deeply frustrated and insecure about her place in the White House, said aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity, out of concern about discussing internal strife.
The first couple declined to be interviewed.
A Harvard-trained lawyer, she had given up her career for what initially seemed to her a shapeless post, and she tried to wriggle out of some ceremonial events that she saw as not having much purpose, including the annual luncheon for Congressional spouses held by the first lady since 1912. She tried to limit her public exposure, saying she would work only two days a week; inside the White House, the difficulty of getting Mrs. Obama to agree to doing an event became a running joke.
The confinement of the White House was also a shock; suddenly she was cut off from her old life and rituals, and she hesitated even to take her daughters to school or some soccer games for fear of causing a fuss. The family had intended to return to Chicago frequently, but their first attempt was so complicated — their brick-front home was shrouded in black curtains to foil snipers, and because they couldn’t just buy groceries anymore, Navy stewards fed them in their own home — they seldom returned. While the president found Camp David artificial and cut off, the first lady loved it because she could roam free of prying photographers.
“I don’t think any of us contemplated how isolating this whole experience would be,” Dr. Eric Whitaker, a close friend from Chicago, said in an interview. “I don’t think this is a fun part about being the first family for any of them.”
Mrs. Obama often found herself caught in an internal debate about how the Obamas should look and live, travel and entertain. As the first African-American first lady, she wanted everything to be flawless and sophisticated; she felt “everyone was waiting for a black woman to make a mistake,” a former aide said.
But her husband’s advisers — in particular, Mr. Gibbs — were worried that the White House might appear oblivious to public anger about joblessness, banker bailouts and bonuses. The result was constant, anxious give-and-take between the East and West Wings about vacations, décor, entertainment, even matters as small as whether to announce the hiring of a new florist.
“We all have watched what happens when people get caricatured,” Mr. Gibbs said in an interview, explaining why he policed such personal matters. With a mistake like John Edwards’s $400 haircut in 2007, “there’s no way to correct that.” Other aides said there was a reason Mr. Gibbs became the main enforcer of the rules of political life: because Mr. Obama, all too aware that his wife never wanted that life, would not.
For all of the first lady’s newness, she was quick to identify problems. From the start she worried that the White House was not presenting a clear, compelling story of the president’s actions to the public, a former aide said. She also told her own advisers that she wanted a more central role in communicating the administration’s message; the West Wing failed to consider how she fit in with her husband’s broader narrative, she protested.
She particularly wanted to help sell the health care overhaul in spring 2009. “Figure out how to use me effectively,” she told her aides. “This is my priority.” But West Wing advisers, recalling the public resentment of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s involvement in health care as first lady, mostly declined her offer.
Mr. Emanuel, who told colleagues that his battles as a staffer with Mrs. Clinton back then had taught him to steer clear of first ladies, mostly avoided Mrs. Obama. The tense relationship between the East and West Wings remained a muted matter, but the strains eventually became deep enough that the first lady’s team held a retreat in the winter of 2010 to discuss the problem. Ms. Jarrett, a senior adviser to the president, served as an envoy and tried to smooth relations. But Ms. Jarrett’s mix of roles — she had her own West Wing portfolio, acted as Michelle Obama’s advocate, and was so close to the Obamas that she vacationed with them — created its own tensions.
That summer, in exchange for a key vote on an energy bill, Mr. Emanuel, without asking the first lady’s permission, promised Allen Boyd, a Florida congressman, that she would appear at an event. Annoyed, she attended the event, but registered her broader disapproval by refusing to commit to campaigning for the midterms. She eventually withheld agreement for nearly a year, according to former East and West Wing advisers. Instead she focused on an agenda of her own.
Her reluctance to campaign left Mr. Emanuel incredulous, according to two aides: The elections were already looking like a potential bloodbath, and the White House was going to face them without the president’s popular spouse?
Stuck on the Sidelines
Michelle Obama never wanted to be the kind of first lady who interfered with West Wing business, she told her aides. It was her husband’s administration, not hers, she sometimes said. She had little appetite or expertise for policy detail, and she knew the history of first ladies —like Nancy Reagan and Mrs. Clinton — who had been deemed meddlers, unelected figures who wielded unearned power.
And yet as the administration hit obstacle after obstacle in 2010 —Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts, a health care law that squeaked through Congress yet remained unpopular, the Gulf oil spill and the approach of the midterm elections — Mrs. Obama became increasingly concerned.
