Archive For December 2009
Arianna Calls Out Kudlow For Dow ‘50,000′ Prediction, Urges People To Ditch Bailed Out Banks (VIDEO)
on December 31, 2009 by Jude Emantsal in Other News, Comments (0)
Arianna was on CNBC’s “The Call” today to discuss the Move Your Money campaign. Host Larry Kudlow challenged the idea of switching money from big banks to community banks. Arianna countered that she’s not sure why anyone is still listening to Kudlow, given his previous predictions that have turned out to be wildly off-base, including his statement in 1999, “By 2020, the Dow index will reach 50,000, and the 10,000 benchmark will be reduced to a small blip on a large screen.”
Kudlow repeatedly denied ever having made that prediction, actually claiming that it was Jim Cramer who had. But in the second segment, Arianna read Kudlow’s direct quote from his March 18, 1999 Wall Street Journal article back to him.
Seeking Alpha has more.
WATCH: Part 1
WATCH: Part 2
Here is Kudlow’s full statement:
The dominant event of the late 20th century is the bull-market prosperity of the 1980s and 1990s. This was caused largely by a shift back to free-market economics, a reduction in the role of the state and an expansion of personal liberty. At the turn of a new century, taking the right road will extend the long cycle of wealth creation and technological advance for decades to come. By 2020 the Dow index will reach 50,000, and the 10,000 benchmark will be reduced to a small blip on a large screen.
John Yoo: Obama Is A Continuation Of Bush On Executive Powers
on by Jude Emantsal in Other News, Comments (0)
In his new book, former Bush administration attorney and infamous torture memo collaborator John Yoo favorably argues that President Barack Obama is wielding executive powers in the same manner as his White House predecessor.
Titled “Crisis and Command,” Yoo’s 500-plus-page work looks at the evolution of presidential powers from Washington to Bush, but with an afterword added for the current White House occupant. Few people have theorized as much about the limits of the powers granted to the presidency under the constitution (though, in Yoo’s case, much of that theorizing went into figuring out how to stretch or defy those limits). And, in his writing, the current U.C. Berkeley law professor insists that Obama has — due to the challenges of elected office — shunned the anti-Bush posture he struck as a presidential candidate.
“President Obama has come to have more in common with the ends of the Bush administration’s terrorism policies than did Candidate Obama,” Yoo writes. “It should be clear, further, that this would not be possible were it not for a broad view of presidential power.”
Yoo points to a continued American presence in Iraq, enhanced deployment to Afghanistan, the continuation of the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping power and the “extensive use of predator drones” as examples of a Bush-like wartime executive operating under the reduced (but still present) constraints of Congress and the judicial branch. “Even ordering the CIA to follow military rules in interrogating enemy combatants depends wholly on the president’s authority to command the military and determine operational tactics and strategy,” he adds. “Congress itself refused to place the CIA under the rules of the Army Field Manual on interrogation.”
“Obama has done nothing less than exercise many of the executive’s broader powers in time of emergency of way,” Yoo writes, in words that will undoubtedly irritate the White House and cause howls among Obama’s progressive critics.
Yoo does not fully disrespect the role Congress plays during times of war. He notes that even as Obama sought the closure of Gitmo, the legislative branch was well within its rights to balk at appropriating the funds to transfer “any detainee from Guantanamo Bay to enter the United States.”
But the afterword is defined not by sketching out the role of the legislative branch, but rather by a glaringly satisfied, told-you-so examination of Obama’s first months in office. He calls the president “naïve” for having said during the campaign that America could “reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” He also pokes Obama for demanding the closure of Gitmo, “terminating” the CIA’s capacity to used advanced interrogation methods on suspected terrorists and for releasing the Bush administration’s torture memos — “some of which I worked on,” Yoo writes.
Obama, he writes, “pleased the left wing of the Democratic Party.” But he also “threatened to handicap our intelligence agencies from preventing future terrorist attacks.”
