AUSTIN, Texas — Physicists at The University of Texas at Austin have designed a new system that, when fully developed, would use fusion to eliminate most of the transuranic waste produced by nuclear power plants.
The invention could help combat global warming by making nuclear power cleaner and thus a more viable replacement of carbon-heavy energy sources, such as coal.
"We have created a way to use fusion to relatively inexpensively destroy the waste from nuclear fission," says Mike Kotschenreuther, senior research scientist with the Institute for Fusion Studies (IFS) and Department of Physics. "Our waste destruction system, we believe, will allow nuclear power—a low carbon source of energy—to take its place in helping us combat global warming."
Toxic nuclear waste is stored at sites around the U.S. Debate surrounds the construction of a large-scale geological storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, which many maintain is costly and dangerous. The storage capacity of Yucca Mountain, which is not expected to open until 2020, is set at 77,000 tons. The amount of nuclear waste generated by the U.S. will exceed this amount by 2010.
The physicists' new invention could drastically decrease the need for any additional or expanded geological repositories.
"Most people cite nuclear waste as the main reason they oppose nuclear fission as a source of power," says Swadesh Mahajan, senior research scientist.
The scientists propose destroying the waste using a fusion-fission hybrid reactor, the centerpiece of which is a high power Compact Fusion Neutron Source (CFNS) made possible by a crucial invention.
The CFNS would provide abundant neutrons through fusion to a surrounding fission blanket that uses transuranic waste as nuclear fuel. The fusion-produced neutrons augment the fission reaction, imparting efficiency and stability to the waste incineration process.
Kotschenreuther, Mahajan and Prashant Valanju, of the IFS, and Erich Schneider of the Department of Mechanical Engineering report their new system for nuclear waste destruction in the journal Fusion Engineering and Design.
There are more than 100 fission reactors, called "light water reactors" (LWRs), producing power in the United States. The nuclear waste from these reactors is stored and not reprocessed. (Some other countries, such as France and Japan, do reprocess the waste.)
The scientists' waste destruction system would work in two major steps.
First, 75 percent of the original reactor waste is destroyed in standard, relatively inexpensive LWRs. This step produces energy, but it does not destroy highly radiotoxic, transuranic, long-lived waste, what the scientists call "sludge."
In the second step, the sludge would be destroyed in a CFNS-based fusion-fission hybrid. The hybrid's potential lies in its ability to burn this hazardous sludge, which cannot be stably burnt in conventional systems.
"To burn this really hard to burn sludge, you really need to hit it with a sledgehammer, and that's what we have invented here," says Kotschenreuther.
One hybrid would be needed to destroy the waste produced by 10 to 15 LWRs.
The process would ultimately reduce the transuranic waste from the original fission reactors by up to 99 percent. Burning that waste also produces energy.
The CFNS is designed to be no larger than a small room, and much fewer of the devices would be needed compared to other schemes that are being investigated for similar processes. In combination with the substantial decrease in the need for geological storage, the CFNS-enabled waste-destruction system would be much cheaper and faster than other routes, say the scientists.
The CFNS is based on a tokamak, which is a machine with a "magnetic bottle" that is highly successful in confining high temperature (more than 100 million degrees Celsius) fusion plasmas for sufficiently long times.
The crucial invention that would pave the way for a CFNS is called the Super X Divertor. The Super X Divertor is designed to handle the enormous heat and particle fluxes peculiar to compact devices; it would enable the CFNS to safely produce large amounts of neutrons without destroying the system.
"The intense heat generated in a nuclear fusion device can literally destroy the walls of the machine," says research scientist Valanju, "and that is the thing that has been holding back a highly compact source of nuclear fusion."
Valanju says a fusion-fission hybrid reactor has been an idea in the physics community for a long time.
"It's always been known that fusion is good at producing neutrons and fission is good at making energy," he says. "Now, we have shown that we can get fusion to produce a lot of neutrons in a small space."
Producing an abundant and clean source of "pure fusion energy" continues to be a goal for fusion researchers. But the physicists say that harnessing the other product of fusion—neutrons—can be achieved in the near term.
In moving their hybrid from concept into production, the scientists hope to make nuclear energy a more viable alternative to coal and oil while waiting for renewables like solar and pure fusion to ramp up.
"The hybrid we designed should be viewed as a bridge technology," says Mahajan. "Through the hybrid, we can bring fusion via neutrons to the service of the energy sector today. We can hopefully make a major contribution to the carbon-free mix dictated by the 2050 time scale set by global warming scientists."
The scientists say their Super X Divertor invention has already gained acceptance in the fusion community. Several groups are considering implemented the Super X Divertor on their machines, including the MAST tokamak in the United Kingdom, and the DIIID (General Atomics) and NSTX (Princeton University) in the U.S. Next steps will include performing extended simulations, transforming the concept into an engineering project, and seeking funding for building a prototype.
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For more information, contact: Lee Clippard, College of Natural Sciences, 512-232-0675; Dr. Mike Kotschenreuther, 512-471-1322; Dr. Swadesh Mahajan, 512-471-4376.
4 Comments to "Nuclear Fusion-Fission Hybrid Could Destroy Nuclear Waste and Contribute to Carbon-Free Energy Future"
1. Ryan said on January 28, 2009
I assume this technology still does nothing to address the horrendous environmental and health consequences associated with the mining and enrichment of nuclear fuel? Though the radioactive waste from the plants themselves is a grave concern, it is only one of the numerous deadly problems associated with nuclear power. No nuclear plants should be permitted or allowed to operate until these threats are addressed and resolved.
2. qraal said on January 28, 2009
Turn off the nukes and what do people do for electricity then? Burn coal? What kind of unrealistic picture of the world is that? Most of the supposed environmental issues from mine tailings have been exaggerated by Greens for political reasons, but it is still an issue and can only be improved by higher-efficiency use of fission fuels. We need to be able to burn all the U238 as well as the bit of U235 we focus our efforts on now.
3. Tony Turpn said on January 29, 2009
We need to give everything a chance in our energy needs. What can be more deadly is waiting for the "perfect" solution to come along. I applaud these scientists for trying to solve problems instead of waiting and hoping someone else will solve the problem for them. If they wait, we can always burn more coal, right?
4. Brad said on January 29, 2009
It's a step in the right direction. Having worked with the movement of radioactive waste, I like the idea of reducing the amount that we stuff into holes in the ground.
http://www.utexas.edu/news/2009/01/27/nuclear_hybrid/?AddInterest=1284
Thursday, January 29, 2009
NRLN Applauds Cheaper Prescription Drugs Initiative
Apparently our new President "gets" what the NRLN has been advocating since its founding. According to the White House website at www.whitehouse.gov , President Obama supports allowing seniors to import safe prescription drugs from overseas, and will prevent pharmaceutical companies from blocking cheap and safe generic drugs from the market. Also, President Obama supports allowing the federal government to negotiate for lower drug prices for the Medicare program, just as it does to lower prices for veterans.
Since January 28, 2002, when the first NRLN Board of Directors was elected, the NRLN has spoken out for the need to make prescription drugs more affordable. One of the NRLN's first Action Alerts asked NRLN Grassroots Network members to write to their U.S. Representatives to urge support for the Senate-passed Greater Access To Affordable Pharmaceuticals Act of 2002.
The NRLN aggressively work on Capitol Hill to promote the passage of S. 2328, the Pharmaceutical Market Access and Drug Safety Act of 2004 introduced by Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND). Although the bill did not pass, it had the right objective to allow for the importation of prescription drugs.
The bill continued to be introduced in subsequent sessions of Congress. On June 22, 2007, NRLN's Past President Jim Norby, sent letters to thank the U.S. House members who were sponsoring H.R. 380, the Pharmaceutical Market Access and Drug Safety Act of 2007. Jim pointed out in his letter that "Americans deserve to have the benefit of global competition in the pharmaceutical industry. Furthermore, your proposed legislation would provide a structure for the FDA to ensure a high level of safety for prescription drug imports."
To this day, a major objective in the NRLN's Legislative Agenda is to gain passage of legislation for the importation of safe and lower-cost prescription drugs. We also continue to seek passage of a bill to force the negotiation of prices for Medicare prescription drugs.
Yesterday, January 28, Congressional Democrats introduced legislation (H.R. 684, S. 330) that would allow traditional Medicare to establish one or more plans to compete with private plans under the prescription drug benefit, CQ HealthBeat reports. In addition, the legislation, sponsored by Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and Reps. Marion Berry (D-Ark.) and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), would strengthen the ability of Medicare beneficiaries to appeal denials of coverage for medically necessary medications under all Medicare Part D plans. The legislation also would require the Health and Human Services Secretary to negotiate directly with pharmaceutical companies for the prices of medications under Part D. We are now examining these companion bills and may be asking your support in sending messages to lobby for their passage by Congress. Stay tuned!
I can't say what the genesis was for President Obama's position to support the importation of safe prescription drugs and for the federal government to negotiate for lower drug prices for Medicare participants. I can say that in the NRLN's proposal made last May to the Democratic National Platform Committee there was this statement: "No American should be forced to choose between meals and medications. We support competitive bidding of prescription drugs, faster approval of generic drugs, and the safe importation of lower-cost drugs from other countries subject to approval by the FDA. "
The NRLN will be supporting President Obama's desire for cheaper prescription drugs and will be using our influence on Capitol Hill to gain the introduction of a bill. When the timing is right, we will engage our Grassroots Network to voice your support for more competition in the pharmaceutical industry.
In the meantime, help the NRLN grow its Grassroots Network by asking your friends to sign up at http://capwiz.com/abtr/mlm/signup/ . Also encourage them to become an Individual Contributing Member of the NRLN by going to www.nrln.org and clicking on the "Join Us" tab at the top of the website's home page.
Bill KadereitPresident, National Retiree Legislative Network
From: "NRLN President Bill Kadereit"Add sender to Contacts
Since January 28, 2002, when the first NRLN Board of Directors was elected, the NRLN has spoken out for the need to make prescription drugs more affordable. One of the NRLN's first Action Alerts asked NRLN Grassroots Network members to write to their U.S. Representatives to urge support for the Senate-passed Greater Access To Affordable Pharmaceuticals Act of 2002.
The NRLN aggressively work on Capitol Hill to promote the passage of S. 2328, the Pharmaceutical Market Access and Drug Safety Act of 2004 introduced by Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND). Although the bill did not pass, it had the right objective to allow for the importation of prescription drugs.
The bill continued to be introduced in subsequent sessions of Congress. On June 22, 2007, NRLN's Past President Jim Norby, sent letters to thank the U.S. House members who were sponsoring H.R. 380, the Pharmaceutical Market Access and Drug Safety Act of 2007. Jim pointed out in his letter that "Americans deserve to have the benefit of global competition in the pharmaceutical industry. Furthermore, your proposed legislation would provide a structure for the FDA to ensure a high level of safety for prescription drug imports."
To this day, a major objective in the NRLN's Legislative Agenda is to gain passage of legislation for the importation of safe and lower-cost prescription drugs. We also continue to seek passage of a bill to force the negotiation of prices for Medicare prescription drugs.
Yesterday, January 28, Congressional Democrats introduced legislation (H.R. 684, S. 330) that would allow traditional Medicare to establish one or more plans to compete with private plans under the prescription drug benefit, CQ HealthBeat reports. In addition, the legislation, sponsored by Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and Reps. Marion Berry (D-Ark.) and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), would strengthen the ability of Medicare beneficiaries to appeal denials of coverage for medically necessary medications under all Medicare Part D plans. The legislation also would require the Health and Human Services Secretary to negotiate directly with pharmaceutical companies for the prices of medications under Part D. We are now examining these companion bills and may be asking your support in sending messages to lobby for their passage by Congress. Stay tuned!
I can't say what the genesis was for President Obama's position to support the importation of safe prescription drugs and for the federal government to negotiate for lower drug prices for Medicare participants. I can say that in the NRLN's proposal made last May to the Democratic National Platform Committee there was this statement: "No American should be forced to choose between meals and medications. We support competitive bidding of prescription drugs, faster approval of generic drugs, and the safe importation of lower-cost drugs from other countries subject to approval by the FDA. "
The NRLN will be supporting President Obama's desire for cheaper prescription drugs and will be using our influence on Capitol Hill to gain the introduction of a bill. When the timing is right, we will engage our Grassroots Network to voice your support for more competition in the pharmaceutical industry.
In the meantime, help the NRLN grow its Grassroots Network by asking your friends to sign up at http://capwiz.com/abtr/mlm/signup/ . Also encourage them to become an Individual Contributing Member of the NRLN by going to www.nrln.org and clicking on the "Join Us" tab at the top of the website's home page.
Bill KadereitPresident, National Retiree Legislative Network
From: "NRLN President Bill Kadereit"
Officials: Army suicides at 3-decade high
By PAULINE JELINEK, Associated Press Writer Pauline Jelinek, Associated Press Writer
2 hrs 9 mins ago
WASHINGTON – Suicides among Army troops soared again last year and are at a nearly three-decade high, senior defense officials told The Associated Press on Thursday.
At least 128 soldiers killed themselves in 2008, said two officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the data has not been formally released.
The final count likely will be considerably higher because more than a dozen other suspicious deaths are still being investigated and could also turn out to be self-inflicted.
