This period in our history was followed by one of enlightened Civil Rights legislation initiated by President Johnson, culminating in the magnificent "I Have A Dream Speech," by Dr.King on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
We now are experiencing a period of retrogression by a president who will say anything and do everything in order to be re-elected. He will stop at nothing and encourages and condones outrageous accusations and behavior of his advisors, staff and political hacks.
Obama is the personification of political 'black trash.'
Far too many were suckered into his change talk and now they have the opportunity to vote for more of the same.
God help our nation if he is re-elected. (See 1 below.)
As for Romney. I, for the life of me, do not understand why he ducked the Chick Fil A mud fight because the issue was about free speech and the right of a citizen to speak his mind.
Romney does not have to get down on Obama's sleazy level but he needs to do more than simply respond to challenges.
I am reading Luigi Zingales': "A Capitalism For The People." It is in two sections and I have completed the first seven chapters in which the author explains how America is becoming like his native Italy - a Crony Capitalistic nation.
Having just returned from New York and buried under with mail etc. at a later date I will review his book. It is an eye opener.
The second section is devoted to answers on how we can recapture the lost genius of American prosperity.
Speaking of New York. The city is exploding (perhaps a bad choice of a word) with new structures going up in Wall Street's Financial District, Brooklyn (very hot), Chelsea (also hot) and even Manhattan. Did not get up as far as Harlem but know it too is experiencing a structural renaissance.
I spoke with an informed realtor and she said some of it is fleeing foreign money but mostly it is American money that is behind the new construction and the city 's need for more housing and office space.
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A series of articles pertaining to Israel etc. (See 2, 2a and 2b below.)
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El-Erian explains why the Fed is Impotent.
When there is a concerted effort on the part of Central Banks to bail water it can take a while before the water breeches the dam. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1) Obama aides say president now has personal ‘genuine disdain’ for Romney
By Alex Pappas
For President Barack Obama, it’s now personal.
A new book cites Obama aides saying the president has a “genuine disdain” for Mitt Romney. “One factor made the 2012 grind bearable and at times even fun for Obama: he began campaign preparations feeling neutral about Romney, but like the former governor’s GOP opponents in 2008 and 2012, he quickly developed a genuine disdain for the man,” author Glenn Thrush writes in the soon-to-be released e-book “Obama’s Last Stand.”
Thrush — a reporter for Politico, which published book excerpts Sunday – writes that Obama’s feelings for Romney are different from how he personally felt about other Republican opponents on the Hill, and about other campaign rivals in the past. “Obama, a person close to him told me, didn’t even feel this strongly about conservative, combative House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the Hill Republican he disliked the most,” Thrush writes. “At least Cantor stood for something, he’d say.”
“When he talked about Romney, aides picked up a level of anger he never had for Clinton or McCain, even after Sarah Palin was picked as his running mate. ‘There was a baseline of respect for John McCain. The president always thought he was an honorable man and a war hero,’ said a longtime Obama adviser. ‘That doesn’t hold true for Romney. He was no goddamned war hero.’”
Thrush writes that “scorn stoked Obama’s competitive fire, got his head in the game, which came as a relief to some Obama aides who had seen his interest flag when he didn’t feel motivated to crush the opposition.”
This sentiment is very different, also, to what Romney publicly says about the president. “I don’t think the president’s a bad guy, I just think his political philosophy is entirely wrong.”
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2) Let’s hear it for Israel, the Arab world’s all-purpose enemy
By George Jonas
And how is the Arab Spring?
Well, there’s bad news, and good news.
The bad news is that since the beginning of the phenomenon that has been discussed more and understood less than any in recent years, hostility to Israel in the region has only increased.
The good news is that while the appetite to harm the Jewish state and its inhabitants has grown in the Arab/Muslim world since the fall of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia launched what was supposed to be the region’s democratic renewal, the capacity to do so has diminished.
An increase in hostility was predictable. Hatred against Israel, kept on a low boil, is the organizing principle of the Middle East. It’s the region’s main fuel of governance; often its only fuel. Some ruling regimes — kings, dictators, whatever — may have oil wells and sandy beaches, but other than hating Israel (and looking after their families and tribes) they have few if any ideas. If they do, chances are it’s to hate some other group in addition to Israel. In the Middle East a country’s national purpose often amounts to little more than a list of its enemies. A feeling of being ill-done by dominates the consciousness of groups and individuals.
