Joe Nocera, "While the Markets Swoon ...": Bush Is Still to Blame

Voicing discontent with Obama's "uninspired" speech on Monday, Joe Nocera, in his latest New York Times op-ed, "While the Markets Swoon ... (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/09/opinion/nocera-while-the-markets-swoon.html?hp), would have us know that the economic crisis is the fault of George W. Bush:

"Has any president in American history left behind as much lasting damage as George W. Bush? In addition to two unfinished wars, he also set us on the path to our current financial mess."

Okay, Bush is to blame, but Obama was elected to end the wars and guide us out of the morass. This hasn't happened.

In its editorial entitled "Past Time for a New Agenda" (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/09/opinion/past-time-for-a-new-agenda.html?_r=1&hp), The New York Times today rails against the Republicans in its efforts to shift the blame for the economic debacle. Is "I didn't do it" shaping up to be the theme of the 2012 Obama reelection campaign?

What a shame that Obama is not being challenged in the primaries by Hillary.

"Past Time for a New Agenda": The Political Agenda of The New York Times

In a less than remarkable opinion piece entitled "Past Time for a New Agenda" (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/09/opinion/past-time-for-a-new-agenda.html?_r=1&hp), the editorial board of The New York Times purportedly calls upon President Obama to shift his apparently limited attention span from curbing debt to job growth. The editorial mentions the proposals for job growth proffered by the president on Monday:

"Increased investment in infrastructure, renewing the payroll tax cut and extending jobless benefits are vital to prevent further backsliding. Inaction on the payroll tax and unemployment benefits could cost nearly a full percentage point in growth next year."

But does the editorial board have any novel suggestions to spur employment? Obviously not. In fact, the overwhelming bulk of this epistle was devoted to partisan politics (Italics added):

• "In the defective logic of the Republican machine, that was Mr. Obama’s fault because it occurred on his watch. (That’s a breathtaking bit of hypocrisy, by the way, from the party that fabricated the debt-ceiling crisis.)"
• "The credit decision put a price tag on the agenda of dysfunction that Republicans brought to Washington, in which unnecessary crises are created to achieve their goals of shrinking government and bringing down Mr. Obama. When one of the two political parties announces its willingness to let the nation default, S.& P. essentially said, those who lend it money can no longer trust it to act rationally."
• "But having spent far too long haggling over the margins of the Republican agenda to reduce the deficit with only spending cuts, the president needs to move to a very different set of priorities. He should start making the case that it is foolish to focus the nation’s attention solely on debt, where the Republicans want it, and instead shift every available resource toward jobs."
• "If he stays locked into the arid agenda of the Republicans, the economy will remain as dormant as his speech on Monday, which is just where his rivals hope it will be in November 2012."
• "Defeatists may say that it is impossible to consider programs like these at a time when Republicans will find a way to kill any worthy idea from the White House, especially those that might require some short-term spending. But the shackles forged by Republican lawmakers can only be broken with the power of good ideas."
• "He is now free to move past that deal, to outline much bolder plans for a turnaround. Then he could defy Republicans — with their crabbed vision of government’s role — to stand in his way."

Query: Is this editorial about job creation or an obsessive campaign manifesto?

Given the chaos in world financial markets, I am astounded by such partisan tripe. If Obama is finally able to rise to the occasion and pull the US out of this morass, he will be reelected. If he and the subservient editorial board of The New York Times pursue the blame game, Obama and friends should get an early start on packing prior to January 2013.

You Lack Faith in the Creditworthiness of the US? Buy Cow Manure, Not Gold!

I had many calls from clients over the past 24 hours concerning my stance with regard to the malaise affecting world financial markets. Let me make this as short as I made it to my customers: I bought shares yesterday in the companies in which I believe. Obviously, it could be that I bought them too high, and if I were to have waited, I might have been able to buy them at a better price; however, there is no doubt in my mind that the markets will recover, and the share price of the companies in which I invest will do well over time.

When asked whether I recommend the purchase of gold, I told my customers that I prefer cow manure. I explained that unlike Standard & Poor's, my faith in the ability of the United States government to repay its debt has not changed one iota, and if it did, gold would offer me little security over the long-term. On the other hand, if the US government were to default, we would all be growing vegetables in our gardens, and cow manure for fertilizer would ultimately prove more valuable.