The new figure of more than 128 compares to 115 in 2007 and 102 in 2006 — and is the highest since record keeping began in 1980.
It also calculates to a rate of 20.2 per 100,000 soldiers — which is higher than the adjusted civilian rate for the first time since the Vietnam War, officials said.
The Army plans to announce the figures at a news conference later Thursday.
Officials have said repeatedly that troops are under tremendous and unprecedented stress because of repeated and long tours of duty due to the simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The stress has placed further burdens on an overwhelmed military health care system also caring for huge numbers of troops suffering from post-traumatic stress, depression and other mental health problems as well as physical care for tens of thousands of wounded.
Yearly increases in suicides have been recorded since 2004, when there were 64 — only about half the number now. And they've occurred despite increased training, prevention programs, increased psychiatric staff and other Army efforts to stem the rise.
Officials are expected to announce additional attempts to help soldiers at the news conference.
When studying individual cases, officials said they found that the most common factors for suicides were soldiers suffering problems with their personal relationships, legal or financial issues and problems on the job.
The previous number of suicides, combined, among the Army's active-duty soldiers and National Guard and Reserve troops also was the highest on record — 18.8 per 100,000. But the new pace of 20.2 suicides per 100,000 soldiers is startling because it for the first time surpasses the civilian number, when adjusted to reflect the Army's younger and male-heavy demographics.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the suicide rate for U.S. society overall was about 11 per 100,000 in 2004, the latest year for which the agency has figures. But the Army says the civilian rate is more like 19.5 per 100,000 when adjusted.
The new rate of 20.2 — which also will be higher if more suicides are confirmed — compares to 18.8 per 100,000 in 2007, 17.5 in 2006 and 9.8 in 2002 — the first full year after the start of the war in Afghanistan
The new Army report follows one earlier this month showing that the Marine Corps recorded more suicides last year than any year since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
That report said 41 Marines were possible or confirmed suicides in 2008, or 16.8 per 100,000 troops. The Marine rate remained unchanged because the Corps is increasing in size, officials said.
Marines and Army units have borne most of duty in the two ongoing wars, which have required more use of ground forces to fight the insurgencies.
But the numbers kept by the service branches don't show the whole picture of war-related suicides because they don't include deaths after people have left the military. The Department of Veterans Affairs tracks those numbers and says there were 144 suicides among the nearly 500,000 service members who left the military from 2002-2005 after fighting in at least one of the two ongoing wars.
The true incidence of suicide among veterans is not known, according to a report last year by the Congressional Research Service. Based on numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the VA estimates that 18 veterans a day — or 6,500 a year — take their own lives, but that number includes vets from all previous wars.
"The suicide numbers released today come as no surprise to the veterans' community who has experienced the psychological toll of war," said Paul Rieckhoff, director of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. "But we cannot let current trend lines continue. These are preventable deaths for which the Department of Defense and the VA can and must take bold action."
___
On the Net:
Army suicide prevention http://www.armyg1.army.mil/HR/suicide/default.asp
Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090129/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/army_suicides/print
2 hrs 9 mins ago
WASHINGTON – Suicides among Army troops soared again last year and are at a nearly three-decade high, senior defense officials told The Associated Press on Thursday.
At least 128 soldiers killed themselves in 2008, said two officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the data has not been formally released.
The final count likely will be considerably higher because more than a dozen other suspicious deaths are still being investigated and could also turn out to be self-inflicted.
The new figure of more than 128 compares to 115 in 2007 and 102 in 2006 — and is the highest since record keeping began in 1980.
It also calculates to a rate of 20.2 per 100,000 soldiers — which is higher than the adjusted civilian rate for the first time since the Vietnam War, officials said.
The Army plans to announce the figures at a news conference later Thursday.
Officials have said repeatedly that troops are under tremendous and unprecedented stress because of repeated and long tours of duty due to the simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The stress has placed further burdens on an overwhelmed military health care system also caring for huge numbers of troops suffering from post-traumatic stress, depression and other mental health problems as well as physical care for tens of thousands of wounded.
Yearly increases in suicides have been recorded since 2004, when there were 64 — only about half the number now. And they've occurred despite increased training, prevention programs, increased psychiatric staff and other Army efforts to stem the rise.
Officials are expected to announce additional attempts to help soldiers at the news conference.
When studying individual cases, officials said they found that the most common factors for suicides were soldiers suffering problems with their personal relationships, legal or financial issues and problems on the job.
The previous number of suicides, combined, among the Army's active-duty soldiers and National Guard and Reserve troops also was the highest on record — 18.8 per 100,000. But the new pace of 20.2 suicides per 100,000 soldiers is startling because it for the first time surpasses the civilian number, when adjusted to reflect the Army's younger and male-heavy demographics.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the suicide rate for U.S. society overall was about 11 per 100,000 in 2004, the latest year for which the agency has figures. But the Army says the civilian rate is more like 19.5 per 100,000 when adjusted.
The new rate of 20.2 — which also will be higher if more suicides are confirmed — compares to 18.8 per 100,000 in 2007, 17.5 in 2006 and 9.8 in 2002 — the first full year after the start of the war in Afghanistan
The new Army report follows one earlier this month showing that the Marine Corps recorded more suicides last year than any year since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
That report said 41 Marines were possible or confirmed suicides in 2008, or 16.8 per 100,000 troops. The Marine rate remained unchanged because the Corps is increasing in size, officials said.
Marines and Army units have borne most of duty in the two ongoing wars, which have required more use of ground forces to fight the insurgencies.
But the numbers kept by the service branches don't show the whole picture of war-related suicides because they don't include deaths after people have left the military. The Department of Veterans Affairs tracks those numbers and says there were 144 suicides among the nearly 500,000 service members who left the military from 2002-2005 after fighting in at least one of the two ongoing wars.
The true incidence of suicide among veterans is not known, according to a report last year by the Congressional Research Service. Based on numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the VA estimates that 18 veterans a day — or 6,500 a year — take their own lives, but that number includes vets from all previous wars.
"The suicide numbers released today come as no surprise to the veterans' community who has experienced the psychological toll of war," said Paul Rieckhoff, director of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. "But we cannot let current trend lines continue. These are preventable deaths for which the Department of Defense and the VA can and must take bold action."
___
On the Net:
Army suicide prevention http://www.armyg1.army.mil/HR/suicide/default.asp
Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090129/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/army_suicides/print
Americans receiving jobless benefits hit record
By CHRISTOPHER S. RUGABER, AP Economics Writer Christopher S. Rugaber, Ap Economics Writer
45 mins ago
WASHINGTON – The number of people receiving unemployment benefits has reached an all-time record, the government said Thursday, and more layoffs are spreading throughout the economy.
The Labor Department reported that the number of Americans continuing to claim unemployment insurance for the week ending Jan. 17 was a seasonally adjusted 4.78 million, the highest on records dating back to 1967. That's an increase of 159,000 from the previous week and worse than economists' expectations of 4.65 million.
As a proportion of the work force, the tally of unemployment benefit recipients is the highest since August 1983, a department analyst said.
The total released by the department doesn't include about 1.7 million people receiving benefits under an extended unemployment compensation program authorized by Congress last summer. That means the total number of recipients is actually closer to 6.5 million people.
Businesses continued to hemorrhage jobs Thursday. Ford Motor Co. reported a fourth-quarter loss of $5.9 billion and said its credit arm would cut 20 percent of its work force, or 1,200 jobs. Eastman Kodak Co. said it's cutting 3,500 to 4,500 jobs, or 14 to 18 percent of its work force, as it posted a $137 million quarterly loss on plunging sales of photography products. Black & Decker Corp. said its fourth-quarter profit tumbled 77 percent and the power tools manufacturer announced about 1,200 job cuts.
More signs of the deepening recession came in separate government reports on home sales and durable goods.
The Commerce Department said Thursday that new home sales fell 14.7 percent in December to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 331,000, the lowest pace on records dating back to 1963. For 2008, builders sold 482,000 homes, the weakest results since 1982.
The median price of a new home sold last month was $206,500, a drop of 9.3 percent from a year ago. The median is the point where half the homes sold for more and half for less.
Meanwhile, new orders for durable goods dropped by 2.6 percent last month, even worse than the 2 percent decline economists expected. Orders fell 5.7 percent for the year, the second biggest drop on government records, exceeded only by a 10.7 percent plunge in 2001, according to the Commerce Department.
The financial markets fell on the news. The Dow Jones industrial average dropped about 115 points in midday trading.
The tally of Americans filing new jobless benefit claims rose slightly to a seasonally adjusted 588,000 last week, from a downwardly revised figure of 585,000 the previous week. That also was worse than analysts' forecast of 575,000 new claims.
The number of initial claims is close to the 26-year high of 589,000 reached in late December, though the work force has grown by about half since then.
The record number of ongoing benefit claims is an indication that laid-off workers are having a difficult time finding new jobs, economists said.
"This highlights the key point that the trend in gross hirings has slowed as abruptly as the trend in gross firings ... has risen," Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist for High Frequency Economics, wrote in a research note.
A year ago, continuing claims stood at about 2.7 million, less than half their current level when the extended unemployment program is included.
Abiel Reinhart, an economic analyst at JPMorgan Chase, said the report indicates the unemployment rate likely rose this month. January's figure will be released Feb. 6.
The rate jumped to 7.2 percent in December, a 16-year high. Employers cut an average of 510,000 jobs in the last three months of 2008, and may cut a similar amount in January, Reinhart said.
The crush of new and continuing claims has overwhelmed many states' ability to process them all. Electronic filing systems crashed in three states earlier this month, and last week Michigan said it would hire 276 workers and open a fourth call center to handle increased phone traffic.
President Barack Obama's $819 billion economic stimulus package, approved by the House Wednesday and now on its way to the Senate, would provide $500 million to the states to upgrade their unemployment insurance systems. The measure also continues the extended unemployment compensation program, which adds up to 33 weeks of benefits, until the end of the year.
Companies have announced a huge number of layoffs this week as they prepare for an extended period of economic weakness. Economists expect the current recession, which began in December 2007, to be the longest since World War II.
Starbucks Corp. on Wednesday said it would cut 6,700 jobs. The coffee company also said it would close 300 underperforming stores, on top of 600 it already planned to shut down.
Time Warner Inc.'s AOL division is cutting up to 700 jobs, or about 10 percent of the online unit's work force. And IBM Corp. has cut thousands of jobs in its sales, software and hardware divisions in the past week, without announcing specific numbers.
Boeing Co., Pfizer Inc., Home Depot Inc. and other U.S. corporate titans also have announced tens of thousands of job cuts this week alone.
Companies have announced about 130,000 layoffs in January, according to an Associated Press tally.
Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090129/ap_on_bi_go_ec_fi/economy/print
45 mins ago
WASHINGTON – The number of people receiving unemployment benefits has reached an all-time record, the government said Thursday, and more layoffs are spreading throughout the economy.
The Labor Department reported that the number of Americans continuing to claim unemployment insurance for the week ending Jan. 17 was a seasonally adjusted 4.78 million, the highest on records dating back to 1967. That's an increase of 159,000 from the previous week and worse than economists' expectations of 4.65 million.
As a proportion of the work force, the tally of unemployment benefit recipients is the highest since August 1983, a department analyst said.
The total released by the department doesn't include about 1.7 million people receiving benefits under an extended unemployment compensation program authorized by Congress last summer. That means the total number of recipients is actually closer to 6.5 million people.
Businesses continued to hemorrhage jobs Thursday. Ford Motor Co. reported a fourth-quarter loss of $5.9 billion and said its credit arm would cut 20 percent of its work force, or 1,200 jobs. Eastman Kodak Co. said it's cutting 3,500 to 4,500 jobs, or 14 to 18 percent of its work force, as it posted a $137 million quarterly loss on plunging sales of photography products. Black & Decker Corp. said its fourth-quarter profit tumbled 77 percent and the power tools manufacturer announced about 1,200 job cuts.
More signs of the deepening recession came in separate government reports on home sales and durable goods.
The Commerce Department said Thursday that new home sales fell 14.7 percent in December to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 331,000, the lowest pace on records dating back to 1963. For 2008, builders sold 482,000 homes, the weakest results since 1982.
The median price of a new home sold last month was $206,500, a drop of 9.3 percent from a year ago. The median is the point where half the homes sold for more and half for less.
Meanwhile, new orders for durable goods dropped by 2.6 percent last month, even worse than the 2 percent decline economists expected. Orders fell 5.7 percent for the year, the second biggest drop on government records, exceeded only by a 10.7 percent plunge in 2001, according to the Commerce Department.
The financial markets fell on the news. The Dow Jones industrial average dropped about 115 points in midday trading.
The tally of Americans filing new jobless benefit claims rose slightly to a seasonally adjusted 588,000 last week, from a downwardly revised figure of 585,000 the previous week. That also was worse than analysts' forecast of 575,000 new claims.
The number of initial claims is close to the 26-year high of 589,000 reached in late December, though the work force has grown by about half since then.
The record number of ongoing benefit claims is an indication that laid-off workers are having a difficult time finding new jobs, economists said.
