Saturday, August 06, 2011
S&P cuts U.S. debt rating
From: McClatchy
Credit rating agency Standard & Poor's downgraded the AAA credit rating the United States has enjoyed for 70 years late Friday night in a move that had been expected, but still left the Obama administration angry and combative.
Credit rating agency Standard & Poor's downgraded the AAA credit rating the United States has enjoyed for 70 years late Friday night in a move that had been expected, but still left the Obama administration angry and combative.
In announcing its rating downgrade to AA+, S&P said the recent debt-ceiling compromise that President Barack Obama signed into law on Tuesday had not done enough to trim the country's burgeoning debt load, currently $14.3 trillion.
S&P said its calculations indicated that under the deal, U.S. debt would total 88 percent of the country's gross domestic product by 2021, making buying the government's long-term debt a riskier investment. It also said the recent battle over the debt-ceiling had shaken its confidence that American political institutions were capable of managing the U.S. deficit and economy.
"The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government's medium-term debt dynamics," S&P said. "More broadly, the downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges to a degree more than we envisioned when we assigned a negative outlook to the rating on April 18, 2011."
The Obama administration angrily accused S&P of sloppy mathematics and a politically tainted assessment, saying the calculation overstated by $2 trillion estimated future spending. As a result of the error, the rating agency overstated the ratio between the U.S. debt load and its economy, the administration said.
Sources familiar with conversations between S&P and the Obama administration, who spoke to reporters on the condition that they not be identified otherwise, said S&P acknowledged the error, but issued its downgrade anyway.
"A judgment flawed by a $2 trillion error speaks for itself," said a Treasury Department spokesperson.
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, blamed the Democrats for the problem for the downgrade in a statement that did not address the debt-ceiling debate that figured so prominently in S&P criticism of U.S. creditworthiness.
"This decision by S&P is the latest consequence of the out-of-control spending that has taken place in Washington for decades," he said in a statement. "Republicans have listened to the voices of the American people and worked to bring the spending binge to a halt. We are no longer debating how much to spend, but rather how much to cut. Unfortunately, decades of reckless spending cannot be reversed immediately, especially when the Democrats who run Washington remain unwilling to make the tough choices required to put America on solid ground."
Analysts expected the S&P action would have little immediate impact on borrowing costs for U.S. businesses or consumers as long as the two other major credit rating agencies, Moody's Investors Service and Fitch Ratings, did not follow suit. Both have signaled they plan no immediate change in the U.S. credit rating.
The U.S.'s major banking regulators immediately took steps to make certain there would be no impact on banks or credit unions that hold U.S. bonds as part of their assets.
In a joint statement, the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, the National Credit Union Administration and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said the downgrade would have no effect on how the agencies would assess financial institutions' health.
"The treatment of Treasury securities and other securities issued and guaranteed by the U.S. government, government agencies, and government-sponsored entities . . . will also be unaffected," the statement said.
The sources familiar with the talks but who could not be otherwise identified said they did not expect the downgrade would have an impact on the market next week. They said the most disappointing aspect of S&P's decision was how it would reflect on the United States abroad.
Credit ratings are given to bonds as a signpost to investors on the risk of a default. A lower credit rating implies more risk and investors often demand a higher interest rate in exchange for purchasing lower-rated bonds.
If the other two large rating agencies were to join S&P in downgrading U.S. bonds at some point in the future, it would raise the cost of borrowing for everything from mortgages and auto loans to how much corporations and cities must pay bond holders.
U.S. government bonds have long been considered the world's safest investment, and few countries can boast of a AAA rating. Only Thursday, as investors fled gold, the stock market and other commodities, they sought to buy U.S. government securities _ in such numbers, in fact, that at one point some government debt was actually paying negative interest.
The sources familiar with the S&P action branded the action as political, saying it focused too much on the ugly process of the debt-ceiling deal, instead of the outcome, which resulted in cutting the deficit by $2.1 trillion over 10 years.
Friday, August 05, 2011
David Akers Is A Class Act
Well, Eagles kicker David Akers tested free agency and was signed by the 49ers. He'll be missed.The picture below is a billboard ad he took out in Philadelphia.A real class act.I hope the Eagles certainly have a sufficient replacement for his consistent performance.
NJ Muslim: From 9/11 detainee lawyer to judge
From: ABC 33/40
As the rubble of ground zero smoldered in the months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the investigation was just as hot across the Hudson River in New Jersey.
More than 1,100 Arabs and Muslims - most of them from New York and northern New Jersey - were rounded up and detained as the FBI feverishly searched for additional terrorists.
In few places was the spotlight as white-hot as in Paterson, where as many as six of the 9/11 hijackers lived or spent time in the weeks before the attacks. As agents went knocking on doors, asking questions about religious practices, finances and acquaintances, many Muslims were cowering on the other side, terrified of being thrown in jail for crimes they knew nothing about.
A young, soft-spoken Muslim immigration attorney named Sohail Mohammed represented many people rounded up in New Jersey in the post-9/11 dragnet. Along the way, he gained the respect and friendship of many top law enforcement officials for his efforts to build bridges between the Muslim community and law enforcement and to help defuse tensions in those incredibly tense days. He won over one official whose favor would prove crucial nearly a decade later: the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, Chris Christie.
Christie, now the state's governor and a darling of the Republican party, nominated Mohammed to a Superior Court judgeship. Mohammed was sworn into office last week, becoming New Jersey's second Muslim judge.
Mohammed, 47, says his religion has nothing to do with how he'll perform his new job.
"My faith, my ethnicity: that means nothing here," he said. "It's not an issue."
Not everyone agreed.
After Christie nominated Mohammed in January for the judgeship, the tough-talking, crime-busting former federal prosecutor found himself accused of cozying up to Islamic radicals. "Governor Christie's Dirty Islamist Ties," one of the kinder Internet headlines read.
Christie, whom GOP loyalists are now begging to run for president, stuck with Mohammed despite a vicious campaign by conservative bloggers who denounced Christie and raised fears that Mohammed would introduce Islamic Sharia law into the courts.
"Sohail Mohammed is an extraordinary American who is an outstanding lawyer who played an integral role post-9/11 in building bridges between the Muslim community and law enforcement," Christie said. "I was there; I saw it.
"Sharia law has nothing to do with this. It's crazy," Christie said. "This Sharia law business is crap; it's crazy and I'm tired of dealing with crazies. I'm happy he's willing to serve after all this baloney."
The fallout from the terror attacks was quick and extreme in Paterson, home to the nation's second-largest Arab-American community after Dearborn, Mich. Carloads of people descended on the city's Arab quarter, screaming obscenities and throwing things at veiled women on the sidewalk. Some radio hosts broadcast - falsely - that Arabs were dancing in the streets and on rooftops when the World Trade Center's towers fell.
Robert Passero, Passaic County's Superior Court assignment judge at the time, was feeling the pressure as well.
"They were recommending I close the courthouse because tempers were high," he said. "There were people from out of town riding through south Paterson making threats. It was very tense."
Passero had known Mohammed for years, taking an interest in him after the young man sat through one of his cases as a juror, then implausibly called the judge's office the following week to say he loved jury duty so much he wanted to do it again. Seeing the makings of a future lawyer, the judge encouraged Mohammed to go to law school, then mentored him along the way, even as Mohammed started a solo practice concentrating on immigration law.
Mohammed would get numerous calls each week from worried Muslims saying FBI agents had knocked on their doors and asked for personal information, including where they worshipped, the names of others who attended the mosque and whether they had ever declared bankruptcy.
"After 9/11 we wanted to forge a better relationship with the Muslim community, we wanted to understand them better, we wanted them to understand us better, explain our job, and that we are there to protect them, too," said Charles McKenna, an assistant U.S. attorney at the time and now head of New Jersey's Office of Homeland Security. "But we didn't have many entrees into that community. Through Sohail, we were able to go in and meet with a lot of the elders of the community. I think that community was a little afraid of the government at that time. A person with his gravitas gave us a foot in the door."
Mohammed undertook several initiatives that eased the mistrust and increased understanding between both sides.
He and other leaders of New Jersey's Muslim community met with FBI and other law enforcement agencies to educate them on Islam and Muslim culture. He helped arrange a job fair at a mosque in which the agencies recruited Muslims for law enforcement jobs. At the time, none of the more than 300 FBI agents assigned to New Jersey spoke Arabic.
Not long afterward, Mohammed and others offered to speak to law enforcement to explain Islam and Muslim culture. By all accounts, the sessions went well. They eventually were expanded beyond the FBI to other agencies, including the Joint Terrorism Task Force.
"It was a tough crowd, but you have to have understanding," Mohammed recalled. "When you are ignorant about something or someone, that brings fear. If you get to know someone and more about them, you remove that fear and we can see people for who they are."
Mohammed began noticing a trend in federal immigration court after Sept. 11: The FBI was clearing suspects - or at least admitting it had lost interest in them as terror suspects - long before the courts dealt with their cases. As a result, many were languishing in county jails for months because the court system was overwhelmed.
One was a 19-year-old gas station attendant in Ocean County who shared the same name as Taliban leader Mohamed Omar. He came to the FBI's attention when customers recalled a co-worker at the station who bore a resemblance to 9/11 hijacker Marwan al-Shehhi and told the agency they remembered someone pumping gas who might have been one of the terrorists.
He wasn't, but the resulting attention led to Omar's detention on charges he had violated his tourist visa by working in the U.S. In less than a week, an immigration judge ordered him deported to his native Egypt. But he remained in custody for nearly four months, with Sohail Mohammed appearing in court repeatedly and inquiring about the delay.
As the rubble of ground zero smoldered in the months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the investigation was just as hot across the Hudson River in New Jersey.
More than 1,100 Arabs and Muslims - most of them from New York and northern New Jersey - were rounded up and detained as the FBI feverishly searched for additional terrorists.
In few places was the spotlight as white-hot as in Paterson, where as many as six of the 9/11 hijackers lived or spent time in the weeks before the attacks. As agents went knocking on doors, asking questions about religious practices, finances and acquaintances, many Muslims were cowering on the other side, terrified of being thrown in jail for crimes they knew nothing about.
A young, soft-spoken Muslim immigration attorney named Sohail Mohammed represented many people rounded up in New Jersey in the post-9/11 dragnet. Along the way, he gained the respect and friendship of many top law enforcement officials for his efforts to build bridges between the Muslim community and law enforcement and to help defuse tensions in those incredibly tense days. He won over one official whose favor would prove crucial nearly a decade later: the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, Chris Christie.
Christie, now the state's governor and a darling of the Republican party, nominated Mohammed to a Superior Court judgeship. Mohammed was sworn into office last week, becoming New Jersey's second Muslim judge.
Mohammed, 47, says his religion has nothing to do with how he'll perform his new job.
"My faith, my ethnicity: that means nothing here," he said. "It's not an issue."
Not everyone agreed.
After Christie nominated Mohammed in January for the judgeship, the tough-talking, crime-busting former federal prosecutor found himself accused of cozying up to Islamic radicals. "Governor Christie's Dirty Islamist Ties," one of the kinder Internet headlines read.
Christie, whom GOP loyalists are now begging to run for president, stuck with Mohammed despite a vicious campaign by conservative bloggers who denounced Christie and raised fears that Mohammed would introduce Islamic Sharia law into the courts.
"Sohail Mohammed is an extraordinary American who is an outstanding lawyer who played an integral role post-9/11 in building bridges between the Muslim community and law enforcement," Christie said. "I was there; I saw it.
"Sharia law has nothing to do with this. It's crazy," Christie said. "This Sharia law business is crap; it's crazy and I'm tired of dealing with crazies. I'm happy he's willing to serve after all this baloney."
The fallout from the terror attacks was quick and extreme in Paterson, home to the nation's second-largest Arab-American community after Dearborn, Mich. Carloads of people descended on the city's Arab quarter, screaming obscenities and throwing things at veiled women on the sidewalk. Some radio hosts broadcast - falsely - that Arabs were dancing in the streets and on rooftops when the World Trade Center's towers fell.
