November 28, 2004
NY TIMES EDITORIAL
Mr. Smith Goes Under the Gavel
Republicans control the White House, both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court. But the greater their power, the more they have focused on one of its few limits: the Senate filibuster. They are so concerned that Democrats will use the filibuster to block a few far-right judicial nominees that they are talking about ending one of the best-known checks and balances in government. Rather than rewrite the rules of government for a power grab, Republicans should look for ways to work with Democrats, who still represent nearly half the country.
The filibuster is almost as old as America itself. In 1790, senators filibustered to prevent Philadelphia from becoming the nation's permanent capital. In the centuries since, senators have used their privilege of unlimited debate to fend off actions supported by a bare majority of the Senate, but deeply offensive to the minority. In 1917, the Senate adopted a formal resolution allowing senators to delay actions unless debate is cut off by a supermajority, which Senate rules now set at 60 votes.
The filibuster has a storied place in the nation's history, and in popular culture. During the Great Depression, Huey Long of Louisiana fought off a bill he opposed by reciting recipes for fried oysters and potlikker. In the 1939 film "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," Jimmy Stewart triumphed over crooked politicians with a 23-hour filibuster. Filibusters were used, notoriously, by Southern senators to fight civil rights legislation, notably the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But even during those dark days, the Senate considered the right to filibuster sacrosanct.
Judicial nominees have never been immune from filibusters. When Republicans opposed President Lyndon Johnson's choice for chief justice, Abe Fortas, they led a successful filibuster to stop him from getting the job. More recently, in the Clinton era, Republicans spoke out loudly in defense of their right to filibuster against the confirmation of cabinet members and judicial nominees. Republican senators, including Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Mike DeWine of Ohio, used a filibuster in 1995 to block President Bill Clinton's nominee for surgeon general. Bill Frist, now the Senate majority leader, supported a filibuster of a Clinton appeals court nomination. Senator Christopher Bond, a Missouri Republican, was quoted in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1993 saying, "On important issues, I will not hesitate to join a filibuster."
Now that Republicans are doing the appointing, they see things very differently. Dr. Frist recently declared on "Fox News Sunday" that preventing votes on judicial nominees is "intolerable." Among the proposals Republicans are floating is the so-called nuclear option. According to Senate rules, changing the filibuster rule should require a two-thirds vote. But in the "nuclear option," Vice President Dick Cheney, as Senate president, would rule that filibusters of judicial nominees could be ended by a simple majority.
That would no doubt put the whole matter in the courts, an odd place for the Republicans - who are fighting this battle in the name of ending activist courts - to want it resolved. The Republicans would have a weak case. The Constitution expressly authorizes the Senate to "determine the rules of its proceedings." That is precisely what it has done.
If it came to a vote, it is not at all clear that the Republicans would be able to command even a majority for ending the filibuster. Senators appreciate their chamber's special role, and much of its uniqueness is based on traditions like the filibuster. Senator Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat who has led the opposition to extremist judicial nominees, says as many as 10 Republican senators could vote against changing the rule.
The Republicans see the filibuster as an annoying obstacle. But it is actually one of the checks and balances that the founders, who worried greatly about concentration of power, built into our system of government. It is also, right now, the main means by which the 48 percent of Americans who voted for John Kerry can influence federal policy. People who call themselves conservatives should find a way of achieving their goals without declaring war on one of the oldest traditions in American democracy.
Saturday, November 27, 2004
Thursday, November 25, 2004
Guardsmen Say They're Facing Iraq Ill-Trained
Troops from California describe a prison-like, demoralized camp in New Mexico that's short on gear and setting them up for high casualties.
By Scott Gold
Times Staff Writer
November 25, 2004
DOÑA ANA RANGE, N.M. — Members of a California Army National Guard battalion preparing for deployment to Iraq said this week that they were under strict lockdown and being treated like prisoners rather than soldiers by Army commanders at the remote desert camp where they are training.
More troubling, a number of the soldiers said, is that the training they have received is so poor and equipment shortages so prevalent that they fear their casualty rate will be needlessly high when they arrive in Iraq early next year. "We are going to pay for this in blood," one soldier said.
They said they believed their treatment and training reflected an institutional bias against National Guard troops by commanders in the active-duty Army, an allegation that Army commanders denied.
The 680 soldiers of the 1st Battalion of the 184th Infantry Regiment were activated in August and are preparing for deployment at Doña Ana, a former World War II prisoner-of-war camp 20 miles west of its large parent base, Ft. Bliss, Texas.
Members of the battalion, headquartered in Modesto, said in two dozen interviews that they were allowed no visitors or travel passes, had scant contact with their families and that morale was terrible.
"I feel like an inmate with a weapon," said Cpl. Jajuane Smith, 31, a six-year Guard veteran from Fresno who works for an armored transport company when not on active duty.