"This highlights the key point that the trend in gross hirings has slowed as abruptly as the trend in gross firings ... has risen," Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist for High Frequency Economics, wrote in a research note.
A year ago, continuing claims stood at about 2.7 million, less than half their current level when the extended unemployment program is included.
Abiel Reinhart, an economic analyst at JPMorgan Chase, said the report indicates the unemployment rate likely rose this month. January's figure will be released Feb. 6.
The rate jumped to 7.2 percent in December, a 16-year high. Employers cut an average of 510,000 jobs in the last three months of 2008, and may cut a similar amount in January, Reinhart said.
The crush of new and continuing claims has overwhelmed many states' ability to process them all. Electronic filing systems crashed in three states earlier this month, and last week Michigan said it would hire 276 workers and open a fourth call center to handle increased phone traffic.
President Barack Obama's $819 billion economic stimulus package, approved by the House Wednesday and now on its way to the Senate, would provide $500 million to the states to upgrade their unemployment insurance systems. The measure also continues the extended unemployment compensation program, which adds up to 33 weeks of benefits, until the end of the year.
Companies have announced a huge number of layoffs this week as they prepare for an extended period of economic weakness. Economists expect the current recession, which began in December 2007, to be the longest since World War II.
Starbucks Corp. on Wednesday said it would cut 6,700 jobs. The coffee company also said it would close 300 underperforming stores, on top of 600 it already planned to shut down.
Time Warner Inc.'s AOL division is cutting up to 700 jobs, or about 10 percent of the online unit's work force. And IBM Corp. has cut thousands of jobs in its sales, software and hardware divisions in the past week, without announcing specific numbers.
Boeing Co., Pfizer Inc., Home Depot Inc. and other U.S. corporate titans also have announced tens of thousands of job cuts this week alone.
Companies have announced about 130,000 layoffs in January, according to an Associated Press tally.
Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090129/ap_on_bi_go_ec_fi/economy/print
Saturday, January 17, 2009
A Letter to the new president. What Obama must do
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Dear Mr. President:
Like FDR three-quarters of a century ago, you're taking charge at a moment when all the old certainties have vanished, all the conventional wisdom been proved wrong. We're not living in a world you or anyone else expected to see. Many presidents have to deal with crises, but very few have been forced to deal from Day One with a crisis on the scale America now faces.
So, what should you do?
In this letter I won't try to offer advice about everything. For the most part I'll stick to economics, or matters that bear on economics. I'll also focus on things I think you can or should achieve in your first year in office. The extent to which your administration succeeds or fails will depend, to a large extent, on what happens in the first year — and above all, on whether you manage to get a grip on the current economic crisis.
The Economic Crisis
How bad is the economic outlook? Worse than almost anyone imagined.
The economic growth of the Bush years, such as it was, was fueled by an explosion of private debt; now credit markets are in disarray, businesses and consumers are pulling back and the economy is in free-fall. What we're facing, in essence, is a yawning job gap. The U.S. economy needs to add more than a million jobs a year just to keep up with a growing population. Even before the crisis, job growth under Bush averaged only 800,000 a year — and over the past year, instead of gaining a million-plus jobs, we lost 2 million. Today we're continuing to lose jobs at the rate of a half million a month.
There's nothing in either the data or the underlying situation to suggest that the plunge in employment will slow anytime soon, which means that by late this year we could be 10 million or more jobs short of where we should be. This, in turn, would mean an unemployment rate of more than nine percent. Add in those who aren't counted in the standard rate because they've given up looking for work, plus those forced to take part-time jobs when they want to work full-time, and we're probably looking at a real-world unemployment rate of around 15 percent — more than 20 million Americans frustrated in their efforts to find work.
The human cost of a slump that severe would be enormous. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan research group that analyzes government programs, recently estimated the effects of a rise in the unemployment rate to nine percent — a worst-case scenario that now seems all too likely. So what will happen if unemployment rises to nine percent or more? As many as 10 million middle-class Americans would be pushed into poverty, and another 6 million would be pushed into "deep poverty," the severe deprivation that happens when your income is less than half the poverty level. Many of the Americans losing their jobs would lose their health insurance too, worsening the already grim state of U.S. health care and crowding emergency rooms with those who have nowhere else to go. Meanwhile, millions more Americans would lose their homes. State and local governments, deprived of much of their revenue, would have to cut back on even the most essential services.
If things continue on their current trajectory, Mr. President, we will soon be facing a great national catastrophe. And it's your job — a job no other president has had to do since World War II — to head off that catastrophe.
Wait a second, you may say. Didn't other presidents also face troubled economies? Yes, they did — but when it came to economic policy, your predecessors weren't actually running the show. For the past half century the Federal Reserve — a more or less independent institution, run by technocrats and deliberately designed to be independent of whoever happens to occupy the White House — has been taking care of day-to-day, and even year-to-year, economic management. Your fellow presidents were just along for the ride.
Remember the economic boom of 1984, which let Ronald Reagan run on the slogan "It's morning again in America"? Well, Reagan had absolutely nothing to do with that boom. It was, instead, the work of Paul Volcker, whom Jimmy Carter appointed as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board in 1979 (and who's now the head of your economic advisory panel). First Volcker broke the back of inflation, at the cost of a recession that probably doomed Carter's re-election chances in 1980. Then Volcker engineered an economic bounce-back. In effect, Reagan dressed up in a flight suit and pretended to be a hotshot economic pilot, but Volcker was the guy who actually flew the plane and landed it safely.
You, on the other hand, have to pull this plane out of its nose dive yourself, because the Fed has lost its mojo.
Compare the situation right now with the one back in the 1980s, when Volcker turned the economy around. All the Fed had to do back then was print a bunch of dollars (OK, it actually credited the money to the accounts of private banks, but it amounts to the same thing) and then use those dollars to buy up U.S. government debt. This drove interest rates down: When Volcker decided that the economy needed a pick-me-up, he was quickly able to drive the interest rate on Treasury bills from 13 percent down to eight percent. Lower interest rates on government debt, in turn, quickly drove down rates on mortgages and business borrowing. People started spending again, and within a few months the economy had gone from slump to boom. Economists call this process — from the Fed's decision to print more money to the resulting pickup in spending, jobs and incomes — the "monetary transmission mechanism." And in the 1980s that mechanism worked just fine.
This time, however, the transmission mechanism is broken.
First of all, while the Fed can still print money, it can't drive interest rates down. Why? Because those interest rates are already about as low as they can go. As I write this letter, the interest rate on Treasury bills is 0.005 percent — that is, zero. And you can't push rates lower than that. Now, you might think that zero interest rates would lead to an orgy of borrowing. But while the U.S. government can borrow money for free, the rest of us can't. Fear rules the financial markets, so over the past year and a half, as the interest rates on government debt have plunged, the interest rates that Main Street has to pay have mostly gone up. In particular, many businesses are paying much higher interest rates now than they were a year and a half ago, before the Fed started cutting. And they're lucky compared to the many businesses that can't get credit at all.
Besides, even if more people could borrow, would they really want to spend? There's a glut of unsold homes on the market, so there's very little incentive to build more houses, no matter how low mortgage rates go. The same goes for business investment: With office buildings standing empty, shopping malls begging for tenants and factories sitting idle, who wants to spend on new capacity? And with workers everywhere worried about job security, people trying to save a few dollars may stampede into stores that offer deep discounts, but not many people want to buy the big-ticket items, like cars, that normally fuel an economic recovery.
So as I said, the Fed has lost its mojo. Ben Bernanke and his colleagues are trying everything they can think of to unfreeze the credit markets — the alphabet soup of new "lending facilities," with acronyms nobody can remember, is growing by the hour. Any day now, the joke goes, everyone will have a Visa card bearing the Fed logo. But at best, all this activity only serves to limit the damage. There's no realistic prospect that the Fed can pull the economy out of its nose dive.
So it's up to you.
Rescuing The Economy
The last president to face a similar mess was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and you can learn a lot from his example. That doesn't mean, however, that you should do everything FDR did. On the contrary, you have to take care to emulate his successes, but avoid repeating his mistakes.
About those successes: The way FDR dealt with his own era's financial mess offers a very good model. Then, as now, the government had to deploy taxpayer money in order to rescue the financial system. In particular, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation initially played a role similar to that of the Bush administration's Troubled Assets Relief Program (the $700 billion program everyone knows about). Like the TARP, the RFC bulked up the cash position of troubled banks by using public funds to buy up stock in those banks.
There was, however, a big difference between FDR's approach to taxpayer-subsidized financial rescue and that of the Bush administration: Namely, FDR wasn't shy about demanding that the public's money be used to serve the public good. By 1935 the U.S. government owned about a third of the banking system, and the Roosevelt administration used that ownership stake to insist that banks actually help the economy, pressuring them to lend out the money they were getting from Washington. Beyond that, the New Deal went out and lent a lot of money directly to businesses, to home buyers and to people who already owned homes, helping them restructure their mortgages so they could stay in their houses.
Can you do anything like that today? Yes, you can. The Bush administration may have refused to attach any strings to the aid it has provided to financial firms, but you can change all that. If banks need federal funds to survive, provide them — but demand that the banks do their part by lending those funds out to the rest of the economy. Provide more help to homeowners. Use Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the home-lending agencies, to pass the government's low borrowing costs on to qualified home buyers. (Fannie and Freddie were seized by federal regulators in September, but the Bush administration, bizarrely, has kept their borrowing costs high by refusing to declare that their bonds are backed by the full faith and credit of the taxpayer.)
Conservatives will accuse you of nationalizing the financial system, and some will call you a Marxist. (It happens to me all the time.) And the truth is that you will, in a way, be engaging in temporary nationalization. But that's OK: In the long run we don't want the government running financial institutions, but for now we need to do whatever it takes to get credit flowing again.
All of this will help — but not enough. By all means you should try to fix the problems of banks and other financial institutions. But to pull the economy out of its slide, you need to go beyond funneling money to banks and other financial institutions. You need to give the real economy of work and wages a boost. In other words, you have to get job creation right — which FDR never did.
This may sound like a strange thing to say. After all, what we remember from the 1930s is the Works Progress Administration, which at its peak employed millions of Americans building roads, schools and dams. But the New Deal's job-creation programs, while they certainly helped, were neither big enough nor sustained enough to end the Great Depression. When the economy is deeply depressed, you have to put normal concerns about budget deficits aside; FDR never managed to do that. As a result, he was too cautious: The boost he gave the economy between 1933 and 1936 was enough to get unemployment down, but not back to pre-Depression levels. And in 1937 he let the deficit worriers get to him: Even though the economy was still weak, he let himself be talked into slashing spending while raising taxes. This led to a severe recession that undid much of the progress the economy had made to that point. It took the giant public works project known as World War II — a project that finally silenced the penny pinchers — to bring the Depression to an end.
The lesson from FDR's limited success on the employment front, then, is that you have to be really bold in your job-creation plans. Basically, businesses and consumers are cutting way back on spending, leaving the economy with a huge shortfall in demand, which will lead to a huge fall in employment — unless you stop it. To stop it, however, you have to spend enough to fill the hole left by the private sector's retrenchment.
How much spending are we talking about? You might want to be seated before you read this. OK, here goes: "Full employment" means a jobless rate of five percent at most, and probably less. Meanwhile, we're currently on a trajectory that will push the unemployment rate to nine percent or more. Even the most optimistic estimates suggest that it takes at least $200 billion a year in government spending to cut the unemployment rate by one percentage point. Do the math: You probably have to spend $800 billion a year to achieve a full economic recovery. Anything less than $500 billion a year will be much too little to produce an economic turnaround.
Spending on that scale, at a time when the weakening economy is driving down tax collection, will produce some really scary deficit numbers. But the consequences of too much caution — of a failure on your part to do enough to stop the economy's nose dive — will be even scarier than the coming ocean of red ink.
In fact, the biggest problem you're going to face as you try to rescue the economy will be finding enough job-creation projects that can be started quickly. Traditional WPA-type programs — spending on roads, government buildings, ports and other infrastructure — are a very effective tool for creating employment. But America probably has less than $150 billion worth of such projects that are "shovel-ready" right now, projects that can be started in six months or less. So you'll have to be creative: You'll have to find lots of other ways to push funds into the economy.
As much as possible, you should spend on things of lasting value, things that, like roads and bridges, will make us a richer nation. Upgrade the infrastructure behind the Internet; upgrade the electrical grid; improve information technology in the health care sector, a crucial part of any health care reform. Provide aid to state and local governments, to prevent them from cutting investment spending at precisely the wrong moment. And remember, as you do this, that all this spending does double duty: It serves the future, but it also helps in the present, by providing jobs and income to offset the slump.
You can also do well by doing good. The Americans hit hardest by the slump — the long-term unemployed, families without health insurance — are also the Americans most likely to spend any aid they receive, and thereby help sustain the economy as a whole. So aid to the distressed — enhanced unemployment insurance, food stamps, health-insurance subsidies — is both the fair thing to do and a desirable part of your short-term economic plan.
Even if you do all this, however, it won't be enough to offset the awesome slump in private spending. So yes, it also makes sense to cut taxes on a temporary basis. The tax cuts should go primarily to lower- and middle-income Americans — again, both because that's the fair thing to do, and because they're more likely to spend their windfall than the affluent. The tax break for working families you outlined in your campaign plan looks like a reasonable vehicle.
