Obama cannot bring himself to be critical of Muslims. He cannot cut the umbilical cord that binds him to his ancestors.
Over the years, I have been critical of Obama on many levels and, until recently, was reluctant to connect his actions to his Muslim background. However, it is becoming more evident to me the Muslim influence on Obama is increasingly evident and dictates his policies and/or failure to develop appropriate strategies in our war with Jihadsts.
Soon I suspect there will be a deal with Iran which will give this rogue nation a decided advantage and Obama and Kerry will portray it as a resounding victory as they have characterized virtually every failure as a breakthrough, a decided accomplishment etc. (See 1 and 1a below.)
Meanwhile, Ukraine burns, Jordan displays gumption and Obama remains out to lunch! (See 1b and 1c below.)
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My sense of the market is that we have enjoyed a nice rally, oil prices have risen as rig counts have been significantly reduced and remaining earnings and economic reports have shown steady improvement.
The fly in the ointment remains not the statistical quantity but the quality of the reported figured. Yes, more are employed but we still remain under employed. Yes, wages are showing a modest uptick but the middle class are not earning anywhere near their former levels and , except for energy, every basic cost of living item is quite a bit higher. A restrained recovery has cooled corporate attitudes and capital spending.
Europe's economic outlook continues in doubt as Greece remains an economic basket case that could blow the EU sky high. Russia is in an economic strait jacket so Putin must keep Russians attention focused on Ukraine and not Russian living costs.
China is re-stimulating their economy and though, we would gladly trade their GDP for ours, China has many social issues and woes that will continue to the challenge their leadership.
My conclusion is, from this point forward I would use any further market rise to build cash and/or maintain existing cash balances. Historically, as we approach income tax day, the market shift turns more negative. The consecutive period from Oct to April far outpaces the period from May - September, according to Yale Hirsch's Almanac.
Having involved myself in the market for 55 years, anything I say or write should be taken with a large dose of salt. (See 2 below.)
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The irony of part G! (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)Why the White House Is Getting Lonelier on Iran
The administration has persistently avoided dealing with the most serious critics of its Iran policy.
Suddenly, we seem to be having the conversation the administration didn’t want to have: a conversation about just where President Obama’s approach to Iran is taking us. A Washington Post editorial has put the issue on the agenda in a way that it will be hard for the spinners and Iran-apologists to dance past, and there are signs that bipartisan concerns are beginning to grow.
The Post, in one of the most important newspaper editorials of recent years, signals out three important concerns with the President’s approach:
- First, a process that began with the goal of eliminating Iran’s potential to produce nuclear weapons has evolved into a plan to tolerate and restrict that capability.
- Second, in the course of the negotiations, the Obama administration has declined to counter increasingly aggressive efforts by Iran to extend its influence across the Middle East and seems ready to concede Tehran a place as a regional power at the expense of Israel and other U.S. allies.
- Finally, the Obama administration is signaling that it will seek to implement any deal it strikes with Iran — including the suspension of sanctions that were originally imposed by Congress — without seeking a vote by either chamber. Instead, an accord that would have far-reaching implications for nuclear proliferation and U.S. national security would be imposed unilaterally by a president with less than two years left in his term.
As the Post points out, a cavalcade of distinguished American foreign policy voices, including Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, have issued warnings that the White House seems to have lost its way as it tries to navigate the complex minefield that is U.S.-Iranian relations. As my colleague Michael Doran has recently pointed out in an article that contributed to the rising disquiet about the administration’s Iran strategy, the approach to Iran has been the centerpiece of the administration’s Middle East strategy from 2009 to the present day.
What’s interesting is that the growing disquiet about our Iran policy isn’t over the basic decision to negotiate with Iran. Although as usual the White House tries to portray its opponents as hot heads whose unreasoning hatred of Iran combines with a love of war to create a blind opposition to the President’s sensible and rational preference for diplomacy, the debate is not about whether to negotiate with Iran. It is about how to ensure that those negotiations advance important American interests.