Never good at growing vegetables, I will stick with my belief in the creditworthiness of the US and take advantage of the decline in world equity markets to add to my positions in the companies which I respect and trust.

New York Times Editorial, "Palestinians and the U.N."

In an opinion piece entitled "Palestinians and the U.N." (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/08/opinion/palestinians-and-the-un.html?_r=1&hp), The New York Times editorial board takes the position that a vote on statehood by the United Nations in September will "further isolate both Israel and Washington" and alienate Palestinians, allowing extremists to attempt to "exploit that disaffection." The editorial begins:

"In little more than a month, the Palestinians are expected to ask the United Nations to recognize their state. We have sympathy for their yearning and their frustration. For years, they have been promised a negotiated solution — President Obama called for a peace deal by September — and they are still empty-handed."

I also have sympathy for the Palestinians' "yearning" for statehood, but am disdainful of their so-called "frustration." The New York Times ignores the fact that Israeli prime ministers Barak and Olmert offered Arafat and Abbas, respectively, statehood on the basis of the 1967 lines with land swaps as necessary, all in accordance with Obama's current guidelines, but in both instances the president of the Palestinian Authority demurred. Why? Because neither Arafat nor Abbas was ultimately willing to recognize Israel's right to exist within any boundaries whatsoever.

The New York Times editorial board continues:

"With the September deadline approaching, the Obama administration is back in the business of incremental diplomacy. The White House is working with Israel and the Quartet (the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations) on a statement setting out parameters for negotiations. The core element: a Palestinian state based on pre-1967 borders with mutually agreed land swaps and guarantees for Israel’s security.

. . . .

To have any chance of inducing the Palestinians to drop their statehood bid — and finally move the peace process forward — the United States and its partners should put a map and a deal on the table, with a timeline for concluding negotiations and a formal U.N. statehood vote. The Security Council and the Arab League need to throw their full weight behind it."

The Times editorial board nowhere acknowledges that "guarantees for Israel's security" must begin with an acknowledgement of Israel's right to exist. How is this to be obtained when the Hamas charter calls for the murder of all Jews? Is Israel expected to make a separate deal with the Palestinian Authority? Given the unrest in the Arab world, is Palestinian Authority President Abbas, who recently concluded a unity deal with Hamas, currently prepared to acknowledge Israel's right to exist? No way.

Let the Palestinians acknowledge Israel's right to exist, and then let the negotiations begin. However, there is no mention of Israel's need for this fundamental building stone for peace in the Times editorial.

Israel and the US will be "isolated"? Perhaps the Times editorial board should come to terms with current US popularity in the Muslim world. A 2011 Pew Research Center survey taken before the raid which killed Osama bin Laden showed that US popularity in Pakistan had "fallen to an all-time low, with just 11 percent of Pakistanis holding a favorable view of the country and President Barack Obama" (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/05/19/ap/asia/main20064522.shtml).

The popularity of the US in the Arab world? According to a 2011 poll conducted by IBOPE Zogby International for the Arab American Institute Foundation in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Morocco (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/checkpoint-washington/post/arab-worlds-views-of-us-president-obama-increasingly-negative-new-poll-finds/2011/07/12/gIQASzHVBI_blog.html) determined:

"In most countries surveyed, favorable attitudes toward the United States dropped to levels lower than they were during the last year of the Bush administration. The killing of Osama bin Laden also worsened attitudes toward the United States.

In Saudi Arabia, for instance, 30 percent of respondents said they had a favorable view of the United States (compared with 41 percent in 2009), while roughly 5 percent said the same in Egypt (compared with 30 percent in 2009)."

Or in other words, the US is already isolated in the Muslim world, and Israel will remain a pariah state beset with existential threats no matter what they do. Further isolation? Wake up and smell the coffee.

Thomas Friedman, "Win Together or Lose Together": We Just Need to Pull Together

In his latest op-ed, "Win Together or Lose Together" (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/opinion/sunday/Friedman-win-together-or-lose-together.html?_r=1&ref=opinion), New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman would explain the United States's economic decline in four paragraphs:

"Our slow decline is a product of two inter-related problems. First, we’ve let our five basic pillars of growth erode since the end of the cold war — education, infrastructure, immigration of high-I.Q. innovators and entrepreneurs, rules to incentivize risk-taking and start-ups, and government-funded research to spur science and technology.