Altruism: It Lies Within All of Us
on by Jude Emantsal in Other News, Comments (0)
Altruism: The ultimate driver of charity. Doing something just because it is the right thing to do. It lies within all of us, to one extent or the other, indelibly etched in our genome and cultural heritage. In some, the willingness to yield to its power occurs every minute of every day. In others, it sparks to life spontaneously from time to time. In others, it requires a little cajoling to move a person to charitable action. So what does it take to turn on the altruistic fire in each of us? What is the trigger?
I have been told that my choice of public health as a profession puts me in the former of those categories. I certainly did not do it for the level of pay. My oldest daughter used to get kidded when she attended her scholarship-paid private school in Cincinnati because I was in the health field, but I am not a doctor. We constantly got mail sent to Dr. Gary Stein, no matter how many times I corrected them. The other parents and administration couldn’t figure out my motivation. How can you be working in the health field and have an income of less than $45,000 per year? Considering that I lived in a family with some medically-fragile people, I had to rely on my insurance to keep them healthy, instead of my income. In this day and age, with the current state of the health care system, it may have not been my best decision, but I made it with the altruism in my heart running at full-blast.
At the time, I was working as a field agent and Public Health Advisor for the CDC, tracking and bringing folks with STDs, TB and HIV to treatment. It was a noble cause and hard work. I did it over two decades, moving my family across the country through several automatic transfers. It was hard on my family and far from comfortable or glamorous. So why did I do it? I felt personally rewarded. It made me feel good.
Recently, The Huffington Post reprinted an article from the St. Petersburg Times about my wife and family, and how we have endured the trials and tribulations of dealing with the health care system and their genetically-based disease, Sticklers Syndrome. The combination of my middle-class income and the ability (or inability) of our insurance to cover their care led to a financial decision that ultimately led to my wife’s current loss of eyesight for the sake of her children’s care.
Ten Things That Did Not Suck About The Media In 2009
on by Jude Emantsal in Other News, Comments (0)
It’s New Year’s Eve, that time of year when you toss aside your better instincts and succumb to America’s need for Contemplative Listicles that Explain The Year In Which We Lived.
And then, one day, you make a Listicle About Listicles, or you do one better and make a Listicle of The Best 85 Words Ending In -icle, In Order.
Of course, both of those things have already been done this year.
So, we begin today with Ten Things About The Media That Did Not Suck In 2009:
BLOOMBERG NEWS
One of the sad things about living through this dark time in our nation’s economy is the terrible way the media has addressed it. When they’re not praising the culprits or treating human misery as pornography, they’re trying to get us to sympathize with very well-off people who are surviving just fine, or just experiencing a fancy mid-life crisis about the recession.
But over at Bloomberg News, the reporters who originally set about bringing the complexities of the financial world into an open-source environment spent all year carrying on with their code breaking, and they routinely deliver the most clear-eyed, pom-pom-free, fact-dense, explained-at-length journalism on how the world was destroyed and what’s being done to put it back together. There are too many examples to count: Jesse Westbrook’s piece on Mary Schapiro is just the most recent example. And when others honored Ben Bernanke on the cover of their magazine, Bloomberg took on the Fed. That’s how they rolled, all year.
Underscoring this is a bit of sadness, as one of Bloomberg’s finest, Mark Pittman, passed away this year. You can see MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan leading a praise chorus, here.
STEPHEN COLBERT
Yeah, it’s getting to be a bit repetitive to constantly praise Comedy Central’s late night duo, but until more people crowd them out by making the same commitment to not suck at doing their jobs, it’s going to be obligatory. This year, Colbert’s been praised for doing all he can to bring residents of the District of Columbia some Constitutional rights, he’s been way out in front in the arena of Glenn Beck ridicule, and he inspiringly lit Barack Obama afire for his detainee policy at Bagram AFB. But my personal favorite moment came with his dissection of the health care lobby’s influence on lawmakers: “Folks, there are some things that everybody knows, but nobody says.”
You do realize that Colbert is one of the few people in the media who has noticed they way the health care lobby has worked to file down the teeth of health care reform, let alone give a shit about it, right?