The debate over Iran negotiations is really a debate over Middle East strategy as a whole. The Iran apologists inside the administration and out have a case that basically looks like this: Iran is the best possible long term partner for the United States in the region and American and Iranian interests are strategically aligned. The Saudis, who call themselves our allies, export religious extremism and are fundamentally committed to a backward form of political organization. The Saudi monarchy is a ticking time bomb that will one day explode when the population tires of a greedy, corrupt and incompetent royal family. Iran, by contrast, has a large and educated middle class; flawed as its current political system may be, forces are at work that will soon make Iran a much more modern and democratic country than any of the backward Arab states with whom the United States is currently allied. An end to U.S.-Iranian hostility over the nuclear issue will do more than lay a dangerous dispute to rest. It will open the door to a much wider and more fruitful relationship.
The goal of American policy should therefore be to create a relationship of trust between the two capitals based on this community of interest. When the regime feels less threatened by the United States, and when it understands that the United States wants to work with it towards a regional order that is in the interess of both countries, Iran will begin to work ‘within the system’ and become a responsible stakeholder rather than an exporter of subversion. Moreover, an end to sanctions combined with better relations with the United States will contribute to the democratization of Iranian society. The revolution, Iran apologists argue, is old and decrepit. The rising generations are tired of clerical rule and hunger for western modernity. The United States is actually popular among Iranian youth. The clerics and their repressive allies are only clinging to power because the sense of encirclement and danger drives nationalists into their camp and because the sanctions undermine the middle class and concentrate economic power in the hands of the Revolutionary Guard and other regime allies. By offering a face-saving compromise on the nuclear issue, ending sanctions and opening the door to a wider role for Iran in the region, the Obama administration can stabilize the region and democratize Iran while reducing the American profile—and reducing our dependence on unsteady and problematic allies like the Gulf states.
This is an intoxicating vision, and a number of people have been intoxicated by it. But it is not the only reason the President can give to defend his policy approach. Besides hope, there is fear. What is the alternative, President Obama asks his critics, to the White House course? Strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities? Won’t those just set the nuclear program back by at most a few years while consolidating the power of a regime that will hate America more than before? War with Iran—at a time when the region is already in flames and the American people are deeply war-weary? What happens to the international coalition that has been supporting the United States in the nuclear negotiations if the Americans are seen to be walking away from them?
There is merit to these points, more merit than some of the President’s harsher critics are prepared to acknowledge. It is much easier to criticize an existing Iran policy than to propose (and to execute) something different.
But the growing chorus of sober and informed critics of the White House approach to Iran aren’t for the most part attacking the idea of negotiations over the nuclear issue or even of a possible future rapprochement with Iran. This isn’t even primarily an argument about exactly how many centrifuges the nuclear talks allow the Iranians in the end – or about any of the other technical details of a proposed nuclear understanding. The skeptics are criticizing what looks like a disjointed and misguided approach to the relationship with Iran that threatens to further destabilize the Middle East. It is possible that the administration has good answers for them, but up until now the White House has preferred not to engage with the serious arguments against its Iran approach. The longer the President and his top aides keep pretending that critics have no concerns that are worth taking seriously, the more they feed the narrative that the White House is in over its head on Iran—that it has lost sight of some important considerations in a headlong drive to get a deal. That perception, unless refuted (rather than mocked, caricatured or ignored) will ensure that neither Congress nor the country will allow the White House to pursue an Iran strategy that lacks public buy-in and consent.
So what are the arguments the White House needs to address in order to shore up the eroding support for its Iran strategy?
The Balance of Power Problem
One of the strongest arguments in favor of this approach to Iran comes from those who see in it an opening for the United States to cut back its commitments in the Middle East without sacrificing core interests—by adopting the posture of an “offshore balancer.” Instead of being intimately involved with all the nitty-gritty of Middle Eastern power politics, the United States could rely on an offshore naval and air presence to ensure that no single power in the Middle East can dominate the rest. In some cases offshore balancing serves as a code-phrase to suggest a loosening of the U.S.-Israeli alliance as part of a general pullback; in others it is a way one underlines one’s differences from George W. Bush and his strategy. Proponents of this strategy have been among the strongest supporters of the administration’s Iran approach.