Since it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, it’s not necessarily baseless: The easiest way to have an enemy is to be one. The centrality of hatred to the culture is remarkable. The Cartesian idea is “I hate, therefore I am.” Self-righteousness is overwhelming: each desire thwarted becomes an example of justice denied. It’s not a pretty place, but millions call it home. In many ways, Israel is a godsend to the one-trick ponies who rule the region. Their culture defines “ruling” as inoculating your own sect or tribe against all others, including the ones that form your own country.
Many Middle East nations — Iraq, Syria, Libya, to name three — are just temporarily halted civil wars. They’re truces rather than countries. Canada may be “two solitudes,” but it isn’t an uneasy truce between French and English Canadians. Iraq is, between Shia and Sunni Muslims. In such an ambiance, nothing is handier than an all-purpose enemy, just out of reach, close enough to seem a realistic threat but too far to be one.
Tyrants can govern by whipping up enough popular sentiment against the Jewish state to give their regimes an apparent national purpose and distract people’s attention from domestic woes, then relax and spend some money in the capitals of Europe. The key is a low boil, though. If the anti-Israeli sentiment boils over, causing riots against the government for being too soft on the Zionists, or foolish attempts to attack Haifa with rockets, which in turn invites retaliation, the people’s hatred of Israel becomes a headache for the very rulers who instigated it. “Yeah, well, it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch,” somebody might say, “I’ll lose no sleep over it.” He should, though, because it’s like pulling a thread from a piece of fabric.
Things can unravel in an instant. Tyranny, Egyptian-style, under Hosni Mubarak or Libyan-style, under Muammar Gaddafi, often manifested itself in dictatorial governments balancing on a tightrope, trying to maintain a fragile peace with Israel against their own bellicose people, trying to counteract the effects of the sentiments they themselves instigated. When they couldn’t, the forces they helped conjure up turned against them. If lucky, they died in a hail of bullets on the reviewing stand like Anwar Sadat; if not, bludgeoned like a cornered rat in a culvert, in the manner of Gaddafi. It’s a fate Bashar al-Assad has been trying to avoid, which is hardly surprising.
Assad “has threatened to rain missiles down on Tel Aviv should NATO try to dislodge him,” as Michael Koplow put it in the National Interest, but in fact Syria’s tyrant has been raining missiles (and if not missiles, then shells and bullets) on his own towns and villages. No wonder, for that’s where his enemies live — his actual enemies, as opposed to his mythical ones. It’s his fellow Syrians who want to trap him in a culvert and drown him, preferably along with his entire tribe.
Israel has no interest in touching him with a 10-foot pole, especially as long as he’s keeping Syria’s armed forces and rebels thinning each other’s ranks. We won’t understand much about the Arab Spring as long as we persist in looking at it through Western eyes. We see popular uprisings against dictatorships as moves in the direction of Western-style democracy. If they happened here, they probably would be. Where they’re actually happening they’re taking their societies in the opposite direction.
The Arab Spring is an attempt to return the region to its roots. It’s not to Westernize the Middle East and make it more democratic; it’s to Easternize it and make it more Islamic. If the early 20th century was about the East trying to join what it couldn’t lick, the early 21st may be about the East trying to lick what it hasn’t been able to join.
2a) Contentions Palestinians Waiting for Obama to Win
Israel is being criticized today in the world press for playing hardball with five of the 12 non-aligned nations that had hoped to gather in Ramallah to formally back the Palestinian Authority's latest attempt to get the United Nations to back their bid for statehood.
The delegations from Algeria, Bangladesh, Cuba, Indonesia and Malaysia who sought to enter the territories while sticking to their non-recognition of the Jewish state were not allowed in, effectively spiking the entire event. The collapse of what the PA had hoped would be a "Ramallah Declaration" was just the latest indication that the Palestinians' latest UN bid might end as badly as their first try. However, the Palestinians are smart enough to know that placing your chips on the ability of a disorganized and powerless faction like the Non-Aligned Movement isn't a good bet. Far more significant than the posturing in Ramallah were the comments by aides of PA President Mahmoud Abbas that their UN campaign would be largely put on hold until after the U.S. presidential election.
As the Times of Israel reports, Abbas is planning to soft pedal his UN effort until November because he understands that any talk about the Palestinians could hinder Obama's re-election hopes. Though the PA has been dismayed by the president's election year Jewish charm offensive that has seen their concerns pigeonholed in Washington, Abbas is clearly hoping for a better result once Obama is safely returned to office. Abbas had hoped the meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement's Palestine Committee in Ramallah would give him a boost, but the collapse of the publicity stunt is yet another setback for his diplomatic offensive. Israel will be accused of playing the bully in this incident, and the Palestinians may think it will serve their cause, but the spectacle of nations that don't recognize Israel's existence seeking entry via Israeli crossings is not likely to harm the Jewish state.