But let's be clear: Tax cuts are not the tool of choice for fighting an economic slump. For one thing, they deliver less bang for the buck than infrastructure spending, because there's no guarantee that consumers will spend their tax cuts or rebates. As a result, it probably takes more than $300 billion of tax cuts, compared with $200 billion of public works, to shave a point off the unemployment rate. Furthermore, in the long run you're going to need more tax revenue, not less, to pay for health care reform. So tax cuts shouldn't be the core of your economic recovery program. They should, instead, be a way to "bulk up" your job-creation program, which otherwise won't be big enough.
Now my honest opinion is that even with all this, you won't be able to prevent 2009 from being a very bad year. If you manage to keep the unemployment rate from going above eight percent, I'll consider that a major success. But by 2010 you should be able to have the economy on the road to recovery. What should you do to prepare for that recovery?
Beyond the Crisis
Crisis management is one thing, but America needs much more than that. FDR rebuilt America not just by getting us through depression and war, but by making us a more just and secure society. On one side, he created social-insurance programs, above all Social Security, that protect working Americans to this day. On the other, he oversaw the creation of a much more equal economy, creating a middle-class society that lasted for decades, until conservative economic policies ushered in the new age of inequality that prevails today. You have a chance to emulate FDR's achievements, and the ultimate judgment on your presidency will rest on whether you seize that chance.
The biggest, most important legacy you can leave to the nation will be to give us, finally, what every other advanced nation already has: guaranteed health care for all our citizens. The current crisis has given us an object lesson in the need for universal health care, in two ways. It has highlighted the vulnerability of Americans whose health insurance is tied to jobs that can so easily disappear. And it has made it clear that our current system is bad for business, too — the Big Three automakers wouldn't be in nearly as much trouble if they weren't trying to pay the medical bills of their former employees as well as their current workers. You have a mandate for change; the economic crisis has shown just how much the system needs change. So now is the time to pass legislation establishing a system that covers everyone.
What should this system look like? Some progressives insist that we should move immediately to a single-payer system — Medicare for all. Although this would be both the fairest and most efficient way to ensure that all Americans get the health care they need, let's be frank: Single-payer probably isn't politically achievable right now, simply because it would represent too great a change. At least at first, Americans who have good private health insurance will be reluctant to trade that insurance for a public program, even if that program will ultimately prove better.
So the thing to do in your first year in office is pass a compromise plan — one that establishes, for the first time, the principle of universal access to care. Your campaign proposals provide the blueprint. Let people keep their private insurance if they choose, subsidize insurance for lower-income families, require that all children be covered, and give everyone the option to buy into a public plan — one that will probably end up being cheaper and better than private insurance. Pass legislation doing all that, and we'll have universal health coverage up and running by the end of your first term. And that will be an achievement that, like FDR's creation of Social Security, will permanently change America for the better.
All this will cost money, mainly to pay for those insurance subsidies, and some people will tell you that the nation can't afford major health care reform given the costs of the economic recovery program. Let's talk about why you should ignore the naysayers.
First, let's put the costs of the economic-recovery program in perspective. It's possible that reviving the economy might cost as much as a trillion dollars over the course of your first term. But the Bush administration wasted at least twice that much on an unnecessary war and tax cuts for the wealthiest; the recovery plan will be intense but temporary, and won't place all that much burden on future budgets. Put it this way: With long-term federal debt paying the lowest interest rates in half a century, the interest costs on a trillion dollars in new debt will amount to only $30 billion a year, about 1.2 percent of the current federal budget.
Second, there's good reason to believe that health care reform will save money in the long run. Our system isn't just full of holes in coverage, it's also grossly inefficient, with huge bureaucratic costs — such as the immense resources that insurance companies devote to making sure they don't cover the people who need health care the most. And under a universal system it will be much easier to use our health care dollars wisely, to spend money only on medical procedures that work and not on those that don't. Since rising health care costs are the main source of the grim, long-run projections for the federal budget, the truth is that we can't afford not to move forward on health care reform.
And let's not ignore the long-term political effects. Back in 1993, when the Clintons tried and failed to create a universal health care system, Republican strategists like William Kristol (now my colleague at The New York Times) urged their party to oppose any reform on political grounds; they argued that a successful health care program, by conveying the message that government can actually serve the public interest, would fundamentally shift American politics in a progressive direction. They were right — and the same considerations that made conservatives so opposed to health care reform should make you determined to make it happen.
Universal health care, then, should be your biggest priority after rescuing the economy. Providing coverage for all Americans can be for your administration what Social Security was for the New Deal. But the New Deal achieved something else: It made America a middle-class society. Under FDR, America went through what labor historians call the Great Compression, a dramatic rise in wages for ordinary workers that greatly reduced income inequality. Before the Great Compression, America was a society of rich and poor; afterward it was a society in which most people, rightly, considered themselves middle class. It may be hard to match that achievement today, but you can, at least, move the country in the right direction.
What caused the Great Compression? That's a complicated story, but one important factor was the rise of organized labor: Union membership tripled between 1935 and 1945. Unions not only negotiated better wages for their own members, they also enhanced the bargaining power of workers throughout the economy. At the time, conservatives warned that wage gains would have disastrous economic effects — that the rise of unions would cripple employment and economic growth. But in fact, the Great Compression was followed by the great postwar boom, which doubled American living standards over the course of a generation.
Unfortunately, the Great Compression was reversed starting in the 1970s, as American workers once again lost much of their bargaining power. This loss was partly due to changes in the world economy, as major U.S. manufacturing corporations started facing more international competition. But it also had a lot to do with politics, as first the Reagan administration, then the Bush administration, did all they could to undermine the ability of workers to organize.
You can make a start on reversing that process. Clearly, you won't be able to oversee a tripling of union membership anytime soon. But you can do a lot to enhance workers' rights. One is to start laying the groundwork to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it much harder for employers to intimidate workers who want to join a union. I know it probably won't happen in your first year, but if and when it does, the legislation will enable America to take a huge step toward recapturing the middle-class society we've lost.
Truth & Reconciliation
There are many other issues you'll need to deal with, of course. In particular, I haven't said a word about environmental policy, which is ultimately the most important issue of all. That's because I suspect that it won't be possible to pass a comprehensive plan for dealing with climate change in your first year. By all means, put as much environmentally friendly investment as possible — such as spending to enhance energy efficiency — into the initial recovery plan. But I'm guessing that 2009 won't be the year to introduce cap-and-trade measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. If I'm wrong, that's great — but I'm not counting on big environmental policy moves right away.
I also haven't said anything about foreign policy. Your team is well aware of the need to wind down the war in Iraq — which is, by the way, costing about as much each year as the insurance subsidies we need to implement universal health care. You're also aware of the need to find the least bad solution for the mess in Afghanistan. And I don't even want to think about Pakistan — but you have to. Good luck.
There is, however, one area where I feel the need to break discipline. I'm an economist, but I'm also an American citizen — and like many citizens, I spent the past eight years watching in horror as the Bush administration betrayed the nation's ideals. And I don't believe we can put those terrible years behind us unless we have a full accounting of what really happened. I know that most of the inside-the-Beltway crowd is urging you to let bygones be bygones, just as they urged Bill Clinton to let the truth about scandals from the Reagan-Bush years, in particular the Iran-Contra affair, remain hidden. But we know how that turned out: The same people who abused power in the name of national security 20 years ago returned as part of the team that, under the second George Bush, did it all over again, on a much larger scale. It was an object lesson in the truth of George Santayana's dictum: Those who refuse to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
That's why this time we need a full accounting. Not a witch hunt, maybe not even prosecutions, but something like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that helped South Africa come to terms with what happened under apartheid. We need to know how America ended up fighting a war to eliminate nonexistent weapons, how torture became a routine instrument of U.S. policy, how the Justice Department became an instrument of political persecution, how brazen corruption flourished not only in Iraq, but throughout Congress and the administration. We know that these evils were not, whatever the apologists say, the result of honest error or a few bad apples: The White House created a climate in which abuse became commonplace, and in many cases probably took the lead in instigating these abuses. But it's not enough to leave this reality in the realm of things "everybody knows" — because soon enough they'll be denied or forgotten, and the cycle of abuse will begin again. The whole sordid tale needs to be brought out into the sunlight.
It's probably best if Congress takes the lead in investigations of the Bush years, but your administration can do its part, both by not using its influence to discourage the investigations and by bringing an end to the Bush administration's stonewalling. Let Congress have access to records and witnesses, and let the truth be told.
That said, the future is what matters most. This month we celebrate your arrival in the White House; at a time of great national crisis, you bring the hope of a better future. It's now up to you to deliver on that hope. By enacting a recovery plan even bolder and more comprehensive than the New Deal, you can not only turn the economy around — you can put America on a path toward greater equality for generations to come.
Respectfully,
Paul Krugman
Rolling Stone Magazine [From Issue 1070 — January 22, 2009]
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/25456948/what_obama_must_do/5
Dear Mr. President:
Like FDR three-quarters of a century ago, you're taking charge at a moment when all the old certainties have vanished, all the conventional wisdom been proved wrong. We're not living in a world you or anyone else expected to see. Many presidents have to deal with crises, but very few have been forced to deal from Day One with a crisis on the scale America now faces.
So, what should you do?
In this letter I won't try to offer advice about everything. For the most part I'll stick to economics, or matters that bear on economics. I'll also focus on things I think you can or should achieve in your first year in office. The extent to which your administration succeeds or fails will depend, to a large extent, on what happens in the first year — and above all, on whether you manage to get a grip on the current economic crisis.
The Economic Crisis
How bad is the economic outlook? Worse than almost anyone imagined.
The economic growth of the Bush years, such as it was, was fueled by an explosion of private debt; now credit markets are in disarray, businesses and consumers are pulling back and the economy is in free-fall. What we're facing, in essence, is a yawning job gap. The U.S. economy needs to add more than a million jobs a year just to keep up with a growing population. Even before the crisis, job growth under Bush averaged only 800,000 a year — and over the past year, instead of gaining a million-plus jobs, we lost 2 million. Today we're continuing to lose jobs at the rate of a half million a month.
There's nothing in either the data or the underlying situation to suggest that the plunge in employment will slow anytime soon, which means that by late this year we could be 10 million or more jobs short of where we should be. This, in turn, would mean an unemployment rate of more than nine percent. Add in those who aren't counted in the standard rate because they've given up looking for work, plus those forced to take part-time jobs when they want to work full-time, and we're probably looking at a real-world unemployment rate of around 15 percent — more than 20 million Americans frustrated in their efforts to find work.
The human cost of a slump that severe would be enormous. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan research group that analyzes government programs, recently estimated the effects of a rise in the unemployment rate to nine percent — a worst-case scenario that now seems all too likely. So what will happen if unemployment rises to nine percent or more? As many as 10 million middle-class Americans would be pushed into poverty, and another 6 million would be pushed into "deep poverty," the severe deprivation that happens when your income is less than half the poverty level. Many of the Americans losing their jobs would lose their health insurance too, worsening the already grim state of U.S. health care and crowding emergency rooms with those who have nowhere else to go. Meanwhile, millions more Americans would lose their homes. State and local governments, deprived of much of their revenue, would have to cut back on even the most essential services.
If things continue on their current trajectory, Mr. President, we will soon be facing a great national catastrophe. And it's your job — a job no other president has had to do since World War II — to head off that catastrophe.
Wait a second, you may say. Didn't other presidents also face troubled economies? Yes, they did — but when it came to economic policy, your predecessors weren't actually running the show. For the past half century the Federal Reserve — a more or less independent institution, run by technocrats and deliberately designed to be independent of whoever happens to occupy the White House — has been taking care of day-to-day, and even year-to-year, economic management. Your fellow presidents were just along for the ride.
Remember the economic boom of 1984, which let Ronald Reagan run on the slogan "It's morning again in America"? Well, Reagan had absolutely nothing to do with that boom. It was, instead, the work of Paul Volcker, whom Jimmy Carter appointed as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board in 1979 (and who's now the head of your economic advisory panel). First Volcker broke the back of inflation, at the cost of a recession that probably doomed Carter's re-election chances in 1980. Then Volcker engineered an economic bounce-back. In effect, Reagan dressed up in a flight suit and pretended to be a hotshot economic pilot, but Volcker was the guy who actually flew the plane and landed it safely.
You, on the other hand, have to pull this plane out of its nose dive yourself, because the Fed has lost its mojo.
Compare the situation right now with the one back in the 1980s, when Volcker turned the economy around. All the Fed had to do back then was print a bunch of dollars (OK, it actually credited the money to the accounts of private banks, but it amounts to the same thing) and then use those dollars to buy up U.S. government debt. This drove interest rates down: When Volcker decided that the economy needed a pick-me-up, he was quickly able to drive the interest rate on Treasury bills from 13 percent down to eight percent. Lower interest rates on government debt, in turn, quickly drove down rates on mortgages and business borrowing. People started spending again, and within a few months the economy had gone from slump to boom. Economists call this process — from the Fed's decision to print more money to the resulting pickup in spending, jobs and incomes — the "monetary transmission mechanism." And in the 1980s that mechanism worked just fine.