It’s hard to see why the offshore balancers should support the White House on this. The gravest danger to the balance of power in the Middle East today is not Saudi Arabia, Israel, or Turkey. The greatest danger is Iran’s push to consolidate its domination of the swath of territory from Iraq through Syria to Lebanon. If the United States aimed to pursue an offshore balancing strategy, it would currently be coming down like a ton of bricks on Iran’s regional ambitions. Instead, the Obama administration appears to be edging toward embracing Iran as a useful partner against ISIS and its fellow travelers.
A nuclear deal under these circumstances that lifts the sanctions without addressing the question of Iran’s regional ambitions would have the inevitable effect of greatly strengthening Iran’s hand.
Intelligent skeptics want to understand what the administration thinks about Iran’s growing predominance in the region. Is our strategy one of offshore balancing, or is it based on something like a return to the Nixon strategy of relying on the Shah of Iran as our right hand in the region? If the former, what does the administration propose to do about the imbalance that increasingly favors Iran? If the latter, what assurances does the administration have that a regionally dominant Iran would be our friend?
The Strategic Alignment Problem
The offshore balancer question leads to the next issue that troubles informed skeptics of the current negotiations with Iran. Supporters of a new relationship argue that the United States and Iran can work together for the long term because their interests are broadly aligned.
That may be true—and it may not be. It seems, for example, that Iran would be a much more hawkish leader of OPEC than the Saudis have been. With a larger population and an ambitious regional policy, Iran would likely use its enhanced influence in OPEC to push prices higher.
More fundamentally, for Iran to hold its position as a regional strongman, it would have to overcome deep-seated Sunni Arab prejudices against both its Shi’a faith and its Persian culture. Being identified as Uncle Sam’s closest regional ally and hired gun would not exactly strengthen Iran’s soft power in the Middle East.
So far, Iran has consistently cast its quest for regional power as a movement of “Islamic Resistance” against the United States and its sidekick in Jerusalem. It casts American allies like the Saudis and others as pawns and puppets of the anti-Islamic “Crusader-Zionist” alliance. Iran and its allies (Syria, Hezbollah, and, in the past and once again perhaps in the near future, Hamas) have identified themselves as the “Resistance Front,” and have consistently taken the hardest possible line against both the United States and Israel.
Perhaps the administration has solid grounds for the belief that a stronger Iran would be a friendlier power. To the naked eye, however, it would seem that the larger Iran looms in the region, the more it will need the image of anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism to legitimate its position.
The Obama administration will not be able to address rising skepticism about its Iran policy unless and until it can show why it makes sense to think that a stronger Iran will choose alignment with the United States when its own political interests would benefit from a more anti-American posture.
The Regime Change Argument
One of the most attractive arguments in favor of the current course is that moving to a less polarized relationship with Iran will accelerate a transition toward a more democratic and less theocratic regime within Iran. A new and democratic Iran is struggling to emerge from the chrysalis of the revolutionary government; by opening Iran’s economy to the world we can help the Iranian people change the regime from within. The new Iran that comes to life in this way will be a reliable partner for the United States and other free countries in remaking the region.
This argument is extremely popular and indeed is a mainstay among the many Iranian exiles and expats who are lobbying for improved relations between their countries of adoption and origin. It is passionately advanced; many of its advocates have friends and family back in Iran who long for this kind of opening and have high hopes for the results.
It may be true, but again it may not be. Most revolutions fail, if our criteria for success is the destruction of a dictatorship and its replacement by a stable, democratic regime. Exiles and upper middle class liberals are notoriously out of touch with political developments in their own countries. Look at the Egyptian liberals who passionately believed that the overthrow of Mubarak would lead to the kind of liberal democracy they so deeply and sincerely long for.
One of the things that keeps Iran skeptics up at night worrying is the fear that in fact the White House is betting the ranch on some kind of democratic evolution in Iran as the sanctions come down and the nuclear standoff ends. Certainly a democratic revolution in Iran would be a welcome development, but the Obama administration has a terrible track record in predicting the outcomes of Middle East political turmoil. Americans generally are bad at predicting when revolutions will take place in foreign countries, and we are if anything worse at predicting the course those revolutions take once under way.
