I have never seen a sign saying Women Working even though I have seen women occasionally laboring alongside men workers .
Obviously our various road departments are not very PC and are out of touch with our nation's new found gender sensibilities.
Since we have become such a divided nation and so over the board conscious of being PC, I submit we start protesting by not driving so that every faction of our fractured society involved in road and other public works are represented by appropriate signage. Think of all the gas we might save as well as rid our fouled air of pollution.
I will leave to your own sense of righteous indignation what they might be.
For suggestions we could have worker signs that identify different sexes, races, religions, sexual preferences etc.
That should unite us and, at the same time, make our driving experience more democratic!
A response from a dear friend. (See 1 below.)
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Insights into the thinking of leftist conspirators. (See 1a below.)
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Maybe next time and there will be one. (See 2 below.)
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Peres got it wrong according to Anthony Julius. (See 3 below)
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Show Me voters listened but did not heed. (See 4 below.)
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Someone asked me what I thought of the Mosque being built in New York and I said it is the equivalent of an abortion clinic being built next to The Vatican.
Whether it is legally acceptable misses the point. It is offensive and any group seeking to locate it there is, at the very least, totally insensitive and must have a nefarious ulterior motive.
Tom Friedman and The New York Times editorial staff , of course, see it totally different. They write how it demonstrates our openness and tolerance.
Tolerance of someone spitting in your face demonstrates stupidity at worst and meekness at best.(See 5, 5a and 5b below.)
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Another missed opportunity getting to be a habit. (See 6 below.)
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J Cost explains what went wrong with Obama. (See 7 below.)
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John McWhorter is willing to confront the subject of ethics of The Black Caucus members head on and more power to him. Have black members of Congress outdone white members in shaking down American enterprises? Are their ethical lapses a reflection of a broader character flaw? You decide (See 8 below.)
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Too long to publish but an excellent read on why too many Democrats underestimated Gov. Christie. See:"Chris Christie: The Scourge of Trenton - Daniel Foster, National Review"
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Victor Davis Hanson on illegal immigration.
When Americans tag themselves are they not engaged in a form of racial profiling? (See 9 below.)
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Is The Fed running out of options? (See 10 below.)
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Dick
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1)1a)The only industry that has benefitted from the stimulus bill is the road sign industry for all the “This project paid for by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act” signs. And you want to give the sign industry more work? Soon we’ll have more sign painters than lawyers. But maybe that would be a good thing.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1a)JournoList and the Leftist Mentality
By J.R. Dunn
The publication of JournoList discussions has opened a door into the private world of the left, revealing to some extent how their minds work.
In a way, the JournoList scandal is old news. It's something long suspected on our side of the aisle, something we've occasionally seen brief glimpses of (as in the identical slogans and taglines that just happen to appear in stories, columns, and headlines with amazing synchronicity). After the first debate of the 2000 election, I saw the line "Sometimes Al Gore is too hot, sometimes he's too cold, and sometimes he's just right" from six different sources in a single hour. This, as Trotsky would have put it, was no accident, comrades. Media leftists, and their co-conspirators in the academy and the think-tanks, manipulate and distort the news reaching the American public, and they always have. They do it constantly, consistently, and energetically. It is a formally established process, well-understood by anyone who has been paying attention.
Establishing that truth is plenty in and of itself. But there's another beneficial aspect to the JournoList downloads: They provide a useful window into the actual thinking of the left, which is something they like to keep hidden -- with good reason, as we shall see.
Again, this is nothing new. But confirming a fact adds to our knowledge just as much as discovering one does. And the JournoList scandal has confirmed -- or rather, reaffirmed -- a number of things concerning the legacy media.
The first is their stifling sense of moral superiority. These people truly believe they are moral paragons, fully qualified to act as guides to the Neanderthal rabble, even if they have to cheat, lie, and manipulate to do it. Signs of this are found throughout the e-mails, no matter what the ostensible topic. Sara Mead (Aug 30, 2008, 12:24am) asserts, "I'm not at all a fan of Palin, either, but as liberals and decent human beings, we should be respectful in how we refer to people with disabilities." Even if we're using them as a club to beat the opposition, evidently.
Katha Pollitt (Sept 8, 2008, 3:11pm) moans that the Dems are simply "too lofty" to get down in the gutter with the GOP. (The inclusive "we" is used throughout when referring to JournoList, the Democrats, or the Left in general.)
The second point is that they truly believe all their own propaganda. The U.S. is run by "racists" (as one of them states bluntly), and Bush is the reincarnation of Hitler. The Republicans are throwbacks out to force Americans into serfdom. This is Gospel Truth, so solid it requires neither evidence nor debate. The world works exactly like an Oliver Stone movie, and in no other way. Kathleen Geier (Sept 8, 2008, 3:01pm): "the GOP obviously takes great pride in being the stupid party. And hey -- it's worked!"
David Roberts (Sept 8, 2008, 3:34pm): "There simply is nothing on the left like the partisan media on the right. The left has no media soldiers, only ironically distanced media observers."
The Tea Parties in particular got the J-listers all in a tizzy, to the point where an entire thread was devoted to labeling them as fascists. Ryan Donmoyer (Aug 7, 2009, 8:08am) kicked things off: "You know, at the risk of violating Godwin's law, is anyone starting to see parallels here between the teabaggers and their tactics and the rise of the Brownshirts? Esp. Now that it's getting violent? Reminds me of the Beer Hall fracases of the 1920s."
Rick Perlstein (Aug 7, 2009, 10:59am): "... fascism is a variety of coalition politics; and... elements for that coalition are visible on the horizon."
Katha Pollitt (Aug 7, 2009, 12:20pm): "Unlike the German or Italian fascists, today's US rightwingers have nothing concrete to offer people. Just the pleasures of racism and selfishness and fear."
In case you were wondering -- nope, no mention of Kenneth Gladney, the SEIU, or the New Orleans attack, either.
(Reading the original posts, by the way, is well worth it. Page after page of people earnestly pretending that they're not doing exactly what they're doing -- that is, distorting the news. Founder and chief guru Ezra Klein is particularly adamant: No message discipline here, he insists. We're just a discussion board! Then you get this, from veteran lefty academic Todd Gitlin [Sept 8, 2008, 9:37pm]: "On the question of liberals coordinating, what the hell's wrong with some critical mass of liberal bloggers & journalists saying the following among themselves: McCain lies about his maverick status. Routinely, cavalierly, cynically. Palin lies about her maverick status. Ditto, ditto, ditto. McCain has a wretched temperament. McCain is a warmonger. Palin belongs to a crackpot church and feels warmly about a crackpot party that trashes America ...
Again. And again. Vary the details. There are plenty[.]"
Kind of blows the whole charade, doesn't it?)