We mistakenly treated the end of the cold war as a victory that allowed us to put our feet up — when it was actually the onset of one of the greatest challenges we’ve ever faced. We helped to unleash two billion people just like us — in China, India and Eastern Europe. For us to effectively compete and collaborate with them — to maintain the American dream — required studying harder, investing wiser, innovating faster, upgrading our infrastructure quicker and working smarter.

Instead of doing that at the scale we needed — that is, building muscle — we injected ourselves with massive amounts of credit steroids (just like our baseball players). This enabled millions of people to buy homes they could not afford and to fill jobs in construction and retail that did not require that much education. Our European friends went on a similar binge.

All this debt blew up in 2008 in the U.S. and Europe, and that led to the second problem: Homeowners, firms, banks and governments are all now 'deleveraging' or trying to — meaning that they are saving more, shopping less, paying off debts and trying to dig out from mortgages that are under water."

Fascinating. No mention by Friedman of disastrous American involvement in overseas wars. No mention of the demise of the enforcement of antitrust laws, which has resulted in the elimination of companies, competition and jobs. No mention of the elimination of the uptick rule, which has turned US financial markets into a cash cow manipulated by predatory big players, instead of a home for investment, which has in turn choked off cash for promising startups. And the list continues.

Friedman's one-paragraph solution?:

"If juggling all these needs at once sounds hard and complicated, it is. There is no easy, one-policy fix. We need to help people deleverage, cut some spending, raise some revenues and reinvest in our growth engines — as an integrated strategy for national renewal. Something this big and complex cannot be accomplished by one party alone. It will require the kind of collective action usually reserved for national emergencies. The sooner we pull together the better."

"Pull together"? Friedman's solution to save the economy sounds a bit like the lyrics from the Youngbloods's 1960s hit "Get Together":

"C'mon people now,
Smile on your brother
Ev'rybody get together
Try and love one another right now
Right now
Right now!"

Thanks, Tom, and hurry off and tell Obama. I'm sure he can't wait to hear the good news: Pull together, abide by the "five basic pillars of growth," "deleverage," and salvation is around the corner. Sweet.

Joe Nocera, "The Tea Party, Take Two": "Nothing Like a Good Financial Crisis to Turn You Into a Liberal"

In his latest New York Times op-ed, "The Tea Party, Take Two" (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/06/opinion/the-tea-party-take-two.html?hp), Joe Nocera describes his liberal upbringing and apologizes for accusing Tea Party Republicans of waging "jihad on the American people" in a prior column (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/02/opinion/the-tea-partys-war-on-america.html?_r=2&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss). Nocera, chagrined by this earlier apoplectic attack, explains his rant:

"Then came the financial crisis. I like to joke that there’s nothing like a good financial crisis to turn you into a liberal. But it’s not really a joke. The more I learned the back story that led to the crisis, the more horrified I became. The lack of regulation and oversight of Wall Street and the big subprime companies like Countrywide, driven by the ideology of deregulation, was thoughtless and irresponsible. The refusal of bank regulators to stop subprime abuses bordered on the criminally negligent. The unwillingness of the Obama Justice Department, even now, to hold anyone to account for their role in the crisis has been disheartening."

Unlike Nocera, appellations of liberal and conservative and attributions of good and evil do not interest me, notwithstanding my liberal upbringing. More important is a path out of the abyss.

I would also observe that absent from Nocera's laundry list of factors contributing to the crisis is the decline of antitrust regulation over the course of past decades, which, under the auspices of both liberal and conservative administrations, has also wrecked havoc upon competition and the job market (see: http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.com/search/label/antitrust).

Nocera gently scolds Obama for the financial crisis:

"I still think it was terribly wrong for the Republicans to use the threat of default to insist on massive spending cuts, though President Obama also deserves blame for playing his hand so poorly. Putting on my pragmatist hat again, I also think Congress could not have chosen a worse time to rein in spending. Yes, the country’s enormous debt — and the entitlement programs that are driving the federal deficit — needs to be brought under control."

