Amazing how friends and family respond! Makes you understand and is living proof of what a generous people Americans are.
Daniel's link:https://www.crowdrise.com/
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Seib and U.S-Israel tensions! (See 1 below.)
Dumb and getting dumber! (See 1a below.)
Arrogance and a narcissistic president, who believes he knows it all, is the basis for breakdown of relationships with all nations friendly to America.
It began with the removal of Churchill's bust, insulting America in Egypt, followed by insulting Netanyahu as Obama went for dinner and leaving the Prime Minister of Israeli to cool his heels.
Obama has accomplished his goal and we have two more years to go! (See 1b below.)
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This was sent to me by a liberal friend and fellow memo reader and it is one with which I concur:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/
===
Obama has repeatedly said Turkey's Erdogan was one of his closest friends. Oh well! (See 2 below.)
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The other story behind employment. (See 3 below.)
===
Music from Israel will not drown out the sound of Hamas rockets! http://www.youtube.com/embed/z1PJ2ZP9a0g
===
Dick
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1) Why Tensions Are Climbing Between Israel and the U.S.
Broken Peace Process, Iran Nuclear Talks Stir Resentment on Both Sides
By Gerald F. Seib
U.S.-Israeli relations had been surviving a spring and summer of exceptional strains pretty well.
Until now, that is. Suddenly, serious stress fractures are opening up as the Israeli operation against Hamas in the Gaza Strip enters its third week—and they figure to get worse before they get better.
The clearest sign came Sunday, in the form of what might have seemed just another pro forma White House statement, describing a call between President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Those two leaders have a relationship filled with all the warmth and conviviality of relations between Sens. Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid, and the tension crackled through the seemingly dry language.
"The President…reiterated the United States' serious and growing concern about the rising number of Palestinian civilian deaths and the loss of Israeli lives, as well as the worsening humanitarian situation in Gaza," said the statement.
Specifically citing attempts by Secretary of State John Kerry to broker a cease-fire in the fight between Israel and Hamas—efforts openly derided by some Israeli officials—the statement went on to say that "the President made clear the strategic imperative of instituting an immediate, unconditional humanitarian cease-fire that ends hostilities now" and leads to a permanent end of hostilities.
As is usually the case, there is a backdrop to these tensions, one important to understand in grasping the real meaning of the cracks appearing now.
On the U.S. side, there is residual anger at Israel's response, spanning months leading up the current crisis, to efforts by Mr. Kerry to broker a broader peace deal with the Palestinians. That peace process broke down just days before the discovery of the bodies of three Israeli teenagers, apparently killed by Palestinians, which set off the chain of events that led to the current wave of fighting and rocket attacks.
Nobody thinks the demise of that round of Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking led directly to the outbreak of hostilities, of course. But American officials do think the breakdown did make the situation harder to contain. "One of the reasons for a peace process," says a senior official, "is that without a peace process you have a vacuum."
On the Israeli side, officials felt that, between the weakness of Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank and the extremism of Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip, they had no meaningful partner for peace.
Worse, some considered the American push a grandstand play by Mr. Kerry. The attitude was summed up by the comment of one senior Israeli official, reported in an Israeli newspaper, that Israel's best bet was for Mr. Kerry to "get a Nobel Peace Prize and leave us alone."
Meanwhile, Israel also was squirming over the talks between the U.S. and five international powers and Iran over the Iranian nuclear program. As it became obvious that those talks were moving in the direction of an agreement that would leave Iran with a continuing capacity to enrich uranium, Israeli discomfort grew. When the talks were extended earlier this month for four more months, it grew further. A separate issue, yes, but one that affects the atmosphere.
None of that seemed to matter much when hostilities broke out between Israel and Hamas across the Israeli border in the Gaza Strip. At the outset, Mr. Obama publicly supported Israel's right to strike back when hit by rockets fired at its cities from Gaza.
Notably, there were no American calls for a cease-fire then. The U.S. was tacitly accepting Israel's desire to take advantage of the hostilities to clean out some of Hamas's enlarged supply of rockets, and to close down tunnels its forces had dug into Israeli territory. When Israel accepted an Egyptian cease-fire proposal and Hamas rejected it, White House acceptance of Israel's military actions was clear.
That began to change when Israel moved from an aerial offensive to a ground incursion into Gaza. American and Israeli analyses fell out of sync. U.S. officials began to fear that the deaths of hundreds of Palestinians were stirring up enough anger in the Gaza Strip and West Bank to put the longer-term U.S. quest for peace out of reach for a long, long time.