Decades ago, H.L. Mencken pointed out that Boobus Americanus (his shorthand term for native jackasses) couldn't perceive the world around him except through the preset pattern of black v. white, heroes v. villains, angels v. devils. It's a comic-book view of the world derived from the deep selfishness of unconscious childhood: the inborn conviction that anyone opposed to you must be wrong because he or she is in opposition.
After undergoing the ordeals of the past century, born in large part of the horrors that absolute certainty brings, most Americans have matured far beyond this. We now understand that there is no one, group or individual, who never fails, who is consistently right, who makes no mistakes. We know that if we are ever to achieve purity of action, the motives that must be constantly and honestly examined are our own. This new social maturity has brought us some great victories: the collapse of segregation with next to no bloodshed, the recovery from the disasters of the '60s with no purges or recriminations, the response to one of the most vicious attacks this country has ever endured without vengeance upon the people of the same creed as the murderers.
This new maturity of outlook has achieved the level of a standard of behavior in this country. It is well on its way to becoming part of the definition of what it is to be an American.
...With one great exception, as we have seen here -- the American Left. Amid that group, mental tribalism exists in almost refined purity. It is commonplace among journalists, intellectuals, and academics: Their side wears the white robes and wields stainless blades. The other side -- no matter who they are -- are no more than Orcs and Morlocks.
That's the JournoList worldview, as derived from their own words on their own private network. Many of us (and I'm certainly one) have thought for years that this mindset was so naïve, so unworldly, as to be totally bogus. It had to be a pose intended to disarm, a mask for something more cynical and calculating. But that's not the case. What we have here is a pack of Eric Hoffer's True Believers in the flesh.
This attitude is dangerous. It validates any kind of atrocity. Recall that the younger and more "innocent" the Khmer Rouge and Chinese Red Guards were, the more viciously and heartlessly they behaved. (Though not all the JournaListas have the excuse of youth -- Gitlin, for example, has been peddling socialism since the Bolshis wore spats.)
They know the truth. They are fighting on behalf of a "better world," so no crime exists for them. They are absolved before they even act.
So any action is justified. Attacking Sarah Palin's family. Calling for FOX to be shut down. Giggling as you imagine Rush Limbaugh's death. Or these immortal words from Spencer Ackerman, written in the world's leading democracy in the first decade of the third millennium: "[F]ind a rightwinger's [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically." (Obviously, as anybody who has seen a photo of little Spencer is well aware.)
There's mystery hovering over our current political situation. That mystery is this: They should have won long ago. The Left should have taken over American society with ease at about the time of Lyndon B. Johnson, or at the latest, Jimmy Carter. They controlled the media for generations, along with the bureaucracy, the educational system all the way up, and many of the professions. They ran Congress as a fiefdom for nearly fifty years. Under the circumstances, we should today be all getting up for daily calisthenics at 4am under the benign eyes of our neighborhood commissars before setting out on our bicycles for work at the People's Cooperative Embryo Processing Plant.
But even today, when they're the closest they've been in seventy years, the Left is suffering moral collapse, giving up before the final bell, all the while whining about how unfair it all is, how this country is too recalcitrant and stubborn for them to "save."
A contradiction this deep requires an explanation -- which can also be found in the JournoList e-mails. Namely, they reflect a stupidity of an extremely high order. All of it -- the misinformation, the confusion between fact and opinion, the dull-witted schemes -- and the grammar and spelling, for that matter -- all suggest nothing more than a crew of not-too-bright adolescents sneaking smokes out in back of the field house and moaning about parents, teachers, and the jocks. The e-mails have that same sour air: the sneering, the boasting, the half-digested half-ideas, the inability to carry any project to conclusion, and the well-practiced impulse to blame somebody, anybody else. And these are their best and brightest, the cream of the graduates of their highest institutes of learning. Ezra and the four hundred dwarfs.
So what we should take away from the JournoList debacle is a sense of confidence and good cheer, born out of knowledge that the opposition is nowhere near as potent as many of us may have feared. This doesn't mean that we can ignore them. The truly stupid can do as much damage as, or more than, the committed psychopath. But handling them is easier -- simply a matter of flushing them out. Put the "JL" brand on them and assure that it never comes off. See that they're tied to this particular yardarm no matter where they go or what they do. Buckeye Texan's list can act as a resource -- it should be taped to the side of every AT reader's computer tower, on every basement rec room wall, and stored in every bathrobe pocket.
I'll get the ball rolling with this mention of Walter Shapiro -- one of the list's older members, from the look of him -- who in this piece has taken the time to straighten us all out about the meaning of Sherrod "scandal." I'll grant Bud his status as an expert, due the fact that he probably knows more about manipulating the news that most of us, and leave him and the rest of the J-Listers with a revised version of an old line, adapted to the realities of their new world: There ain't no comeback from stupid.
J.R. Dunn is consulting editor of American Thinker and will edit the forthcoming Military Thinker
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2)Huge Iranian energy plant explosion coincides with bid on Ahmadinejad's life
Mysterious explosions at new Iranian petrochemicals plantA massive explosion killed at least five workers at the giant Pardis petrochemicals complex in southern Iran Wednesday, August 4, at around 12:30 - just about the time an explosive device was hurled at Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as his heavily secured armored convoy drove through the northern Iranian city of Hamadan. This is reported by debkafile's Iranian sources.
Ahmadinejad was unhurt although some of his bodyguards and bystanders were certainly injured. He made straight for Hamadan's central stadium and began delivering a speech that was broadcast live by state television.
Assaluyeh, the site of the Pardis complex, is situated at the opposite end of Iran, on its southern Persian Gulf coast not far from the Bushehr nuclear reactor. Iranian officials admit that large sections of the complex were destroyed but attributed the blast to a ruptured gas pipe. Intelligence sources report that the plant was hit by five explosive devices. It was new, personally inaugurated on July 28 by President Ahmadinejad, who described it as a miracle of Iranian hi-tech.
Iranian spokesman were also trying to play down the attempt on the president's life by a bomber present in the large audience surrounding his convoy. At first they reported that the target was the journalists' minivan riding in his convoy. But their security services made haste to put the Hamadan and Pardis attacks together for a joint investigation. They suspect some enemy antagonist may have sought to prove it can simultaneously strike at two major targets in opposite ends of the country and get close to the president and also the Bushehr reactor.
Assaluyeh the town is a particularly sensitive place, because it is the hub of the Pars Special Energy Economic Zone whose industries are fueled by the natural gas piped in from the giant South Pars field.
Three days before the petrochemical complex was inaugurated, there was another mysterious explosion at a second energy plant, this one located on Kharg Island.
Iran's security chiefs are beginning to suspect that one or more groups of covert saboteurs are at large on Iran's coast opposite the Strait of Hormuz and are gunning for the strategic industries and facilities located there.
Hamadan's population is incidentally purely Iranian Shiite with none of the ethnic or religious minorities persecuted by the regime. It was built at Biblical Shushan, the burial sites of Queen Esther and Mordecai, several hundreds kilometers west of Tehran.