This time, however, the transmission mechanism is broken.
First of all, while the Fed can still print money, it can't drive interest rates down. Why? Because those interest rates are already about as low as they can go. As I write this letter, the interest rate on Treasury bills is 0.005 percent — that is, zero. And you can't push rates lower than that. Now, you might think that zero interest rates would lead to an orgy of borrowing. But while the U.S. government can borrow money for free, the rest of us can't. Fear rules the financial markets, so over the past year and a half, as the interest rates on government debt have plunged, the interest rates that Main Street has to pay have mostly gone up. In particular, many businesses are paying much higher interest rates now than they were a year and a half ago, before the Fed started cutting. And they're lucky compared to the many businesses that can't get credit at all.
Besides, even if more people could borrow, would they really want to spend? There's a glut of unsold homes on the market, so there's very little incentive to build more houses, no matter how low mortgage rates go. The same goes for business investment: With office buildings standing empty, shopping malls begging for tenants and factories sitting idle, who wants to spend on new capacity? And with workers everywhere worried about job security, people trying to save a few dollars may stampede into stores that offer deep discounts, but not many people want to buy the big-ticket items, like cars, that normally fuel an economic recovery.
So as I said, the Fed has lost its mojo. Ben Bernanke and his colleagues are trying everything they can think of to unfreeze the credit markets — the alphabet soup of new "lending facilities," with acronyms nobody can remember, is growing by the hour. Any day now, the joke goes, everyone will have a Visa card bearing the Fed logo. But at best, all this activity only serves to limit the damage. There's no realistic prospect that the Fed can pull the economy out of its nose dive.
So it's up to you.
Rescuing The Economy
The last president to face a similar mess was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and you can learn a lot from his example. That doesn't mean, however, that you should do everything FDR did. On the contrary, you have to take care to emulate his successes, but avoid repeating his mistakes.
About those successes: The way FDR dealt with his own era's financial mess offers a very good model. Then, as now, the government had to deploy taxpayer money in order to rescue the financial system. In particular, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation initially played a role similar to that of the Bush administration's Troubled Assets Relief Program (the $700 billion program everyone knows about). Like the TARP, the RFC bulked up the cash position of troubled banks by using public funds to buy up stock in those banks.
There was, however, a big difference between FDR's approach to taxpayer-subsidized financial rescue and that of the Bush administration: Namely, FDR wasn't shy about demanding that the public's money be used to serve the public good. By 1935 the U.S. government owned about a third of the banking system, and the Roosevelt administration used that ownership stake to insist that banks actually help the economy, pressuring them to lend out the money they were getting from Washington. Beyond that, the New Deal went out and lent a lot of money directly to businesses, to home buyers and to people who already owned homes, helping them restructure their mortgages so they could stay in their houses.
Can you do anything like that today? Yes, you can. The Bush administration may have refused to attach any strings to the aid it has provided to financial firms, but you can change all that. If banks need federal funds to survive, provide them — but demand that the banks do their part by lending those funds out to the rest of the economy. Provide more help to homeowners. Use Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the home-lending agencies, to pass the government's low borrowing costs on to qualified home buyers. (Fannie and Freddie were seized by federal regulators in September, but the Bush administration, bizarrely, has kept their borrowing costs high by refusing to declare that their bonds are backed by the full faith and credit of the taxpayer.)
Conservatives will accuse you of nationalizing the financial system, and some will call you a Marxist. (It happens to me all the time.) And the truth is that you will, in a way, be engaging in temporary nationalization. But that's OK: In the long run we don't want the government running financial institutions, but for now we need to do whatever it takes to get credit flowing again.
All of this will help — but not enough. By all means you should try to fix the problems of banks and other financial institutions. But to pull the economy out of its slide, you need to go beyond funneling money to banks and other financial institutions. You need to give the real economy of work and wages a boost. In other words, you have to get job creation right — which FDR never did.
This may sound like a strange thing to say. After all, what we remember from the 1930s is the Works Progress Administration, which at its peak employed millions of Americans building roads, schools and dams. But the New Deal's job-creation programs, while they certainly helped, were neither big enough nor sustained enough to end the Great Depression. When the economy is deeply depressed, you have to put normal concerns about budget deficits aside; FDR never managed to do that. As a result, he was too cautious: The boost he gave the economy between 1933 and 1936 was enough to get unemployment down, but not back to pre-Depression levels. And in 1937 he let the deficit worriers get to him: Even though the economy was still weak, he let himself be talked into slashing spending while raising taxes. This led to a severe recession that undid much of the progress the economy had made to that point. It took the giant public works project known as World War II — a project that finally silenced the penny pinchers — to bring the Depression to an end.
The lesson from FDR's limited success on the employment front, then, is that you have to be really bold in your job-creation plans. Basically, businesses and consumers are cutting way back on spending, leaving the economy with a huge shortfall in demand, which will lead to a huge fall in employment — unless you stop it. To stop it, however, you have to spend enough to fill the hole left by the private sector's retrenchment.
How much spending are we talking about? You might want to be seated before you read this. OK, here goes: "Full employment" means a jobless rate of five percent at most, and probably less. Meanwhile, we're currently on a trajectory that will push the unemployment rate to nine percent or more. Even the most optimistic estimates suggest that it takes at least $200 billion a year in government spending to cut the unemployment rate by one percentage point. Do the math: You probably have to spend $800 billion a year to achieve a full economic recovery. Anything less than $500 billion a year will be much too little to produce an economic turnaround.
Spending on that scale, at a time when the weakening economy is driving down tax collection, will produce some really scary deficit numbers. But the consequences of too much caution — of a failure on your part to do enough to stop the economy's nose dive — will be even scarier than the coming ocean of red ink.
In fact, the biggest problem you're going to face as you try to rescue the economy will be finding enough job-creation projects that can be started quickly. Traditional WPA-type programs — spending on roads, government buildings, ports and other infrastructure — are a very effective tool for creating employment. But America probably has less than $150 billion worth of such projects that are "shovel-ready" right now, projects that can be started in six months or less. So you'll have to be creative: You'll have to find lots of other ways to push funds into the economy.
As much as possible, you should spend on things of lasting value, things that, like roads and bridges, will make us a richer nation. Upgrade the infrastructure behind the Internet; upgrade the electrical grid; improve information technology in the health care sector, a crucial part of any health care reform. Provide aid to state and local governments, to prevent them from cutting investment spending at precisely the wrong moment. And remember, as you do this, that all this spending does double duty: It serves the future, but it also helps in the present, by providing jobs and income to offset the slump.
You can also do well by doing good. The Americans hit hardest by the slump — the long-term unemployed, families without health insurance — are also the Americans most likely to spend any aid they receive, and thereby help sustain the economy as a whole. So aid to the distressed — enhanced unemployment insurance, food stamps, health-insurance subsidies — is both the fair thing to do and a desirable part of your short-term economic plan.
Even if you do all this, however, it won't be enough to offset the awesome slump in private spending. So yes, it also makes sense to cut taxes on a temporary basis. The tax cuts should go primarily to lower- and middle-income Americans — again, both because that's the fair thing to do, and because they're more likely to spend their windfall than the affluent. The tax break for working families you outlined in your campaign plan looks like a reasonable vehicle.
But let's be clear: Tax cuts are not the tool of choice for fighting an economic slump. For one thing, they deliver less bang for the buck than infrastructure spending, because there's no guarantee that consumers will spend their tax cuts or rebates. As a result, it probably takes more than $300 billion of tax cuts, compared with $200 billion of public works, to shave a point off the unemployment rate. Furthermore, in the long run you're going to need more tax revenue, not less, to pay for health care reform. So tax cuts shouldn't be the core of your economic recovery program. They should, instead, be a way to "bulk up" your job-creation program, which otherwise won't be big enough.
Now my honest opinion is that even with all this, you won't be able to prevent 2009 from being a very bad year. If you manage to keep the unemployment rate from going above eight percent, I'll consider that a major success. But by 2010 you should be able to have the economy on the road to recovery. What should you do to prepare for that recovery?
Beyond the Crisis
Crisis management is one thing, but America needs much more than that. FDR rebuilt America not just by getting us through depression and war, but by making us a more just and secure society. On one side, he created social-insurance programs, above all Social Security, that protect working Americans to this day. On the other, he oversaw the creation of a much more equal economy, creating a middle-class society that lasted for decades, until conservative economic policies ushered in the new age of inequality that prevails today. You have a chance to emulate FDR's achievements, and the ultimate judgment on your presidency will rest on whether you seize that chance.
The biggest, most important legacy you can leave to the nation will be to give us, finally, what every other advanced nation already has: guaranteed health care for all our citizens. The current crisis has given us an object lesson in the need for universal health care, in two ways. It has highlighted the vulnerability of Americans whose health insurance is tied to jobs that can so easily disappear. And it has made it clear that our current system is bad for business, too — the Big Three automakers wouldn't be in nearly as much trouble if they weren't trying to pay the medical bills of their former employees as well as their current workers. You have a mandate for change; the economic crisis has shown just how much the system needs change. So now is the time to pass legislation establishing a system that covers everyone.
What should this system look like? Some progressives insist that we should move immediately to a single-payer system — Medicare for all. Although this would be both the fairest and most efficient way to ensure that all Americans get the health care they need, let's be frank: Single-payer probably isn't politically achievable right now, simply because it would represent too great a change. At least at first, Americans who have good private health insurance will be reluctant to trade that insurance for a public program, even if that program will ultimately prove better.
So the thing to do in your first year in office is pass a compromise plan — one that establishes, for the first time, the principle of universal access to care. Your campaign proposals provide the blueprint. Let people keep their private insurance if they choose, subsidize insurance for lower-income families, require that all children be covered, and give everyone the option to buy into a public plan — one that will probably end up being cheaper and better than private insurance. Pass legislation doing all that, and we'll have universal health coverage up and running by the end of your first term. And that will be an achievement that, like FDR's creation of Social Security, will permanently change America for the better.
All this will cost money, mainly to pay for those insurance subsidies, and some people will tell you that the nation can't afford major health care reform given the costs of the economic recovery program. Let's talk about why you should ignore the naysayers.
First, let's put the costs of the economic-recovery program in perspective. It's possible that reviving the economy might cost as much as a trillion dollars over the course of your first term. But the Bush administration wasted at least twice that much on an unnecessary war and tax cuts for the wealthiest; the recovery plan will be intense but temporary, and won't place all that much burden on future budgets. Put it this way: With long-term federal debt paying the lowest interest rates in half a century, the interest costs on a trillion dollars in new debt will amount to only $30 billion a year, about 1.2 percent of the current federal budget.
Second, there's good reason to believe that health care reform will save money in the long run. Our system isn't just full of holes in coverage, it's also grossly inefficient, with huge bureaucratic costs — such as the immense resources that insurance companies devote to making sure they don't cover the people who need health care the most. And under a universal system it will be much easier to use our health care dollars wisely, to spend money only on medical procedures that work and not on those that don't. Since rising health care costs are the main source of the grim, long-run projections for the federal budget, the truth is that we can't afford not to move forward on health care reform.
And let's not ignore the long-term political effects. Back in 1993, when the Clintons tried and failed to create a universal health care system, Republican strategists like William Kristol (now my colleague at The New York Times) urged their party to oppose any reform on political grounds; they argued that a successful health care program, by conveying the message that government can actually serve the public interest, would fundamentally shift American politics in a progressive direction. They were right — and the same considerations that made conservatives so opposed to health care reform should make you determined to make it happen.
Universal health care, then, should be your biggest priority after rescuing the economy. Providing coverage for all Americans can be for your administration what Social Security was for the New Deal. But the New Deal achieved something else: It made America a middle-class society. Under FDR, America went through what labor historians call the Great Compression, a dramatic rise in wages for ordinary workers that greatly reduced income inequality. Before the Great Compression, America was a society of rich and poor; afterward it was a society in which most people, rightly, considered themselves middle class. It may be hard to match that achievement today, but you can, at least, move the country in the right direction.
What caused the Great Compression? That's a complicated story, but one important factor was the rise of organized labor: Union membership tripled between 1935 and 1945. Unions not only negotiated better wages for their own members, they also enhanced the bargaining power of workers throughout the economy. At the time, conservatives warned that wage gains would have disastrous economic effects — that the rise of unions would cripple employment and economic growth. But in fact, the Great Compression was followed by the great postwar boom, which doubled American living standards over the course of a generation.
Unfortunately, the Great Compression was reversed starting in the 1970s, as American workers once again lost much of their bargaining power. This loss was partly due to changes in the world economy, as major U.S. manufacturing corporations started facing more international competition. But it also had a lot to do with politics, as first the Reagan administration, then the Bush administration, did all they could to undermine the ability of workers to organize.
You can make a start on reversing that process. Clearly, you won't be able to oversee a tripling of union membership anytime soon. But you can do a lot to enhance workers' rights. One is to start laying the groundwork to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it much harder for employers to intimidate workers who want to join a union. I know it probably won't happen in your first year, but if and when it does, the legislation will enable America to take a huge step toward recapturing the middle-class society we've lost.