Robert Passero, Passaic County's Superior Court assignment judge at the time, was feeling the pressure as well.
"They were recommending I close the courthouse because tempers were high," he said. "There were people from out of town riding through south Paterson making threats. It was very tense."
Passero had known Mohammed for years, taking an interest in him after the young man sat through one of his cases as a juror, then implausibly called the judge's office the following week to say he loved jury duty so much he wanted to do it again. Seeing the makings of a future lawyer, the judge encouraged Mohammed to go to law school, then mentored him along the way, even as Mohammed started a solo practice concentrating on immigration law.
Mohammed would get numerous calls each week from worried Muslims saying FBI agents had knocked on their doors and asked for personal information, including where they worshipped, the names of others who attended the mosque and whether they had ever declared bankruptcy.
"After 9/11 we wanted to forge a better relationship with the Muslim community, we wanted to understand them better, we wanted them to understand us better, explain our job, and that we are there to protect them, too," said Charles McKenna, an assistant U.S. attorney at the time and now head of New Jersey's Office of Homeland Security. "But we didn't have many entrees into that community. Through Sohail, we were able to go in and meet with a lot of the elders of the community. I think that community was a little afraid of the government at that time. A person with his gravitas gave us a foot in the door."
Mohammed undertook several initiatives that eased the mistrust and increased understanding between both sides.
He and other leaders of New Jersey's Muslim community met with FBI and other law enforcement agencies to educate them on Islam and Muslim culture. He helped arrange a job fair at a mosque in which the agencies recruited Muslims for law enforcement jobs. At the time, none of the more than 300 FBI agents assigned to New Jersey spoke Arabic.
Not long afterward, Mohammed and others offered to speak to law enforcement to explain Islam and Muslim culture. By all accounts, the sessions went well. They eventually were expanded beyond the FBI to other agencies, including the Joint Terrorism Task Force.
"It was a tough crowd, but you have to have understanding," Mohammed recalled. "When you are ignorant about something or someone, that brings fear. If you get to know someone and more about them, you remove that fear and we can see people for who they are."
Mohammed began noticing a trend in federal immigration court after Sept. 11: The FBI was clearing suspects - or at least admitting it had lost interest in them as terror suspects - long before the courts dealt with their cases. As a result, many were languishing in county jails for months because the court system was overwhelmed.
One was a 19-year-old gas station attendant in Ocean County who shared the same name as Taliban leader Mohamed Omar. He came to the FBI's attention when customers recalled a co-worker at the station who bore a resemblance to 9/11 hijacker Marwan al-Shehhi and told the agency they remembered someone pumping gas who might have been one of the terrorists.
He wasn't, but the resulting attention led to Omar's detention on charges he had violated his tourist visa by working in the U.S. In less than a week, an immigration judge ordered him deported to his native Egypt. But he remained in custody for nearly four months, with Sohail Mohammed appearing in court repeatedly and inquiring about the delay.
Turkey's Long Road to a New Military Culture
From: Real Clear World
Turkeys ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is developing a major plan to restructure the Turkish Armed forces (TSK), Todays Zaman reported Aug. 2. According to the report, the envisioned restructuring would help normalize civilian-military relations and lead to the transformation of the armed forces into a more effective fighting force. The report comes as the annual meeting of the Supreme Military Council (YSK) chaired by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is in session. The meeting is scheduled to conclude Thursday.
Promotions and appointments are usually unveiled in these YSK meetings. Three days before this years session, the TSK chief as well as the commanders of the land, air and naval forces collectively resigned. The move by the top brass was designed to try and counter the growing influence of the AKP government over the Turkish armed forces, which has weakened as a political power over the past four years. However, the resignations have only further swung the pendulum in favor of the civilians - to the point where the decades-old military dominance over the civilians seems to have been reversed.
The AKP is definitely pleased to have paved the way to a moment where the TSK would begrudgingly accept a civilian government, even one led by its historic ideological rivals. Erdogan's government has the power to appoint the military's leaders (as opposed to rubber-stamping the top generals' decisions).
However, this privilege is just the first step in the AKPs vision for the military. The AKP would like to capitalize on this nascent civilian supremacy over the military as quickly as possible. It would like to reconfigure the military to serve the Erdogan administrations assertive foreign policy agenda.
Yet reshaping the armed forces to serve as an instrument of foreign-policy projection seems a far loftier goal. Subordinating the military under civilian authority seems much simpler when compared to the ambitious goal of reshaping the armed forces into an instrument of foreign policy power projection. Put differently, it will be a long time before the Turkish military will be able to serve in such a manner. Even where civilian-military imbalance of power is not an issue, a state needs years (if not decades) to transform the military into an entity that can project power far beyond its borders.
In Ankara's case the challenge is even greater - many prerequisites still need to be achieved. The first step entails installing a cadre of commanders who are beholden to the AKP for their positions. Next, a culture must be ingrained within the officers and soldiery that moves the military away from seeing itself as a praetorian force that is the sole guardian of the Republic's Kemalist ideals to one that is the defender of the constitution (which another mainstay that will also need to be altered in its own time).
Promotions and appointments are usually unveiled in these YSK meetings. Three days before this years session, the TSK chief as well as the commanders of the land, air and naval forces collectively resigned. The move by the top brass was designed to try and counter the growing influence of the AKP government over the Turkish armed forces, which has weakened as a political power over the past four years. However, the resignations have only further swung the pendulum in favor of the civilians - to the point where the decades-old military dominance over the civilians seems to have been reversed.
The AKP is definitely pleased to have paved the way to a moment where the TSK would begrudgingly accept a civilian government, even one led by its historic ideological rivals. Erdogan's government has the power to appoint the military's leaders (as opposed to rubber-stamping the top generals' decisions).
However, this privilege is just the first step in the AKPs vision for the military. The AKP would like to capitalize on this nascent civilian supremacy over the military as quickly as possible. It would like to reconfigure the military to serve the Erdogan administrations assertive foreign policy agenda.
Yet reshaping the armed forces to serve as an instrument of foreign-policy projection seems a far loftier goal. Subordinating the military under civilian authority seems much simpler when compared to the ambitious goal of reshaping the armed forces into an instrument of foreign policy power projection. Put differently, it will be a long time before the Turkish military will be able to serve in such a manner. Even where civilian-military imbalance of power is not an issue, a state needs years (if not decades) to transform the military into an entity that can project power far beyond its borders.
In Ankara's case the challenge is even greater - many prerequisites still need to be achieved. The first step entails installing a cadre of commanders who are beholden to the AKP for their positions. Next, a culture must be ingrained within the officers and soldiery that moves the military away from seeing itself as a praetorian force that is the sole guardian of the Republic's Kemalist ideals to one that is the defender of the constitution (which another mainstay that will also need to be altered in its own time).
Thursday, August 04, 2011
Breivik and the Anti-Zionist Smear
From: Real Clear Politics
In the aftermath of Anders Breivik's terrorist rampage in Norway, a "blame the Jews" theme has emerged: assertions that Breivik was driven by fanatical devotion to Israel. Mostly, complaints about the media's failure to identify Breivik as a Zionist zealot have been confined to fringe blogs on the left and the right -- but they have also cropped up in more mainstream venues, such as the blog of prominent pundit Andrew Sullivan. Daily Beast columnist Michelle Goldberg has pointed to the Oslo killer as evidence of a convergence between right-wing Zionism and European fascism, united by hatred against Muslims.
The recent phenomenon of far-right nationalists latching on to Jewish and Zionist causes in presumed anti-Muslim solidarity is real and troubling (especially given some of these nationalist groups' anti-Semitic roots). But the trope of Breivik as a Zionist soldier is a smear -- a gross distortion that plays into the campaign to delegitimize and vilify Israel.
The apparent proof of Breivik's alleged Zionist obsession is that his 1,500-page manifesto, "A European Declaration of Independence," has 359 mentions of Israel and 324 mentions of Jews. That sounds like a lot until you realize the "declaration" is just under 780,000 words.
The document, which Breivik distributed online just before his killing spree, covers many subjects, including the evil of women's liberation (there are 200 references to feminism and feminists). But it has one central focus: Islam and the Muslim menace. The words "Islam," "Islamic" and "Islamist" combined appear 3,360 times; the word "Muslim," 3,632 times.
Virtually all of Breivik's other ideas stem from this obsession: Feminism is bad because it saps Western civilization's (and its men's) ability to resist Islam; Israel is good because it is an ally in this struggle.
Moreover, Breivik's "Zionism" coexists with a virulent brand of selective anti-Semitism -- one that sees Jews as likely carriers of cosmopolitan, nontraditional values and targets liberal Jews for special loathing. In his discussion of Nazism, Breivik agrees that most German and European Jews in the 1930s were "disloyal" -- "similar to the liberal Jews today." Hitler's error, he believes, was to lump the "good" Jews with the "bad," instead of rewarding the former with a Jewish homeland in a Muslim-free Palestine.
As for the present, Breivik estimates that about three-quarters of European and American Jews, and about half of Israeli Jews, "support multiculturalism"; he urges fellow nationalists to "embrace the remaining loyal Jews as brothers rather than repeating the mistake of" the Nazis. What to do with today's "disloyal" Jews, he does not say.
Anti-Defamation League director Abraham H. Foxman has written that Breivik's professed pro-Zionism is a reminder to "be wary of those whose love for the Jewish people is born out of hatred of Muslims or Arabs."
There's no shortage of such false friends these days. In England, the once-rabidly anti-Jewish British National Party, led by an unrepentant Holocaust denier, has recast itself in an anti-Muslim, Zionist-friendly image. The English Defense League, whose "protests" include such tactics as yelling "Muslim scum" at women in headscarves and invading Asian-owned shops, has also taken part in pro-Zionist demonstrations. (England's premier Jewish group, the Board of Jewish Deputies, has firmly rejected such "support.") Ironically, the EDL's main American champion, Muslim-baiting blogger Pamela Geller, has recently voiced alarm over the growth of anti-Semitism in the group's ranks.
Meanwhile, in the anti-Israel camp, quite a few would gladly tar all Zionist views with anti-Muslim hate. Loonwatch.com, a website that focuses on exposing Islamophobia -- and has run intelligent, well-argued rebuttals of extreme anti-Islam propaganda -- has also posted items that portray such extremism as virtually part and parcel of Zionism.
Sometimes, such links are concocted. Last October, England's Jewish Chronicle ran an Internet poll on whether rabbis should work with the EDL. (The answer was a resounding no.) Anti-Zionist blogger Terry Greenstein and York Palestine Solidarity Campaign Chairman Terry Gallogly were caught bragging online about trying to rig the poll for the EDL in order to embarrass the Zionists.
Yes, some Zionists have made statements about Muslims that amount to bigotry, or at least to offensive generalizations. Disturbingly, comments defending Breivik's views have cropped up on Israeli online forums. Such ugly sentiments may be explained in the context of ethnic and religious tensions in Israel, but they cannot be condoned -- any more than anti-Semitism among Arabs and Muslims can be excused by resentment of Israeli policies.
Therein lies the rub: Talk of Zionism and Islamophobia inevitably raises the specter of the far more violent, vastly more rampant Jew-bashing rhetoric in the much of the Arab and Muslim media today.
Unfortunately, not many prominent Muslims have condemned this hate speech. Moreover, some Western leftists have excused Muslim anti-Semitism as a reaction to Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. A few years ago, the British Muslim Council boycotted commemorations of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz because the ceremony did not include a tribute to victims of Israeli "genocide." American left-wing blogger and columnist Eric Alterman opined that it was "morally idiotic" to expect Arabs to honor Jewish suffering "while Jews, in the form of Israel and its supporters -- and in this I include myself -- are causing much of theirs." Actually, what's "morally idiotic" is to make excuses for racial and religious hatred.