If anything, the contretemps is a reminder that what the PA is trying to execute is an end run around the peace process. They want independence and Israel's withdrawal from disputed territory but are not willing to negotiate about it and instead are simply demanding the UN hand it to them on a silver platter. Last summer, the world press was abuzz with predictions of a "diplomatic tsunami" which would swamp Israel as the Palestinians were acclaimed at the UN. But the tsunami was barely a light sprinkle as the world yawned and refused to back their play.
Though it is still possible that with the help of the Non-Aligned nations they can upgrade their membership privileges via a UN General Assembly resolution, such a step would entail considerable risks for the PA, including the loss of U.S. funding as well as Israeli financial retaliation. As for their cherished hopes that a second Obama administration would do their bidding, that is exactly the sort of rumbling that scares Democrats who fear Jewish voters will remember the three years of administration pressure on Israel rather than the last few months of friendship.
But even though the Palestinians have good reason to think that a Romney administration would be far less willing to tilt the diplomatic playing field in their direction as Obama has done, they need to remember why they've accomplished nothing in the past four years. Even though Obama has been the least friendly president to Israel in at least a generation, the Palestinians got nothing out of it. President Obama picked fights with Israel over settlements, the 1967 lines and the status of Jerusalem, but the Palestinians still struck out because they foolishly thought Obama would do all their dirty work for them and still refused to negotiate. Israelis may worry about what Obama's re-election will mean for them, as they know it is a certainty that the charm offensive will end the day after the election.
But they can take comfort in the fact that it isn't likely that Mahmoud Abbas will get any braver or smarter in the next four years. Even with a friend in the White House, the Palestinians will gain no territory or a state so long as they are unwilling to negotiate. Nor can they hope to achieve those goals unless they are prepared to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn. Because that is still a virtual impossibility, their faith in Obama or the ability of any American politician to help them is clearly misplaced.
2b) The Middle East Minorities "Problem"
By Yisrael Ne'eman
The unfolding disaster in Syria is the culmination of a process begun more than 150 years ago when minorities were given equal rights by the Ottoman Empire due to European pressures. Previously the dhimma strictures of Islamic Sharia law discrimination were enforced in Muslim societies for over 1000 years.
The change to a European value based society enforcing Enlightenment ideals did not come easily. Such equality was harshly resented and often minorities suffered no less than before. The Muslim majorities continued to be suspect in the eyes of the varying minorities who entertained repressed fears of the re-implementation of majority Islamist rule whereby once again they would be relegated to second class discriminatory status or could find themselves "outside the realm" and deemed as heretics, an even more damning category.
According to the dhimma strictures, Jews and Christians as "People of the Book" received previous Divine revelation and therefore were permitted to live in a subservient status. Heretics such as the Druze and Alawites or the Zoroastrian non-believers could and often would suffer a much more devastating fate. European Enlightenment ideals as embodied in 20th century secular Arab nationalism were meant to eliminate religious persecution and to enfranchise all into the new evolving identity no longer derived from Sharia law.
We live in the post 1856 Middle East where minority issues became one of the major reasons for violence throughout the region. A quick review illustrates the following:
Turkey – The Ottomans murdered some 1.5 million Armenians during the 1915 Genocide while another 2 million Greeks were forced to flee during the Greco-Turkish War of 1920 – 21. It should be mentioned that 100,000s of Muslims fled from Greece to Turkey although eastern Greece still has a large Muslim population. However 98% of all Turks are Muslims. Antisemitism exploded in the 1950s and most Jews left the country for Israel although some 20,000 still remain despite occasional attacks and intermittent synagogue bombings.
Iraq - Prior to WWII there was a large Christian population comprising Nestorians, Chaldeans, Greek Orthodox and Armenians. Most were massacred or forced to flee following persecutions during and after the war leaving some 250,000 dead. Turkish genocidal policies as exhibited towards the Armenians in 1915 had a major impact but the local Muslim Arabs were known to have participated or at best to have taken an apathetic stance. Iraq had a sizeable Christian population even after WWII but abuse and persecution, including church bombings by Jihadi groups in recent years have destroyed what was left of the community. Jews suffered from Iraqi Muslim antisemitism during and after WWII. The Farhud pogrom in 1941 claimed 180 lives and further attacks with the establishment of the State of Israel led to the flight of over 130,000 Jews by 1952. Arriving with nothing except a suitcase since their property was nationalized 120,000 arrived in Israel while another 10,000 went elsewhere in the Western world.