Truth & Reconciliation
There are many other issues you'll need to deal with, of course. In particular, I haven't said a word about environmental policy, which is ultimately the most important issue of all. That's because I suspect that it won't be possible to pass a comprehensive plan for dealing with climate change in your first year. By all means, put as much environmentally friendly investment as possible — such as spending to enhance energy efficiency — into the initial recovery plan. But I'm guessing that 2009 won't be the year to introduce cap-and-trade measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. If I'm wrong, that's great — but I'm not counting on big environmental policy moves right away.
I also haven't said anything about foreign policy. Your team is well aware of the need to wind down the war in Iraq — which is, by the way, costing about as much each year as the insurance subsidies we need to implement universal health care. You're also aware of the need to find the least bad solution for the mess in Afghanistan. And I don't even want to think about Pakistan — but you have to. Good luck.
There is, however, one area where I feel the need to break discipline. I'm an economist, but I'm also an American citizen — and like many citizens, I spent the past eight years watching in horror as the Bush administration betrayed the nation's ideals. And I don't believe we can put those terrible years behind us unless we have a full accounting of what really happened. I know that most of the inside-the-Beltway crowd is urging you to let bygones be bygones, just as they urged Bill Clinton to let the truth about scandals from the Reagan-Bush years, in particular the Iran-Contra affair, remain hidden. But we know how that turned out: The same people who abused power in the name of national security 20 years ago returned as part of the team that, under the second George Bush, did it all over again, on a much larger scale. It was an object lesson in the truth of George Santayana's dictum: Those who refuse to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
That's why this time we need a full accounting. Not a witch hunt, maybe not even prosecutions, but something like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that helped South Africa come to terms with what happened under apartheid. We need to know how America ended up fighting a war to eliminate nonexistent weapons, how torture became a routine instrument of U.S. policy, how the Justice Department became an instrument of political persecution, how brazen corruption flourished not only in Iraq, but throughout Congress and the administration. We know that these evils were not, whatever the apologists say, the result of honest error or a few bad apples: The White House created a climate in which abuse became commonplace, and in many cases probably took the lead in instigating these abuses. But it's not enough to leave this reality in the realm of things "everybody knows" — because soon enough they'll be denied or forgotten, and the cycle of abuse will begin again. The whole sordid tale needs to be brought out into the sunlight.
It's probably best if Congress takes the lead in investigations of the Bush years, but your administration can do its part, both by not using its influence to discourage the investigations and by bringing an end to the Bush administration's stonewalling. Let Congress have access to records and witnesses, and let the truth be told.
That said, the future is what matters most. This month we celebrate your arrival in the White House; at a time of great national crisis, you bring the hope of a better future. It's now up to you to deliver on that hope. By enacting a recovery plan even bolder and more comprehensive than the New Deal, you can not only turn the economy around — you can put America on a path toward greater equality for generations to come.
Respectfully,
Paul Krugman
Rolling Stone Magazine [From Issue 1070 — January 22, 2009]
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/25456948/what_obama_must_do/5
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Before Israel’s Invasion, Hamas Popularity Was Waning Among Its Neighbors -- Even in Gaza Itself
by Richard Wike, Associate Director, Pew Global Attitudes Project
January 8, 2009
In the Middle East and elsewhere, Muslim reaction to the Israeli offensive in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip has been swift and angry, with protests in Amman, Beirut, Istanbul, Tehran, Jakarta, and several other capitals. Palestinians in East Jerusalem and in the West Bank, where Hamas rival Fatah dominates, have also demonstrated against Israel, some carrying the green flag of Hamas into the streets. However, before the current conflict in Gaza, Hamas hardly enjoyed universal popularity among Muslims, and among some key Arab publics, its support had been waning.
The 2008 Pew Global Attitudes survey found significant opposition to the organization in several predominantly Muslim countries, not to mention considerable opposition to suicide bombing -- a frequent tactic of Hamas in the past -- as well as deep reservations about one of Hamas' chief sponsors, Iran. Still, given the striking antipathy toward Israel throughout much of the Arab and Muslim worlds, if Hamas survives reasonably intact and comes to be viewed as the Palestinians' primary defender against the Jewish state, its popularity may rise.
Muslim Views of Hamas Mixed
Among the eight countries with sizeable Muslim populations surveyed by the Pew Global Attitudes Project in 2008, Hamas received a positive rating in only one, Jordan, where 55% voiced a favorable view of the organization while 37% expressed an unfavorable opinion. Still, Jordanian attitudes toward Hamas were less positive than in 2007, when 62% gave the group a favorable rating, and 36% a negative one.
Hamas' image also declined in neighboring Egypt. In 2007, Egyptians were split (49% favorable, 49% unfavorable). By 2008, however, only 42% had a favorable opinion, while 50% held a negative view.
In general, the 2008 survey revealed few differences between men and women on this issue, although Egypt is an interesting exception. Egyptian women were divided over Hamas -- 50% expressed a positive view and 47% a negative view. Egyptian men, however, tended to offer a negative evaluation -- 35% favorable, 53% unfavorable.
In another Arab public included on the survey, Lebanon, the dividing line is not gender, but religion. Overall, only one-quarter of Lebanese said they view Hamas favorably, unchanged from 2007. But the overall number masks deep and growing divisions among the country's three major religious groups. Hamas -- a largely Sunni organization -- received its highest ratings from Lebanese Shia, 64% of whom expressed a positive view of the group. However, just 9% of Lebanese Sunnis expressed a favorable opinion. Moreover, the division between the two Muslim sects grew sharper between 2007 and 2008, with Hamas' image improving among Shia and declining among Sunnis. Perceptions of Hamas among the country's Christians have consistently been overwhelmingly negative.
Positive views of Hamas are especially scarce in Turkey, where just 6% expressed a positive opinion, down from 14% in 2007. In the other four countries where the question was asked -- all of which are outside the Middle East -- the group is less familiar. Large numbers in Nigeria, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Tanzania are unable to give either a positive or negative assessment.
Palestinian Views of Hamas
Hamas has, of course, enjoyed a degree of popularity among Palestinians in recent years. It won a majority of seats in the January 2006 parliamentary elections, and in Pew's 2007 survey most Palestinians (62%) had a positive view of the group, while just one-third (33%) gave it a negative rating.1 However, more recent polling, conducted in the weeks prior to the Israeli incursion, showed Hamas receiving less favorable marks than its rival Fatah, the organization headed by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
A Nov. 20-23, 2008 poll by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center found that 37% of Palestinians would vote for Fatah in legislative elections, compared with just 20% for Hamas. In the Fatah-controlled West Bank, Fatah led Hamas by a 35-18% margin. More interestingly, Fatah also led by a 40-22% margin in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. A poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, conduced December 3-5, 2008, also found that Fatah was more popular than Hamas in both the West Bank and Gaza.
Turning Away from Radicalism
There are other signs that the public opinion environment in the Muslim world had been growing less hospitable to Hamas. In recent years, there has been a steady decline in support for Hamas' most infamous tactic: suicide bombing. For instance, in the 2002 Pew Global Attitudes survey, 74% of Lebanese Muslims said suicide bombing was often or sometimes justifiable, compared with 32% six years later. Between 2004 and 2008, acceptance of suicide bombing dropped from 41% to 5% among Pakistani Muslims; and between 2005 and 2008, it dropped from 57% to 25% among Muslims in Jordan.
Another sign of disaffection is seen in the mixed reivew -- at best -- that Iran, widely considered a major benefactor of Hamas, receives in many largely Muslim nations. Most notably, at least half of those surveyed in Lebanon (66%), Jordan (56%), Turkey (56%), and Egypt (54%) expressed a negative opinion of Iran in the 2008 Pew Global Attitudes poll. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fared even worse -- majorities in Egypt (74%), Jordan (71%), Lebanon (67%), and Turkey (60%) said they have little or no confidence in the Iranian leader. So to the extent that Hamas is viewed as a proxy for Iran in a regional power struggle, this may damage the group's appeal.
Animosity Toward Israel
On the other hand, to the extent that Hamas comes to be seen as the leader of Arab opposition to Israel, this may increase its popularity. Views about Israel, and about Jews more broadly, are extremely negative in many Muslim nations, and are especially so in Arab countries.
Unsurprisingly, Muslim sympathies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lean heavily toward the Palestinians. For example, in Pew's 2007 survey more than 80% in Egypt, Morocco, Jordan and Kuwait said they sympathize more with the Palestinians. The only largely Muslim country included on the survey in which sympathy for Israel reached double figures was the African nation of Mali (13%).
Attitudes toward Jews in general are quite negative throughout much of the Muslim world. Unfavorable views of Jews were almost universal in the three Arab nations surveyed in 2008 -- Lebanon (97% unfavorable), Jordan (96%), and Egypt (95%). Opinions were only somewhat less negative in Pakistan (76% unfavorable), Turkey (76%), and Indonesia (66%).
In many ways, Muslim views toward Israel are also linked to perceptions of the United States. The 2007 Pew Global Attitudes poll found that roughly nine-in-ten Jordanians (91%) and Palestinians (90%) felt that American policy favors Israel too much, and more than eight-in-ten felt this way in Lebanon, Egypt, Kuwait, and Morocco.
The same survey found considerable pessimism among Arab publics about the possibility of Israeli and Palestinian coexistence. More than seven-in-ten Egyptians, Jordanians, Palestinians, and Kuwaitis believed that "the rights and needs of the Palestinian people cannot be taken care of as long as the state of Israel exists," highlighting the fact that, even before the current crisis, optimism on this issue was rare in Arab nations.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
1 The 2007 survey was conducted in the Palestinian territories April 21-30, 2007, before the outbreak of widespread violence between Hamas and Fatah in the summer of 2007.
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1075/before-israels-invasion-hamas-popularity-was-waning-among-its-neighbors-even-in-gaza-itself
January 8, 2009
In the Middle East and elsewhere, Muslim reaction to the Israeli offensive in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip has been swift and angry, with protests in Amman, Beirut, Istanbul, Tehran, Jakarta, and several other capitals. Palestinians in East Jerusalem and in the West Bank, where Hamas rival Fatah dominates, have also demonstrated against Israel, some carrying the green flag of Hamas into the streets. However, before the current conflict in Gaza, Hamas hardly enjoyed universal popularity among Muslims, and among some key Arab publics, its support had been waning.
The 2008 Pew Global Attitudes survey found significant opposition to the organization in several predominantly Muslim countries, not to mention considerable opposition to suicide bombing -- a frequent tactic of Hamas in the past -- as well as deep reservations about one of Hamas' chief sponsors, Iran. Still, given the striking antipathy toward Israel throughout much of the Arab and Muslim worlds, if Hamas survives reasonably intact and comes to be viewed as the Palestinians' primary defender against the Jewish state, its popularity may rise.
Muslim Views of Hamas Mixed
Among the eight countries with sizeable Muslim populations surveyed by the Pew Global Attitudes Project in 2008, Hamas received a positive rating in only one, Jordan, where 55% voiced a favorable view of the organization while 37% expressed an unfavorable opinion. Still, Jordanian attitudes toward Hamas were less positive than in 2007, when 62% gave the group a favorable rating, and 36% a negative one.
Hamas' image also declined in neighboring Egypt. In 2007, Egyptians were split (49% favorable, 49% unfavorable). By 2008, however, only 42% had a favorable opinion, while 50% held a negative view.
In general, the 2008 survey revealed few differences between men and women on this issue, although Egypt is an interesting exception. Egyptian women were divided over Hamas -- 50% expressed a positive view and 47% a negative view. Egyptian men, however, tended to offer a negative evaluation -- 35% favorable, 53% unfavorable.
In another Arab public included on the survey, Lebanon, the dividing line is not gender, but religion. Overall, only one-quarter of Lebanese said they view Hamas favorably, unchanged from 2007. But the overall number masks deep and growing divisions among the country's three major religious groups. Hamas -- a largely Sunni organization -- received its highest ratings from Lebanese Shia, 64% of whom expressed a positive view of the group. However, just 9% of Lebanese Sunnis expressed a favorable opinion. Moreover, the division between the two Muslim sects grew sharper between 2007 and 2008, with Hamas' image improving among Shia and declining among Sunnis. Perceptions of Hamas among the country's Christians have consistently been overwhelmingly negative.
Positive views of Hamas are especially scarce in Turkey, where just 6% expressed a positive opinion, down from 14% in 2007. In the other four countries where the question was asked -- all of which are outside the Middle East -- the group is less familiar. Large numbers in Nigeria, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Tanzania are unable to give either a positive or negative assessment.
Palestinian Views of Hamas
Hamas has, of course, enjoyed a degree of popularity among Palestinians in recent years. It won a majority of seats in the January 2006 parliamentary elections, and in Pew's 2007 survey most Palestinians (62%) had a positive view of the group, while just one-third (33%) gave it a negative rating.1 However, more recent polling, conducted in the weeks prior to the Israeli incursion, showed Hamas receiving less favorable marks than its rival Fatah, the organization headed by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
A Nov. 20-23, 2008 poll by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center found that 37% of Palestinians would vote for Fatah in legislative elections, compared with just 20% for Hamas. In the Fatah-controlled West Bank, Fatah led Hamas by a 35-18% margin. More interestingly, Fatah also led by a 40-22% margin in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. A poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, conduced December 3-5, 2008, also found that Fatah was more popular than Hamas in both the West Bank and Gaza.