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3)Head to Head with Attorney Anthony Julius
Princess Diana's divorce lawyer, London litigator Anthony Julius, publishes book on the History of anti-Semitism in Britain.
By Danna Harman
Most famous, perhaps, as Princess Diana's divorce lawyer, prominent London litigator Anthony Julius is also known for fighting off a libel suit by Holocaust denier David Irving and writing a book on T.S. Eliot's anti-Semitism. His latest book, "Trials of the Diaspora," presents an ambitious history of anti-Semitism in Britain.
What do you think of President Shimon Peres' comments about anti-Semitism in Britain?
Well, it is perfectly and patently true that there has been a significant and complicated element of anti-Semitism in English attitudes towards Jews and relations with Israel. I would absolutely not want to deny that there is anti-Semitism. There is a tendency among the Anglo-Jewish establishment to deny it out of desire to fit in with the larger political establishment and to them I would say, you are wrong - it does exist.
But, like every judgment that is a two-sentence sound bite, Peres gets it wrong. Or, rather, partly wrong. To him I would say, yes, there is anti-Semitism, but British attitudes and actions cannot be understood only in that prism. That is only a part of the larger picture. Characterizing someone or something as anti-Semitic should be a last resort. The focus on anti-Semitism is a little one-eyed, meaning he is not seeing the whole picture.
There is also a strong philo-Semitic component here, and even more significantly, there is a strong component of real politics and pursuit of national self interest in Britain's words and actions.
While there are some in the Anglo Jewish community that deny anti-Semitism, as you mention, there are many others who claim it is getting worse. What do you think? Why do so many Jews here feel insecure?
There is a lot that is overstated. I heard one person describe living here like living in the last months of the Weimar Republic. No.
But it is a little worse than before and it is worrying. It's troubling that it is necessary for schools and shuls to be protected by security guards. And it's also troubling that people don't think its troubling.
It's hard to see where the threats are coming from with utter precision. There is no doubt that there are high levels of anti-Israel discourse in some of the Muslim communities here which become anti-Semitic ... It's also plain that there is a sort of perceived opinion now about the history of Israel that is utterly and ignorantly hostile to Israel. The whole complicated history of the region has been cast into a melodrama with a villain and a victim. And Israel is the villain.
Is any of this particular to Britain? What differentiates anti-Semitism here from anywhere else?
There is a sense that anti-Semitism is the same everywhere. Like it says in the Haggadah - in every generation one rises up to destroy us. But I feel what is under-explored and should be better explored is actually the heterogeneity of anti-Semitism, the fact that there are different anti-Semitisms and they constitute the enemy in different ways. There are distinctions.
In Britain, the historical differences are greater than the contemporary ones. Among historical peculiarities of English anti-Semitism, I would say it has been exceptionally innovative. The blood libel first appeared here, and the expulsion of 1290 was the first national expulsion.
Second is that in more recent times, anti-Semitism has been of an export kind. England has exported its anti-Semitism to the continent. What we started, other nations in Europe adopted and in some cases continued. And another distinctive feature is with literary figures like Shylock and Fagin. There are not many other literatures that have produced such characters.
I suppose another peculiarity of the English is the non-lethal character of modern anti-Semitism. It has not been an affair of pogroms or legislative exclusion, it's also not really been an affair of major anti-Semitic set pieces. There was no Dreyfus trial here.
Is there something anti-Semitic about the often virulent criticism of Israel and its government and policies by many in Britain?
What I tried to do in the book is to make what is to me a banal and obvious point - which is that its an empirical question. Anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are not to be collapsed into one predetermined entity, nor are the two to be utterly sundered. There are times when anti-Israeli, or anti-Likud discourse is polluted by anti-Semitic tropes, but other occasions when its not.
How do we know which is which?
It's not that easy to define, but easy to identify. Broadly speaking, the relating of Israel to Nazi Germany and Zionism to Nazism, that seems to me to be strongly anti-Semitic in its impulse. It is a kind of malicious attempt to identify persecuted with the persecuted.
What about those who argue that the disproportionate attention paid to Israel and its actions is in some way itself tainted with anti-Semitism?
This is what is called "what about-ery." What about this other country, or that one. I think it's the least attractive form of defense. To say "Well, yes, maybe I did do this and this, but over there, they did worse." Well, this creates a playground defense when you are resisting a punishment from the teacher, but I don't think it has any real moral weight to it. Criticisms have to be addressed in their own terms, and if they are felt to be disproportionate it's unfortunate, but I don't think it necessarily is anti-Semitism.
There are many reasons that this particular Middle East dispute [between Israel and the Palestinians], among all the disputes in the world, attracts so much attention. One reason is that it's accessible to Europe, and journalists tend not to get shot. They can stay in Jerusalem, meet all sorts of sophisticated and interesting Israelis and Palestinians in the evenings and go on photo tours of occupied territories in the day. Another reason is that it is the Holy Land, it has this huge part to play in the culture of imagination of the rest of the world.
Another reason is that Europe, and Britain in particular, has such a huge stake in this area. Britain ran the mandate for 25 years, and this is still fresh in people's memory, especially among the political classes in this country.
None of this has anything to do with anti-Semitism.
That said, there are of course sometimes when there is anti-Semitism in some of the disproportionate attention. The belief that Israel is the center of some network of evil is frighteningly close to early versions of anti-Semitism, in which the Jews themselves were constituted as being the center of world evil - a conspiratorial, maligned force. That sort of conception cuts very close to some formulation.
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4) The Show-Me State Sends a Message
By Henry Olsen
President Obama and the Democratic congressional leadership predicted soon after the passage of their health-care bill that the public would soon come to support it after they learned more about the law’s provisions. Missouri’s voters decisively rejected that argument yesterday, passing by a wide margin an initiative that would outlaw the individual mandate.
While some commentators have suggested this was fueled by high Republican turnout, the results suggest otherwise. The measure passed in every county save one, heavily Democratic St. Louis City. It was approved by over 70 percent in virtually every county, and by 60-62 percent even in strongly Democratic counties such as Jackson, which includes Kansas City, Boone, which includes the University of Missouri, and St. Louis and St. Genevieve counties.
As everyone knows, the Rube Goldberg contraption known as health-care reform falls apart if there is no individual mandate. Without forcing people to pay for health insurance, many people would choose not to buy any. Those people would likelier be younger and healthier, meaning that those who did enroll would be sicker and older than the general population. This would increase the cost to insurance companies, quickly making them unprofitable and sinking our entire private insurance market.
The Show-Me State has shown Washington that its bill won’t fly. Whether the verdict is delivered by the people or the courts, real health-care reform will be back on the table sooner than you think.
– Henry Olsen is director of the American Enterprise Institute’s National Research Initiative
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5)Is This Tolerance?
By David Harsanyi
Is questioning the presence of a mosque at ground zero really a sign of bigotry?
