Saturday Morning News Bitlets
By LisaB on March 7, 2009 at 2:20 PM in Current Affairs
1) WaPo has a piece today that suggests BO may be looking a lot more like GWB than people think and has been no more wiling than GWB after 9/11 to ask Americans to sacrifice.
Obama spelled out what he proposes this to mean for 98 percent of Americans: “You will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime. In fact, the recovery plan provides a tax cut . . . and these checks are on the way.”
So much for summoning the country to sacrifice. Obama has been no more willing to ask average Americans to pitch in, even once the recession is over, than Bush.
Then WaPo says BO’s efforts and attitude to the opposition also look familiar.
What about bipartisanship? Like Bush, Obama offered a few early gestures. And like Bush, he has been unapologetic about using emergency measures like the stimulus bill to press polarizing Democratic priorities, such as the expansion of Medicaid benefits to the unemployed and union-friendly contracting provisions.
Apparently the reason this comparison is so surprising to some people is they thought BO was a centrist in the first place. Well, they didn’t pay attention during the primary, did they?
2) Forbes, on the other hand, has a piece today calling out Christopher Buckley, David Gergen and David Brooks for their eager over-the-top support of BO when they really should have known better.
. . . Christopher Buckley, David Gergen and David Brooks. All three used to insist that Obama was some species of centrist or moderate. Now that Obama has proposed the most massive expansion of government in the history of the republic, each has recognized that just conceivably he might have been mistaken.
Not much meat on the bone here, but amusing from a schadenfreude standpoint.
3) Former Australian PM Keating worries that US Treasury Sec. Geithner doesn’t have what it takes. Specifically, Keating says Geithner, when working on the Asian Financial crisis, made some bone-headed decisions.
In a speech to a closed gathering at the Lowy Institute in Sydney on Thursday, Paul Keating gave a starkly different account of Geithner’s record in handling the Asian crisis: “Tim Geithner was the Treasury line officer who wrote the IMF [International Monetary Fund] program for Indonesia in 1997-98, which was to apply current account solutions to a capital account crisis.”
In other words, Geithner fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem. And his misdiagnosis led to a dreadfully wrong prescription.
Geithner thought Asia’s problem was the same as the ones that had shattered Latin America in the 1980s and Mexico in 1994, a classic current account crisis. In this kind of crisis, the central cause is that the government has run impossibly big debts
——–
But the Asian crisis was completely different. The Asian governments that went to the IMF for emergency loans – Thailand, South Korea and Indonesia – all had sound public finances.
——–
But Geithner, through his influence on the IMF, imposed the same cure the IMF had imposed on Latin America and Mexico. It was the wrong cure. Indeed, it only aggravated the problem.
——–
China, in particular, drew hard conclusions from the IMF’s mishandling of the Asian crisis. It decided that it would never allow itself to be dependent on the IMF, or the US, or the West generally, for its international solvency. Instead, it would build the biggest war chest the world had ever seen.———–
Keating went on to argue that, by frightening the Chinese into building their vast $US2 trillion foreign reserves, Geithner was responsible for the build-up of tremendous imbalance in the world financial system. This imbalance, in turn, according to Keating, contributed to the global financial crisis which has since devastated the world economy.
Can one man be responsible for the financial mess we have before us now? I don’t really believe that – it’s simply too complex. However, it’s an interesting perspective.
4) From Thedailybeast comes a story about the unraveling of Eastern Europe.
Give or take the odd Balkan war, the “end of history” (as coined by Francis Fukuyama) has lasted twenty years in Eastern Europe. But today it’s the resurrection rather than the death of history that has caste its shadow over the region. Those dark clouds on the East European horizon are the impending storms of economic collapse. The political and economic situation in much of Eastern Europe—particularly in Latvia, Hungary and Romania—is about to turn very nasty. Multiply the consequences of the current American recession several times and you have an idea of what lies in store for much of the region.
It’s happened before, of course. The impact of today’s global meltdown on the region is raising all the ghosts of the interwar period of the 20th century—those dreadfully dark years in Eastern Europe when a similarly dramatic global monetary meltdown triggered economic depression, mass unemployment, and the rise of autarky, authoritarianism, and xenophobia. The end result was the destruction of democracy everywhere outside Czechoslovakia and the emergence of popular Fascist movements in Austria, Romania, Hungary, and, of course, Germany.
Definitely an issue to keep eyes on. As the financial mess engulfs the more shaky states of Europe, it is important to remember that mass immigration and non-acclimation of those immigrants in many European states will contribute to unrest.
5) Jackie and Dunlap are concerned about American dogs losing their place to European dogs.
by Ronald Scott
* More novels by 
* 
(
)
- You'll have access to 18 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines, and books, as well as ultra-fast Web browsing with Amazon Silk -- faster than iPad. Full e-mail and document access and a keyboard. Fire can transmit what is on your screen onto a connected TV or monitor without an accessory. It runs Flash (iPad doesn't). 