Turning Away from Radicalism
There are other signs that the public opinion environment in the Muslim world had been growing less hospitable to Hamas. In recent years, there has been a steady decline in support for Hamas' most infamous tactic: suicide bombing. For instance, in the 2002 Pew Global Attitudes survey, 74% of Lebanese Muslims said suicide bombing was often or sometimes justifiable, compared with 32% six years later. Between 2004 and 2008, acceptance of suicide bombing dropped from 41% to 5% among Pakistani Muslims; and between 2005 and 2008, it dropped from 57% to 25% among Muslims in Jordan.
Another sign of disaffection is seen in the mixed reivew -- at best -- that Iran, widely considered a major benefactor of Hamas, receives in many largely Muslim nations. Most notably, at least half of those surveyed in Lebanon (66%), Jordan (56%), Turkey (56%), and Egypt (54%) expressed a negative opinion of Iran in the 2008 Pew Global Attitudes poll. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fared even worse -- majorities in Egypt (74%), Jordan (71%), Lebanon (67%), and Turkey (60%) said they have little or no confidence in the Iranian leader. So to the extent that Hamas is viewed as a proxy for Iran in a regional power struggle, this may damage the group's appeal.
Animosity Toward Israel
On the other hand, to the extent that Hamas comes to be seen as the leader of Arab opposition to Israel, this may increase its popularity. Views about Israel, and about Jews more broadly, are extremely negative in many Muslim nations, and are especially so in Arab countries.
Unsurprisingly, Muslim sympathies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lean heavily toward the Palestinians. For example, in Pew's 2007 survey more than 80% in Egypt, Morocco, Jordan and Kuwait said they sympathize more with the Palestinians. The only largely Muslim country included on the survey in which sympathy for Israel reached double figures was the African nation of Mali (13%).
Attitudes toward Jews in general are quite negative throughout much of the Muslim world. Unfavorable views of Jews were almost universal in the three Arab nations surveyed in 2008 -- Lebanon (97% unfavorable), Jordan (96%), and Egypt (95%). Opinions were only somewhat less negative in Pakistan (76% unfavorable), Turkey (76%), and Indonesia (66%).
In many ways, Muslim views toward Israel are also linked to perceptions of the United States. The 2007 Pew Global Attitudes poll found that roughly nine-in-ten Jordanians (91%) and Palestinians (90%) felt that American policy favors Israel too much, and more than eight-in-ten felt this way in Lebanon, Egypt, Kuwait, and Morocco.
The same survey found considerable pessimism among Arab publics about the possibility of Israeli and Palestinian coexistence. More than seven-in-ten Egyptians, Jordanians, Palestinians, and Kuwaitis believed that "the rights and needs of the Palestinian people cannot be taken care of as long as the state of Israel exists," highlighting the fact that, even before the current crisis, optimism on this issue was rare in Arab nations.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
1 The 2007 survey was conducted in the Palestinian territories April 21-30, 2007, before the outbreak of widespread violence between Hamas and Fatah in the summer of 2007.
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1075/before-israels-invasion-hamas-popularity-was-waning-among-its-neighbors-even-in-gaza-itself
An Unnecessary War by Jimmy Carter
I know from personal involvement that the devastating invasion of Gaza by Israel could easily have been avoided.
After visiting Sderot last April and seeing the serious psychological damage caused by the rockets that had fallen in that area, my wife, Rosalynn, and I declared their launching from Gaza to be inexcusable and an act of terrorism. Although casualties were rare (three deaths in seven years), the town was traumatized by the unpredictable explosions. About 3,000 residents had moved to other communities, and the streets, playgrounds and shopping centers were almost empty. Mayor Eli Moyal assembled a group of citizens in his office to meet us and complained that the government of Israel was not stopping the rockets, either through diplomacy or military action.
Knowing that we would soon be seeing Hamas leaders from Gaza and also in Damascus, we promised to assess prospects for a cease-fire. From Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, who was negotiating between the Israelis and Hamas, we learned that there was a fundamental difference between the two sides. Hamas wanted a comprehensive cease-fire in both the West Bank and Gaza, and the Israelis refused to discuss anything other than Gaza.
We knew that the 1.5 million inhabitants of Gaza were being starved, as the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food had found that acute malnutrition in Gaza was on the same scale as in the poorest nations in the southern Sahara, with more than half of all Palestinian families eating only one meal a day.
Palestinian leaders from Gaza were noncommittal on all issues, claiming that rockets were the only way to respond to their imprisonment and to dramatize their humanitarian plight. The top Hamas leaders in Damascus, however, agreed to consider a cease-fire in Gaza only, provided Israel would not attack Gaza and would permit normal humanitarian supplies to be delivered to Palestinian citizens.
After extended discussions with those from Gaza, these Hamas leaders also agreed to accept any peace agreement that might be negotiated between the Israelis and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who also heads the PLO, provided it was approved by a majority vote of Palestinians in a referendum or by an elected unity government.
Since we were only observers, and not negotiators, we relayed this information to the Egyptians, and they pursued the cease-fire proposal. After about a month, the Egyptians and Hamas informed us that all military action by both sides and all rocket firing would stop on June 19, for a period of six months, and that humanitarian supplies would be restored to the normal level that had existed before Israel's withdrawal in 2005 (about 700 trucks daily).
We were unable to confirm this in Jerusalem because of Israel's unwillingness to admit to any negotiations with Hamas, but rocket firing was soon stopped and there was an increase in supplies of food, water, medicine and fuel. Yet the increase was to an average of about 20 percent of normal levels. And this fragile truce was partially broken on Nov. 4, when Israel launched an attack in Gaza to destroy a defensive tunnel being dug by Hamas inside the wall that encloses Gaza.
On another visit to Syria in mid-December, I made an effort for the impending six-month deadline to be extended. It was clear that the preeminent issue was opening the crossings into Gaza. Representatives from the Carter Center visited Jerusalem, met with Israeli officials and asked if this was possible in exchange for a cessation of rocket fire. The Israeli government informally proposed that 15 percent of normal supplies might be possible if Hamas first stopped all rocket fire for 48 hours. This was unacceptable to Hamas, and hostilities erupted.
After 12 days of "combat," the Israeli Defense Forces reported that more than 1,000 targets were shelled or bombed. During that time, Israel rejected international efforts to obtain a cease-fire, with full support from Washington. Seventeen mosques, the American International School, many private homes and much of the basic infrastructure of the small but heavily populated area have been destroyed. This includes the systems that provide water, electricity and sanitation. Heavy civilian casualties are being reported by courageous medical volunteers from many nations, as the fortunate ones operate on the wounded by light from diesel-powered generators.
The hope is that when further hostilities are no longer productive, Israel, Hamas and the United States will accept another cease-fire, at which time the rockets will again stop and an adequate level of humanitarian supplies will be permitted to the surviving Palestinians, with the publicized agreement monitored by the international community. The next possible step: a permanent and comprehensive peace.
The writer was president from 1977 to 1981. He founded the Carter Center, a nongovernmental organization advancing peace and health worldwide, in 1982
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/07/AR2009010702645.html
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Real Peace in The Middle East
It is with much sadness when I witness another example of people using violence in the name of righteousness and calling their actions defensible, they are not. Violence only leads to more violence.
Once, FDR, perhaps our greatest President placed two irreconcilable parties in a locked room until they created their own solution, and then he enforced their agreement. Perhaps that is the only way Israelis and Palestinians can find peace as well.
It is time to end this mess, both people are better than this.
Tom Love
After visiting Sderot last April and seeing the serious psychological damage caused by the rockets that had fallen in that area, my wife, Rosalynn, and I declared their launching from Gaza to be inexcusable and an act of terrorism. Although casualties were rare (three deaths in seven years), the town was traumatized by the unpredictable explosions. About 3,000 residents had moved to other communities, and the streets, playgrounds and shopping centers were almost empty. Mayor Eli Moyal assembled a group of citizens in his office to meet us and complained that the government of Israel was not stopping the rockets, either through diplomacy or military action.
Knowing that we would soon be seeing Hamas leaders from Gaza and also in Damascus, we promised to assess prospects for a cease-fire. From Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, who was negotiating between the Israelis and Hamas, we learned that there was a fundamental difference between the two sides. Hamas wanted a comprehensive cease-fire in both the West Bank and Gaza, and the Israelis refused to discuss anything other than Gaza.
We knew that the 1.5 million inhabitants of Gaza were being starved, as the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food had found that acute malnutrition in Gaza was on the same scale as in the poorest nations in the southern Sahara, with more than half of all Palestinian families eating only one meal a day.
Palestinian leaders from Gaza were noncommittal on all issues, claiming that rockets were the only way to respond to their imprisonment and to dramatize their humanitarian plight. The top Hamas leaders in Damascus, however, agreed to consider a cease-fire in Gaza only, provided Israel would not attack Gaza and would permit normal humanitarian supplies to be delivered to Palestinian citizens.
After extended discussions with those from Gaza, these Hamas leaders also agreed to accept any peace agreement that might be negotiated between the Israelis and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who also heads the PLO, provided it was approved by a majority vote of Palestinians in a referendum or by an elected unity government.
Since we were only observers, and not negotiators, we relayed this information to the Egyptians, and they pursued the cease-fire proposal. After about a month, the Egyptians and Hamas informed us that all military action by both sides and all rocket firing would stop on June 19, for a period of six months, and that humanitarian supplies would be restored to the normal level that had existed before Israel's withdrawal in 2005 (about 700 trucks daily).
We were unable to confirm this in Jerusalem because of Israel's unwillingness to admit to any negotiations with Hamas, but rocket firing was soon stopped and there was an increase in supplies of food, water, medicine and fuel. Yet the increase was to an average of about 20 percent of normal levels. And this fragile truce was partially broken on Nov. 4, when Israel launched an attack in Gaza to destroy a defensive tunnel being dug by Hamas inside the wall that encloses Gaza.
On another visit to Syria in mid-December, I made an effort for the impending six-month deadline to be extended. It was clear that the preeminent issue was opening the crossings into Gaza. Representatives from the Carter Center visited Jerusalem, met with Israeli officials and asked if this was possible in exchange for a cessation of rocket fire. The Israeli government informally proposed that 15 percent of normal supplies might be possible if Hamas first stopped all rocket fire for 48 hours. This was unacceptable to Hamas, and hostilities erupted.
After 12 days of "combat," the Israeli Defense Forces reported that more than 1,000 targets were shelled or bombed. During that time, Israel rejected international efforts to obtain a cease-fire, with full support from Washington. Seventeen mosques, the American International School, many private homes and much of the basic infrastructure of the small but heavily populated area have been destroyed. This includes the systems that provide water, electricity and sanitation. Heavy civilian casualties are being reported by courageous medical volunteers from many nations, as the fortunate ones operate on the wounded by light from diesel-powered generators.
The hope is that when further hostilities are no longer productive, Israel, Hamas and the United States will accept another cease-fire, at which time the rockets will again stop and an adequate level of humanitarian supplies will be permitted to the surviving Palestinians, with the publicized agreement monitored by the international community. The next possible step: a permanent and comprehensive peace.
The writer was president from 1977 to 1981. He founded the Carter Center, a nongovernmental organization advancing peace and health worldwide, in 1982
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/07/AR2009010702645.html
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Real Peace in The Middle East
It is with much sadness when I witness another example of people using violence in the name of righteousness and calling their actions defensible, they are not. Violence only leads to more violence.
Once, FDR, perhaps our greatest President placed two irreconcilable parties in a locked room until they created their own solution, and then he enforced their agreement. Perhaps that is the only way Israelis and Palestinians can find peace as well.
It is time to end this mess, both people are better than this.
Tom Love
Sunday, January 4, 2009
A President Forgotten but Not Gone
By FRANK RICH
WE like our failed presidents to be Shakespearean, or at least large enough to inspire Oscar-worthy performances from magnificent tragedians like Frank Langella. So here, too, George W. Bush has let us down. Even the banality of evil is too grandiose a concept for 43. He is not a memorable villain so much as a sometimes affable second banana whom Josh Brolin and Will Ferrell can nail without breaking a sweat. He’s the reckless Yalie Tom Buchanan, not Gatsby. He is smaller than life.
The last NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll on Bush’s presidency found that 79 percent of Americans will not miss him after he leaves the White House. He is being forgotten already, even if he’s not yet gone. You start to pity him until you remember how vast the wreckage is. It stretches from the Middle East to Wall Street to Main Street and even into the heavens, which have been a safe haven for toxins under his passive stewardship. The discrepancy between the grandeur of the failure and the stature of the man is a puzzlement. We are still trying to compute it.
The one indisputable talent of his White House was its ability to create and sell propaganda both to the public and the press. Now that bag of tricks is empty as well. Bush’s first and last photo-ops in Iraq could serve as bookends to his entire tenure. On Thanksgiving weekend 2003, even as the Iraqi insurgency was spiraling, his secret trip to the war zone was a P.R. slam-dunk. The photo of the beaming commander in chief bearing a supersized decorative turkey for the troops was designed to make every front page and newscast in the country, and it did. Five years later, in what was intended as a farewell victory lap to show off Iraq’s improved post-surge security, Bush was reduced to ducking shoes.