So Mr. Kerry jumped in. Tensions grew as Israelis felt his proposals for a cease-fire didn't give sufficient security guarantees, seemed to equate the state of Israel and radicals in Hamas, and empowered Hamas's backers in the governments of Turkey and Qatar. A temporary ban on American airline flights into Israel on safety grounds infuriated Israelis.
American officials, meantime, chafed at the open Israeli hostility toward what they considered a good-faith effort by Mr. Kerry to end a nasty fight that they feel can harm Israel in the long run.
This diplomatic dance isn't occurring in a vacuum, however. Israelis consider Hamas a problem, but they regard Iran's nuclear program an existential threat. Those nuclear talks with Iran resume soon. American officials actually aren't optimistic about reaching a long-term deal, but Israelis are nervous. Which is why more tensions likely lie ahead.
1a) Palestine Makes You Dumb
To argue the Palestinian side, in the Gaza war, is to make the case for barbarism.
By Bret Stephens
Of all the inane things that have been said about the war between Israel and Hamas, surely one dishonorable mention belongs to comments made over the weekend by Benjamin J. Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications.
Interviewed by CNN's Candy Crowley, Mr. Rhodes offered the now-standard administration line that Israel has a right to defend itself but needs to do more to avoid civilian casualties. Ms. Crowley interjected that, according to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Jewish state was already doing everything it could to avoid such casualties.
"I think you can always do more," Mr. Rhodes replied. "The U.S. military does that in Afghanistan."
How inapt is this comparison? The list of Afghan civilians accidentally killed by U.S. or NATO strikes is not short. Little of the fighting in Afghanistan took place in the dense urban environments that make the current warfare in Gaza so difficult. The last time the U.S. fought a Gaza-style battle—in Fallujah in 2004—some 800 civilians perished and at least 9,000 homes were destroyed. This is not an indictment of U.S. conduct in Fallujah but an acknowledgment of the grim reality of city combat.
Oh, and by the way, American towns and cities were not being rocketed from above or tunneled under from below as the Fallujah campaign was under way.
Ben Rhodes, a White House victim of the Palestine Effect. mandel ngan/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Maybe Mr. Rhodes knows all this and was merely caught out mouthing the sorts of platitudes that are considered diplomatically de rigueur when it comes to the Palestinians. Or maybe he was just another victim of what I call the Palestine Effect: The abrupt and often total collapse of logical reasoning, skeptical intelligence and ordinary moral judgment whenever the subject of Palestinian suffering arises.
Consider the media obsession with the body count. According to a daily tally in theNew York Times, NYT -5.88% as of July 27 the war in Gaza had claimed 1,023 Palestinian lives as against 46 Israelis. How does the Times keep such an accurate count of Palestinian deaths? A footnote discloses "Palestinian death tallies are provided by the Palestinian Health Ministry and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs."
OK. So who runs the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza? Hamas does. As for the U.N., it gets its data mainly from two Palestinian agitprop NGOs, one of which, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, offers the remarkably precise statistic that, as of July 27, exactly 82% of deaths in Gaza have been civilians. Curiously, during the 2008-09 Gaza war, the center also reported an 82% civilian casualty rate.
When minutely exact statistics are provided in chaotic circumstances, it suggests the statistics are garbage. When a news organization relies—without clarification—on data provided by a bureaucratic organ of a terrorist organization, there's something wrong there, too.
But let's assume for argument's sake that the numbers are accurate. Does this mean the Palestinians are the chief victims, and Israelis the main victimizers, in the conflict? By this dull logic we might want to rethink the moral equities of World War II, in which over one million German civilians perished at Allied hands compared with just 67,000 British and 12,000 American civilians.
The real utility of the body count is that it offers reporters and commentators who cite it the chance to ascribe implicit blame to Israel while evading questions about ultimate responsibility for the killing. Questions such as: Why is Hamas hiding rockets in U.N.-run schools, as acknowledged by the U.N. itself? What does it mean that Hamas has turned Gaza's central hospital into "a de facto headquarters," as reported by the Washington Post? And why does Hamas keep rejecting, or violating, cease-fires agreed to by Israel?