Those who currently oppose the President’s strategy on Capitol Hill and elsewhere want to know that the President isn’t pursuing a strategy that depends on the deus ex machina of a timely, friendly, and successful democratic revolution that has us all getting along like there had never been any bad blood to begin with. They want to be sure that the President and the very tight and close circle of relatively inexperienced people on whom he relies haven’t swallowed the Kool Aid passed out by Iranian exiles—remarkably similar in many ways to the Kool Aid that Iraqi exiles passed out to members of the Bush administration. How does the President’s strategy hold up if we assume that the same of assemblage of messianic ayatollahs and thuggish Revolutionary Guards will be running Iran when the sanctions are lifted?
The Alliance Problem
Finally, there is the question of our current unhappy allies. In pursuit of a new understanding with Iran, the White House has put severe stress on our existing relationships with countries like Saudi Arabia and Israel. As a result, Iran has been able to watch America’s regional position and alliance network weaken without lifting a finger or spending a dime. Seeing public quarrels erupt between Riyadh and Washington, and Jerusalem and Washington, makes people feel all warm and fuzzy in Tehran.
One can imagine situations in which the United States would switch from one set of allies to another. Something very like that has been gradually happening in South Asia as the United States and Pakistan move away from each other while the United States and India draw nearer. But the case in India for a U.S.-India alliance seems much stronger than the case for a U.S.-Iran alliance seems in Tehran. The administration has never articulated a compelling case for the belief that the U.S. and Iran are natural allies in today’s Middle East. Nor has much on this subject been heard from Tehran.
Under the circumstances, it looks to many as if the United States is dumping its old allies without securing a replacement. More may be said behind closed doors than is heard on the street, but even those who participate in high level briefings do not seem to have much confidence that the nuclear talks are simply an overture that looks almost certain to produce a much wider and sturdier U.S.-Iranian partnership that will be more useful and stable than the network allies we currently have.
If the administration has a serious case for how its Iran policy will leave the United States with a stronger and more useful regional alliance network than it now has, that case has not been made, not only to the public at large, but to the congressional leaders and former secretaries of state who could be expected to be convinced by strong arguments along these lines.
And this, finally, is why the chorus of concern about the President’s Iran strategy is becoming so much louder this winter. The bits and pieces of the strategy that we know about don’t make sense, and the President and his team don’t seem to understand how weak and vapid the case they make to the public really is. We are reduced to hoping that there is some kind of Top Secret strategy of genius that the circle of advisors close to the President isn’t sharing, but the President’s very checkered record as a global strategist makes this kind of confidence hard to sustain.
Unless President Obama can make a much stronger case for his Iran policy than he has so far done, expect skepticism and opposition to grow.
Though a vote won’t be held on a new Iran sanctions bill is being put off until late March, the question of what is exactly going on in the talks between the West and Tehran deserves more attention. The chattering classes have focused largely on a pointless dispute about whether Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu will speak to Congress in March about Iran. But the real issue is the substance of the current negotiations. As a Washington Posteditorial noted yesterday, the clear intent of the Obama administration is to acquiesce to Iran’s demands to be allowed to keep its nuclear infrastructure as well as treat the regime, as a legitimate regional power in the Middle East is no longer in much doubt. That leaves observers asking two very important questions. One is whether Iran can be trusted to keep the terms of any nuclear deal it signs. The other is whether the Obama administration can be trusted to hold the Iranians accountable.
As the Post points out, the danger inherent in the administration’s Iran policy is that by letting them keep thousands of centrifuges and a nuclear stockpile that could be quickly re-activated to allow it to build a weapon, the terms currently being discussed will, at the very least, allow the Islamist regime to become a threshold nuclear power. Though he continues to insist, as he has since he first started running for president in 2007, that he won’t let Iran get a nuclear weapon, the president doesn’t seem to have a problem with that. Why? The answer is that Obama believes that the U.S. and Iran have common interests that will allow them to cooperate together in the region and that the ayatollahs have too much to gain from a reconciliation with the West in terms of their nation’s economy to want to risk it all by building a bomb.
But the problem with that formulation is that it is fundamentally mistaken. Iran has no interest in America’s need for regional stability and preserving moderate Arab regimes allied with the West, let alone protecting the existence of the state of Israel. To the contrary, it hopes to threaten both the Arab states and Israel via the threat of a nuclear weapon as well as keeping the pressure on them through the use of its Hezbollah terrorist auxiliaries and allied terror groups like Hamas. Yet Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon as well as its progress on ballistic missiles means that this is a problem that concerns the entire West and not just Israel and the Arabs.