Later Mr. Emanuel would glide into the Chicago mayor’s office, partly on the basis of his strong ties to Mr. Obama, but by a year into the administration, his relationship with the president had grown strained. While he relied heavily on Mr. Emanuel, especially in dealing with Congress, Mr. Obama told advisers that he had concerns about his chief of staff’s overall management and planning skills, along with his outbursts toward staff members. Mr. Emanuel openly said that he thought the health care overhaul had been a bad idea, and after accounts of his views began to surface in the news media in early 2010, he went into the Oval Office and offered his resignation to Mr. Obama, according to several colleagues.
The chief of staff “understood that the stories were an embarrassment and felt like he owed it to him to offer his resignation,” Mr. Axelrod said. The president declined to accept it, telling Mr. Emanuel that his punishment was to stay and push through the health care measure, according to Mr. Axelrod and others. Mr. Emanuel declined to comment on the matter.
But that spring, Mrs. Obama made it clear that she thought her husband needed a new team, according to her aides. When the president decided to deliver a lofty speech about overhauling immigration laws in June 2010, even though there was no legislation on the table and the effort could hurt vulnerable Democrats, Mr. Emanuel objected. Aides did not produce the speech he wanted and the president stayed up much of the night rewriting — but the address drew a flat reception. Mr. Obama was irritated, two advisers said, and told Ms. Jarrett to keep an eye on other top staff members to make sure that they delivered what he wanted.
Several West Wing aides said they had heard secondhand that Mrs. Obama was angry about the incident. Later, they said they wondered: was the president using his wife to convey what he felt?
In September 2010, after a summer of infighting throughout the West Wing, things finally exploded.
Early on Sept. 16, Robert Gibbs was scanning the news when a story stopped him short: according to a new French book, Michelle Obama had told Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the French first lady, that living in the White House was “hell.” It was a potential disaster — the equivalent of the $400 haircut, Mr. Gibbs feared, coming just weeks before election day and on the heels of a vacation in Spain that had drawn accusations of lavish spending.
Mr. Gibbs asked her aides to find out if she had said anything even close (no, the answer came back), and then fought the story back for hours, having the book translated and convincing the Élysée Palace to issue a denial. By noon the potential crisis had been averted.
But at Mr. Emanuel’s 7:30 a.m. staff meeting the next day, Ms. Jarrett announced that the first lady had concerns about the White House’s response to the book, according to several people present. All eyes turned to Mr. Gibbs, who started to steam.
“Don’t go there, Robert, don’t do it,” Mr. Emanuel warned.
“That’s not right, I’ve been killing myself on this, where’s this coming from?” Mr. Gibbs yelled, adding expletives. He interrogated Ms. Jarrett, whose calm only seemed to frustrate him more. The two went back and forth, Ms. Jarrett unruffled, Mr. Gibbs shaking with rage. Finally, several staff members said, Mr. Gibbs cursed the first lady — colleagues stared down at the table, shocked — and stormed out.
Mr. Gibbs later acknowledged the outburst but said he had misdirected his rage and accused Ms. Jarrett of making up the complaint. After the book incident, he “stopped taking her at all seriously as an adviser to the president,” Mr. Gibbs said, adding, “Her viewpoint in advising the president is that she has to be up and the rest of the White House has to be down.”
Ms. Jarrett declined to discuss the incident; two East Wing aides said she had misspoken, and that Mrs. Obama had not made any criticism.
Colleagues defended both parties. Mr. Gibbs had devoted years to the Obama cause, some said. Ms. Jarrett was trustworthy, said others, including Peter M. Rouse, another senior adviser. The blowup proved not only the fractures in the once-unified Obama team, but just how complicated the nexus between the first couple and staff members in the White House had become.
Forging a New Role
By then, Michelle Obama’s trajectory in the White House was changing. She was mastering and subtly redefining the role that had once seemed formless to her, and becoming more acclimated to her new life.
Sometimes her work seemed like an answer, in miniature, to what was going wrong with the presidency. If her husband’s health care law was unpopular and at risk of being reversed, she would throw herself into her campaign on nutrition and exercise, which had similar end goals — improving health, lowering costs. If her husband wasn’t connecting with audiences, she would win them over with vibrant speeches.
Her popularity, combined with her husband’s eroding support, gave her more leverage than she had early in the administration. An Oval Office meeting a few weeks before the 2010 midterms captured her changing position.
