It seemed a gesture of Christian tolerance when a clergyman at St Paul’s Cathedral told police to allow anti-capitalist protesters camped outside to continue their demonstration.
But the alliance appeared to be faltering yesterday as St Paul’s closed for the first time since the Blitz, claiming it had no choice because of the dangers posed by the growing numbers on its doorstep.
WASHINGTON — President Obama’s announcement that the last American soldiers will leave Iraq by the end of this year capped a momentous week in which he could also take credit for helping dispatch one of the world’s great villains, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
Conventional wisdom holds that none of this will matter to Mr. Obama’s frayed political fortunes, which will be determined by the economy rather than the notches he is piling up on his statesman’s belt.
Yet Mr. Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq — a campaign pledge kept — and the successful NATO air campaign in Libya — with no American casualties, and at a tiny fraction of the cost of Iraq — allowed him to thread a political needle: reaffirming his credentials as a wartime leader while reassuring his Democratic base that he is making good on the promises that got him elected.
This one-two punch may also strengthen the president’s hand against his eventual Republican opponent, according to Mr. Obama’s supporters, by depriving Republicans of a cudgel typically used on Democratic presidents, that they are weak on national security. The swift and fierce criticism of his Iraq decision by the Republican candidates shows how reluctant they are to cede this advantage to him.
“There is an aggregate effect to all the president’s foreign policy successes,” said Bill Burton, a former White House aide who is a senior strategist at Priorities USA Action, a political action committee backing the Obama campaign. “The notion of who is a stronger leader will be deeply influenced by the promises the president kept.”
During the past three recessions, the top 1% of earners (those making $380,000 or more in 2008) experienced the largest income shocks in percentage terms of any income group in the U.S., according to research from economists Jonathan A. Parker and Annette Vissing-Jorgensen at Northwestern University. When the economy grows, their incomes grow up to three times faster than the rest of the country's. When the economy falls, their incomes fall two or three times as much.
The super-high earners have the biggest crashes. The number of Americans making $1 million or more fell 40% between 2007 and 2009, to 236,883, while their combined incomes fell by nearly 50%—far greater than the less than 2% drop in total incomes of those making $50,000 or less, according to Internal Revenue Service figures.
Also, at MTV, "Britney Spears' 'Criminal' Director Talks Gun Controversy," and "Britney Spears Director Leads Us Through 'Criminal' Video."
RELATED: At London's Daily Mail, "Rebel fighter answered Gaddafi daughter's desperate phone call and told her: Old Fuzzhead is dead."
A particularly perverse version of such enabling can be seen in Michelle Goldberg's, "One Percent," at the Jewish magazine Tablet. Goldberg keeps stressing how Occupy Wall Street is "anarchist," and hence, there's no way to control or ostracize the "minimal" numbers of anti-Semitic members:
Occupy Wall Street lacks tools for enforcing any sort of discipline, or ostracizing troublemakers. When someone at a Tea Party rally holds a particularly offensive sign, as many have, the movement can denounce them. But there is no one at Occupy Wall Street to do the denouncing.Somehow Goldberg can write this with a straight face, after she writes earlier in the essay that the organizing model at Zuccotti Park has "has fostered, for the most part, a spirit of volunteerism and cooperation." So which is it? Anarchy or cooperation? If there's cooperation among activists, there's not an "inability to enforce some kind of order." All these idiots have to do is get in the face of the Jew-hating freaks and have them GTFO. What's the problem?
An ugly old tradition is back: exploiting anti-Semitism to break the backs of popular movements that threaten the power of the wealthiest 1 percent of our population. It is being used to undermine the Occupy Wall Street movement, which has conservatives in a state of near panic....There's more at the link, and Rosenberg gets hammered at the comments. He's a really bad act, and his ravings are truly the product of the most perverse neo-communist class-warfare tropes. He turns my stomach.
Because utilizing anti-Semitism directly would not succeed in this country today, the reactionary defenders of the economic status quo are using the flip side of the coin: the fear of being labeled anti-Semitic. They are accusing Occupy Wall Street of anti-Semitism, relying on the old myth that Wall Street is Jewish and hence that opposition to Wall Street’s agenda is just opposition to Jews.
Unmasked ... shows us the Parisian mobs (leftists and Islamists) crying “Death to the Jews” in 2001. We see and hear angry, hate-choked speeches delivered on American campuses which characterize Israel as a “Nazi, Apartheid” state. We see Israeli soldiers confiscating 50 tons of ship-borne weapons in 2010 — weapons which included rockets with the capacity to attack the Israeli Navy and even more sites in civilian Israel. We see what really happened when armed Turkish mercenaries violated international law and attacked Israeli soldiers on the Mavi Marmara. We are reminded that Israel was condemned for exercising its legal right to self-defense, and that Israel brings all goods and supplies into Gaza after first checking for weapons. The “blockade” of Gaza exists to keep weapons out that are being expressly brought in to exterminate Israelis.Read the whole thing.
When I ran into anti-Semitism in the early 1970s, I at first believed it could be contained, even resolved, if Israel only Did Something Else.
I was wrong. No matter what else or what more Israel did or could do, it would ever have been enough. Israel’s crime is an essential and existential one. It exists. This is unforgivable. It remains a permanent offense to Arabs and Muslims. In 2000, when Arafat launched his Second Intifada, I knew that Wiesel’s bloody beast was back. In 2003, I published a book about it: The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It.
What I first began writing and talking about nearly a decade ago has here been brought to life, expanded, and dramatically enacted in this film.