Israel's supporters should avoid dubious alliances that deepen Jewish-Muslim polarization. Critics of anti-Muslim bigotry should clean house.
At least 109 killed today in Syria’s Hama, activist group says
From: NOW Lebanon
CNN said on Thursday that Avaaz, a global activist group, said that at least 109 people died in and around the Syrian city of Hama today, adding that Avaaz cited a medical source.
"The brutality continues in Hama on the fourth day of Ramadan. Communication with the city and surrounding area is very difficult as the electricity supply has been cut off," Avaaz said.
"However, Avaaz has been in touch with a medical source who confirms that 109 people have been killed since the early hours of the morning. Avaaz has been told that more have been injured and bodies are lying in the streets as ambulances and private vehicles are unable to get through."
One resident who spoke to CNN by satellite phone said injured people have died in hospitals because there is no electricity in the facilities.
Residents reported a breakdown and cutoff in communications and electricity accompanying the siege, and said the military was bombing the city.
The resident said entrances of the city are blocked, with no one getting in or out, adding that snipers are deployed across the city.
“People who try to leave the city are being shot,” he also said, adding that “he was told there was ‘genocide’ in one particular area of the city.”
CNN said on Thursday that Avaaz, a global activist group, said that at least 109 people died in and around the Syrian city of Hama today, adding that Avaaz cited a medical source.
"The brutality continues in Hama on the fourth day of Ramadan. Communication with the city and surrounding area is very difficult as the electricity supply has been cut off," Avaaz said.
"However, Avaaz has been in touch with a medical source who confirms that 109 people have been killed since the early hours of the morning. Avaaz has been told that more have been injured and bodies are lying in the streets as ambulances and private vehicles are unable to get through."
One resident who spoke to CNN by satellite phone said injured people have died in hospitals because there is no electricity in the facilities.
Residents reported a breakdown and cutoff in communications and electricity accompanying the siege, and said the military was bombing the city.
The resident said entrances of the city are blocked, with no one getting in or out, adding that snipers are deployed across the city.
“People who try to leave the city are being shot,” he also said, adding that “he was told there was ‘genocide’ in one particular area of the city.”
Bulgaria Becomes the Latest Ally to Get the Obama Treatment
From: Commentary Magazine
In what’s becoming something of a pattern for the Obama administration, the way we’re conducting relations with Bulgaria is increasingly indefensible. Sofia is a NATO ally, an EU member state and has contributed troops to our missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. But–like so many other allies who made a point of supporting us in the early years of the Global War on Terror–treatment at the hands of U.S. Ambassador James Warlick has fallen somewhere between condescending neglect and active alienation.
Frustration with Warlick spans the the political spectrum. Things got so bad a few months ago that someone started a new media initiative calling for “A Day Without Warlick.” When asked about the campaign, the ambassador “laughed and pointed out it was part of democracy, which is a marvelous thing.” The dripping paternalism was about as well-received as you’d expect.
Last April, Warlick blasted the independent Bulgarian judiciary for dishonesty and corruption, adding in the process that Prime Minister Boyko Borisov’s center-right coalition needed to “pay special attention” to their own laws. When asked to walk back his attack, Warlick very pointedly declined, insisting he had just been trying to “provoke a discussion.”
Sometimes there’s a purpose behind the Obama administration’s diplomatic offensives against democratically-elected allied governments. There are times when the White House prefers dealing with a country’s opposition and tries to unseat ruling coalitions. But Warlick has not limited himself to attacking the sitting GERB party.
He’s also engaged in extended feuds with Bulgaria’s powerful center-left Socialist opposition — the Socialist former Interior Minister recently lashed out at him as “trash” and demanded his recall with the leader of the hard-right Ataka party. He recently took a meeting with breakaway opposition MPs from across the political spectrum and was reported to have “expressed his admiration of the independent MPs for the bravery to part ways” with their parties.
That accounts for Bulgaria’s right, center and left — an alienation hat trick that would be difficult to pull off even if you were trying — plus the top figures of the Bulgarian Supreme Court and Parliament.
That’s a problem. If regional dynamics continue unfolding the way they’re going to continue unfolding, Bulgaria is set to become a literal front line in a realigned geopolitical order. Sofia’s support for the West has already made it a target for jihadist incitement, with IslamOnline accusing Bulgarians of assisting in “many episodes of ethnic cleansing by the crusaders.” A Wikileaks cable concluded that “Bulgaria’s participation in U.S.-led action in Iraq and Afghanistan has increased its profile as a potential target for Islamic terrorist groups” and that “Islamic extremism in Bulgaria is a very real concern.” Last year, national security forces raided and broke up extremist groups involved in the financing of more than 150 mosques. And so on.
The more pressing geopolitical issue is how the region will respond to the increasingly open neo-Ottoman ambitions of AKP-dominated Turkey. Ankara has indicated it considers the presence of Bulgarian-Turkish Muslims on Bulgarian soil to be a justification for interfering in Bulgaria’s internal affairs. That population is a leftover from the blood-soaked Ottoman occupation that included some of the 19th century’s worst atrocities, from the the Batak massacre of 5,000 civilians to a broader campaign of mass slaughter the New York Times identified as the horror of the century. Instead of showing circumspection about the near-genocidal colonization of parts of Bulgaria, earlier this year, Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister committed Ankara to supporting Bulgarian Turks in “preserving [their] ethnic roots.”
Turkey’s regional ambitions are unlikely to erupt into armed hostility even in the medium term – although the Cyprus situation counsels caution – but it’s easy to imagine a scenario where Ankara triggers a diplomatic crisis by backing border villages that suddenly announce strong inclinations toward “self-determination.”
Even if a flashpoint never emerges between Bulgaria and Turkey, the tide of anti-American and anti-Western sentiment in Turkey will force us to look to Bulgaria as a key regional ally. Sofia is already offering to host NATO missile defense assets that Turkey seems set to reject, something we suddenly need as we try to build a missile defense architecture in Eastern Europe. As our alliances in the Middle East crumble, Bulgaria might be as close to that critical part of the world as we can get our bases and some of our assets.
Frustration with Warlick spans the the political spectrum. Things got so bad a few months ago that someone started a new media initiative calling for “A Day Without Warlick.” When asked about the campaign, the ambassador “laughed and pointed out it was part of democracy, which is a marvelous thing.” The dripping paternalism was about as well-received as you’d expect.
Last April, Warlick blasted the independent Bulgarian judiciary for dishonesty and corruption, adding in the process that Prime Minister Boyko Borisov’s center-right coalition needed to “pay special attention” to their own laws. When asked to walk back his attack, Warlick very pointedly declined, insisting he had just been trying to “provoke a discussion.”
Sometimes there’s a purpose behind the Obama administration’s diplomatic offensives against democratically-elected allied governments. There are times when the White House prefers dealing with a country’s opposition and tries to unseat ruling coalitions. But Warlick has not limited himself to attacking the sitting GERB party.
He’s also engaged in extended feuds with Bulgaria’s powerful center-left Socialist opposition — the Socialist former Interior Minister recently lashed out at him as “trash” and demanded his recall with the leader of the hard-right Ataka party. He recently took a meeting with breakaway opposition MPs from across the political spectrum and was reported to have “expressed his admiration of the independent MPs for the bravery to part ways” with their parties.
That accounts for Bulgaria’s right, center and left — an alienation hat trick that would be difficult to pull off even if you were trying — plus the top figures of the Bulgarian Supreme Court and Parliament.
That’s a problem. If regional dynamics continue unfolding the way they’re going to continue unfolding, Bulgaria is set to become a literal front line in a realigned geopolitical order. Sofia’s support for the West has already made it a target for jihadist incitement, with IslamOnline accusing Bulgarians of assisting in “many episodes of ethnic cleansing by the crusaders.” A Wikileaks cable concluded that “Bulgaria’s participation in U.S.-led action in Iraq and Afghanistan has increased its profile as a potential target for Islamic terrorist groups” and that “Islamic extremism in Bulgaria is a very real concern.” Last year, national security forces raided and broke up extremist groups involved in the financing of more than 150 mosques. And so on.
The more pressing geopolitical issue is how the region will respond to the increasingly open neo-Ottoman ambitions of AKP-dominated Turkey. Ankara has indicated it considers the presence of Bulgarian-Turkish Muslims on Bulgarian soil to be a justification for interfering in Bulgaria’s internal affairs. That population is a leftover from the blood-soaked Ottoman occupation that included some of the 19th century’s worst atrocities, from the the Batak massacre of 5,000 civilians to a broader campaign of mass slaughter the New York Times identified as the horror of the century. Instead of showing circumspection about the near-genocidal colonization of parts of Bulgaria, earlier this year, Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister committed Ankara to supporting Bulgarian Turks in “preserving [their] ethnic roots.”
Turkey’s regional ambitions are unlikely to erupt into armed hostility even in the medium term – although the Cyprus situation counsels caution – but it’s easy to imagine a scenario where Ankara triggers a diplomatic crisis by backing border villages that suddenly announce strong inclinations toward “self-determination.”
Even if a flashpoint never emerges between Bulgaria and Turkey, the tide of anti-American and anti-Western sentiment in Turkey will force us to look to Bulgaria as a key regional ally. Sofia is already offering to host NATO missile defense assets that Turkey seems set to reject, something we suddenly need as we try to build a missile defense architecture in Eastern Europe. As our alliances in the Middle East crumble, Bulgaria might be as close to that critical part of the world as we can get our bases and some of our assets.
Birth control plan: Conscience vs. special interests
From: Washington Examiner
President Obama this week used his health care law to hand a lucrative special favor to two industries that have ardently supported his party: Planned Parenthood and the drug industry.
The largesse came in the form of a rule proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services that would require all new insurance plans to cover the entire cost of all forms of prescription contraception -- including those that also act as abortion drugs.
This free-pills-for-all proposal embodies two dark themes of the Obama era: cronyism and trampling on the freedom of conscience.
Once again, Obama, who pretends to be battling the special interests, is rewarding powerful lobbies that support him. Even worse, the federal rule, which would effectively force everyone to purchase insurance that covers abortifacient contraceptives, also reveals the true shape of the Culture War in America: The Left uses the brutal tool of the government to impose its morality on everyone, forcing religious conservatives to act against conscience, all the while howling about imminent "theocracy."
Pharmaceuticals are the quintessential "special interest." Drugmakers have spent $2.2 billion on lobbying since 1998, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, more than any other industry. In the Obama era, the drug industry's $635 million lobbying tab exceeds that of Wall Street and the oil and gas industry, combined.
For the 2010 election, as a reward for passing Obamacare, Big Pharma spent millions in ads boosting vulnerable Democratic senators including Harry Reid. Obamacare subsidized the drug companies in many ways, but it's hard to get better than this "free contraception" rule. Obamacare requires individuals to carry insurance and forces large employers to insure their workers. It also prohibits insurance companies from turning down applicants, and subsidizes more people's insurance.
Finally, Obamacare will force all insurers to fully cover all prescription contraceptives and not charge a co-pay. So everyone has to buy insurance, and everyone's insurance has to cover contraception. Government has become a magical money machine for drugmakers.
Planned Parenthood, intimately tied to the Democratic Party's money machine, is another prime beneficiary of Obama's proposed rule. Planned Parenthood has in the past set up special profitable arrangements with drugmakers such as Barr Pharmaceuticals, which sold the Plan B morning-after pill (an abortifacient).
HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has a long and lucrative relationship with the drug industry. As governor of Kansas, she supported subsidies for embryo research and, in turn, received more than $400,000 in backing from a biotech industry group.
But more troubling than the special-interest collusion with government is the assault on economic freedom and freedom of conscience.