The location was the president’s domain, but the meeting was held to appease the first lady, who was finally agreeing to campaign for the midterm elections. One by one, members of the political team came before the Obamas, laying out arguments, details, statistics about how the first lady could help capture votes. In an interview the year before, the first couple had rejected the idea that they were using their marriage for political gain. (Most photos of them are “ somebody else’s images,” the first lady had said.) Now they absorbed polling data that showed that Democratic voters loved seeing them together, according to several participants at the meeting.
“This is a great presentation,” the president said with an I-never-get-this-treatment grin: aides were now doing things on his wife’s terms, with planning and precision.
Still, Mrs. Obama agreed to only eight campaign stops, fewer than the political team had wanted. “She basically agreed to do nothing,” one aide said.
Now that her husband faces a tough re-election fight, that tentativeness has vanished: She is all in, she has told aides. If Mrs. Obama has sometimes been an internal critic, she is also her husband’s most determined advocate. Though she still avoids detailed policy or strategy discussions, she now has the role she sought in amplifying his message, speaking alongside him at Fort Bragg, N.C., about the end of the Iraq war, spotlighting her veteran hiring initiatives to push his stalled jobs bills, even sharing his weekly radio address. “To me, she seems more content than I’ve seen her throughout this process since he’s been running for president, which is a very good thing,” Mr. Axelrod said.
The worse things got for her husband in 2011, the more she rallied to his side, buoying him personally and politically. In August, after the debt ceiling negotiations in Washington reached their painful conclusion, Mrs. Obama gave a party for his 50th birthday, warning guests not to leave early and delivering a stemwinder of a toast in praise of her husband.
As the sun faded, the 150 guests — friends, celebrities, officials — sat on the South Lawn, listening to the first lady describe her version of Barack Obama: a tireless, upright leader who rose above Washington games, killed the world’s most wanted terrorist and still managed to coach his daughter Sasha’s basketball team. The president, looking embarrassed, tried to cut her off, several guests said, but she told him he had to sit and listen.
She also thanked him for putting up with how hard she had been on him. At that line, a few of the advisers glanced at each other in recognition.
This article was adapted from “The Obamas,” by Jodi Kantor, which will be published Tuesday by Little, Brown & Company
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2THE PRESIDENCY
SOME WILL APPRECIATE THIS AND SOME WILL NOT.
HOWEVER, ALL OF IT IS TRUE.
After two years of Obama ... |
Here's your change!
January 2009 | TODAY | % chg | Source | ||||
Avg.. Retail price/gallon gas in U.S. | $1.83 | $3.44 | 84% | 1 | |||
Crude oil, European Brent (barrel) | $43..48 | $99..02 | 127.7% | 2 | |||
Crude oil, West TX Inter. (barrel) | $38..74 | $91..38 | 135.9% | 2 | |||
Gold: London (per troy oz.) | $853.25 | $1,369.50 | 60.5% | 2 | |||
Corn, No.2 yellow, Central IL | $3.56 | $6.33 | 78.1% | 2 | |||
Soybeans, No. 1 yellow, IL | $9.66 | $13..75 | 42.3% | 2 | |||
Sugar, cane, raw, world, lb. Fob | $13..37 | $35..39 | 164.7% | 2 | |||
Unemployment rate, non-farm, overall | 7.6% | 9.4% | 23.7% | 3 | |||
Unemployment rate, blacks | 12.6% | 15.8% | 25.4% | 3 | |||
Number of unemployed | 11,616,000 | 14,485,000 | 24.7% | 3 | |||
Number of fed. Employees | 2,779,000 | 2,840,000 | 2.2% | 3 | |||
Real median household income | $50,112 | $49,777 | -0.7% | 4 | |||
Number of food stamp recipients | 31,983,716 | 43,200,878 | 35.1% | 5 | |||
Number of unemployment benefit recipients | 7,526,598 | 9,193,838 | 22.2% | 6 | |||
Number of long-term unemployed | 2,600,000 | 6,400,000 | 146.2% | 3 | |||
Poverty rate, individuals | 13.2% | 14.3% | 8.3% | 4 | |||
People in poverty in U.S. | 39,800,000 | 43,600,000 | 9.5% | 4 | |||
U.S.. Rank in Economic Freedom World Rankings | 5 | 9 | n/a | 10 | |||
Present Situation Index | 29.9 | 23.5 | -21.4% | 11 | |||
Failed banks | 140 | 164 |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------2a)A Historical Cycle Bodes Ill for the Markets
By FLOYD NORRIS
AT the turn of the last century, it was widely accepted that American stocks were virtually certain to be good long-term investments. Now, far fewer people are confident of that.Multimedia