The Colbert ReportMon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Stimulus, Schmimulus — We Need Jobs to Build a Sustainable Economy
on by Jude Emantsal in Other News, Comments (0)
The debate over federal government action to promote jobs has been plagued by a number of false assumptions that are encapsulated in the word “stimulus.” More confusion has been added under the banner “timely, targeted, and temporary” – a supposed formula for a successful “stimulus.” The idea behind the slogan was that the financial collapse could be quickly undone in two steps: first, a bailout to quell the financial panic so banks would lend and then the stimulus to get consumers spending again.
In reality, the U. S. economy will falter for many years unless a government-led reform recognizes new economic and environmental realities and confronts the challenges before us. We can return to full employment by creating jobs that lay the foundation for shared prosperity, or we can wait for the captains of capitalism to rescue us under the same trickle-down paradigm that has failed so spectacularly. Facing peak oil and global competition for scarce natural resources, we must repair and reform the physical and intellectual undergirding of our economy to build a broad base of prosperity.
Why the Old Economy Can’t and Shouldn’t Be Revived
False optimism for a quick recovery ignores the fact that U. S. economic growth from the Reagan era through 2007 was built on weak foundations. That economy could best be described as “bubble-licious.” The media touted periods of rapid growth of GDP, but most workers knew that their own economic situation was stagnant or sinking. Instead of good times, we actually experienced a series of overvalued assets leading to bailouts, including:
The Savings and Loan scandal cost U. S. taxpayers $124 billion between 1989 and 1993.[1]
The 1997-8 currency debacles[2] beginning with the Thai baht and other southeast Asian currencies (including Malaysia’s, Indonesia’s, the Philippines’) and later affecting South Korea, Japan, Russia,[3] and Brazil. Crony capitalism, real estate bubbles, and bad loans fueled a crisis that eventually led to IMF/World Bank bailouts of181 bn and aid from Japan of30 bn.
The oil and commodities bubbles of 2007-8, which caused serious and continuing hunger throughout the developing world and which precipitated …
The housing collapse in the United States, which precipitated …
The financial collapse. The bailout has cost U. S. taxpayers and the Federal Reserve over2 trillion (out of a theoretical maximum of over23 trillion in grants, capital injections, loans, and guarantees comprising all the programs devised to deal with the crisis).[4]
Experts tell us we are beginning to see a collapse of commercial real estate loans that may set the financial world on its ear yet again and drive the bailout cost still higher. The FDIC has bailed out 115 banks this year and is running low on funds, yet 400 more banks are at risk of failure.[5]
(Note: A bailout occurs when rich people get money to cover losses they would otherwise absorb based on their market transactions. They may be owners or employees of the collapsing corporation or they may be creditors of that corporation. Usually, the cost of the bailout is at least partially off-loaded to the poor and middle classes.)
PBS’ ‘This Emotional Life’: Are We Born With ‘Innate’ Ideas?
on by Jude Emantsal in Other News, Comments (0)
I’ve spent many years studying children’s behavior, trying to better understand how “nature” and “nurture” impact human development and the role of social experience on brain development. Some of this science is featured in the upcoming PBS series, This Emotional Life (airing next week, January fourth through sixth on PBS).
In a relatively short period of time, our society has radically shifted our collective view of childhood–just over a generation ago, the maxim was that children “should be seen and not heard,” reflecting relatively little interest in early childhood. Now a great deal of media attention, marketing, and adult conversation is centered about questions regarding the best approaches to parenting. This is a double-edged sword. In some ways, parenting has become a competitive sport, with adult’s perceptions of their own competence too closely tied to their children’s performance. On the other hand, it does appear to be the case that early childhood is important for human development, and adult attention to the needs of children has lead to improvements in children’s health and education. As a scientist, I spend a lot of time studying how and what children are learning as they interact with their parents and others.
The hot button issue in child development concerns what is “innate” or what sorts of information, traits, and tendencies are already in our brains from the moment we are born. The idea that we enter the world with lots of skills and knowledge is an old and very attractive idea. But my own view is more of a vanilla ice-cream approach. Rather than lots of fancy features, it is likely that what humans enter the world with is a general ability to learn. We have an amazing ability to be able to pick up on various things that are happening in the environment and remember them and group them together. As a result of these very, very powerful abilities to learn, what we’re able to do is master lots of different complex behaviors–reading emotions, understanding basic physics, decoding language. If human infants are indeed born with highly effective learning abilities, when we’re interacting with our children we are teaching them.