Or is it just common sense?
This week, the prospects of an Islamic center's rising on the boundary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks were all but assured when a New York City commission unanimously voted to allow the demolition of the building that now sits on the site.
Which, technically speaking, is the right thing to do.
After all, if we were to apply a skewed moral litmus test to First Amendment protections, we'd be no better than folks who support the Fairness Doctrine or oppose the Citizens United campaign finance decision.
And if we backed the use of zoning laws to compel others to act in accordance with our own value systems, hey, we'd be as tyrannical as the average environmentalist on the average city council.
But since when does deference to the Constitution prohibit a person from pointing out the obvious and worrisome symbolism of this project?
If we concede that a mosque at ground zero is a sign of our tolerance - and it is - surely debating the problems with its setting lets the world know we have the cognitive ability not to be a bunch of saps.
Bigot!
It is, you see, ugly and un-American to question the motivations of those opening an Islamic center a stone's throw from ground zero - a project that will cost $100 million - but not ugly of organizers to pick a spot that's a stone's throw from ground zero.
Those who have spoken out against the project - Sarah Palin, Rick Lazio, Newt Gingrich and the Anti-Defamation League, among many others - have been accused of political grandstanding and, naturally, of peddling a form of unquenchable "bigotry."
Let's concede that grandstanding is a permanent feature of political interaction.
(Though there have been fewer distasteful forms of grandstanding than the preening and imperious lecturing we see from those who decide what is and isn't tolerance.) But opposing the ideology of religious institutions - any religion - does not constitute bigotry.
Furthermore, Daisy Khan, a partner in the Cordoba project, conceded in an interview with National Public Radio that Islam "has been hijacked by the extremists, and this center is going to create that counter-momentum, which will amplify the voices of the moderate Muslims."
That would be a productive - if unprecedented - undertaking. We need more secularized Muslims. And, of course, reasonable Americans do not conflate the moderate with the radical. Yet even Khan states that the religion has been "hijacked." So surely, it is to be expected that some would be skeptical of the group's intentions.
There is, you see, some evidence to back the concern.
Though the Cordoba Initiative is under no obligation to do so, if its purpose is to battle extremism within Islam and build cooperation with other faiths, why not divulge the funders of the project? Why not unconditionally condemn Islamist terrorism?
Neither has happened.
Then again, even if we were boundlessly tolerant, there is an inescapable fact: This 13-story community center is going to be built two blocks from the worst modern atrocity committed in the name of Islam.
Such a project is not just in poor taste; for many Americans, it confirms their concerns about Islam's provocative nature.
How that helps interfaith dialogue remains a mystery.
5a)Broadway and the Mosque
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Let me explain. A couple weeks ago, President Obama and his wife held “A Broadway Celebration: In Performance at the White House,” a concert in the East Room by some of Broadway’s biggest names, singing some of Broadway’s most famous hits. Because my wife is on the board of the public TV station that organized the evening, WETA, I got to attend, but all I could think of was: I wish the whole country were here.
It wasn’t just the great performances of Audra McDonald, Nathan Lane, Idina Menzel, Elaine Stritch, Karen Olivo, Tonya Pinkins, Brian d’Arcy James, Marvin Hamlisch and Chad Kimball, or the spirited gyrations of the students from the Joy of Motion Dance Center and the Duke Ellington School of the Arts performing “You Can’t Stop the Beat” — it was the whole big, rich stew. African-American singers and Hispanic-American dancers belting out the words of Jewish and Irish immigrant composers, accompanied by white musicians whose great-great-grandparents came over on the Mayflower for all I know — all performing for America’s first black president whose middle name is Hussein.
The show was so full of life, no one could begrudge Elaine Stritch, 84, for getting a little carried away and saying to Mr. Obama, seated in the front row: “I’d love to get drunk with the president.”
Feeling the pulsating energy of this performance was such a vivid reminder of America’s most important competitive advantage: the sheer creative energy that comes when you mix all our diverse people and cultures together. We live in an age when the most valuable asset any economy can have is the ability to be creative — to spark and imagine new ideas, be they Broadway tunes, great books, iPads or new cancer drugs. And where does creativity come from?
I like the way Newsweek described it in a recent essay on creativity: “To be creative requires divergent thinking (generating many unique ideas) and then convergent thinking (combining those ideas into the best result).”
And where does divergent thinking come from? It comes from being exposed to divergent ideas and cultures and people and intellectual disciplines. As Marc Tucker, the president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, once put it to me: “One thing we know about creativity is that it typically occurs when people who have mastered two or more quite different fields use the framework in one to think afresh about the other. Intuitively, you know this is true. Leonardo da Vinci was a great artist, scientist and inventor, and each specialty nourished the other. He was a great lateral thinker. But if you spend your whole life in one silo, you will never have either the knowledge or mental agility to do the synthesis, connect the dots, which is usually where the next great breakthrough is found.”
Which brings me back to the Muslim community center/mosque, known as Park51. It is proposed to be built two blocks north of where the twin towers stood and would include a prayer space, a 500-seat performing arts center, a swimming pool and a restaurant. The Times reported that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Muslim leader behind the project, who has led services in TriBeCa since 1983, said he wants the center to help “bridge and heal a divide” among Muslims and other religious groups. “We have condemned the actions of 9/11,” he said.
I greatly respect the feelings of those who lost loved ones on 9/11 — which was perpetrated in the name of Islam — and who oppose this project. Personally, if I had $100 million to build a mosque that promotes interfaith tolerance, I would not build it in Manhattan. I’d build it in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. That is where 9/11 came from, and those are the countries that espouse the most puritanical version of Sunni Islam — a version that shows little tolerance not only for other religions but for other strands of Islam, particularly Shiite, Sufi and Ahmadiyya Islam. You can study Islam at virtually any American university, but you can’t even build a one-room church in Saudi Arabia.
That resistance to diversity, though, is not something we want to emulate, which is why I’m glad the mosque was approved on Tuesday. Countries that choke themselves off from exposure to different cultures, faiths and ideas will never invent the next Google or a cancer cure, let alone export a musical or body of literature that would bring enjoyment to children everywhere.
When we tell the world, “Yes, we are a country that will even tolerate a mosque near the site of 9/11,” we send such a powerful message of inclusion and openness. It is shocking to other nations. But you never know who out there is hearing that message and saying: “What a remarkable country! I want to live in that melting pot, even if I have to build a boat from milk cartons to get there.” As long as that happens, Silicon Valley will be Silicon Valley, Hollywood will be Hollywood, Broadway will be Broadway, and America, if we ever get our politics and schools fixed, will be O.K.
5b)A Monument to Tolerance
It has been disturbing to hear and read the vitriol and outright bigotry surrounding the building of a mosque two blocks from the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. So it was inspiring when New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission voted 9 to 0 on Tuesday to reaffirm one of the basic tenets of democracy: religious tolerance.