Egypt – Coptic Christians comprising 10% of the population suffered discrimination and attacks in the past and are continued victims of murders and church bombings in the wake of the Islamic Revolution. Today approximately 150 Jews remain in Egypt out of a community once numbering over 65,000. Antisemitism led to massive flight and impoverishment by the late 1960s.
Iran – Zoroastrian and Bahai adherents were and are harshly persecuted often suffering long prison terms or even death. Most Jews and Christians fled over the years with the majority of the former arriving in Israel. About 20,000 Jews still remain. Large minority populations remain in Syria and Lebanon – two states whose only chance of survival is a secular Arab nationalism as advocated by the Baath ideology.
Beginning in the 1970s the Arab secular state structures failed while Islamic fundamentalism made a comeback. The Islamic Awakening (Arab Spring) brought the two into a head on collision in March 2011 and Syria's Assad regime is increasingly losing its grip. The minorities are desperate as are the Sunni majority led rebels. Jews faced persecution in Syria and over the years fled both countries.
In Lebanon the once majority Christians are the minority and the previously peripheral pro-Iranian Shiites are today the dominant plurality as attested to by Hezbollah influence. Syria is ruled by a minorities coalition of Alawites (Assad family), Christians, Druze and secular Sunnis. All were and are traumatized by the thought of a Sunni Muslim Brotherhood regime where Sharia law will determine who is acceptable, dhimmi or a heretic. Middle Eastern minorities can only suffer under Islamist rule, especially when mixed with a "well deserved" revenge for the recent humiliations, oppression and massacres suffered by the Sunni opposition. Such can be the expected outcome whether religious or "liberal democratic" rulers take office.
Looking back at the past century and a half one can expect the Baathist Syrian "Minorities Regime" to battle to the bloody end and quite possibly carve out a mini-Alawite state as a refuge for all minorities to avoid total defeat. However the only way to ensure their existence is with big power support, especially from Moscow. Once upon a time Lebanon was a "Christian" country but never enjoyed an international commitment to its survival as appears to be the case with the Russian-Alawite (plus Christians and Druze) alliance. Furthermore, at least for the moment, the Iranians are in the picture using the Alawites as a conduit to strengthen their Shiite Hezbollah proxies in Lebanon.
A Syrian collapse signals the beginning of Tehran's own demise regardless of the impact of Western sanctions resulting from their nuclear program. The Jews as the most roundly persecuted Middle Eastern community guaranteed their own continuity though the Israeli state entity in alliance with the Western powers, in particular the United States. Ironically Middle Eastern Jews as a whole are by far the most free and successful of all the communities today. No doubt the brutal Assad regime needs to be removed from power. But the question remains as to why secular Arab nationalism became so oppressive and is often led by minorities? Although no less violent, Arab minorities not only learned from the majority behavior but intended to pre-empt Islamist extremism and not suffer the dictates of Sharia law and Islamist extremism as had their ancestors of less than 200 years ago.
When seeking the roots of conflict in the Middle East one must examine the religious and ethnic persecutions of minorities by the Muslim majority over the centuries. What is needed is a liberal democratic solution, but as far as Syria is concerned there is none in sight. As for Lebanon, a renewed civil conflict may be just around the corner. The Islamic Awakening and its resulting clash with Middle Eastern minorities are far from over.
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3) Pimco’s El-Erian: ‘Best Fed Can Do is Postpone Storm’
By Dan Weil
The Federal Reserve is impotent when it comes to bringing the economy back to health now, says Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive officer and co-chief investment officer of Pacific Investment Management Co.
“The best the Fed can do is to postpone the storm a little,” he told CNN Money. "It doesn’t have the tools to promote growth and to deal with our structural issues.” The central bank is hesitant to move quickly – it refrained from additional easing at its meeting last week – partly because it’s worried about what’s happening overseas, particularly in Europe, El-Erian said. Editor's Note: Economist Unapologetically Calls Out Bernanke, Obama for Mishandling Economy. See What They Did And, “every time the Fed does something it creates problems somewhere else,” he said.
On the labor front, while Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has promised to create 250,000 jobs a month if he becomes president, “there’s no killer app to create jobs,” El-Erian said. “You need simultaneous movement on a number of fronts – the functioning of the labor market, housing market, credit markets, infrastructure, fiscal reform.
Two realities stand in the way of that, El-Erian said. “First and foremost our political system isn’t allowing us to converge on a common analysis let alone a solution.
And second, the international environment is tough. Europe is having a major crisis.” Some at the Fed disagree with El-Erian’s point that there is little the central bank can now do for the economy. Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren told The New York Times that the central bank should increase its mortgage bond and Treasury holdings until the economy rebounds. Read more: Pimco’s El-Erian: ‘Best Fed Can Do is Postpone Storm’
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