That is why the bipartisan sanctions bill proposed by Senators Mark Kirk and Robert Menendez is so important. It provides at least a measure of accountability to the process since it raises the price for Iran for dragging out negotiations or for continuing to refuse to accept even another weak deal with the West like the interim agreement signed in November 2013.
Even more to the point, is the question of whether even a weak deal, such as the one Obama and Kerry embraced in 2013 can be enforced by this or subsequent administrations. To date, the administration has refused to take seriously charges that the Iranians are already cheating on the interim deal. The dynamic of the process is such that the president views any such questions or even threats of more sanctions with hostility because he sees them as a threat to his goal of a rapprochement with Iran.
This is problematic because so long as Iran believes that Washington won’t take violations of a nuclear deal seriously, it will feel free to push the envelope on more cheating. Since the president has already conceded that, as the Post wrote, “a process that began with the goal of eliminating Iran’s potential to produce nuclear weapons has evolved into a plan to tolerate and restrict that capability,” it is difficult to believe the Islamist regime will think it need worry about the president abandoning a process to which he has become so devoted no matter what they do.
That brings us back to the question of the sanctions bill. Realists must understand that even if the bill is passed and then a threatened presidential veto is overridden, Congress can’t stop Obama from negotiating with Iran and coming up with a bad deal. Nor is it likely that it will be able to force him to put such a treaty to a vote as the Constitution demands since the president will seek to evade that requirement.
Indeed, even if the bill were to become law, the president could also use waivers in the legislation to prevent its enforcement. This is something of a poison pill that was forced on its sponsors by both political expediency (getting more Democratic votes) and legal technicalities (existing sanctions laws also have waivers that could be used by Obama to thwart this bill). But to the credit of both Kirk and Menendez, they have attempted to write their waivers in such a way as to constrict the president from wantonly ignoring the intent of Congress. Though this and other administrations have used waivers to flout the meaning of laws, doing so in this case will involve not merely a desire on the part of the president to ignore Congress but a willingness to lie about Iran’s conduct.
This is a president who has already demonstrated on a host of issues but most notably on immigration that he is not constrained by the normal Constitutional order or even the rule of law. That means that it is difficult to have confidence that any waiver, no matter how carefully it is drafted, will be able to force the president to hold Iran accountable.
That, in a nutshell, is the problem with the Iran talks. It’s not just that given its record as well as its regional and nuclear ambitions, Iran is not to be trusted. It’s that President Obama can also not be trusted to pursue a policy that is aimed at stopping Iran from becoming a threshold nuclear power. Without such accountability, there is no reason for Congress or the American people to trust the outcome of the negotiations.
1b) Fear of Vladimir Putin grows in EU capitals amid spectre of ‘total war’
Analysis: That Angela Merkel has gone to Moscow speaks to the sudden gravity of the situation in east Ukraine
In Brussels and other European capitals, the fear of Vladimir Putin is becoming palpable. The mood has changed in a matter of weeks from one of handwringing impotence over Ukraine to one of foreboding.
The anxiety is encapsulated in the sudden rush to Moscow by Angela Merkel and François Hollande. To senior figures closely involved in the diplomacy and policymaking over Ukraine, the Franco-German peace bid is less a hopeful sign of a breakthrough than an act of despair.
“There’s nothing new in their plan, just an attempt to stop a massacre,” said one senior official.
Carl Bildt, the former Swedish foreign minister, said a war between Russia and the west was now quite conceivable. A senior diplomat in Brussels, echoing the broad EU view, said arming the Ukrainians would mean war with Russia, a war that Putin would win.
Announcing the surprise mission to Kiev and Moscow, Hollande sounded grave and solemn. The Ukraine crisis, he said, started with differences, which became a conflict, which became a war, and which now risked becoming “total war”.
Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former Danish prime minister and until recently the head of Nato, publicly voiced fears that Putin could expand what is seen as Soviet revisionism to countries now in Nato and the EU. In the Baltics, Putin might risk a little exercise in “hybrid warfare”, he said, just to test how the western alliance would react.