A reasonable person might conclude from this that Hamas, which started the war, wants it to continue, and that it relies on Israel's moral scruples not to destroy civilian sites that it cynically uses for military purposes. But then there is the Palestine Effect. By this reasoning, Hamas only initiated the fighting because Israel refused to countenance the creation of a Palestinian coalition that included Hamas, and because Israel further objected to helping pay the salaries of Hamas's civil servants in Gaza.
Let's get this one straight. Israel is culpable because (a) it won't accept a Palestinian government that includes a terrorist organization sworn to the Jewish state's destruction; (b) it won't help that organization out of its financial jam; and (c) it won't ease a quasi-blockade—jointly imposed with Egypt—on a territory whose central economic activity appears to be building rocket factories and pouring imported concrete into terrorist tunnels.
This is either bald moral idiocy or thinly veiled bigotry. It mistakes effect for cause, treats self-respect as arrogance and self-defense as aggression, and makes demands of the Jewish state that would be dismissed out of hand anywhere else. To argue the Palestinian side, in this war, is to make the case for barbarism. It is to erase, in the name of humanitarianism, the moral distinctions from which the concept of humanity arises.
Typically, the Obama administration is hedging its bets. The Palestine Effect claims another victim.
1b) Leaders’ chat leak a ‘severe violation of a private discussion’
According to BBC reporter Paul Danahar, the State Department says that if President Barack Obama’s conversation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was indeed leaked to Israel’s Channel 1, it would constitute a “severe violation of a private discussion.”
Hebrew transcript of Obama and Netanyahu’s phone call
Israel’s Channel 1 publishes a Hebrew transcript of a portion of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama’s telephone conversation Sunday, in which Obama is insistent that Israel unilaterally halt all military activities in the Gaza Strip.
The following is an English translation of the Hebrew account of the talk given in the report:
Barack Obama: I demand that Israel agrees to an immediate, unilateral ceasefire and halt all offensive activities, in particular airstrikes.
Benjamin Netanyahu: And what will Israel receive in exchange for a ceasefire?
BO: I believe that Hamas will cease its rocket fire — silence will be met with silence.
BN: Hamas broke all five previous ceasefires. It’s a terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel.
BO: I repeat and expect Israel to stop all its military activities unilaterally. The pictures of destruction in Gaza distance the world from Israel’s position.
BN: Kerry’s proposal was completely unrealistic and gives Hamas military and diplomatic advantages.
BO: Within a week of the end of Israel’s military activities, Qatar and Turkey will begin negotiations with Hamas based on the 2012 understandings, including Israel’s commitment to removing the siege and restrictions on Gaza.
BN: Qatar and Turkey are the biggest supporters of Hamas. It’s impossible to rely on them to be fair mediators.
BO: I trust Qatar and Turkey. Israel is not in the position that it can choose its mediators.
BN: I protest because Hamas can continue to launch rockets and use tunnels for terror attacks –
BO: (interrupting Netanyahu) The ball’s in Israel’s court, and it must end all its military activities.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Author: Richard Cohen
Source: The Washington Post.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s anti- Semitism is getting the better of him. Once again, the Turkish prime minister has trotted out the Hitler analogy in relation to Israel and what it has done in Gaza. “They curse Hitler morning and night,” he said of the Israelis. “However, now their barbarism has surpassed even Hitler’s.”
The jobless rate may be down from its recession peak of 10 percent, but much of this results from adults, discouraged by the lack of decent job openings, have quit altogether. They are neither employed nor looking for work.
Only about half of the drop in the adult participation rate may be attributed to the Baby Boom generation reaching retirement age. Lacking adequate resources to retire, a larger percentage of adults over 65 are working than before the recession.
Many Americans who would like full time jobs are stuck in part-time positions, because businesses can hire desirable part-time workers to supplement a core of permanent, full-time employees, but at lower wages. And Obamacare’s employer health insurance mandates will not apply to workers on the job less than 30 hours a week.
Since 2000, Congress has enhanced the earned income tax credit, and expanded programs that provide direct benefits to low-income workers, including food stamps, Medicaid, Obamacare, and rent and mortgage assistance.
Virtually all phase as family incomes rise, either by securing higher hourly pay or working more hours, and impose an effective marginal tax rate as high as 50 percent. Consequently, these programs discourage work and skills acquisition, and encourage single parents and one partner in two adult households not to work. Often, these motivate single people to work only part-time.
Undocumented immigrants face more difficulties accessing these programs, and lax immigration enforcement permits them to openly take jobs that government benefits discourage low-income Americans from accepting.