Obama could have played his hand better? Oh really? When was there ever a written budget plan from the president?

"Congress could not have chosen a worse time to rein in spending"? The real question is why didn't Obama deal with the debt ceiling months earlier. Nobody has illustrated this point better, albeit humorously, than Jon Stewart (see: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-august-1-2011/dealageddon----a-compromise-without-revenues).

I went to sleep last night feeling ill from the week's events - the slaughter of civilians in Syria, the downing of a helicopter in Afghanistan, the tumultuous debt ceiling debate, world economic rot - not knowing of the downgrade by Standard and Poor's of US debt, which will only add to the chaos on world markets on Monday. Will Obama, now purportedly focusing his attention on jobs, be able to turn the American economy away from the shoals? Why do I lack confidence in the Procrastinator in Chief?

But perhaps we should at least be grateful that Nocera apologized for his uncivil outburst. No such remorse has been expressed by Nicholas Kristof, who recently lumped Republicans together with al-Qaeda (see: http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.com/2011/07/nicholas-kristofs-republicans-zealots.html). Kristof's incendiary language, protected by the First Amendment but conducive of violence, doesn't belong on the op-ed page of The New York Times.

Nicholas Kristof, "Seeking Balance on the Mideast": No Balance in Kristof's Column

Choosing to ignore Assad's tank onslaught upon the citizens of the Syrian city of Hama and divert the attention of the readership of The New York Times to – you guessed it – Israel, Nicholas Kristof, in his latest op-ed entitled "Seeking Balance on the Mideast" (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/04/opinion/seeking-balance-on-the-mideast.html?_r=1&hp), would excuse himself by writing:

"Whenever I write about Israel, I get accused of double standards because I don’t spill as much ink denouncing worse abuses by, say, Syria. I plead guilty. I demand more of Israel partly because my tax dollars supply arms and aid to Israel. I hold democratic allies like Israel to a higher standard — just as I do the U.S."

Actually, no one is accusing Nicholas of double standards, but rather something far worse.

Kristof writes:

"Similarly, when Israel stormed into Gaza in 2008 to halt rocket attacks, more than 1,300 Gazans were killed, according to B’Tselem, a respected Israeli human rights group."

Peculiar how Kristof fails to state the number of mortar shells, rockets and missiles that had been fired from Gaza at civilian targets in southern Israel prior to Operation Cast Lead: over 10,000. And by the way, two more rockets were fired from Gaza at Israeli cities yesterday (see: http://www.jpost.com/Defense/Article.aspx?id=232392).

More odious, however, is how Kristof fails to mention that B'Tselem's casualties figures are hotly disputed (see, for example: http://maurice-ostroff.tripod.com/id328.html). Kristof also chooses to ignore the casualties figures carefully researched by the Israel Defense Forces: 1,166 Palestinians died, of whom only 295 were non-combatants (see: http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=137286). The Israel Defense Forces numbers were recently confirmed in large part by Hamas (see: http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=193521), but there is no acknowledgement of this by Kristof.

Kristof also praises J Street and would have us believe that support of Israel is a "conservative" phenomenon:

"That’s because those Jews who vote and donate based on Israel are disproportionately conservative (the same is true of Christians who are most passionate about Israel issues)."

Kristof ignores the most recent Gallup poll concerning the support of the US public for Israel (http://www.gallup.com/poll/146408/americans-maintain-broad-support-israel.aspx):

"Americans' views toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict held fairly steady over the past year, with a near record-high 63% continuing to say their sympathies lie more with the Israelis. Seventeen percent sympathize more with the Palestinians."

Question for Kristof: Are all of these supporters of Israel "conservatives" and/or "extremists"?

According to section 17 of The New York Times Company Policy on Ethics in Journalism (http://www.nytco.com/press/ethics.html):

"As journalists we treat our readers, viewers, listeners and online users as fairly and openly as possible. Whatever the medium, we tell our audiences the complete, unvarnished truth as best we can learn it."

Did Kristof report the "complete, unvarnished truth" in his latest column, in which he apparently seeks to have his readers compare Israel's 2008 operation in Gaza to curtail rocket fire against civilians with current Syrian atrocities in Hama? You decide.