The editors of The New Republic are wiser than they know in trying to keep their distance from the Zuccotti Park protesters. In their zeal to recapture the spirit of the 1960s, the Occupy Wall Streeters are replicating the very processes that produced the current crack-up of liberalism. But if the editors arrived at the right conclusion, they came to it by a false path, one which has produced a fundamental misunderstanding of the history of American liberalism.More at the link.
The core of the TNR editorial lays out what in principle is an honorable and essential difference between liberals and radicals. Unlike radicals, “liberals,” says TNR “are capitalists.” But that underlying premise of the editorial is belied by the historical record.
Herbert Croly, the founder of TNR, understood himself as a radical for whom the use of the then uncommon term “liberal” was merely a euphemism for an American sort of socialism. Croly spoke of his seminal book, The Promise of American Life—the founding document of American liberalism—as “socialistic.” It’s true that it was only in the 1930s that many at TNR openly referred to themselves as socialists. But looking back, in 1931, Edmund Wilson argued strongly for liberals to give up Croly's "gradual and natural approximation to socialism" and to embrace socialism openly.
The period from roughly 1950 to 1970 was the anomaly. It took the concussive effects of the Communist conquest of Eastern Europe in the wake of World War Two to temporarily pull liberalism off its socialist path.
The radicals of the 1960s deployed their justified opposition to the Vietnam War to blind themselves to the consequences and meaning of statism and Stalinism. Their aggressively willed ignorance produced the 1972 McGovern platform which re-wrote the traditional program of the European socialist parties in the American language of rights. Employment, educational quality, and housing were to become matters of right subject to the power of judicially supervised bureaucracies.
Since then the distinction between liberalism and anti-capitalist radicalism has been continuously effaced by the rise of a vast regulatory state staffed, in part, by public sector unionists. Statism in America eschewed a European-style ownership of the means of production. Rather its aim has been, in the name of good and defensible causes such as a cleaner environment, to run as much of the economy as possible through government, directly and indirectly. The upshot is that the American percentage of GDP devoted to government has reached European levels. And by and large liberals approve of this trend. According to a February 2010 Gallup survey, 53 percent of Democrats and 61 percent of liberals have a positive image of socialism. The Gallup findings were backed up by a December 2010 Rasmussen survey which found that 42 percent of Democrats—the people whom former Presidential candidate Howard Dean described as “The Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party”—think that the government should manage the economy completely.
As the GOP casts about for a response to Occupy Wall Street, at least one prominent Republican isn't sweating it. In the war over class, Mitt Romney is already waving a white flag. And therein lies one of his chief liabilities as a Republican nominee or president.Keep reading.
The Occupy masses don't have a unified message, though the Democrats embracing them aren't making that mistake. President Obama helpfully explained that the crowds in New York and elsewhere are simply expressing their "frustrations" at unequal American society. The answer to their protests is, conveniently, his own vision for the country. If wealthier Americans and corporations are just asked to pay their "fair share," if "we can go back to that then I think a lot of that anger, that frustration dissipates," said the president.
This is a campaign theme in the making, and one with which Mr. Obama has already had plenty of practice. Congressional Democrats, too, see the value of pivoting off Occupy Wall Street to build an election-year class-warfare argument.
PREVIOUSLY: "Oh! Darling (I'll Never Do You No Harm)."
If the values prove accurate, Kadafi will go down in history as one of the most rapacious as well as one of the most bizarre world leaders, on a scale with the late Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire or the late Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines.Yeah, and some dude at The Guardian is bawling about how Gaddafi didn't get a "private" death. Like he deserved it, idiot.
... based on the number of toxic loans in the system in 2008, the government was responsible for not just a simple majority, but more than two-thirds. It's quantifiable — 71% to be exact (see chart). And the remaining 29% of private-label junk was mostly attributable to Countrywide Financial, which was under the heel of HUD and its "fair-lending" edicts.
Via Memeorandum and Verum Serum.
PHOTO CREDIT: That Mr. G Guy.
The champions of the European Union once touted it as a “bold new experiment in living” and “the best hope in an insecure age.” But these days “fear is coursing through the corridors of Brussels,” as the B.B.C. reported in September. Such fear is justified, for the nations of Europe are struggling with fiscal problems that challenge the integrity of the whole E.U.-topian ideal. Greece teetering on the brink of default on its debts, E.U. nations squabbling about how to deal with the crisis, debt levels approaching 100 percent of GDP even in economic-powerhouse countries like Germany and France, and European banks exposed to depreciating government bonds are some of the signposts on the road to decline.Continue reading.
A monetary union comprising independent states, each with its own peculiar economic and political interests, histories, cultural norms, laws, and fiscal systems, was bound to end up in the current crisis. All that borrowed money, however, was necessary for funding the lavish social welfare entitlements and employment benefits that once impressed champions of the “European Dream.” Yet, despite the greater fiscal integration created by the E.U., sluggish, over-regulated, over-taxed economies could not generate enough money to pay for such amenities. Now, the president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, admits, “We can’t finance our social model.”
This financial crisis means the government-financed dolce vita lifestyle once brandished as a reproach to work-obsessed America is facing cutbacks and austerity programs immensely unpopular among Europeans otherwise used to amenities like France’s 35-hour work week, or Greece’s two extra months of pay, or England’s generous housing subsidies that cost $34.4 billion a year. No surprise, then, that from Athens’ Syntagma Square to Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, austerity measures attempting to scale back government spending have been met with strikes, demonstrations, boycotts, and protests, some violent, on the part of citizens for whom such government entitlements have become human rights. In fact, such transfers of wealth have been formalized as rights in Articles 34 and 35 of the E.U.’s Charter of Fundamental Human Rights.