That Merkel has gone to Moscow is telling in itself and speaks to the sudden gravity of the situation. The Russian-speaking German chancellor has talked to the German-speaking Putin more than 40 times in the past year as the main western mediator on Ukraine. But until Friday she had never gone to Moscow. Only a few weeks ago she vetoed a summit in Kazakhstan with Putin because she believed there was no point negotiating with someone she no longer trusted.
Putin is demanding that a large tract of eastern Ukraine, taken by force by his separatist proxies in recent weeks, be granted internationally licensed autonomy and that a new frontline be recognised as a basis for a putative ceasefire.
The parallel might be 1991 in Croatia when the Serbs took a quarter of the country and then consolidated their grip behind lines patrolled by UN peacekeepers. It crippled and destabilised Croatia.
European policymakers say this is Putin’s aim in Ukraine. In Croatia the land-grab lasted four years until Zagreb, gradually armed by the Americans and Europeans, quickly routed the Serbs militarily.
The big difference then was that the Serbs were stretched by a bigger war next door in Bosnia where eventually Nato bombed them to the negotiating table. That will not happen with the Russians.
Arming the Ukrainians, meanwhile, will open up big divisions between the Americans and most Europeans. Putin is playing on those divisions as he plays on splits between the Europeans. He does not need to try very hard. The divisions are ever-present over sanctions.
On Monday the EU will impose more sanctions, extending a blacklist of pro-Russia separatists and Russians by 19 names. These penalties are minor. The broader economic sanctions in force against Russian banks and companies are more serious. They lapse in July unless extended by all EU governments.
Last year the biggest opponent was Matteo Renzi, the Italian prime minister, whose then foreign minister, Federica Mogherini, now coordinates EU foreign policy. The new leftwing pro-Russia Greek government may be this summer’s problem.
The sanctions policy has so far held up, but is showing acute strains. Senior diplomats from EU governments regularly say the sanctions are hurting but are not working because they have not changed Putin’s behaviour. The EU is split in two, with Britain leading the pro-sanctions side and a sizeable group complaining that the punishment has cost the EU an estimated 15% of exports to Russia. Germany is the pivot, the swing power.
Putin is increasingly seen as a reckless gambler who calls bluffs and takes risks, and is inscrutable, paranoid and unpredictable. Trying to work out what he wants is guesswork. The Europeans sound scared.
Ukraine is a huge problem for Europe, not least the dawning realisation that fixing it will cost tens of billions and will take a very long time. But for Europe it is becoming clear that the real nightmare is not Ukraine, but Putin’s Russia.
1c) FORMER NATO CHIEF WARNS
Expect Russia to Test Article V
Vladmir Putin will probably stir unrest in a Baltic NATO state to test the alliance’s resolve directly in the wake of his success in Ukraine, according to Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former Secretary-General of NATO. The Telegraph reports:
“This is not about Ukraine. Putin wants to restore Russia to its former position as a great power,” he told The Telegraph.“There is a high probability that he will intervene in the Baltics to test Nato’s Article 5,” he said, referring to the solidarity clause that underpins collective security.“Putin knows that if he crosses the red line and attacks a Nato ally, he will be defeated. Let us be quite clear about that. But he is a specialist in hybrid warfare,” he said.
Media attention this week has been focused on U.S.-European-Russian negotiations over Ukraine. But the West needs to be looking north and trying to get ahead of the next security crisis—in a way that it did decidedly did not with Ukraine.
Unlike Ukraine, the Baltic states are members of NATO. And as NATO members, they are guaranteed by Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty that an attack on one will be treated as an attack on all—and defended as such. But absent willpower, guarantees are just words on paper. If Putin approaches the Baltics the way he has Ukraine—inflaming local grievances, sending in Russian soldiers without insignia (“little green men”), maintaining a pretext of deniability—will the European members of NATO consider themselves obliged to respond? Will the U.S.? The risk of war with Russia must be balanced against the prospect of the whole Western alliance system, and the deterrence it carries, collapsing before the world’s eyes. The uncertainty regarding the American and Western European commitment to the Baltic states therefore makes the calculations for everyone involved more dangerous.