A major reason for the earlier confidence was that in the 15 years from the end of 1984 through the end of 1999, the total return of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was more than 740 percent, even after adjusting for inflation. That amounted to a compound annual real return of more than 15 percent.At the end of 2011, by contrast, the 15-year return — from the end of 1996 — was just 3 percent. And most of those gains came in the first three years of the period. Since the end of 1999, the stock market has not come close to keeping up with inflation.The first of the accompanying charts shows compound 15-year real returns on stock market investments from the period that ended in 1943 through the one that ended last month.Broadly, it appears there is a cycle that is repeating itself, in which the 15-year return tops out at more than 15 percent and then falls precipitously.In June 1964, the real return over the previous 15 years averaged 15.6 percent a year, the highest that figure had ever been. The stock market did not begin to fall then, but it could no longer maintain the torrid pace, and the 15-year return figures began to decline. On a real total return basis, stock prices hit their highs for the era in late 1968, and by the mid-1970s were in free fall as high inflation combined with a bear market.By 1979, an investor who bought stocks in 1964, when the market seemed to be a sure moneymaker, had lost money after adjusting for inflation, even after including dividend income.In the early 1980s, the stock market turned around, and by mid-1997 the 15-year return figure had reached a new high of 15.8 percent.The second chart overlays the two cycles. The first line goes from the end of 1943 through the end of 1980, when the line was in negative territory. The second one, beginning at the end of 1980, continues through the end of last year.The match between the lines is far from perfect, but there are significant similarities. If past is prologue, the 15-year return is likely to continue to decline and to turn negative in about four years. That does not necessarily imply that stocks will fall during that period, since that could happen with small gains over the period. And, of course, there is no assurance that history will repeat itself.It is probably significant that opinion surveys show Americans are more pessimistic than they have been in many years. There is a fear that the American economy is in decline and that this country will be unable to compete with emerging Asian economies, principally China. There was a similar fear in the late 1970s, although then the fear was that the United States could not compete with Japan.Perhaps overconfidence inspired in part by a strong stock market also played a role in American military history. Within a few years after the 1964 peak for 15-year returns, the United States escalated the Vietnam War. Within a few years after the 1999 peak, the United States decided to invade Iraq.The other two charts indicate that the stock market may have done surprisingly well over the last 15 years, considering how little the economy grew over that period. Through the third quarter of last year — the most recent data available — real gross domestic product had risen at an annual rate of just 2.3 percent over the previous 15 years. That was the lowest return since the 15 years ending in 1960, a period that was distorted because it included the rapid decline in real gross domestic product in 1946 as the production of weapons halted after World War II.Similarly, over the last 15 years the total real personal income earned by Americans has risen at an annual rate of just 2.6 percent. That is the lowest for any similar period for which G.D.P. data is available. Both the G.D.P. and personal income rates of growth are well below where they were when the cumulative stock returns bottomed out in 1982.After the pessimism of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the economy and the stock market turned around as it became clear the American economy was resilient and could adapt to a changing world. The question now is whether that can happen again.
3) Failed Education Policy Has Crippled Economy
By Barry Elias
Relative economic immobility in the United States is a function of our failed education policy during the past four decades.
According to the Economic Mobility Project conducted by The Pew Charitable Trust, work force participation by women increased 30 percentage points, from 40 percent to 70 percent, during this time. For 30 years (1974-2004), inflation adjusted income for women in their 30s surged 300 percent.
However, these huge increases in mobility were undermined by the stagnation of men’s incomes and their reduced work-force participation rate.
As a result, average inflation adjusted per capita income declined during this time.
The income distribution became greater with larger, less-mobile portions at both extremes. The Pew study suggests economic mobility doesn't occur for approximately 4 percent of individuals in the lowest quintile and highest quintiles of the population (lowest and highest 20 percent).
Public policy initiatives that favored the wealthy were enacted by a political class immune to the economic realities of their constituents.
As a result, education policy suffered greatly. It has produced a relatively low skilled labor force that is ill-less equipped to meet global demand: a trend that will take decades to correct.
Building our economy begins with building our children before they enter formal schooling.