The rule would force folks who don't want contraception insurance to pay for contraception. Acting of their own free will, infertile couples, gay people, celibate people or postmenopausal women would not buy contraception insurance. Obama's mandate -- like similar mandates in 28 states -- unnecessarily drives up these people's health insurance.
But with prescription contraception, conscience enters the picture.
First, there is the (admittedly small) minority of observant Catholics who follow Rome's teaching that contraception subverts the procreative nature of marital sex. While most health care plans cover contraception, Obamacare's rules and proposed rules would basically make it illegal for someone to not pay for contraception.
But the proposed rule, promulgated under Obamacare's mandate for "free" preventive care, doesn't just cover the Pill, it also covers "morning-after" contraceptives that sometimes work by killing a fertilized egg that has already begun cell division. In other words, these are also abortion pills.
Plan B's manufacturers admitted the drug could "prevent pregnancy" by stopping a zygote from implanting on its mother's uterus (once implanted, the zygote is called an embryo).
The new "morning-after" pill being promoted by Planned Parenthood, called "Ella" is closer to the avowed abortion pill, RU-486, than to Plan B. While Ella can delay ovulation, and thus prevent fertilization, it also can prevent a zygote from implanting, or -- to use the FDA's word -- "affect" implantation. What does that mean? "Ella starves an implanted embryo to death," Anna Franzonello, attorney for Americans United for Life, tells me. The drug, like RU-486, blocks progesterone, the chemical the uterus needs in order to host an embryo.
The administration's proposed rule has a conscience exception for religious institutions, but "religious institution" is defined so narrowly that it wouldn't include a Catholic school -- though a seminary would probably be protected.
President Obama this week used his health care law to hand a lucrative special favor to two industries that have ardently supported his party: Planned Parenthood and the drug industry.
The largesse came in the form of a rule proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services that would require all new insurance plans to cover the entire cost of all forms of prescription contraception -- including those that also act as abortion drugs.
This free-pills-for-all proposal embodies two dark themes of the Obama era: cronyism and trampling on the freedom of conscience.
Once again, Obama, who pretends to be battling the special interests, is rewarding powerful lobbies that support him. Even worse, the federal rule, which would effectively force everyone to purchase insurance that covers abortifacient contraceptives, also reveals the true shape of the Culture War in America: The Left uses the brutal tool of the government to impose its morality on everyone, forcing religious conservatives to act against conscience, all the while howling about imminent "theocracy."
Pharmaceuticals are the quintessential "special interest." Drugmakers have spent $2.2 billion on lobbying since 1998, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, more than any other industry. In the Obama era, the drug industry's $635 million lobbying tab exceeds that of Wall Street and the oil and gas industry, combined.
For the 2010 election, as a reward for passing Obamacare, Big Pharma spent millions in ads boosting vulnerable Democratic senators including Harry Reid. Obamacare subsidized the drug companies in many ways, but it's hard to get better than this "free contraception" rule. Obamacare requires individuals to carry insurance and forces large employers to insure their workers. It also prohibits insurance companies from turning down applicants, and subsidizes more people's insurance.
Finally, Obamacare will force all insurers to fully cover all prescription contraceptives and not charge a co-pay. So everyone has to buy insurance, and everyone's insurance has to cover contraception. Government has become a magical money machine for drugmakers.
Planned Parenthood, intimately tied to the Democratic Party's money machine, is another prime beneficiary of Obama's proposed rule. Planned Parenthood has in the past set up special profitable arrangements with drugmakers such as Barr Pharmaceuticals, which sold the Plan B morning-after pill (an abortifacient).
HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has a long and lucrative relationship with the drug industry. As governor of Kansas, she supported subsidies for embryo research and, in turn, received more than $400,000 in backing from a biotech industry group.
But more troubling than the special-interest collusion with government is the assault on economic freedom and freedom of conscience.
The rule would force folks who don't want contraception insurance to pay for contraception. Acting of their own free will, infertile couples, gay people, celibate people or postmenopausal women would not buy contraception insurance. Obama's mandate -- like similar mandates in 28 states -- unnecessarily drives up these people's health insurance.
But with prescription contraception, conscience enters the picture.
First, there is the (admittedly small) minority of observant Catholics who follow Rome's teaching that contraception subverts the procreative nature of marital sex. While most health care plans cover contraception, Obamacare's rules and proposed rules would basically make it illegal for someone to not pay for contraception.
But the proposed rule, promulgated under Obamacare's mandate for "free" preventive care, doesn't just cover the Pill, it also covers "morning-after" contraceptives that sometimes work by killing a fertilized egg that has already begun cell division. In other words, these are also abortion pills.
Plan B's manufacturers admitted the drug could "prevent pregnancy" by stopping a zygote from implanting on its mother's uterus (once implanted, the zygote is called an embryo).
The new "morning-after" pill being promoted by Planned Parenthood, called "Ella" is closer to the avowed abortion pill, RU-486, than to Plan B. While Ella can delay ovulation, and thus prevent fertilization, it also can prevent a zygote from implanting, or -- to use the FDA's word -- "affect" implantation. What does that mean? "Ella starves an implanted embryo to death," Anna Franzonello, attorney for Americans United for Life, tells me. The drug, like RU-486, blocks progesterone, the chemical the uterus needs in order to host an embryo.
The administration's proposed rule has a conscience exception for religious institutions, but "religious institution" is defined so narrowly that it wouldn't include a Catholic school -- though a seminary would probably be protected.
Time to Stockpile Lucky Charms?
From: The Weekly Standard
The Obama administration is after your Lucky Charms, or at least your children’s. The public comment period closed on July 14 for a set of “voluntary” guidelines for the marketing of food to children. If adopted, these rules will transform the advertising of breakfast cereals.
Put forward by an interagency working group, the guidelines will establish nutritional standards that most cereals flunk—and not just those of the “Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs” variety. Corn Flakes will not be advertisable to children, along with Raisin Bran, Special K, Rice Krispies, and Wheaties. Plain Cheerios squeak by the proposed 2016 rules but fall foul of the “ultimate goal” for sodium effective in 2021.
While cereals are the most obvious targets of the guidelines, all foods marketed to children will have to meet the proposed nutritional standards. Many don’t. Peanut butter (both smooth and crunchy) has too much saturated fat. Jelly has too much sugar. Forget about apple-cinnamon instant oatmeal and Mott’s apple sauce.
These foods may still appear in grocery stores, but not in brightly colored packages adorned with cartoon characters. Toucan Sam, Cap’n Crunch, and Tony the Tiger will have to retire.
The definition of “marketing to children” is broad. A television show is deemed “targeted to children” if 20 percent of the audience is 18 or under. Any child-oriented theme, like education or parenting or T-ball, cannot be mentioned in the advertising of foods that don’t meet the standards. Frosted Flakes will no longer be allowed to sponsor Little League baseball. The Coca Cola Company will have to give up its Coca Cola Scholars Foundation (which provides $3.4 million a year in scholarships) or perhaps rename it after one of the company’s bottled waters. General Mills’s “Box Tops for Education” program will be barred from kid-friendly cereals. The slogan “Choosy moms choose Jif” will be forbidden as too “targeted.”
Martin Redish, a law professor at Northwestern University, isn’t buying this. He argues that if adopted, the regulations will improperly restrict constitutionally protected speech.
The agencies defend the guidelines, he says, by calling them merely a tool for “self-regulation.” But Redish says they will be anything but voluntary. If you don’t “self-regulate” you’ll attract the ire of the working group’s member agencies: the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Agriculture, and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
Flouting the guidelines may bring anything from public shaming by the White House to investigations and class action lawsuits. What food company wants to get on the FDA’s bad side?
More important, Redish foresees an inevitable move toward compulsory regulation. He points to a 2010 White House report on childhood obesity which states, “If voluntary efforts to limit the marketing of less healthy foods . . . to children do not yield substantial results, the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] could consider . . . modernizing rules” for limiting ads.
Redish also quotes a high-ranking FTC official as saying that without “greater strides” under the “voluntary” guidelines, Congress is likely to “decide for all of us what additional steps are required.”
Maybe, but a group called the Sensible Food Policy Coalition is pushing back. Former Obama White House communications director Anita Dunn has teamed up with 17 companies, including Kellogg, General Mills, and PepsiCo, to counter the proposed rules.
“I don’t want to use the term ‘overreach,’ ” Dunn told me, pausing for effect, “but the broad nature of the proposed regulations, both in terms of who they apply to, this gigantic universe of people, what they consider ‘children’s programming,’ the unworkable, impracticable standards they use in their nutritional values—that’s the issue.”
When asked if her work with the coalition was at odds with her former roles on the Obama team, she said the regulation of children’s food advertising had nothing to do with Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign.
It’s not a First Lady thing, Dunn said, “It’s a Tom Harkin thing,” adding that she’s known the senator, an Iowa Democrat, since 1984, and “he’s become an unbelievable ideologue.”
Dunn’s coalition put forward their own guidelines on July 14, just in time for inclusion in the official comments, which the working group is now reviewing. The counter-guidelines were received warmly by the FTC chairman, who called them “exactly the type of initiative the commission had in mind.”
“I think everybody is looking for ways to address the significant childhood obesity problem in this country,” Dunn said.
Washington seems to be addressing this the way it addresses so many things: poorly, and with a mess of top-down regulations.
China and Cyber WArfare
From: Vanity Fair.com
Lying there in the junk-mail folder, in the spammy mess of mortgage offers and erectile-dysfunction drug ads, an e-mail from an associate with a subject line that looked legitimate caught the man’s eye. The subject line said “2011 Recruitment Plan.” It was late winter of 2011. The man clicked on the message, downloaded the attached Excel spreadsheet file, and unwittingly set in motion a chain of events allowing hackers to raid the computer networks of his employer, RSA. RSA is the security division of the high-tech company EMC. Its products protect computer networks at the White House, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, most top defense contractors, and a majority of Fortune 500 corporations.
The parent company disclosed the breach on March 17 in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The hack gravely undermined the reputation of RSA’s popular SecurID security service. As spring gave way to summer, bloggers and computer-security experts found evidence that the attack on RSA had come from China. They also linked the RSA attack to the penetration of computer networks at some of RSA’s most powerful defense-contractor clients—among them, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and L-3 Communications. Few details of these episodes have been made public.
The RSA and defense-contractor hacks are among the latest battles in a decade-long spy war. Hackers from many countries have been exfiltrating—that is, stealing—intellectual property from American corporations and the U.S. government on a massive scale, and Chinese hackers are among the main culprits. Because virtual attacks can be routed through computer servers anywhere in the world, it is almost impossible to attribute any hack with total certainty. Dozens of nations have highly developed industrial cyber-espionage programs, including American allies such as France and Israel. And because the People’s Republic of China is such a massive entity, it is impossible to know how much Chinese hacking is done on explicit orders from the government. In some cases, the evidence suggests that government and military groups are executing the attacks themselves. In others, Chinese authorities are merely turning a blind eye to illegal activities that are good for China’s economy and bad for America’s.
Lying there in the junk-mail folder, in the spammy mess of mortgage offers and erectile-dysfunction drug ads, an e-mail from an associate with a subject line that looked legitimate caught the man’s eye. The subject line said “2011 Recruitment Plan.” It was late winter of 2011. The man clicked on the message, downloaded the attached Excel spreadsheet file, and unwittingly set in motion a chain of events allowing hackers to raid the computer networks of his employer, RSA. RSA is the security division of the high-tech company EMC. Its products protect computer networks at the White House, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, most top defense contractors, and a majority of Fortune 500 corporations.
The parent company disclosed the breach on March 17 in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The hack gravely undermined the reputation of RSA’s popular SecurID security service. As spring gave way to summer, bloggers and computer-security experts found evidence that the attack on RSA had come from China. They also linked the RSA attack to the penetration of computer networks at some of RSA’s most powerful defense-contractor clients—among them, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and L-3 Communications. Few details of these episodes have been made public.