Instead of caving in to the angry voices — many but not all of them self-promoting Republican politicians — commissioners paved the way for construction of the mosque and Islamic center. It was not just the right thing to do, it was the only thing to do.
The attacks of Sept. 11 were not a religious event. They were mass murder. The American response, as President Obama and President George W. Bush before him have said many times, was not a war against Islam.
It was not surprising that Republican ideologues like Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin came out against the mosque. A Congressional candidate in North Carolina has found it to be a good way to get attention and, yes, stoke prejudice against Muslims. We expect this sort of behavior from these kinds of Republicans. They have been shamelessly playing the politics of fear since 9/11.
Some of the families of the victims of the attacks, who deserve our respect and sympathy, are uneasy about the mosque. But it would be a greater disservice to the memories of their loved ones to give into the very fear that the terrorists wanted to create and, thus, to abandon the principles of freedom and tolerance.
There was simply no excuse for the behavior of the Anti-Defamation League, which eagerly piled on with the opponents of the mosque. It should not be built “in the shadow” of the World Trade Center, the group said, because it would “cause some victims more pain.” It was distressing to see the rationalization of bigotry used by an organization that has been fighting discrimination of all kinds, especially during some of the worst days of the Ku Klux Klan.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg got it just right in a speech on Governors Island, within view of the Statue of Liberty. He called the proposed mosque “as important a test of separation of church and state as any we may see in our lifetime, and it is critically important that we get it right.” The plans for the $100 million center should encourage those who want Muslims and non-Muslims in America to find common ground.
Mayor Bloomberg noted in his speech that in the United States and in “the freest city in the world,” the owners of the building have the right to use their property as a house of worship. “The government has no right whatsoever to deny that right,” he said. We agreed with his assessment that the lawsuits being threatened against the mosque should be easily thrown out. The local community board has given the Muslim center approval as well.
This hasn’t stopped Rick Lazio, a Republican candidate for governor, from turning the landmark commission’s vote into a nasty little photo-op for his campaign. “This is not about religion,” he said. “It’s about this particular mosque.”
Mr. Lazio has it wrong. We’re curious where in the Constitution he finds the power for the government to deny anyone the right to build a “particular” mosque or church or synagogue or any other house of worship.
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6)Obama's Iraq speech: another missed opportunity
By Peter Feaver
President Obama's speech on Iraq was a disappointment. Not a surprise, but a disappointment.
It was disappointing because it was yet another missed opportunity. He could have shown real statesmanship by acknowledging he was wrong about the surge. He could have reached across the aisle and credited Republicans who backed the policy he vigorously opposed and tried to thwart, a policy that has made it possible (but by no means certain) to hope for a responsible end to the Iraq war. He could have have told the truth about his Iraq strategy, that what he has pursued thus far has not been what he was arguing for in the campaign -- that would have involved the departure of all U.S. troops by mid 2008 -- but rather he has followed, in a more or less desultory fashion, a script written in the status of forces agreement negotiated by President Bush and Prime Minister Maliki.
Instead of giving such a speech, Obama gave a campaign address trying to claim credit for anything that is going well in Iraq and trying to avoid blame for anything that is going poorly. That may be shrewd campaign politics, but it is not the statesmanship the occasion warranted. The commander-in-chief missed an opportunity, and I worry that it will come back to haunt us.
Given how perilous his political position is, it should not surprise that Team Obama chose to play politics with the moment. The latest USA Today poll has Obama down to 41 percent presidential approval, very dangerous waters indeed for a first-term president heading into the mid-term elections.
Yet for precisely this reason, Obama needs all the support he can get. He needs as sure a footing for all of his war policies as he can build. The surest foundation is one based on honesty and candor and that speaks to the people most committed to seeing the wars through to a successful conclusion -- even if they happen to be in the opposite party.
The truth is that Obama is running out of pages in the Bush playbook on Iraq and so increasingly it will fall to Obama to forge his own Iraq policy. Once the playbook is entirely his, he will bear full responsibility for the consequences. The only real change he made to the Iraq playbook he inherited was to signal to the Iraqi leaders that he was, in Charles Krauthammer's words, "washing his hands of Iraq." Where President Bush signaled a commitment to succeed regardless of the political cost, President Obama has signaled, perhaps unintentionally, a commitment to abandon Iraq regardless of the national security costs.
It is a commitment I don't think he can really stick to unless the Bush surge really has produced irreversible progress in Iraq -- something that no Bush alum would ever claim. If Iraq spirals into chaos, Obama will encounter the very same national interest calculation Bush encountered: What happens in Iraq matters greatly for U.S. national security, even more than what happens in Afghanistan (this is why Bush prioritized Iraq over Afghanistan in 2006-2008 when both were in trouble).
Adverse developments in Iraq will be (and will look to be) increasingly a function of the Obama Team taking their eye off of the ball and rushing to declare mission accomplished. Yes, in such a scenario the Iraqis should bear most of the blame, but the part that is due to U.S. action or inaction will be Obama's responsibility. And it will matter. Iraq is at the center of a region that every president since Jimmy Carter has identified as vital to our national security. Iraq is next door to, and the playground for mischief from, the most thorny national security challenge the United States faces: a nuclear-weapons-seeking Iranian regime. These inconvenient facts mean that if the Iraqi situation demands more focused and costly U.S. attention, it will likely get it. At that point, what sort of domestic coalition will be available for President Obama's Iraq policy?
Of course, what matters is less what he says about Iraq and more what he and the Iraq hands in his administration actually do. The lack of strategic focus from the White House has made their job harder, but it has not necessarily doomed the Iraq team's efforts irrevocably. We can hope that they will be able to wield our rapidly decreasing leverage with rapidly increasing skill. Hope is not the surest foundation for a national security strategy, but it may be our best bet at this.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------7) What Went Wrong with Obama?
By Jay Cost
Robert Reich had a thought-provoking piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. Unfortunately, his argument begins to fall apart two thirds of the way through.
Reich argues:
A stimulus too small to significantly reduce unemployment, a TARP that didn't trickle down to Main Street, financial reform that doesn't fundamentally restructure Wall Street, and health-care reforms that don't promise to bring down health-care costs have all created an enthusiasm gap. They've fired up the right, demoralized the left, and generated unease among the general population...
The administration deserves enormous credit. It accomplished as much as it possibly could with a fragile 60 votes in the Senate, a skittish Democratic majority in the House, and a highly-disciplined Republican opposition in both chambers. Yet Bismarck's dictum about politics as the art of the possible is not altogether correct.
The real choice is between achieving what's possible within the limits of politics as given, or changing that politics to extend those limits and thereby more assuredly achieve intended goals. The latter course is riskier but its consequences can be more enduring and its mandate more powerful, as both Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan demonstrated.
So far, Barack Obama has chosen the former course. Despite the remarkable capacities he displayed during the 2008 campaign to inspire and rally Americans behind him, as president he has for the most part opted for an inside game.