When we are forming our earliest relationships, such as forming social bonds or attachments — what we are doing is learning. We are learning how to signal to others when we need help for hunger or pain or fear; we are learning who responds to our needs, and how consistently those people respond. As we become older, we learn more complex social cues: what makes other people upset; what makes them comforted; what will result in punishment; what will result in reward. I believe that our brains are born ready to learn about emotional cues…but all that learning depends upon the kinds and quality of social experiences that we have had. These experiences turn on different sets of genes, tune our attention to different aspects of our social world, and imbue our experiences with meaning.
The 12 Legislative Battles To Look Forward To In 2010
on by Jude Emantsal in Other News, Comments (0)
The past year was grueling for Democrats trying to getting major legislation passed — with most of the focus on health care reform. But 2010 will be filled with more hard fights for the Obama administration. Here’s what to look forward too.
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Trying to Save Water When the Law Says Waste It
on by Jude Emantsal in Other News, Comments (0)
TESUQUE, NM–Reading the frightening tales contained in Steven Solomon’s new book “Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization” here in the high mountain desert of New Mexico is like reading about the dangers of nuclear power in the shadow of the cooling towers at Three Mile Island. You wonder if anyone is paying attention?
The contrary human, social, and legal behaviors when it comes to water, which Solomon describes in his book, are in abundant evidence here. I’m the president of a mutual domestic water association. It’s like a municipal water system but on a tiny scale. We have seven wells, two water tanks, five or so miles of underground pipes and it’s our job to supply water to about sixty-five houses.
As the kind of fellow who came of age around the time of Earth Day I worry constantly about how much we waste. Living here in a region whose annual rainfall is what New York City gets in a couple of months, water–or the lack of it–is an inescapable worry. Privately, we do our best to keep our consumption down. The amount my wife and I use is well below the national average of 4,800 to 6,000 gallons for a similar sized household. Our main bathroom features a waterless urinal and we treat our wastewater and reuse watering the trees around our house. So as individuals, we do what we can. But that’s not the problem.
Rather it is in my capacity as one of many officials in the massive state’s water system that I confront rules that encourages the use of water rather than its conservation. At fault are the out-of-date water laws that govern us and no one dares change them out of fear. Water rights are the most precious thing on can hold in the Southwest. People used to kill each other over them in the old days. Today they use lawyers.
Our mutual domestic system has the legally enshrined right to draw 29.5 acre-feet per year. (The fact that we measure water in acre feet already tells you a lot about the arcane nature of water politics out here.) At this rate we permit each house to use up to 163,000 gallons a year, more than twice what the average two-person household use.
After reading Solomon’s book one would immediately conclude that such excessive use makes our little water system a prime example of what is leading to the pending water crisis. So one might suggest, as some of use the new members of our water board did, that we encourage residents to conserve and use less water. Although veteran members received the idea politely, the reception to it was as if we had suggested there was merit in altering the Second Amendment during a meeting of a local chapter of the National Rifle Association.
10 Worst Moments In New York Politics
on by Jude Emantsal in Other News, Comments (0)
The worst New York political moments of 2009:
10. Senator Charles Schumer calls a flight attendant a “bitch.”
Schumer is just about the only national political name we have left in New York, so this was depressing even if, as he claimed later, he only muttered it under his breath. Worse, he’s so impressed with his own importance that he seemed to feel health care reform couldn’t survive if he was forced to turn off his cell phone on the DC shuttle.
9. Brooklyn kidney ring
An investigation into political corruption in New Jersey produced 44 arrests, including a Brooklyn rabbi who was charged with the sale of black-market kidneys. Levy Izhak Rosenbaum allegedly bought organs from hard-up people in Israel and sold them to patients in the United States. This is only peripherally a political story, but you have to like the change of pace.