Helping our children build their blocks may be the key to our future.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------4)The Price of Obama's Peace Dividend Is an Increased Risk of War
By Jim YardleyPresident Obama went to the Pentagon Thursday to announce cuts in defense spending that will, according to his estimates, reduce the nation's defense budget by just under $490 billion over the next ten years.
The president made the case that with the end of U.S. involvement in Iraq and the pending drawdown of troops in Afghanistan, "the tide of war is receding." He also said that his new plan is "smart" and "strategic" and that it sets priorities. And his top priority, that to some would seem most alarming, is contained in this statement from
The president also paid lip service to the dangers that exist in the Middle East, where he said the military would remain "vigilant."
Mr. Obama tried to counter the expected criticism of his plan by claiming that the United States will, even after his proposed cuts, be spending more than the top 10 military budgets of other countries combined. Depending on which set of statistics Obama was using, this might actually be accurate. But in checking a copy of the 2009 edition of The CIA World Factbook (and I am not making that up -- you can get a copy from Amazon), in 2005, the United States was spending approximately 4.06% of its GDP on defense. China, one of that group of 10 nations that Mr. Obama referenced, was spending about 4.3% of its GDP on its military as of 2006. With the phenomenal growth of the Chinese economy in the past several years, if they continue spending at that 4.3% rate and continue growing, their military will be a rising threat. The president considers the PRC to be a threat to our interests in the Pacific, and their military has recently added a full-sized aircraft carrier to their fleet.
It is apparent that the president, in developing his strategy, used the same extensive knowledge, his superior intellect, and worldly wealth of experience that he brought to his strategy for his $800-billion stimulus, his strategy for providing cost-free health care to millions of Americans, and his strategy for using "smart diplomacy" to defuse hot spots around the world.
As a veteran who spent two fun-filled years serving in Vietnam, I think that I can say without too much fear of contradiction that the Pentagon would not object to all spending cuts. If the proposed cuts were limited to those weapons and weapon systems that are forced on them by senators and representatives who are more interested in protecting defense industries in their states and districts than in strengthening the combat-effectiveness of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines, the ladies and gentlemen who wear stars on shoulders would be cheering instead of standing mute on the podium behind Obama as he laid out his new, "smart" strategic plan.
But the most significant weakness of Obama's plan is that it ignores a basic, but often underappreciated, fact. The perception and appearance of overwhelming strength will make the actual need for that same overwhelming strength unnecessary. The appearance of weakness, on the other hand, is as much an invitation to aggression as pasting a "kick me" sign to your own back.
Obama should realize this more than just about any other politician that has ever lived. He is acutely aware, at all times, of how he, himself, is perceived. How the electorate views him is constantly in the forefront of all his decisions. So how he could blunder by ignoring how a reduction of the readiness of U.S. military, no matter the size of the reduction, gives a perception of weakness?
The United States has real enemies who will test just how much weakness there is in actuality, and compare that against their perceptions. Just like your teenage kids will push the envelope to see how much they can get away with, certain countries will attack us, refuse to cooperate with us, or threaten smaller nations in their area of interest with the casual reference to the U.S. military cutbacks.
You can be sure that the foreign offices of such nations are already drafting the diplomatic communiqués that will advise these smaller nations to remember that Uncle Sam will no longer be able to protect them. Strip away all the diplomatic verbal gymnastics, and the message would be in about the same tone as one delivered by Tony Soprano to a small neighbor store: "Nice little country you have here. Be a shame if anything happened to it, now wouldn't it?"
Should this prove to be effective (and, historically speaking, it has worked pretty well as a power play since at least the days of Julius Caesar), these same nations would be emboldened to ever greater and more potent actions against American interests, American military and diplomatic personnel that they could reach out and touch, and even attacks on the homeland.
This is the cost of the president's desire to reduce the effectiveness of our military. It may save a few dollars in the short term, but it is like the first move in a game of chess. Unless you are thinking ten moves ahead, you might just as well not play the game at all, because you will lose -- everything.
Jim Yardley is a retired financial controller, a Vietnam veteran, and an independent voter. Jim blogs at jimyardley.wordpress.com, or he can be contacted directly at james.v.yardley@gmail.com.
5)WhyIslamism Is Winning
By JOHN M. OWEN IV
EGYPT’S final round of parliamentary elections won’t end until next week, but the outcome is becoming clear. The Muslim Brotherhood will most likely win half the lower house of Parliament, and more extreme Islamists will occupy a quarter. Secular parties will be left with just 25 percent of the seats.