Reich's column is in line with other liberal output that has argued that Obama did not go liberal enough. He "opted for an inside game," rather than "extend(ing) those limits" to achieve big, i.e. liberal, goals. If he had done the latter, middle class Americans would have felt the positive benefits already and his poll numbers would not be sliding.
I disagree with this line of thinking. I doubt very much that Obama could have used "the remarkable capacities he displayed during the 2008 campaign" to "inspire and rally Americans," thus "changing that politics." All Presidents face real constraints, and Obama is no different. Acknowledging and identifying them can help us understand where the President has gone wrong.
On the stimulus, he certainly could have gone no bigger than what he did. Reich fails to acknowledge the political fallout from an even larger stimulus package. Deficit spending is a major political issue that has dominated public discussion since the battle between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Reich and Paul Krugman might fault Obama for not spending more, but their preferred level of deficit spending is politically untenable. It always has been. Even FDR was consistently worried about deficits. Granted that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was not enough economic boost for the price tag, but that does not meant that the price tag could have or should have been higher. Not in this country. See: Perot, H. Ross, peculiar appeal of.
As for health care, Obama's goal was an FDR- or LBJ-style comprehensive, systematic reform of the system. It was to be his Social Security, his Medicare. But Obama simply lacked a sufficiently broad mandate to pull off such a feat. If the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act seems less august than Social Security and Medicare, that's because Obama's political position upon assuming the office was not as strong as FDR or LBJ's.
To appreciate what I'm talking about, consider the following picture. It compares Obama's election in 2008 (by county) to previous landslides - Roosevelt in 1932 and 1936, Eisenhower in 1952, Johnson in 1964, and Reagan in 1980. These maps come from an excellent French cartographer named Frédéric Salmon, whose work can be accessed here. They follow a different color scheme than the red-blue divide we are used to. In the following maps, Republican counties are in blue - and they become darker blue as the county votes more heavily Republican. Meanwhile, Democratic counties are in yellow - and they move to brown as the county votes more heavily Democratic.
As should be clear, Obama's victory was geographically narrower than Reagan's, LBJ's, Ike's or FDR's. Substantially so. Obama did much more poorly in rural and small town locales. They have a history of progressive/liberal support, but Obama was unable to place himself in the rural progressive tradition of William Jennings Bryan. This makes his coalition the most one-sided of any on the above maps. Most of his political support comes from the big cities and the inner suburbs. The exurbs, small towns, and rural areas generally voted Republican (with notable exceptions in the Upper Midwest).
In fact, if you look at presidential elections going back 100 years, Obama's is the most geographically narrow of any victors except Carter, Kennedy, and Truman - none of whom had transformative presidencies. Even Bill Clinton in 1996, whose share of the two-party vote was comparable to Obama's, still had a geographically broader voting coalition. Ditto George H.W. Bush in 1988.
Voting input inevitably determines policy output, and these maps hold the key to Reich's disappointment with the President. In our system, it's not just the number of votes that matter, but - thanks to Roger Sherman - how they are distributed across the several states. Obama's urban support base was sufficient for political success in the House, which passed a very liberal health care bill last November. But rural places have greater sway in the Senate - and Obama's weakness in rural America made for a half-dozen skittish Democrats who represent strong McCain states. The evolving thinking on the left - "Obama should have used his campaign-trail magic to change the political dynamic" - is thus totally misguided. The "remarkable capacities he displayed during the 2008 campaign" never persuaded the constituents of the red state Democrats he had to win over. Why should they suddenly start doing so now?
Obama simply lacked the broad appeal to guide the House's liberal proposal through the Senate. So, the result of "going big" was an initially liberal House product that then had to be watered down to win over red state Senators like Landrieu, Lincoln, Nelson, and Pryor. The end result was a compromise bill that, frankly, nobody really liked. Liberals were disappointed, tantalized as they were by the initial House product. Conservatives were wholly turned off, recognizing as they did that the guts of the bill were still liberal. And Independents and soft partisans were disgusted by congressional sausage-making and wary of the bill's provisions.
Was there an alternative approach the President could have taken? I think so. Such a tactic would have acknowledged the sizeable McCain bloc. McCain won 22 states, making his coalition a politically potent minority. Obama should have governed in light of this. I don't mean in hock to it. He didn't have to make Sarah Palin his domestic policy advisor, but he should have ignored the hagiographers who were quick to declare him the next FDR. These flatterers always manifest themselves anytime a new Democrat comes to the White House, and they are of very little help for Democratic Presidents who actually want to be great.
What he should have done instead was disarm his opponents. If he had built initial policy proposals from the middle, he could have wooed the moderate flank of the Republican party, marginalized the conservatives, and alleviated the concerns of those gettable voters in the South and the Midwest. This is precisely what Bill Clinton did between 1995 and 2000, and it is what the President's promises of "post-partisanship" suggested.
Our system of government can only produce policy when geographically broad coalitions favor it. The Senate, more than any other institution, forces such breadth. Obama created breadth the wrong way. He watered down initially liberal legislation to prompt just enough moderate Democrats to sign on. Instead, he should have built policy from the center, then worked to pick up enough votes on either side. The left would have been disappointed, but the right would have been marginalized and, most importantly, Independent voters - who have abandoned the President in droves - might still be on board.
A revolutionary idea in our polarized political climate, I know. Still: ask your average swing voter what he or she thinks of such an approach, and watch them nod in agreement.
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8)Is the CBC Uniquely Unethical?
John McWhorter
How Far Have America’s Black Families Come Since the ‘60s?
How Andrew Breitbart Is Like Al Bundy Not so long ago, all eight of the members of Congress being investigated by the Office of Congressional Ethics were black. Now, two powerful black members of the Congressional Black Caucus are on the griddle. There are two entirely appropriate responses.
One of them is to wonder if there is something racial going on. Yes, that is reasonable. Dismissals of this line of reasoning as mere “crying racism” are, in this case, hasty. Bloggers blithely listing white people who have fallen into the OCE’s line of sight as disproof of the racism charge are missing the point. The issue—so often missed in discussions of race but usually by those crying wolf, not their detractors—is proportion. All eight? Two leading black legislators in two weeks? One is not a race-baiter to ask questions.
Then, the other entirely appropriate response is to ask another question: is there some trait local to the Congressional Black Caucus that makes its members especially likely to commit improprieties of the kind under concern?
The typical understanding is that there is not. As Ronald Walters of U. Maryland’s African American Leadership Center said yesterday, “the swamp is largely white,” referring to the proverbial swamp House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced was to be cleared by efforts such as the OCE’s. And none of us are under any illusion that white legislators haven’t been requiring corporations to “pay to play” since, well, the dawn of the republic.