The RSA and defense-contractor hacks are among the latest battles in a decade-long spy war. Hackers from many countries have been exfiltrating—that is, stealing—intellectual property from American corporations and the U.S. government on a massive scale, and Chinese hackers are among the main culprits. Because virtual attacks can be routed through computer servers anywhere in the world, it is almost impossible to attribute any hack with total certainty. Dozens of nations have highly developed industrial cyber-espionage programs, including American allies such as France and Israel. And because the People’s Republic of China is such a massive entity, it is impossible to know how much Chinese hacking is done on explicit orders from the government. In some cases, the evidence suggests that government and military groups are executing the attacks themselves. In others, Chinese authorities are merely turning a blind eye to illegal activities that are good for China’s economy and bad for America’s.
Wednesday, August 03, 2011
U.S. Move to Create Envoy for Religious Freedom Seen as Meddling by Islamists
From: CNSnews.com
A vote in the U.S. House of Representatives to establish a special envoy to promote religious freedom in parts of the Middle East and South Asia is causing ripples in Egypt, where a Muslim Brotherhood leader says the decision amounts to more U.S. “interference” in Egypt’s affairs.
Concerns about the plight of Egypt’s Christian minority – along with those in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan in particular – featured prominently in hearings leading up to the passage of the Near East and South Central Asia Religious Freedom Act on Friday.
The Senate has yet to vote on a related measure, but passage is considered likely. The Senate bill is sponsored by Republican Sen. Roy Blunt (Mo.) and co-sponsored by a Republican and two Democrats.
The legislation calls for the president to appoint an envoy, serving within the State Department at the ambassadorial level, to promote religious freedom for minorities in specified countries in the Middle East and South and Central Asia, recommending appropriate responses to violations.
The envoy will also be expected to support minority communities, to work with governments abroad to address discriminatory laws, and to represent the U.S. government in contacts with foreign governments and organizations including the United Nations.
Since the toppling of former President Hosni Mubarak, Coptic Christians and churches have come under attack and faced harassment and threats, prompting fears for the future as elections draw nearer.
On Tuesday, the vice president of the Muslim Brotherhood’s “Freedom and Justice Party,” Rafiq Habib, criticized the plan to appoint an envoy.
The Muslim Brotherhood Web site cited him as saying that U.S. lawmakers’ concerns for the safety of Copts and other minorities in Egypt were uncalled for and that Egyptians were “capable of handling their affairs without external interference.”
Habib was quoted further as saying that “the people will no longer accept meddling in their affairs and will not accept other entities to dictate for them how to decide for their future.”
Attacks, bombings, apostasy and blasphemy laws
Passage of the Near East and South Central Asia Religious Freedom Act followed hearings of the congressional Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission in January and March focusing on persecution of Christians in Egypt and Iraq as well as other religious minorities including Baha’is and Ahmadis in Iran, Pakistan and elsewhere.
The legislation names 31 mostly Muslim-majority countries – 18 in the Near East and 13 in South and Central Asia – where the envoy should focus his or her attention, but calls for priority to be given to four countries – Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
It points to bombings and other attacks against Christians in Egypt and Iraq; apostasy cases in Afghanistan; and abuse of blasphemy laws in Pakistan, including the case of Asia Bibi, the first Pakistani Christian woman to be sentenced to death for “blaspheming” Mohammed.
The text also refers briefly to anti-Semitism, citing “Holocaust glorification” in Middle East media.
Speaking on the House floor ahead of the vote Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), who authored the bill, said persecution of Christians was rampant in Afghanistan and Pakistan – “countries where the United States has invested its treasure and the lives of countless brave American soldiers.”
Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) called the fate of Egypt’s Christian minority “the bellwether of the rights for religious minorities in the Middle East.”
Lead Democratic sponsor Rep. Anna Eshoo (Calif.), a Chaldean Catholic, said that “as the daughter of Assyrian and Armenian immigrants who fled the slaughter of Christians in the Middle East, it’s terrifying to see history repeating itself in today’s Iraq. I'm hopeful that the special envoy created by this legislation will elevate the crisis of the Middle East’s religious minorities, giving them the diplomatic attention they so badly need and deserve.”
(A car bomb exploded outside a Syrian Catholic church in Iraq’s northern Iraq city of Kirkuk on Tuesday, injuring at least 23 people. Two car bombs were found and defused at separate Christian locations in the area.)
Worst places in the world to be a Christian
The 31 countries identified in the religious freedom legislation are:
In the Middle East – Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, as well as the West Bank and Gaza; and in South and Central Asia – Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
Many of those countries are considered by religious freedom advocates to be among the most dangerous places to be a Christian or other religious minority.
On the 2011 Open Doors USA’s World Watch list, 12 of the top 20 countries named are among those cited in the legislation. They are – in descending order of the assessed level of persecution – Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Maldives, Yemen, Iraq, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Bhutan, Turkmenistan, Qatar and Egypt.
A vote in the U.S. House of Representatives to establish a special envoy to promote religious freedom in parts of the Middle East and South Asia is causing ripples in Egypt, where a Muslim Brotherhood leader says the decision amounts to more U.S. “interference” in Egypt’s affairs.
Concerns about the plight of Egypt’s Christian minority – along with those in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan in particular – featured prominently in hearings leading up to the passage of the Near East and South Central Asia Religious Freedom Act on Friday.
The Senate has yet to vote on a related measure, but passage is considered likely. The Senate bill is sponsored by Republican Sen. Roy Blunt (Mo.) and co-sponsored by a Republican and two Democrats.
The legislation calls for the president to appoint an envoy, serving within the State Department at the ambassadorial level, to promote religious freedom for minorities in specified countries in the Middle East and South and Central Asia, recommending appropriate responses to violations.
The envoy will also be expected to support minority communities, to work with governments abroad to address discriminatory laws, and to represent the U.S. government in contacts with foreign governments and organizations including the United Nations.
Since the toppling of former President Hosni Mubarak, Coptic Christians and churches have come under attack and faced harassment and threats, prompting fears for the future as elections draw nearer.
On Tuesday, the vice president of the Muslim Brotherhood’s “Freedom and Justice Party,” Rafiq Habib, criticized the plan to appoint an envoy.
The Muslim Brotherhood Web site cited him as saying that U.S. lawmakers’ concerns for the safety of Copts and other minorities in Egypt were uncalled for and that Egyptians were “capable of handling their affairs without external interference.”
Habib was quoted further as saying that “the people will no longer accept meddling in their affairs and will not accept other entities to dictate for them how to decide for their future.”
Attacks, bombings, apostasy and blasphemy laws
Passage of the Near East and South Central Asia Religious Freedom Act followed hearings of the congressional Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission in January and March focusing on persecution of Christians in Egypt and Iraq as well as other religious minorities including Baha’is and Ahmadis in Iran, Pakistan and elsewhere.
The legislation names 31 mostly Muslim-majority countries – 18 in the Near East and 13 in South and Central Asia – where the envoy should focus his or her attention, but calls for priority to be given to four countries – Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
It points to bombings and other attacks against Christians in Egypt and Iraq; apostasy cases in Afghanistan; and abuse of blasphemy laws in Pakistan, including the case of Asia Bibi, the first Pakistani Christian woman to be sentenced to death for “blaspheming” Mohammed.
The text also refers briefly to anti-Semitism, citing “Holocaust glorification” in Middle East media.
Speaking on the House floor ahead of the vote Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), who authored the bill, said persecution of Christians was rampant in Afghanistan and Pakistan – “countries where the United States has invested its treasure and the lives of countless brave American soldiers.”
Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) called the fate of Egypt’s Christian minority “the bellwether of the rights for religious minorities in the Middle East.”
Lead Democratic sponsor Rep. Anna Eshoo (Calif.), a Chaldean Catholic, said that “as the daughter of Assyrian and Armenian immigrants who fled the slaughter of Christians in the Middle East, it’s terrifying to see history repeating itself in today’s Iraq. I'm hopeful that the special envoy created by this legislation will elevate the crisis of the Middle East’s religious minorities, giving them the diplomatic attention they so badly need and deserve.”
(A car bomb exploded outside a Syrian Catholic church in Iraq’s northern Iraq city of Kirkuk on Tuesday, injuring at least 23 people. Two car bombs were found and defused at separate Christian locations in the area.)
Worst places in the world to be a Christian
The 31 countries identified in the religious freedom legislation are:
In the Middle East – Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, as well as the West Bank and Gaza; and in South and Central Asia – Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
Many of those countries are considered by religious freedom advocates to be among the most dangerous places to be a Christian or other religious minority.
On the 2011 Open Doors USA’s World Watch list, 12 of the top 20 countries named are among those cited in the legislation. They are – in descending order of the assessed level of persecution – Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Maldives, Yemen, Iraq, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Bhutan, Turkmenistan, Qatar and Egypt.
Desperately Seeking Skills
From: NationalJournal.com
Eric Spiegel dwells in an alternate universe. The hulking 53-year-old Ohioan, a former Harvard University offensive tackle, follows the headlines from Washington about America’s “jobless recovery” and the agonizingly high unemployment rate of 9.2 percent. But that’s almost the mirror opposite of the problem that faces Spiegel, president of Siemens Corp., the U.S. subsidiary of the German engineering conglomerate. He has jobs galore to offer, more than 3,000 of them nationwide, but he can’t find people with the skills to do them. He’s not just looking for engineering Ph.D.’s, either. He needs hundreds of technicians, welders, and machinists. He has even hired a crew of headhunters to scour the nation for prospects. “We didn’t have to do that a couple of years ago,” he says. “But our human-resource managers are under a lot of pressure from the businesses to fill these positions.”
So, in September, Siemens is launching a new strategy that draws on a very old practice from its parent company in Germany: apprenticeships. In Charlotte, N.C., where Siemens is building the nation’s largest gas-turbine plant and hopes to hire some 800 people next year, the company is opening a pilot program that will pluck non-college-track seniors from nearby Olympic High School; Siemens will pay them an hourly wage to work part-time and will also pay their way through a two-year college program at nearby Central Piedmont Community College.
Why? Because existing technical and vocational schools were not teaching the precision machining skills needed to make the steam turbines and electrical generators, says Mark Pringle, director of the company’s operations in Charlotte. Mike Panigel, Siemens’s chief of human resources, adds, “The bulk of the people, we’ll end up employing; and to those who have not proved to have the necessary skills, we can at least say, ‘You’ve been trained.’ ”
The challenge that Siemens faces highlights the nation’s large and growing “skills mismatch,” a widening gulf between the businesses that are hiring and the skills of millions of Americans who are looking for work. A big debate is raging about how much of today’s unemployment results from the skills mismatch. It’s clear that the Great Recession contributed most to the high jobless rate, despite the “recovery” that officially began two years ago. The weak recovery is nothing less than a total inversion of the debt-inflated consumer bubble of the 2000s.
Consumers, with their wealth reduced and their incomes often stagnant or falling, are reluctant to buy, and stores are unable to sell. Not surprisingly, employers are reluctant to hire.
But beneath that overarching problem, one startling figure jumps out. Educated workers with the right skills are, for the most part, doing all right—far better, at least, than those with little education. “Since the start of the recovery, the economy has created something like 1.5 million to 2 million net new jobs, and of these the vast majority have been ‘high-skilled,’ ” says Susan Lund, head of research for the McKinsey Global Institute.
The most recent population survey by the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics offered this striking contrast: Since the recovery began producing jobs in January 2010, the United States has suffered a net loss of 500,000 jobs among people with high school diplomas or less, but a net gain of 1.2 million jobs for college grads. “During the entire recession, the unemployment rate for college graduates never exceeded 5 percent, while the unemployment rate for people without a high school degree soared to 15 percent,” Lund says. Of the 9.2 percent of Americans who are currently unemployed, 78 percent did not finish high school.
According to a study of major economies by the ManpowerGroup, a Milwaukee-based workforce consultant, 52 percent of employers in the United States complain that they can’t find the right talent—even at a time of sky-high unemployment. That’s a much higher share than the global average of 34 percent.