Islamism did not cause the Arab Spring. The region’s authoritarian governments had simply failed to deliver on their promises. Though Arab authoritarianism had a good run from the 1950s until the 1980s, economies eventually stagnated, debts mounted and growing, well-educated populations saw the prosperous egalitarian societies they had been promised receding over the horizon, aggrieving virtually everyone, secularists and Islamists alike.
The last few weeks, however, have confirmed that a revolution’s consequences need not follow from its causes. Rather than bringing secular revolutionaries to power, the Arab Spring is producing flowers of a decidedly Islamist hue. More unsettling to many, Islamists are winning fairly: religious parties are placing first in free, open elections in Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt. So why are so many Arabs voting for parties that seem politically regressive to Westerners?
The West’s own history furnishes an answer. From 1820 to 1850, Europe resembled today’s Arab world in two ways. Both regions experienced historic and seemingly contagious rebellions that swept from country to country. And in both cases, frustrated people in many nations with relatively little in common rallied around a single ideology — one not of their own making, but inherited from previous generations of radicals.
In 19th-century Europe, that ideology was liberalism. It emerged in the late 18th century from the American, Dutch, Polish and especially French revolutions. Whereas the chief political divide in society had long been between monarchs and aristocrats, the revolutions drew a new line between the “old regime” of monarchy, nobility and church, and the new commercial classes and small landholders. For the latter group, it was the old regime that produced the predatory taxes, bankrupt treasuries, corruption, perpetual wars and other pathologies that dragged down their societies. The liberal solution was to extend rights and liberties beyond the aristocracy, which had inherited them from the Middle Ages.
Suppressing liberalism became the chief aim of absolutist regimes in Austria, Russia and Prussia after they helped defeat France in 1815. Prince Klemens von Metternich, Austria’s powerful chancellor, claimed that “English principles” of liberty were foreign to the Continent. But networks of liberals — Italian carbonari, Freemasons, English Radicals — continued to operate underground, communicating across societies and providing a common language for dissent.
This helped lay the ideological groundwork for Spain’s liberal revolution in 1820. From there, revolts spread to Portugal, the Italian states of Naples and Piedmont, and Greece. News of the Spanish revolution even spurred the adoption of liberal constitutions in the nascent states of Gran Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay, Peru and Mexico. Despite their varied grievances, in each case liberalism served as a rallying point and political program on which the malcontents could agree.
A decade later, in July 1830, a revolution toppled France’s conservative Bourbon monarchy. Insurrection spread to Belgium, Switzerland, a number of German and Italian states and Poland. Once again, a variety of complaints were distilled into the rejection of the old regime and the acceptance of liberalism.
The revolutions of 1848 were more numerous and consequential but remarkably similar to the earlier ones. Rebels with little in common — factory workers in Paris, peasants in Ireland, artisans in Vienna — followed a script written in the 1790s that was rehearsed continuously in the ensuing years across the continent.
Today, rural and urban Arabs with widely varying cultures and histories are showing that they share more than a deep frustration with despots and a demand for dignity. Most, whether moderate or radical, or living in a monarchy or a republic, share a common inherited language of dissent: Islamism.
Political Islam, especially the strict version practiced by Salafists in Egypt, is thriving largely because it is tapping into ideological roots that were laid down long before the revolts began. Invented in the 1920s by the Muslim Brotherhood, kept alive by their many affiliates and offshoots, boosted by the failures of Nasserism and Baathism, allegedly bankrolled by Saudi and Qatari money, and inspired by the defiant example of revolutionary Iran, Islamism has for years provided a coherent narrative about what ails Muslim societies and where the cure lies. Far from rendering Islamism unnecessary, as some experts forecast, the Arab Spring has increased its credibility; Islamists, after all, have long condemned these corrupt regimes as destined to fail.
Liberalism in 19th-century Europe, and Islamism in the Arab world today, are like channels dug by one generation of activists and kept open, sometimes quietly, by future ones. When the storms of revolution arrive, whether in Europe or the Middle East, the waters will find those channels. Islamism is winning out because it is the deepest and widest channel into which today’s Arab discontent can flow.
John M. Owen IV, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia, is the author of “The Clash of Ideas in World Politics: Transnational Networks, States, and Regime Change, 1510-2010.”
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