Employers can, intentionally or unintentionally, abuse the H-1B visa program, which permit businesses to employ foreign workers when qualified Americans are unavailable. Americans may be overlooked, because they demand higher wages, or are not networked with immigrants that are already employed in technical and managerial positions.
The economy has created only about 6 million new jobs during the Bush-Obama years, whereas the comparable figure during the Reagan-Clinton period was about 40 million. A recent study by the Center for Immigration Studies indicates that virtually all the new jobs created since 2000 went to immigrants, whereas none were created for native-born Americans.
Adding in discouraged adults who say they would begin looking for work if conditions were better, those working part-time but say they want full time work, and the effects of immigration, the unemployment rate becomes about 15 percent—and that is a lower bound estimate.
Many young people are being duped both by unscrupulous for profit, post-secondary institutions — as well as accredited colleges and universities with low admission standards—to enroll in useless programs. They would likely be in the labor force now but for easy access to federally sponsored loans and will end up heavily in debt.
Adding in these students, the real unemployment rate among U.S. citizens and permanent residents is at least 18 percent.
Since 2000, GDP growth has averaged 1.7 per year, whereas during the Reagan-Clinton years, it was 3.4 percent. The reluctance of both Presidents Bush and Obama to confront Chinese protectionism and currency manipulation and open up offshore oil for development have created a huge trade deficit that sends consumer demand, growth and jobs abroad.
New business regulations, more burdensome than are necessary to accomplish legitimate consumer protection and environmental objectives, exacerbate these problems.
All of this suppresses wages except for the most skilled and talented workers.
No surprise, average family income, adjusted for inflation has fallen from about $55,600 in 2007 to $51,000 even as the gap between families at the bottom and top widens.
Peter Morici is an economist and business professor at the University of Maryland, national columnist and five-time winner of the MarketWatch best forecaster award. He tweets @pmorici1
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Source: The Washington Post.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s anti- Semitism is getting the better of him. Once again, the Turkish prime minister has trotted out the Hitler analogy in relation to Israel and what it has done in Gaza. “They curse Hitler morning and night,” he said of the Israelis. “However, now their barbarism has surpassed even Hitler’s.”
Erdogan’s Hitler fetish is both revolting and inaccurate. Hitler murdered an estimated 6 million Jews, not to mention millions of Poles, Russians, Gypsies and, as a group, homosexuals; the Israelis have killed in the current Gaza operation more than 1,000 Palestinians. The difference between murdered and killed — the former on purpose, the latter mostly what’s called “collateral damage” — ought to be clear to anyone whose mind is not addled by anti-Semitism.
Israel has gone out of its way to try to avoid civilian deaths. It has often — maybe too often — not succeeded. But it has warned civilians with telephone calls and text messages and even dummy bombs hitting the roof. This, I point out, is far more than President Obama has done when U.S. drones kill terrorists in Pakistan or wherever. Hamas militants are also terrorists and they hide, as every guerrilla army has ever done, among the people.
The loss of civilian life is awful, but it is no Holocaust. It is, though, an opportunity for anti-Semites, latent or otherwise, to express their bigotry. Their implied statement is that the Jews had it coming — see how they act now! Their bigotry overpowers their logic and they deliriously lose all sense of proportion — 6 million vs. 1,000 or so in Gaza — and they conflate the killer with the killed. It is repugnant.
For Erdogan, the handier reference, one closer to home, would have been what the Turks did to the Armenians. This genocide — the very word was coined by Raphael Lemkin to encompass what happened to 1.5 million Armenians during and after World War I — has been roundly denied by the Turkish government. In a dizzying feat of irrationality, the head of that government brushes past the crimes of his own nation to point an accusatory finger at the victims of another nation.
Erdogan’s remarks are merely the reductio ad absurdum of the anti-Israel argument. Some accuse Israel of a hideous lack of proportionality without pausing to say what the proper proportion of death and destruction should be. Would Hamas have ceased firing rockets into Israel if Israel had bombed less? Somehow, I think not. Would Hamas have blown up its own tunnels if Israel had ceased its attack after, say, a week? Again, no. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, did the United States go into Afghanistan to kill exactly 2,977 al-Qaeda and Taliban, an eye for every eye extinguished on that infamous day? Israel is a small nation of only about 8 million people, more than a fifth of them Arabs. Proportionality is a luxury beyond its reach.