More alarmingly, the statistics suggest that the skills mismatch is becoming part of a deep structural problem in the economy. Despairing of finding work, many of the least employable people are simply dropping out of the workforce and swelling the pool of the “permanent” unemployed. As of this June, 43 percent of the nation’s 14 million unemployed workers were in the ranks of long-term unemployed (defined as more than 27 weeks).
That’s the highest level since the government began compiling that data in 1948, far exceeding the previous record of 31.5 percent in 2009, when the economy was near the trough of the recession; the number is likely to be even higher by the end of this year. Even during the great “stagflation” of the 1970s, the proportion of long-term unemployed was only about 18 percent.
The problem, economists warn, is that unemployment begets unemployment as skills atrophy. In a recent analysis, the Federal Reserve Board estimated that a person who has been unemployed less than four weeks has a one-in-three chance of landing a new job within a month. For a person who has been unemployed for 27 weeks or longer, the odds drop to one in 10.
Unemployment isn’t the only result of the skills mismatch. Another is the rising income inequality between people in skilled and less-skilled jobs. That’s already a long-running trend, with real incomes stagnating for much of population and climbing sharply for those at the very top. Worse yet, McKinsey predicts that the skills gap will widen. By 2020, the institute estimates, the United States will have 1.5 million too few college grads to meet employment demands, while nearly 6 million Americans who didn’t finish high school will probably still lack work.
The Obama administration has ramped up spending on education, and it pumped money into job training through the 2009 stimulus package. But most of the added training money has dried up. Total federal spending for job training adds up to a paltry $15 billion annually—about what it was in 2002, adjusting for inflation, according to Georgetown University professor Harry Holzer. “That’s one-tenth of 1 percent of the [gross domestic product],” he says. “That’s way less than virtually any country spends on this stuff.”
Employers, along with Holzer and other analysts, complain that federal job-training programs either don’t respond to their needs or do so only by accident. Washington is spending about $20 billion annually on Pell Grants for post-secondary education, but Holzer says that the money isn’t targeted enough to make a real difference. “Those people go off to community college. They get no guidance,” he said. “They get stuck in remedial classes that they can’t get out of, and eventually they kind of drop away.”
On Capitol Hill, a few legislators are pushing for a whole new approach to job training. “Everywhere I go, businesses say, ‘We have some job openings; the problem is, we don’t have a skilled workforce,’ ” Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., told National Journal. “You go and talk to people. They’ll do anything. They want a job, but they don’t have the skills to be able to get those jobs. And it’s because communities haven’t defined how they’re going to get those jobs that are needed.”
But progress is slow, and political interest is low. Lawmakers in both parties are fixated on cutting spending.
Businesses’ failure to hire more has economists puzzled. Analysts usually cite lack of consumer demand and uncertainty about the future. Some also theorize that the housing collapse made people less mobile and created a “geographic mismatch,” because many homeowners are underwater and can’t sell their homes for enough to pay off their mortgages. Another issue, some experts say, is that employers hold all the bargaining power and have been able to keep compensation low across the board. As a result, workers have fewer “wage signals,” as economists call them, to nudge them from declining industries to rising ones.
But other important changes at the microeconomic level—in the workplace—are aggravating the effects of an anemic economy. For one thing, businesses are leery about hiring anyone but the “perfect candidate,” says Jeffrey Joerres, CEO of the ManpowerGroup. “All that does is exacerbate what’s happening. Companies are down to really analyzing all the elements of their workforce. Every position is carefully evaluated for productivity, even the janitors.”
Beyond being pickier, companies are demanding higher skills—even for jobs that once required no more than a high school diploma. “Take truck drivers,” says the Atlanta Fed’s Altig. “It used to be if a guy drove a truck, that was the end of it. Someone else would take over the other tasks. But one of the things the recession did was cause many companies to reorganize their processes. So that required people who can do multiple tasks. Truck drivers have to do paperwork. Or sales people in auto retailers—there used to be a back office to cut the finance deal. Now you’ve got to be able to do both. So for exactly the same jobs, you need a higher level of competency.”
The average sales rep today has to be much more than a Willy Loman type, “riding on a smile and a shoeshine”; he or she must also be a master of finance and product development. “Sales people are among the hardest to find,” Joerres says. “At the same time [that] their product is becoming more sophisticated to sell, you also now have to be more of a financial expert, because margins are reduced. You have to do deals yourself, do more of a consultative sell instead of just a relationship sell. Product cycles are shortened too, which means you have to refamiliarize yourself with the product catalog regularly. All of this has added to the complexity of the job.”
Nicholas Pinchuk, the CEO of Wisconsin-based Snap-on, which supplies automobile tools to 3,500 franchisees nationwide, says that as the number of computer codes in an average car has jumped from 200 in 1995 to 5,000 today, auto mechanics require the equivalent of an associate’s degree from a good vo-tech school. “Changing the headlight on a car used to be like changing a lightbulb. Now you have to apply a diagnostic tool, a kind of laptop for the car, that coordinates the lights with the control systems of the car, which for some cars means that high beams go on and off automatically or that the headlights move left and right as you go around a turn,” Pinchuk says. “Or take balancing tires. We used to be cavalier about it. But today, cars are lighter because of higher fuel economy. So tire balance is more important. You have to master the shape of the tires. Almost every tire has a high spot, and the rim has a low spot. To sense those, you need equipment skills and a general understanding of materials—for example, the different coefficients of expansion of aluminum and steel.”
With all that specificity cropping up in job descriptions, fewer young people heading into school know “what they need to study,” says Laszlo Bock, director of “people operations” at Google. “There is an information asymmetry.” So here, too, the market doesn’t seem to be adapting. And critics say that the Obama administration hasn’t put the right kind of programs in place to fix either the short-term mismatch or the longer-term college-education deficit. “We don’t even have a national jobs database,” Lund says.
Eric Spiegel dwells in an alternate universe. The hulking 53-year-old Ohioan, a former Harvard University offensive tackle, follows the headlines from Washington about America’s “jobless recovery” and the agonizingly high unemployment rate of 9.2 percent. But that’s almost the mirror opposite of the problem that faces Spiegel, president of Siemens Corp., the U.S. subsidiary of the German engineering conglomerate. He has jobs galore to offer, more than 3,000 of them nationwide, but he can’t find people with the skills to do them. He’s not just looking for engineering Ph.D.’s, either. He needs hundreds of technicians, welders, and machinists. He has even hired a crew of headhunters to scour the nation for prospects. “We didn’t have to do that a couple of years ago,” he says. “But our human-resource managers are under a lot of pressure from the businesses to fill these positions.”
So, in September, Siemens is launching a new strategy that draws on a very old practice from its parent company in Germany: apprenticeships. In Charlotte, N.C., where Siemens is building the nation’s largest gas-turbine plant and hopes to hire some 800 people next year, the company is opening a pilot program that will pluck non-college-track seniors from nearby Olympic High School; Siemens will pay them an hourly wage to work part-time and will also pay their way through a two-year college program at nearby Central Piedmont Community College.
Why? Because existing technical and vocational schools were not teaching the precision machining skills needed to make the steam turbines and electrical generators, says Mark Pringle, director of the company’s operations in Charlotte. Mike Panigel, Siemens’s chief of human resources, adds, “The bulk of the people, we’ll end up employing; and to those who have not proved to have the necessary skills, we can at least say, ‘You’ve been trained.’ ”
The challenge that Siemens faces highlights the nation’s large and growing “skills mismatch,” a widening gulf between the businesses that are hiring and the skills of millions of Americans who are looking for work. A big debate is raging about how much of today’s unemployment results from the skills mismatch. It’s clear that the Great Recession contributed most to the high jobless rate, despite the “recovery” that officially began two years ago. The weak recovery is nothing less than a total inversion of the debt-inflated consumer bubble of the 2000s.
Consumers, with their wealth reduced and their incomes often stagnant or falling, are reluctant to buy, and stores are unable to sell. Not surprisingly, employers are reluctant to hire.
But beneath that overarching problem, one startling figure jumps out. Educated workers with the right skills are, for the most part, doing all right—far better, at least, than those with little education. “Since the start of the recovery, the economy has created something like 1.5 million to 2 million net new jobs, and of these the vast majority have been ‘high-skilled,’ ” says Susan Lund, head of research for the McKinsey Global Institute.
The most recent population survey by the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics offered this striking contrast: Since the recovery began producing jobs in January 2010, the United States has suffered a net loss of 500,000 jobs among people with high school diplomas or less, but a net gain of 1.2 million jobs for college grads. “During the entire recession, the unemployment rate for college graduates never exceeded 5 percent, while the unemployment rate for people without a high school degree soared to 15 percent,” Lund says. Of the 9.2 percent of Americans who are currently unemployed, 78 percent did not finish high school.
According to a study of major economies by the ManpowerGroup, a Milwaukee-based workforce consultant, 52 percent of employers in the United States complain that they can’t find the right talent—even at a time of sky-high unemployment. That’s a much higher share than the global average of 34 percent.
More alarmingly, the statistics suggest that the skills mismatch is becoming part of a deep structural problem in the economy. Despairing of finding work, many of the least employable people are simply dropping out of the workforce and swelling the pool of the “permanent” unemployed. As of this June, 43 percent of the nation’s 14 million unemployed workers were in the ranks of long-term unemployed (defined as more than 27 weeks).
That’s the highest level since the government began compiling that data in 1948, far exceeding the previous record of 31.5 percent in 2009, when the economy was near the trough of the recession; the number is likely to be even higher by the end of this year. Even during the great “stagflation” of the 1970s, the proportion of long-term unemployed was only about 18 percent.
The problem, economists warn, is that unemployment begets unemployment as skills atrophy. In a recent analysis, the Federal Reserve Board estimated that a person who has been unemployed less than four weeks has a one-in-three chance of landing a new job within a month. For a person who has been unemployed for 27 weeks or longer, the odds drop to one in 10.
Unemployment isn’t the only result of the skills mismatch. Another is the rising income inequality between people in skilled and less-skilled jobs. That’s already a long-running trend, with real incomes stagnating for much of population and climbing sharply for those at the very top. Worse yet, McKinsey predicts that the skills gap will widen. By 2020, the institute estimates, the United States will have 1.5 million too few college grads to meet employment demands, while nearly 6 million Americans who didn’t finish high school will probably still lack work.
LIP SERVICE FROM WASHINGTON
Washington has been almost useless on this issue. The federal government’s main job-training law, the Workforce Investment Act, is a bureaucratic mess.The Obama administration has ramped up spending on education, and it pumped money into job training through the 2009 stimulus package. But most of the added training money has dried up. Total federal spending for job training adds up to a paltry $15 billion annually—about what it was in 2002, adjusting for inflation, according to Georgetown University professor Harry Holzer. “That’s one-tenth of 1 percent of the [gross domestic product],” he says. “That’s way less than virtually any country spends on this stuff.”
Employers, along with Holzer and other analysts, complain that federal job-training programs either don’t respond to their needs or do so only by accident. Washington is spending about $20 billion annually on Pell Grants for post-secondary education, but Holzer says that the money isn’t targeted enough to make a real difference. “Those people go off to community college. They get no guidance,” he said. “They get stuck in remedial classes that they can’t get out of, and eventually they kind of drop away.”
On Capitol Hill, a few legislators are pushing for a whole new approach to job training. “Everywhere I go, businesses say, ‘We have some job openings; the problem is, we don’t have a skilled workforce,’ ” Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., told National Journal. “You go and talk to people. They’ll do anything. They want a job, but they don’t have the skills to be able to get those jobs. And it’s because communities haven’t defined how they’re going to get those jobs that are needed.”
But progress is slow, and political interest is low. Lawmakers in both parties are fixated on cutting spending.