But is it this simple? There is indeed something that distinguishes the Congressional Black Caucus from other caucuses in Congress. It is not only an alliance of heads put together, but a massively successful fund-raising outfit, soliciting funds from corporations for nonprofit activities. Nominally there is also a political action committee, but the vast bulk of the corporate donations go to the charities. Inevitably the line between the political and the charitable is fuzzy, and the reality is that contribution to these nonprofit activities rather clearly has an effect on the CBC’s political positions (i.e. votes), as detailed here some months ago.
Business as usual in Washington? Yes, but unsurprisingly, individual CBC members also have their personal nonprofits, such as Charles Rangel’s now famous Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at City College, getting in on the action. (James Clyburn, who seems to have been adopted by the media as the soul of black American Civil Rights-era opinion, has one too.)
The chances that a subset of the high-profile donors that CBC members deal with—such as Coca-Cola, Verizon, General Motors, and Wal-Mart—will not, in good time, have business before central committees such as Ways and Means, which Rangel has had to step down from, are small. As such, CBC members are highly susceptible to conflict-of-interest slip-ups, and we would assume they would therefore be especially vigilant.
Why, then, would Rangel be so, as he himself put it, “sloppy” in policing the line between serving larger interests and serving himself, or at least the appearances thereof? Here, after all is the man who came into office watching his predecessor—Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.—dragged down for ethical lapses hardly unknown among white peers.
Racism is, I suspect, part of the story here—but not in the way we’re supposed to think. Is there a part of Rangel that has supposed that the ethics are fundamentally different for him since his nonprofit is devoted to battling the legacies of institutional racism? The CBC traditionally calls itself “the conscience of Congress,” and in its public statements and activities often functions as a kind of alternate NAACP rather than as a generator of legislation. Under this frame of mind, there would be little difference between serving “myself” and serving “my people.” Surely to combat racism is a greater good than any other. My nonprofit is the fight against racism. The fight against racism is me. Me is the fight against racism. Why not improvise a little, especially if no one is looking?
This seems to be the only kind of explanation, given data in so far, on Maxine Waters’ transgression. She consults with Barney Frank about the propriety of setting up a meeting over bailout funds between Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and a consortium of minority-owned banks when her husband was a stockholder in one of the banks. Frank says it isn’t a good idea, and yet she goes ahead with it, right down to the meeting itself being populated mainly by reps of the very bank her husband was involved with?
To suppose she was concerned solely with preserving her husband’s stock returns may have its kicks. But a better fit with her entire career’s mission, not to mention her current justifications, is that she felt that saving minority banks was a greater good. It’s not hard to see that she, in that position, would readily use as a main conduit the personal connections she naturally had with people at the bank her husband was involved with.
Especially if no one was looking. After all, look at what she has sometimes done even while people were looking—I will never forget her dancing on camera with L.A. gang members.
The visibility issue is, likely, as key as the sense of greater good. Rangel and Waters are such lions that they haven’t had to face challenges in eons. Both would still be voted back in by their constituents today. Too often with both of them, nobody has really been looking to catch ethical lapses that have crept in, whether due to a confusion of the boundary between the self and the Civil Rights Movement or to scruffier things like Rangel’s tax lapses.
Note, in contrast, DC’s Adrian Fenty and his challenger Vincent Gray throwing mud at each other over petty ethical lapses. Fenty simply can’t drift into the openly Tweed-esque dry rot of the kind older generation black pols like Rangel and Waters can.
Other cases of black congressmen under the ethical spotlight of late are due, really, to chance. Roland Burris and Jesse Jackson, Jr. happened to get pulled into the slimy realm of Rod Blagojevich’s grubby quest to become an old-style city boss, of a once-in-a-generation "Who'd-a-thunk-it?" shamelessness. Chicago has long had a substantial contingent of black lawmakers—which I assume we consider a good thing in itself. But black lawmakers will be playing The Game as much as white ones, and if a freakish phenomenon like Blagojevich happens into a drivers’ seat, then big surprise, some of the people who get their toes run over may be black.
And then, OCE attention has not been an inevitable death sentence for black lawmakers. One reason few could recall now what the issue was with California’s Laura Richardson, investigated for a questionable break on her mortgage, was that she was cleared of charges.
Is this the Teachable Moment for this week after all that we supposedly learned three weeks ago from the NAACP/Tea Party fracas and what we learned the week after that about Shirley Sherrod? If so, there are two lessons.
One is that admitting that racism is no longer black people’s main problem does not mean that all calls to assess whether it is in operation are meaningless.
However, another one is that the question “Is this about racism?” cannot be taken as automatically answering itself in the affirmative. The main lesson from the attention the CBC is getting from the OCE is that the CBC needs to get its act together. After all, they can—all they have to do is be more careful and usher new members into a similar frame of mind.
Perhaps for the reasons I have proposed it’s understandable that some of its members would be less inclined to watch their backs and dot every i and cross every t when it comes to conflict of interest issues. But this can serve as explanation only, not excuse. To have not yet reached the mountaintop is not to be exempt from following the rules.
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9)Illogical Immigration
By Victor Davis Hanson
Some 11 million to 15 million illegal aliens are now residing in America, most after crossing into America unlawfully. Once a federal law is arbitrarily not enforced, all sorts of bizarre paradoxes arise from that original contradiction. As proof, examine the following illogical policies and contradictions involving illegal immigration.
Take, for example, profiling -- the controversial questioning of those who appear likely to be illegal aliens. Apparently, American border guards have developed criteria for profiling those deemed likely to be unlawful aliens. Otherwise, how would they have arrested and deported hundreds of thousands in 2009?
Yet apparently, at some arbitrary point distant from the border, those who cross illegally are not supposed to be asked about their immigration status. OK, but exactly why did procedures so radically change at, say, five, 10, 20, or is it 100 miles from the border? A border patrolman often profiles, but a nearby highway patrolman cannot?
The federal government is suing Arizona for the state's efforts to enforce the federal immigration law. The lawsuit alleges that Arizona is too zealous both in enforcing immigration law and encroaching on federal jurisdiction.
But wait -- for years, several American cities have declared themselves sanctuary cities. City officials have even bragged that they would not allow their municipalities to enforce federal immigration statutes. So why does Washington sue a state that seeks to enhance federal immigration laws and yet ignore cities that blatantly try to erode them?
Something is going very wrong in Mexico to prompt more than half a million of its citizens to cross the border illegally each year. Impoverished Mexican nationals variously cite poor economic conditions back home, government corruption, a lack of social services, and racism. In other words, it is not just the desirability of America but also the perceived undesirability of Mexico that explains one of largest mass exoduses in modern history.
But why, then, would Mexican President Felipe Calderon, whose country's conditions are forcing out its own citizens, criticize the United States, which is receiving so many of them? And why, for that matter, would many of those illegal immigrants identify, if only symbolically, with the country that made them leave, whether by waving its flag or criticizing the attitudes of the Americans who took them in?
And how does Mexico treat the hundreds of thousands of aliens who seek to illegally cross its own southern border with Central America each year? Does Mexico believe in sovereign borders to its south but not to its north?