He tried to spin the ruckus as another victory for his administration’s program of democracy promotion. “That’s what people do in a free society,” he said. He had made the same claim three years ago after the Palestinian elections, championed by his “freedom agenda” (and almost $500 million of American aid), led to a landslide victory for Hamas. “There is something healthy about a system that does that,” Bush observed at the time, as he congratulated Palestinian voters for rejecting “the old guard.”
The ruins of his administration’s top policy priority can be found not only in Gaza but in the new “democratic” Iraq, where the local journalist who tossed the shoes was jailed without formal charges and may have been tortured. Almost simultaneously, opponents of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki accused him of making politically motivated arrests of rival-party government officials in anticipation of this month’s much-postponed provincial elections.
Condi Rice blamed the press for the image that sullied Bush’s Iraq swan song: “That someone chose to throw a shoe at the president is what gets reported over and over.” We are back where we came in. This was the same line Donald Rumsfeld used to deny the significance of the looting in Baghdad during his famous “Stuff happens!” press conference of April 2003. “Images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over,” he said then, referring to the much-recycled video of a man stealing a vase from the Baghdad museum. “Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?” he asked, playing for laughs.
The joke was on us. Iraq burned, New Orleans flooded, and Bush remained oblivious to each and every pratfall on his watch. Americans essentially stopped listening to him after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, but he still doesn’t grasp the finality of their defection. Lately he’s promised not to steal the spotlight from Barack Obama once he’s in retirement — as if he could do so by any act short of running naked through downtown Dallas. The latest CNN poll finds that only one-third of his fellow citizens want him to play a post-presidency role in public life.
Bush is equally blind to the collapse of his propaganda machinery. Almost poignantly, he keeps trying to hawk his goods in these final days, like a salesman who hasn’t been told by the home office that his product has been discontinued. Though no one is listening, he has given more exit interviews than either Clinton or Reagan did. Along with old cronies like Karl Rove and Karen Hughes, he has also embarked on a Bush “legacy project,” as Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard described it on CNN.
To this end, Rove has repeated a stunt he first fed to the press two years ago: he is once again claiming that he and Bush have an annual book-reading contest, with Bush chalking up as many as 95 books a year, by authors as hifalutin as Camus. This hagiographic portrait of Bush the Egghead might be easier to buy were the former national security official Richard Clarke not quoted in the new Vanity Fair saying that both Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, had instructed him early on to keep his memos short because the president is “not a big reader.”
Another, far more elaborate example of legacy spin can be downloaded from the White House Web site: a booklet recounting “highlights” of the administration’s “accomplishments and results.” With big type, much white space, children’s-book-like trivia boxes titled “Did You Know?” and lots of color photos of the Bushes posing with blacks and troops, its 52 pages require a reading level closer to “My Pet Goat” than “The Stranger.”
This document is the literary correlative to “Mission Accomplished.” Bush kept America safe (provided his presidency began Sept. 12, 2001). He gave America record economic growth (provided his presidency ended December 2007). He vanquished all the leading Qaeda terrorists (if you don’t count the leaders bin Laden and al-Zawahri). He gave Afghanistan a thriving “market economy” (if you count its skyrocketing opium trade) and a “democratically elected president” (presiding over one of the world’s most corrupt governments). He supported elections in Pakistan (after propping up Pervez Musharraf past the point of no return). He “led the world in providing food aid and natural disaster relief” (if you leave out Brownie and Katrina).
If this is the best case that even Bush and his handlers can make for his achievements, you wonder why they bothered. Desperate for padding, they devote four risible pages to portraying our dear leader as a zealous environmentalist.
But the brazenness of Bush’s alternative-reality history is itself revelatory. The audacity of its hype helps clear up the mystery of how someone so slight could inflict so much damage. So do his many print and television exit interviews.
The man who emerges is a narcissist with no self-awareness whatsoever. It’s that arrogance that allowed him to tune out even the most calamitous of realities, freeing him to compound them without missing a step. The president who famously couldn’t name a single mistake of his presidency at a press conference in 2004 still can’t.
He can, however, blame everyone else. Asked (by Charles Gibson) if he feels any responsibility for the economic meltdown, Bush says, “People will realize a lot of the decisions that were made on Wall Street took place over a decade or so, before I arrived.” Asked if the 2008 election was a repudiation of his administration, he says “it was a repudiation of Republicans.”
“The attacks of September the 11th came out of nowhere,” he said in another interview, as if he hadn’t ignored frantic intelligence warnings that summer of a Qaeda attack. But it was an “intelligence failure,” not his relentless invocation of patently fictitious “mushroom clouds,” that sped us into Iraq. Did he take too long to change course in Iraq? “What seems like an eternity today,” he says, “may seem like a moment tomorrow.” Try telling that to the families of the thousands killed and maimed during that multiyear “moment” as Bush stubbornly stayed his disastrous course.
The crowning personality tic revealed by Bush’s final propaganda push is his bottomless capacity for self-pity. “I was a wartime president, and war is very exhausting,” he told C-Span. “The president ends up carrying a lot of people’s grief in his soul,” he told Gibson. And so when he visits military hospitals, “it’s always been a healing experience,” he told The Wall Street Journal. But, incredibly enough, it’s his own healing he is concerned about, not that of the grievously wounded men and women he sent to war on false pretenses. It’s “the comforter in chief” who “gets comforted,” he explained, by “the character of the American people.” The American people are surely relieved to hear it.
With this level of self-regard, it’s no wonder that Bush could remain undeterred as he drove the country off a cliff. The smugness is reinforced not just by his history as the entitled scion of one of America’s aristocratic dynasties but also by his conviction that his every action is blessed from on high. Asked last month by an interviewer what he has learned from his time in office, he replied: “I’ve learned that God is good. All the time.”
Once again he is shifting the blame. This presidency was not about Him. Bush failed because in the end it was all about him.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/opinion/04rich.html?_r=1&em=&pagewanted=print
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
WE like our failed presidents to be Shakespearean, or at least large enough to inspire Oscar-worthy performances from magnificent tragedians like Frank Langella. So here, too, George W. Bush has let us down. Even the banality of evil is too grandiose a concept for 43. He is not a memorable villain so much as a sometimes affable second banana whom Josh Brolin and Will Ferrell can nail without breaking a sweat. He’s the reckless Yalie Tom Buchanan, not Gatsby. He is smaller than life.
The last NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll on Bush’s presidency found that 79 percent of Americans will not miss him after he leaves the White House. He is being forgotten already, even if he’s not yet gone. You start to pity him until you remember how vast the wreckage is. It stretches from the Middle East to Wall Street to Main Street and even into the heavens, which have been a safe haven for toxins under his passive stewardship. The discrepancy between the grandeur of the failure and the stature of the man is a puzzlement. We are still trying to compute it.
The one indisputable talent of his White House was its ability to create and sell propaganda both to the public and the press. Now that bag of tricks is empty as well. Bush’s first and last photo-ops in Iraq could serve as bookends to his entire tenure. On Thanksgiving weekend 2003, even as the Iraqi insurgency was spiraling, his secret trip to the war zone was a P.R. slam-dunk. The photo of the beaming commander in chief bearing a supersized decorative turkey for the troops was designed to make every front page and newscast in the country, and it did. Five years later, in what was intended as a farewell victory lap to show off Iraq’s improved post-surge security, Bush was reduced to ducking shoes.
He tried to spin the ruckus as another victory for his administration’s program of democracy promotion. “That’s what people do in a free society,” he said. He had made the same claim three years ago after the Palestinian elections, championed by his “freedom agenda” (and almost $500 million of American aid), led to a landslide victory for Hamas. “There is something healthy about a system that does that,” Bush observed at the time, as he congratulated Palestinian voters for rejecting “the old guard.”
The ruins of his administration’s top policy priority can be found not only in Gaza but in the new “democratic” Iraq, where the local journalist who tossed the shoes was jailed without formal charges and may have been tortured. Almost simultaneously, opponents of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki accused him of making politically motivated arrests of rival-party government officials in anticipation of this month’s much-postponed provincial elections.
Condi Rice blamed the press for the image that sullied Bush’s Iraq swan song: “That someone chose to throw a shoe at the president is what gets reported over and over.” We are back where we came in. This was the same line Donald Rumsfeld used to deny the significance of the looting in Baghdad during his famous “Stuff happens!” press conference of April 2003. “Images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over,” he said then, referring to the much-recycled video of a man stealing a vase from the Baghdad museum. “Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?” he asked, playing for laughs.
The joke was on us. Iraq burned, New Orleans flooded, and Bush remained oblivious to each and every pratfall on his watch. Americans essentially stopped listening to him after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, but he still doesn’t grasp the finality of their defection. Lately he’s promised not to steal the spotlight from Barack Obama once he’s in retirement — as if he could do so by any act short of running naked through downtown Dallas. The latest CNN poll finds that only one-third of his fellow citizens want him to play a post-presidency role in public life.
Bush is equally blind to the collapse of his propaganda machinery. Almost poignantly, he keeps trying to hawk his goods in these final days, like a salesman who hasn’t been told by the home office that his product has been discontinued. Though no one is listening, he has given more exit interviews than either Clinton or Reagan did. Along with old cronies like Karl Rove and Karen Hughes, he has also embarked on a Bush “legacy project,” as Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard described it on CNN.
To this end, Rove has repeated a stunt he first fed to the press two years ago: he is once again claiming that he and Bush have an annual book-reading contest, with Bush chalking up as many as 95 books a year, by authors as hifalutin as Camus. This hagiographic portrait of Bush the Egghead might be easier to buy were the former national security official Richard Clarke not quoted in the new Vanity Fair saying that both Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, had instructed him early on to keep his memos short because the president is “not a big reader.”
Another, far more elaborate example of legacy spin can be downloaded from the White House Web site: a booklet recounting “highlights” of the administration’s “accomplishments and results.” With big type, much white space, children’s-book-like trivia boxes titled “Did You Know?” and lots of color photos of the Bushes posing with blacks and troops, its 52 pages require a reading level closer to “My Pet Goat” than “The Stranger.”
This document is the literary correlative to “Mission Accomplished.” Bush kept America safe (provided his presidency began Sept. 12, 2001). He gave America record economic growth (provided his presidency ended December 2007). He vanquished all the leading Qaeda terrorists (if you don’t count the leaders bin Laden and al-Zawahri). He gave Afghanistan a thriving “market economy” (if you count its skyrocketing opium trade) and a “democratically elected president” (presiding over one of the world’s most corrupt governments). He supported elections in Pakistan (after propping up Pervez Musharraf past the point of no return). He “led the world in providing food aid and natural disaster relief” (if you leave out Brownie and Katrina).
If this is the best case that even Bush and his handlers can make for his achievements, you wonder why they bothered. Desperate for padding, they devote four risible pages to portraying our dear leader as a zealous environmentalist.
But the brazenness of Bush’s alternative-reality history is itself revelatory. The audacity of its hype helps clear up the mystery of how someone so slight could inflict so much damage. So do his many print and television exit interviews.
The man who emerges is a narcissist with no self-awareness whatsoever. It’s that arrogance that allowed him to tune out even the most calamitous of realities, freeing him to compound them without missing a step. The president who famously couldn’t name a single mistake of his presidency at a press conference in 2004 still can’t.
He can, however, blame everyone else. Asked (by Charles Gibson) if he feels any responsibility for the economic meltdown, Bush says, “People will realize a lot of the decisions that were made on Wall Street took place over a decade or so, before I arrived.” Asked if the 2008 election was a repudiation of his administration, he says “it was a repudiation of Republicans.”
“The attacks of September the 11th came out of nowhere,” he said in another interview, as if he hadn’t ignored frantic intelligence warnings that summer of a Qaeda attack. But it was an “intelligence failure,” not his relentless invocation of patently fictitious “mushroom clouds,” that sped us into Iraq. Did he take too long to change course in Iraq? “What seems like an eternity today,” he says, “may seem like a moment tomorrow.” Try telling that to the families of the thousands killed and maimed during that multiyear “moment” as Bush stubbornly stayed his disastrous course.
The crowning personality tic revealed by Bush’s final propaganda push is his bottomless capacity for self-pity. “I was a wartime president, and war is very exhausting,” he told C-Span. “The president ends up carrying a lot of people’s grief in his soul,” he told Gibson. And so when he visits military hospitals, “it’s always been a healing experience,” he told The Wall Street Journal. But, incredibly enough, it’s his own healing he is concerned about, not that of the grievously wounded men and women he sent to war on false pretenses. It’s “the comforter in chief” who “gets comforted,” he explained, by “the character of the American people.” The American people are surely relieved to hear it.
With this level of self-regard, it’s no wonder that Bush could remain undeterred as he drove the country off a cliff. The smugness is reinforced not just by his history as the entitled scion of one of America’s aristocratic dynasties but also by his conviction that his every action is blessed from on high. Asked last month by an interviewer what he has learned from his time in office, he replied: “I’ve learned that God is good. All the time.”
Once again he is shifting the blame. This presidency was not about Him. Bush failed because in the end it was all about him.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/opinion/04rich.html?_r=1&em=&pagewanted=print
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
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