GAUGING THE MISMATCH
Economists agree that it’s nearly impossible to precisely quantify the skills problem. It may amount to no more than 2 percentage points of the 9.2 percent unemployment rate, says David Altig, director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. “The unemployment rates for people with bachelor’s degrees or higher is still over double what it was right before the recession,’’ he notes. “It was down under 2 percent. It’s still up around 4.5 percent.” Proportionally, he says, that’s not much different from the rate for those with a high school education, which was about 5 percent before the recession and is about 10 percent now. In absolute numbers of people, though, the gap is widening between those with a college education and those with a high school education or less.Businesses’ failure to hire more has economists puzzled. Analysts usually cite lack of consumer demand and uncertainty about the future. Some also theorize that the housing collapse made people less mobile and created a “geographic mismatch,” because many homeowners are underwater and can’t sell their homes for enough to pay off their mortgages. Another issue, some experts say, is that employers hold all the bargaining power and have been able to keep compensation low across the board. As a result, workers have fewer “wage signals,” as economists call them, to nudge them from declining industries to rising ones.
But other important changes at the microeconomic level—in the workplace—are aggravating the effects of an anemic economy. For one thing, businesses are leery about hiring anyone but the “perfect candidate,” says Jeffrey Joerres, CEO of the ManpowerGroup. “All that does is exacerbate what’s happening. Companies are down to really analyzing all the elements of their workforce. Every position is carefully evaluated for productivity, even the janitors.”
Beyond being pickier, companies are demanding higher skills—even for jobs that once required no more than a high school diploma. “Take truck drivers,” says the Atlanta Fed’s Altig. “It used to be if a guy drove a truck, that was the end of it. Someone else would take over the other tasks. But one of the things the recession did was cause many companies to reorganize their processes. So that required people who can do multiple tasks. Truck drivers have to do paperwork. Or sales people in auto retailers—there used to be a back office to cut the finance deal. Now you’ve got to be able to do both. So for exactly the same jobs, you need a higher level of competency.”
The average sales rep today has to be much more than a Willy Loman type, “riding on a smile and a shoeshine”; he or she must also be a master of finance and product development. “Sales people are among the hardest to find,” Joerres says. “At the same time [that] their product is becoming more sophisticated to sell, you also now have to be more of a financial expert, because margins are reduced. You have to do deals yourself, do more of a consultative sell instead of just a relationship sell. Product cycles are shortened too, which means you have to refamiliarize yourself with the product catalog regularly. All of this has added to the complexity of the job.”
Nicholas Pinchuk, the CEO of Wisconsin-based Snap-on, which supplies automobile tools to 3,500 franchisees nationwide, says that as the number of computer codes in an average car has jumped from 200 in 1995 to 5,000 today, auto mechanics require the equivalent of an associate’s degree from a good vo-tech school. “Changing the headlight on a car used to be like changing a lightbulb. Now you have to apply a diagnostic tool, a kind of laptop for the car, that coordinates the lights with the control systems of the car, which for some cars means that high beams go on and off automatically or that the headlights move left and right as you go around a turn,” Pinchuk says. “Or take balancing tires. We used to be cavalier about it. But today, cars are lighter because of higher fuel economy. So tire balance is more important. You have to master the shape of the tires. Almost every tire has a high spot, and the rim has a low spot. To sense those, you need equipment skills and a general understanding of materials—for example, the different coefficients of expansion of aluminum and steel.”
With all that specificity cropping up in job descriptions, fewer young people heading into school know “what they need to study,” says Laszlo Bock, director of “people operations” at Google. “There is an information asymmetry.” So here, too, the market doesn’t seem to be adapting. And critics say that the Obama administration hasn’t put the right kind of programs in place to fix either the short-term mismatch or the longer-term college-education deficit. “We don’t even have a national jobs database,” Lund says.
The End of Keynes
From: National Review Online
The burial ceremony should be a nice, simple one after the violence done to the aged economist by the failure of the broad Obama stimulus program. The administration’s serial overpromising in his name did more to discredit Keynes than a century’s worth of broadsides by his intellectual enemies.
Nearly three years into the Obama administration, the unemployment rate is more than 9 percent, a grassroots movement devoted to cutting government has the upper hand in the House of Representatives, and the debt of the United States could well be downgraded by Standard and Poor’s. If Durbin thought that in these circumstances Keynes was heading anywhere other than a pine box, he hasn’t been paying attention.
The debt deal is austerity designed by committee. It’s late. It’s needlessly complex. It’s inadequate to our challenges and may not prove particularly functional. But it’s austerity. That a Washington with a Democratic Senate and president has to go through the exercise of at least appearing to cut $2.1 trillion from the deficit with no guaranteed tax increases is a humiliating reversal for Keynes’s self-appointed heirs.
Every time Washington has a showdown, pundits and presidential historians gather on TV sets to lament the breakdown of our governing institutions and the end of compromise. But Congress is still perfectly capable of splitting differences. The debt deal gives a little something to all the major players in a jerry-built, two-part increase in the debt limit coupled with an initial $900 billion agreed-upon cut and at least a $1.2 trillion cut TBD.
House speaker John Boehner gets less spending. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell gets his cute trick of letting Congress disapprove a second debt extension while still giving it to Pres. Barack Obama. Senate majority leader Harry Reid and President Obama get a debt extension past the 2012 election and a special committee that could possibly recommend tax increases.
Washington doesn’t lack for the ability to cut such clever deals; it lacks the collective will to transform the entitlement state. So, it perpetually kicks the job over to a commission. Last year, the Bowles-Simpson commission released a report that President Obama promptly filed away in a drawer in the Resolute Desk. Now, the debt deal creates an all-new special committee to find the unidentified $1.2 trillion second round of cuts.
Realistically, it would have to find them in entitlements. Rarely, though, has a bipartisan committee been so primed for failure. The proposed committee will have 12 members, six from each party. It needs a majority of seven to make a recommendation that goes straight to a vote on the floors of the House and the Senate. Unless either party slips up in one of its appointments, the committee is very likely to deadlock.
As a spur to action, automatic spending cuts equal to $1.2 trillion kick in if the committee fails. The idea is to make these backstop cuts so ham-fisted and distasteful to both parties that they will have an incentive to agree. Democrats will have to stomach even deeper discretionary cuts than in the first round and some Medicare reductions, while Republicans take it on the chin on defense.
Sen. Dick Durbin, the liberal lion from Illinois, pronounces the debt deal “the final interment of John Maynard Keynes.”
Nearly three years into the Obama administration, the unemployment rate is more than 9 percent, a grassroots movement devoted to cutting government has the upper hand in the House of Representatives, and the debt of the United States could well be downgraded by Standard and Poor’s. If Durbin thought that in these circumstances Keynes was heading anywhere other than a pine box, he hasn’t been paying attention.
The debt deal is austerity designed by committee. It’s late. It’s needlessly complex. It’s inadequate to our challenges and may not prove particularly functional. But it’s austerity. That a Washington with a Democratic Senate and president has to go through the exercise of at least appearing to cut $2.1 trillion from the deficit with no guaranteed tax increases is a humiliating reversal for Keynes’s self-appointed heirs.
Every time Washington has a showdown, pundits and presidential historians gather on TV sets to lament the breakdown of our governing institutions and the end of compromise. But Congress is still perfectly capable of splitting differences. The debt deal gives a little something to all the major players in a jerry-built, two-part increase in the debt limit coupled with an initial $900 billion agreed-upon cut and at least a $1.2 trillion cut TBD.
House speaker John Boehner gets less spending. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell gets his cute trick of letting Congress disapprove a second debt extension while still giving it to Pres. Barack Obama. Senate majority leader Harry Reid and President Obama get a debt extension past the 2012 election and a special committee that could possibly recommend tax increases.
Washington doesn’t lack for the ability to cut such clever deals; it lacks the collective will to transform the entitlement state. So, it perpetually kicks the job over to a commission. Last year, the Bowles-Simpson commission released a report that President Obama promptly filed away in a drawer in the Resolute Desk. Now, the debt deal creates an all-new special committee to find the unidentified $1.2 trillion second round of cuts.
Realistically, it would have to find them in entitlements. Rarely, though, has a bipartisan committee been so primed for failure. The proposed committee will have 12 members, six from each party. It needs a majority of seven to make a recommendation that goes straight to a vote on the floors of the House and the Senate. Unless either party slips up in one of its appointments, the committee is very likely to deadlock.
As a spur to action, automatic spending cuts equal to $1.2 trillion kick in if the committee fails. The idea is to make these backstop cuts so ham-fisted and distasteful to both parties that they will have an incentive to agree. Democrats will have to stomach even deeper discretionary cuts than in the first round and some Medicare reductions, while Republicans take it on the chin on defense.
Tuesday, August 02, 2011
Bulldoze: The New Way to Foreclose
From: TIME
Banks have a new remedy for America's ailing housing market: bulldozers.
There are nearly 1.7 million homes in the U.S. in some state of foreclosure. Banks already own some of these homes and will soon repossess many more. Many housing economists worry that a near constant stream of home sales by banks could keep housing prices down for years to come. But what if some of those homes never hit the market?
Increasingly, it appears that banks are turning to demolition teams instead of realtors to rid themselves of their least-valuable repossessed homes. Last month, Bank of America announced plans to demolish 100 foreclosed homes in the Cleveland area. The land will then be donated to local government authorities. BofA says the donations in Cleveland are part of a larger plan to rid itself of its least-salable properties, many of which, according to a company spokesperson, are worth less than $10,000. BofA has already donated 100 homes in Detroit and 150 in Chicago, and may add as many as nine more cities by the end of the year.
And BofA is not alone. A number of banks are ramping up their efforts to not just rid themselves of their unwanted homes but also fully dispose of them. Fannie Mae has a program to sell houses to local municipalities for a few hundred dollars. Wells Fargo has donated 800 homes since 2009. While some of those homes have been demolished, a spokesperson for the bank says many of the homes have been given to not-for-profits with plans to renovate the homes, not tear them down. JPMorgan Chase says it was one of the first banks to donate houses it couldn't sell or didn't think were repairable. Since 2008, JPMorgan has donated or sold at a discount 1,900 houses to city or county officials.
The banks do the deals because once the properties are donated, they no longer have to pay taxes or for upkeep. Tax experts say the banks may also be able to get a write-off for the donations. That appears to be a better strategy than trying to repair some of the homes, which according to a BofA spokesperson are more economical to demolish than fix up. Local governments like these deals because they get free land to develop or use for open space. Cleveland-based Cuyahoga County Land Reutilization Corp., which inked a contract with BofA, has been one of the most aggressive local-government organizations in striking these deals. And housing economists like these deals because they remove homes from the market that would otherwise sell for a low price or not at all, dragging down home prices in general. An oversupply of homes on the market has been one of the big problems plaguing real estate. According to the most recent data, it would take 9½ months for the current number of homes on the market to sell. The housing market is generally considered healthy when supply equals six months of sales. So taking some of these homes off the market for good could remove some of the inventory drag.
The question is whether the banks will ever put up enough housing for demolition to make a difference. The Obama Administration says it is working on a plan to revamp its loan-modification program in order to help keep more people facing foreclosure in their homes, which would reduce the number of properties that banks have to unload on the market. Some areas of the country are looking at how to speed up foreclosures in an effort to return some normality to the market. It's not clear that any of this will work. Certainly, the idea that we are at the point where banks would be better off knocking down houses than reselling them shows there is still something very wrong with the housing market. But what is clear is that banks and others are at a point where they are ready to try something new to boost the housing market. And that is a good sign for the future.
Correction: An earlier version of this article said that Wells Fargo had donated 800 homes to be demolished. In fact, many of those homes have been or in the process of being renovated.
Banks have a new remedy for America's ailing housing market: bulldozers.