8. The Caroline-Kennedy-for-Senate disaster
Some people would put this up higher on the list, as a mess that revealed Gov. David Paterson’s indecisiveness and messy management style. But let’s face it, Kennedy wasn’t entirely without fault in this comedy of errors, and nobody was indicted. By this year’s standards, it could have been worse.
7a Anthony Seminerio pleads guilty
Seminerio, 74, had been a Queens state representative for more than 30 years – one of those dreadful “colorful characters” who are known for saying insane things during legislative debates. Outside, he was a “consultant,” who prosecutors said took $500,000 in payments from people that had business before the state.
7b. Efrain Gonzalez Jr. pleads guilty
Gonzalez, a Bronx Democrat, copped a plea to mail fraud after being charged with taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from nonprofit organizations to pay personal expenses. In 2008 he lost the Democratic nomination (the actual race that mattered) to Pedro Espada, who we will meet higher up on the list. Weep for the poor voters of the Bronx, and the options they are offered on Election Day.
6. Charles Rangel can’t handle money
The most powerful member of the New York Congressional delegation, the chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, has already admitted to keeping wildly inaccurate financial records, sitting on four rent-controlled apartments at one time and failing to report rental income from a home he owns in the Dominican Republic because of a language barrier with the managers: “Every time I thought I was getting through they started speaking Spanish.” Rangel could well lose his chairmanship over this mess. At minimum he’ll be a far less powerful and diminished presence in Washington.
5. State Senate defeats gay marriage
Never, in human memory, has the leadership of the state senate brought a bill up for a vote unless they were sure of passage. This is the issue on which they decided to roll the dice.
DCCC Chair: GOP Opposition To National Security Funds Will Be Issue In 2010
on by Jude Emantsal in Other News, Comments (0)
Democratic leadership in Congress is pledging to make Republican votes against key national security and defense funding measures a feature in the upcoming congressional elections, following the botched Christmas Day terrorist attack aboard a Detroit-bound airliner.
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Chris Van Hollen (D-M.D.) told the Huffington Post on Wednesday that it was the committee’s duty to ensure that, come 2010, the American people are aware that House Republicans opposed a Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill that included funding for airport security.
The 2010 appropriations bill contained Transportation Security Administration funding for explosives detection systems and other security measures — it was opposed by House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), and Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) among others.
“It is not so much that the DCCC will be holding people accountable but the American people will be holding people accountable. They deserve to have that info and we will make sure they have it,” Van Hollen said, in an interview that took place Wednesday afternoon. “And I’m assuming our Republican colleagues will have an opportunity to explain why they voted against additional resources for homeland security.”
The same dynamic would hold true in the Senate, where a procedural play by Republican senators to derail health care reform by nearly killing a separate bill to fund defense operations would be held against them, predicted Van Hollen predicted.
“I think we are going to be very interested in the rationale for those votes,” said the Maryland Democrat. “I mean in the Senate you have the situation where Republicans were delaying a vote on the defense appropriations bill for the purpose of slowing down health care reform and I think the American people don’t want our national security to be held hostage to Republican procedural gamesmanship on health care.”
The electoral foreshadowing on Van Hollen’s part is another illustration of how often politics is intertwined with national security issues. Republicans went on the offensive in the days following the botched airliner attack, accusing the administration of being soft on terror and launching fundraising appeals based on similar premises. All of which produced an angry (if not belated) response from Democrats, who decried the politicization of a nearly catastrophic incident.
“I think it will backfire,” Van Hollen said. “What you are seeing now is that the House and the Senate campaign committees trying to exploit an attempted terrorist attack, to try and raise money off an attempt to blow an airplane out of the sky… I think the American people ought to be appalled by that.”
The bet from the DCCC’s perspective is that campaigning on issues of national security will be considered more palatable than fundraising off a potential terrorist attack. There certainly is a long-standing precedent for making votes on defense and homeland security funding an electoral issue (see: Bush vs. Kerry, 2004). And for many Democrats, the party’s adoption of an offensive posture on such issues is long overdue.