Is Mexico more or less humane to illegal aliens than the country it so often faults? Why, exactly, does Mexico believe that nearly a million of its own nationals annually have claims on American residency, when Chinese, Indian, European and African would-be immigrants are deemed not to? Is the reason proximity? Past history?
Proponents of open borders have organized May Day rallies, staged boycotts of Arizona, sued in federal and state courts, and sought to portray those who want to enforce existing federal immigration law as racially insensitive. But about 70 percent of Americans support securing our borders, and support the Arizona law in particular. Are a clear majority of Americans racist, brainwashed or deluded in believing that their laws should be enforced? And if so, why would immigrants wish to join them?
It is considered liberal to support open borders and reactionary to want to close them. But illegal immigration drives down the hourly wages of the working American poor. Tens of thousands of impoverished people abroad, from Africa to Asia, wait patiently to enter America legally, while hundreds of thousands from Latin America do not. How liberal can all that be?
America extends housing, food and education subsidies to illegal aliens in need. But Mexico receives more than $20 billion in American remittances a year -- its second-highest source of foreign exchange, and almost of it from its own nationals living in the United States. Are Americans then subsidizing the Mexican government by extending social services to aliens, freeing up cash for them to send back home?
These baffling questions are rarely posed, never addressed and often considered politically incorrect. But they will only be asked more frequently in the months ahead.
You see, once a law is not considered quite a law, all sorts of even stranger paradoxes follow.
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War."
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10)The Federal Reserve is Running out of Options to Spark the Economy
DWINDLING OPTIONS: The Fed has only a few remaining options for spurring economic growth and job creation or warding off a debilitating period of deflation, but they are unlikely to work.
By JOHN M. BERRY,
With the economic recovery possibly faltering and little hope Congress will agree to further fiscal stimulus, some economists and politicians want the Federal Reserve to do more to spur growth and jobs. But don’t assume there’s much more the Fed can do at this point.
Federal Reserve chairman Ben S. Bernanke told Congress recently that there are some steps the Fed could take that would help, and that if the economy weakens the central bank will consider acting. He gave no details on what those steps might be.
The Fed has already cut its target for the overnight interest rate, traditionally its key tool for influencing the economy, almost to zero. Last year, research by economist Glenn D. Rudebusch at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank concluded that the recession was so severe that the only way the Fed could provide the economy with the same degree of support as it has in past slumps was to cut that target to a negative 5 percent. That's impossible, of course, since interest rates cannot fall below zero — the so-called zero bound for monetary policy.
Reducing Long-Term Rates
Joseph Gagnon, a former Fed economist now at the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics, proposes that the Fed try to get around that limitation by reducing some longer-term rates nearly to zero as well.
"The three-year Treasury rate is 1 percent; the two-year rate is about three-fourths of a percent; so that's pretty low," Gagnon said recently in an interview posted by the Institute. "But nevertheless, lowering the three-year Treasury rate from 1 percent to one-fourth of a percent is a 75 basis point cut in the three-year rate," which could affect other rates as well. (The Institute is partly funded by Peter G. Peterson; The Fiscal Times is funded as an independent business by Peterson.)
"That's a fairly big policy step in the context of their normal actions," he said. "So, it's sort of, you know, maybe the right size that is needed right now."
However, as of yesterday the yield on 12-month Treasury securities was a scant 27 basis points (a basis point is one one-hundreth of a percentage point), with yields on two-year notes only 55 basis points and those on three-year notes 83 basis points. There's simply no reason to believe reducing all those to around 25 basis points — even if the Fed bought huge amounts of the securities in question to achieve such a target — would actually do much to help the economy. Compare the possible decline in those yields with Rudebusch's 500 basis point drop needed truly to stimulate the economy. "Given what has happened already, maybe you could squeeze this a little more, but how much are you going to get," said Ray Stone of Stone & McCarthy Research Associates. "I don't think you can get much mileage out of this."
Unfortunately, most of the other actions the economists want the Fed to take seem just as unlikely to do much to spur economic growth and job creation--or to ward off a debilitating period of deflation, another rising concern. At least one of the proposals, to stop paying interest on excess reserves held by banks, might force money market mutual funds to shut down and otherwise disrupt short-term money markets.
The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that Fed officials will consider a modest but symbolically important change in the management of their massive securities portfolio when they meet next week. At issue will be whether to use cash the Fed receives when its mortgage-bond holdings mature to buy new mortgage or Treasury bonds, instead of allowing its portfolio to shrink gradually, as it is expected to do in the months ahead.
Confronting Deflation
John Makin, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, recently called on the Fed to "acknowledge the threat of deflation" and a slowing of economic growth "and pledge to keep the funds rate at zero for two years." Further, Makin said in a conference call with reporters, the Fed should set "a price level target" so that if inflation fell below a 1 percent to 2 percent range, it would allow inflation later to be higher to make up the shortfall — though he noted that no central bank has ever done that.
The point of a pledge to keep the overnight rate target unchanged for two years is that if investors believe it then yields two years out will reflect that rock-bottom overnight rate. But investors already seem to have accepted as gospel the Fed's view expressed repeatedly at policymaking meetings that high unemployment and stable inflation expectations "are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels of the
federal funds rate for an extended period." Dino Kos of Portales Partners, who formerly was in charge of the Open Market Desk, the unit at the New York Federal Reserve Bank that does the Fed's daily interventions in the money markets, said an unconditional pledge could help anchor investor confidence that the Fed would not begin raising rates anytime soon.
That would be a better way to try to keep longer-term rates low than setting a target for a three-year rate and intervening to achieve it, Kos said in an interview. On the other hand, two-year rates have come down sharply recently, an indication that the "extended period" language appears to be having the same effect, he said.
Another Option: No More Interest on Excess Reserves
Another idea advocated by some economists is that the Fed should move its current zero to 25 basis point target for the federal funds rate very close to zero and to stop paying interest at a 25 basis point rate on the nearly $1 trillion of excess reserves accumulated by banks after the central bank flooded the system with cash. Without that interest, banks would be more willing to make loans to replace that lost income, or so the argument goes.
However, banks can already make much more than 25 basis points on almost any sort of loan to a creditworthy borrower, even after adjusting for the risk inherent in such a loan. So it's not the interest from the Fed that is a barrier to lending.
And with a federal funds rate even closer to zero, the market in which banks lend to each other at that rate would disappear and money market mutual funds might have to shut down, according to Ward McCarthy, chief financial economist at Jefferies Group. "That would kill the interbank market that has been the mainstay of the banking system throughout modern times," McCarthy said in an interview. As for money market funds, there already have been huge outflows, and if the funds rate went to zero, there wouldn't be enough of a return to encourage investors to leave their money there, he said.
John M. Berry covered the Federal Reserve and the U.S. economy for the Washington Post for 25 years.
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