There are nearly 1.7 million homes in the U.S. in some state of foreclosure. Banks already own some of these homes and will soon repossess many more. Many housing economists worry that a near constant stream of home sales by banks could keep housing prices down for years to come. But what if some of those homes never hit the market?
Increasingly, it appears that banks are turning to demolition teams instead of realtors to rid themselves of their least-valuable repossessed homes. Last month, Bank of America announced plans to demolish 100 foreclosed homes in the Cleveland area. The land will then be donated to local government authorities. BofA says the donations in Cleveland are part of a larger plan to rid itself of its least-salable properties, many of which, according to a company spokesperson, are worth less than $10,000. BofA has already donated 100 homes in Detroit and 150 in Chicago, and may add as many as nine more cities by the end of the year.
And BofA is not alone. A number of banks are ramping up their efforts to not just rid themselves of their unwanted homes but also fully dispose of them. Fannie Mae has a program to sell houses to local municipalities for a few hundred dollars. Wells Fargo has donated 800 homes since 2009. While some of those homes have been demolished, a spokesperson for the bank says many of the homes have been given to not-for-profits with plans to renovate the homes, not tear them down. JPMorgan Chase says it was one of the first banks to donate houses it couldn't sell or didn't think were repairable. Since 2008, JPMorgan has donated or sold at a discount 1,900 houses to city or county officials.
The banks do the deals because once the properties are donated, they no longer have to pay taxes or for upkeep. Tax experts say the banks may also be able to get a write-off for the donations. That appears to be a better strategy than trying to repair some of the homes, which according to a BofA spokesperson are more economical to demolish than fix up. Local governments like these deals because they get free land to develop or use for open space. Cleveland-based Cuyahoga County Land Reutilization Corp., which inked a contract with BofA, has been one of the most aggressive local-government organizations in striking these deals. And housing economists like these deals because they remove homes from the market that would otherwise sell for a low price or not at all, dragging down home prices in general. An oversupply of homes on the market has been one of the big problems plaguing real estate. According to the most recent data, it would take 9½ months for the current number of homes on the market to sell. The housing market is generally considered healthy when supply equals six months of sales. So taking some of these homes off the market for good could remove some of the inventory drag.
The question is whether the banks will ever put up enough housing for demolition to make a difference. The Obama Administration says it is working on a plan to revamp its loan-modification program in order to help keep more people facing foreclosure in their homes, which would reduce the number of properties that banks have to unload on the market. Some areas of the country are looking at how to speed up foreclosures in an effort to return some normality to the market. It's not clear that any of this will work. Certainly, the idea that we are at the point where banks would be better off knocking down houses than reselling them shows there is still something very wrong with the housing market. But what is clear is that banks and others are at a point where they are ready to try something new to boost the housing market. And that is a good sign for the future.
Correction: An earlier version of this article said that Wells Fargo had donated 800 homes to be demolished. In fact, many of those homes have been or in the process of being renovated.
"Presenting: World's Dumbest Home Depot Customer
Reaganite Republican: Sadly, These People Spawn and Vote...: "Presenting: World's Dumbest Home Depot Customer Well, this picture is said to be real, taken by a transportation supervisor for a company..."
Tucson Newspaper Political Cartoonist Fantasized About Obama Sending SEALs to Assassinate Tea Party Republicans
FROM: NewsBusters.org
Today Tucson congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) cast her first vote since she was critically injured in a January shooting.
You'll recall that in the weeks that followed, the media bemoaned the incivility -- supposedly predominantly conservative in nature -- of the political debate which had allegedly created a climate of hate.
But there appears to to be no firestorm over how, just last week, Arizona Daily Star cartoonist David Fitzsimmons fantasized about President Obama sending a SEAL team to assassinate Tea Party-friendly House Republicans.
See the political cartoon below the page break or find it linked here:
Who gains from debt deal? The Pentagon, for one
From: McClatchy
The last-minute deal that Congress is considering to raise the federal debt limit probably will mean trillions of dollars in government spending reductions for most agencies. But one department stands to gain: the Pentagon.
The last-minute deal that Congress is considering to raise the federal debt limit probably will mean trillions of dollars in government spending reductions for most agencies. But one department stands to gain: the Pentagon.
Rather than cutting $400 billion in defense spending through 2023, as President Barack Obama had proposed in April, the current debt proposal trims $350 billion through 2024, effectively giving the Pentagon $50 billion more than it had been expecting over the next decade.
With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan winding down, experts said, the overall change in defense spending practices could be minimal: Instead of cuts, the Pentagon merely could face slower growth.
"This is a good deal for defense when you probe under the numbers," said Lawrence Korb, a defense expert at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning research center. "It's better than what the Defense Department was expecting."
To be sure, the numbers could change. Under the current debt deal the department would have to reduce its budget by $600 billion over the next decade if Congress can't agree on the deficit-reduction proposals of a new 12-member, bipartisan legislative committee that'll be tasked with recommending further spending cuts.
But the proposed figures — after weeks of drawn-out, vitriolic debate between both political parties — raise questions about what, if anything, could lead to substantial defense reductions. Military spending has more or less survived the drawdown of two wars and a domestic economic crisis. Even now, Congress can't agree on how much to cut defense spending while maintaining U.S. military strength.
Rep. C.W. Bill Young, R-Fla., the chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, said: "We are confident that we can make this (debt deal) happen without affecting readiness and without affecting any of our soldiers."
Die-hard conservative Rep. Allen West, R-Fla., said he'd support the bill but that to avoid deep military reductions, "I think the most important thing is to get a strong defense person on the (bipartisan) committee."
Supporters of the debt deal, including top defense officials, said it was too risky to make major defense cuts without examining the national security strategy. They noted that the reductions still represent the sharpest baseline defense budget cuts since the 1990s.
But those who advocate more reductions said that the current proposal, in inflation-adjusted dollars, kept defense spending higher than it was at the height of the Cold War.
Top defense officials have taken to Capitol Hill in recent months to appeal for less dramatic cuts. The incoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, told lawmakers that anything higher than that was "extraordinarily difficult" to absorb. In June, outgoing Vice Chairman Marine Gen. James Cartwright said further reductions threatened to "hollow out" the force.
Before he left office as defense secretary, Robert Gates warned repeatedly that any bigger cuts could lead to a less capable force.
But the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform — known as the Bowles-Simpson proposal, for its two chairmen — proposed far deeper reductions last fall, saying the military could still maintain its power.
Korb, who studies defense budgets, said Congress could cut the defense baseline budget by $100 billion annually over the next decade and still spend more than it did during the height of the Cold War, adjusted for inflation. He noted that the baseline defense budget has climbed every year for 13 years, a record increase.
Adjusted for inflation, the United States spent at most $580 billion a year on defense at the height of the Cold War. In the 2011 fiscal year, the Pentagon's baseline budget is $549 billion, with another $159 billion allotted for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for a total of $708 billion. That total figure drops slightly to $670 billion in the 2012 budget proposal.
Obama's $400 billion reduction would have started with the 2013 fiscal year, but the debt deal begins with the 2014 budget, effectively delaying the pain for the Pentagon by a year. Still, some defense hawks in Congress were worried that even the relatively modest cuts could go too far.
Marshall Wittmann, a spokesman for Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut independent who's a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Monday that Lieberman "is very concerned about rumors that the debt agreement now being negotiated will disproportionately cut defense spending and result in unacceptably high risk to our national security."
Monday, August 01, 2011
Debt deal could pile up $10.4 trillion in new debt over next 10 years, creating more than $20 trillion in debt
From: Washington Times
The debt framework President Obama and congressional leaders reached Sunday night runs 74 pages long, and could authorize as much as $2.4 trillion in new debt — or $32.4 billion per page.
That debt increase will get the country through the 2012 election, both sides said, but it does not bring to an end the sea of red ink that will continue to wash over the federal government for the foreseeable future.
In the near term, the bill sets budget numbers for 2012 that would require a real cut of $7 billion in discretionary spending from 2011 levels, though that’s $25 billion less than projected spending would have been had it kept pace with inflation.
Over the long term, the deal could lead to as much as $2.4 trillion in lower-than-projected spending over the next decade, which also works out to about $32.4 billion per page in lower spending — if all of the conditions are met. But during those 10 years, that still means the country could pile up another $10.4 trillion in new debt, which would leave the government well more than $20 trillion in debt by the end of the decade.
The deal immediately imposes caps on discretionary spending for the next decade, including a total of $1.043 trillion in fiscal year 2012, which begins Oct. 1, rising to $1.047 trillion in 2013 and all the way to $1.234 trillion by 2021.
Discretionary spending encompasses defense and most domestic spending outside of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other programs like agriculture payments that are automatically determined by formula.
Over 10 years, the bill would mean $741 billion in lower discretionary spending than currently projected, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That works out to about a 6 percent cut, meaning $11.26 trillion in discretionary spending would still be allowed.
Republicans said it’s the first time that any spending cuts have been attached to a debt increase, and called it a move in the right direction.
“This is the best agreement we could have hoped for now, with Republicans in control of just the House of Representatives, and Democrats still controlling the Senate and White House,” said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, Texas Republican. “The agreement takes a series of small but significant steps in the right direction, which is better than big steps in the wrong direction.”
Meanwhile, Democratic leaders involved in the negotiations said they were able to keep the discretionary spending cuts to a minimum — just $7 billion in real terms in 2012, and an additional $3 billion in 2013.
And they also guaranteed a certain level of those cuts will have to come out of defense programs, rather than basic domestic spending.
“It protects key investments up front in the cuts that are launched initially, the trillion dollars,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said. “It creates a firewall that ensures that savings are gleaned not just from non-defense discretionary programs, but from defense.”
The debt framework President Obama and congressional leaders reached Sunday night runs 74 pages long, and could authorize as much as $2.4 trillion in new debt — or $32.4 billion per page.
That debt increase will get the country through the 2012 election, both sides said, but it does not bring to an end the sea of red ink that will continue to wash over the federal government for the foreseeable future.
In the near term, the bill sets budget numbers for 2012 that would require a real cut of $7 billion in discretionary spending from 2011 levels, though that’s $25 billion less than projected spending would have been had it kept pace with inflation.
Over the long term, the deal could lead to as much as $2.4 trillion in lower-than-projected spending over the next decade, which also works out to about $32.4 billion per page in lower spending — if all of the conditions are met. But during those 10 years, that still means the country could pile up another $10.4 trillion in new debt, which would leave the government well more than $20 trillion in debt by the end of the decade.
The deal immediately imposes caps on discretionary spending for the next decade, including a total of $1.043 trillion in fiscal year 2012, which begins Oct. 1, rising to $1.047 trillion in 2013 and all the way to $1.234 trillion by 2021.
Discretionary spending encompasses defense and most domestic spending outside of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other programs like agriculture payments that are automatically determined by formula.
Over 10 years, the bill would mean $741 billion in lower discretionary spending than currently projected, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That works out to about a 6 percent cut, meaning $11.26 trillion in discretionary spending would still be allowed.
Republicans said it’s the first time that any spending cuts have been attached to a debt increase, and called it a move in the right direction.
“This is the best agreement we could have hoped for now, with Republicans in control of just the House of Representatives, and Democrats still controlling the Senate and White House,” said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, Texas Republican. “The agreement takes a series of small but significant steps in the right direction, which is better than big steps in the wrong direction.”
Meanwhile, Democratic leaders involved in the negotiations said they were able to keep the discretionary spending cuts to a minimum — just $7 billion in real terms in 2012, and an additional $3 billion in 2013.
And they also guaranteed a certain level of those cuts will have to come out of defense programs, rather than basic domestic spending.
“It protects key investments up front in the cuts that are launched initially, the trillion dollars,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said. “It creates a firewall that ensures that savings are gleaned not just from non-defense discretionary programs, but from defense.”
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Late One Night in the White House Bedroom
Reaganite Republican: Late One Night in the White House Bedroom: "Stressed-out Obama is tossing and turning restlessly...."
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