It is clear that much of the world has grown weary of Israel. Its persistent settlement of the West Bank is surely cause for indignation. Yet there is an edge to the outrage that is elsewhere lacking. When did thousands gather in Europe to protest the Syrian slaughter — not just the government’s abhorrent bombing, use of gas and repression but the torture and murder of about 10,000 activists and dissidents? It was a mass murder that the Syrian government studiously archived — photos and such — which surely deserves the Nazi analogy that comes so easily to the tongue of Erdogan and others. No matter. Silence.
To understand the fury of the European protests, it’s useful to recall — and expand upon — the remark of the Israeli psychiatrist Zvi Rex: “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” For any part of Europe that was complicitous in the Holocaust — essentially most of it — this means coming to grips with a terrible legacy that has to haunt subsequent generations and raises a creepy question: Why did Grandpa kill the Jews? Look at what they have done in Gaza. Now we know.
I take psychiatric theories with a grain of salt, but the effort of Erdogan to make the victim worse than the victimizer is not only false and tasteless, it is psychologically intriguing. It does more than blame the victim. It tends to exonerate the criminal. History is repeating itself — not, as Marx said, as either tragedy or farce, but in Erdogan’s telling as pornography.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3) Real Unemployment Rate Is at Least 18 Percent
The Labor Department on Friday is expected to report the economy added 235,000 jobs in July, and the unemployment rate remained steady at 6.1 percent, but that hardly tells the story.
The jobless rate may be down from its recession peak of 10 percent, but much of this results from adults, discouraged by the lack of decent job openings, have quit altogether. They are neither employed nor looking for work.
Only about half of the drop in the adult participation rate may be attributed to the Baby Boom generation reaching retirement age. Lacking adequate resources to retire, a larger percentage of adults over 65 are working than before the recession.
Many Americans who would like full time jobs are stuck in part-time positions, because businesses can hire desirable part-time workers to supplement a core of permanent, full-time employees, but at lower wages. And Obamacare’s employer health insurance mandates will not apply to workers on the job less than 30 hours a week.
Since 2000, Congress has enhanced the earned income tax credit, and expanded programs that provide direct benefits to low-income workers, including food stamps, Medicaid, Obamacare, and rent and mortgage assistance.
Virtually all phase as family incomes rise, either by securing higher hourly pay or working more hours, and impose an effective marginal tax rate as high as 50 percent. Consequently, these programs discourage work and skills acquisition, and encourage single parents and one partner in two adult households not to work. Often, these motivate single people to work only part-time.
Undocumented immigrants face more difficulties accessing these programs, and lax immigration enforcement permits them to openly take jobs that government benefits discourage low-income Americans from accepting.
Employers can, intentionally or unintentionally, abuse the H-1B visa program, which permit businesses to employ foreign workers when qualified Americans are unavailable. Americans may be overlooked, because they demand higher wages, or are not networked with immigrants that are already employed in technical and managerial positions.
The economy has created only about 6 million new jobs during the Bush-Obama years, whereas the comparable figure during the Reagan-Clinton period was about 40 million. A recent study by the Center for Immigration Studies indicates that virtually all the new jobs created since 2000 went to immigrants, whereas none were created for native-born Americans.
Adding in discouraged adults who say they would begin looking for work if conditions were better, those working part-time but say they want full time work, and the effects of immigration, the unemployment rate becomes about 15 percent—and that is a lower bound estimate.
Many young people are being duped both by unscrupulous for profit, post-secondary institutions — as well as accredited colleges and universities with low admission standards—to enroll in useless programs. They would likely be in the labor force now but for easy access to federally sponsored loans and will end up heavily in debt.
Adding in these students, the real unemployment rate among U.S. citizens and permanent residents is at least 18 percent.
Since 2000, GDP growth has averaged 1.7 per year, whereas during the Reagan-Clinton years, it was 3.4 percent. The reluctance of both Presidents Bush and Obama to confront Chinese protectionism and currency manipulation and open up offshore oil for development have created a huge trade deficit that sends consumer demand, growth and jobs abroad.
New business regulations, more burdensome than are necessary to accomplish legitimate consumer protection and environmental objectives, exacerbate these problems.
All of this suppresses wages except for the most skilled and talented workers.
No surprise, average family income, adjusted for inflation has fallen from about $55,600 in 2007 to $51,000 even as the gap between families at the bottom and top widens.
Peter Morici is an economist and business professor at the University of Maryland, national columnist and five-time winner of the MarketWatch best forecaster award. He tweets @pmorici1
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