Part of the problem, as Rasmussen noted, is that Europe’s militaries are in terrible shape:
“Nato countries have cut defence spending by 20pc in real terms over the last five years – and some by 40pc – while Russia has increased by 80pc. The aggression in Ukraine is a wake-up call,” he said.“We learned in the Libyan crisis that Europe is totally reliant on the Americans for air-refueling, drones, and communications intelligence. We don’t have air transport. It is really bad.”
So the lack of European resolve has more than a little to do with a lack of European capacity. This is where leadership from Washington is vitally necessary. NATO’s presence in Baltics needs to be much stronger both to deter Russian aggression and to demonstrate to the Russian public that the course Putin is on will not intimidate NATO.
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2) For Most Of Us, There's No "Recovery"
From 1820 through 2000, real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product grew at an average annual rate of 3.6 percent. Last year was the ninth consecutive year in which the economy grew less than 3 percent.
Real GDP has grown 13.6 percent since the recovery officially began in June 2009. The average rate of growth at this point in the recoveries from the four recessions since 1975 was 21.9 percent.
If it weren’t for gains made by the well off, there wouldn’t be a “recovery.” Five years after it began, the top 1 percent of earners (more than $366,623 a year) had garnered 81 percent of its fruits. The incomes of the top one-tenth of 1 percent (about $8 million a year) grew 39 percent.
The incomes of the bottom 90 percent declined, according to University of California-Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez. Real median household income was $54,417 in December, 5.1 percent lower than in January 2008 ($57,317).
Most of us get nearly all our income from our jobs. Only 44 percent of adults work 30 hours or more a week, according to Gallup’s survey of the work force. Ten million fewer are working now than when Barack Obama became president.
It took until last March to create as many new jobs as were lost during the Great Recession. For every person who’s found a job, two have left the labor force.
Few new jobs are as good as those lost. In 2012, men working full-time year round earned less (in inflation-adjusted dollars) than they did in 1973, Businessweek said.
About 7.3 million Americans work part time because they can’t find a full-time job. Roughly 25 percent of involuntary part-time workers live in poverty, according to University of New Hampshire Prof. Rebecca Glauber.
The unemployment rate has fallen to 5.6 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s “a big lie,” wrote Gallup Chairman Jim Clifton on his blog. If you’ve quit looking for work after four fruitless weeks, or work as little as an hour a week, BLS doesn’t count you as unemployed, he notes.
“If you have a degree in chemistry or math and are working 10 hours part time because it is all you can find,” BLS doesn’t count you either, Mr. Clifton said.
If the long-term unemployed and the underemployed were counted, the unemployment rate in December would have been 9.1 percent, said Elise Gould, an economist for the Economic Policy Institute.
Economic and job growth are inhibited by government policies.
About 20 percent of employers are cutting back on new hires and worker hours to avoid onerous provisions in Obamacare, surveys by Federal Reserve banks in New York and Dallas indicate.
Three major provisions in the health care law give employers incentives to cut working hours, according to University of Chicago economics professor Casey Mulligan. They’ve reduced full-time employment by about 4 million jobs, he estimates.
The 7,805 regulations issued by the Obama administration through December will boost to $1.88 trillion the cost of complying with federal rules this year, the Competitive Enterprise Institute estimates. Just responding to government requests for information requires more than 9 billion hours of paperwork, said the Office of Management and Budget.
Federal regulations reduce economic growth by as much as 12 percent, estimated the National Association of Manufacturers, and they cost small businesses $10,000 per employee, said the Small Business Administration.
Many studies exaggerate the costs of regulation. But if the Phoenix Center’s estimate that each million-dollar increase in the regulatory budget reduces private-sector employment by 420 jobs is just half right, the burst of regulatory activity during the Obama administration has cost 546,000 jobs. More than 2,000 additional rules are in the pipeline.
The national debt rose from 62 percent of GDP in 2007 to 101.5 percent of GDP in December. Debt projected under current law could reduce average annual income by $2,000 within 25 years, CBO estimated last July.
Instead of cheer leading for an imaginary recovery, more “mainstream” journalists should be explaining why, for many of us, there hasn’t been one.
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