Several soldiers have fled Doña Ana by vaulting over rolls of barbed wire that surround the small camp, the soldiers interviewed said. Others, they said, are contemplating going AWOL, at least temporarily, to reunite with their families for Thanksgiving.
Army commanders said the concerns were an inevitable result of the decision to shore up the strained military by turning "citizen soldiers" into fully integrated, front-line combat troops. About 40% of the troops in Iraq are either reservists or National Guard troops.
Lt. Col. Michael Hubbard of Ft. Bliss said the military must confine the soldiers largely to Doña Ana to ensure that their training is complete before they are sent to Iraq.
"A lot of these individuals are used to doing this two days a month and then going home," Hubbard said. "Now the job is 24/7. And they experience culture shock."
But many of the soldiers interviewed said the problems they cited went much deeper than culture shock.
And military analysts agree that tensions between active-duty Army soldiers and National Guard troops have been exacerbated as the war in Iraq has required dangerous and long-term deployments of both.
The concerns of the Guard troops at Doña Ana represent the latest in a series of incidents involving allegations that a two-tier system has shortchanged reservist and National Guard units compared with their active-duty counterparts.
In September, a National Guard battalion undergoing accelerated training at Ft. Dix, N.J., was confined to barracks for two weeks after 13 soldiers reportedly went AWOL to see family before shipping out for Iraq. (Sam note: see article listed below)
Last month, an Army National Guard platoon at Camp Shelby, Miss., refused its orders after voicing concerns about training conditions and poor leadership.
In the most highly publicized incident, in October, more than two dozen Army reservists in Iraq refused to drive a fuel convoy to a town north of Baghdad after arguing that the trucks they had been given were not armored for combat duty.
At Doña Ana, soldiers have questioned their commanders about conditions at the camp, occasionally breaking the protocol of formation drills to do so. They said they had been told repeatedly that they could not be trusted because they were not active-duty soldiers — though many of them are former active-duty soldiers.
"I'm a cop. I've got a career, a house, a family, a college degree," said one sergeant, who lives in Southern California and spoke, like most of the soldiers, on condition of anonymity.
"I came back to the National Guard specifically to go to Baghdad, because I believed in it, believed in the mission. But I have regretted every day of it. This is demoralizing, demeaning, degrading. And we're supposed to be ambassadors to another country? We're supposed to go to war like this?"
Pentagon and Army commanders rejected the allegation that National Guard or reserve troops were prepared for war differently than their active-duty counterparts.
"There is no difference," said Lt. Col. Chris Rodney, an Army spokesman in Washington. "We are, more than ever, one Army. Some have to come from a little farther back — they have a little less training. But the goal is to get everybody the same."
The Guard troops at Doña Ana were scheduled to train for six months before beginning a yearlong deployment. They recently learned, however, that the Army planned to send them overseas a month early — in January, most likely — as it speeds up troop movement to compensate for a shortage of full-time, active-duty troops.
Hubbard, the officer at Ft. Bliss, also said conditions at Doña Ana were designed to mirror the harsh and often thankless assignments the soldiers would take on in Iraq. That was an initiative launched by Brig. Gen. Joseph Chavez, commander of the 29th Separate Infantry Brigade, which includes the 184th Regiment.
The program has resulted in everything from an alcohol ban to armed guards at the entrance to Doña Ana, Hubbard said.
"We are preparing you and training you for what you're going to encounter over there," Hubbard said. "And they just have to get used to it."
Military analysts, however, questioned whether the soldiers' concerns could be attributed entirely to the military's attempt to mirror conditions in Iraq. For example, the soldiers say that an ammunition shortage has meant that they have often conducted operations firing blanks.
"The Bush administration had over a year of planning before going to war in Iraq," said Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor who has acted as a defense lawyer in military courts. "An ammunition shortage is not an exercise in tough love."
Turley said that in every military since Alexander the Great's, there have been "gripes from grunts" but that "the complaints raised by these National Guardsmen raise some significant and troubling concerns."
The Guard troops in New Mexico said they wanted more sophisticated training and better equipment. They said they had been told, for example, that the vehicles they would drive in Iraq would not be armored, a common complaint among their counterparts already serving overseas.
They also said the bulk of their training had been basic, such as first aid and rifle work, and not "theater-specific" to Iraq. They are supposed to be able to use night-vision goggles, for instance, because many patrols in Iraq take place in darkness. But one group of 200 soldiers trained for just an hour with 30 pairs of goggles, which they had to pass around quickly, soldiers said.
The soldiers said they had received little or no training for operations that they expected to undertake in Iraq, from convoy protection to guarding against insurgents' roadside bombs. One said he has put together a diary of what he called "wasted days" of training. It lists 95 days, he said, during which the soldiers learned nothing that would prepare them for Iraq.
Hubbard had said he would make two field commanders available on Tuesday to answer specific questions from the Los Angeles Times about the training, but that did not happen.
The fact that the National Guardsmen have undergone largely basic training suggests that Army commanders do not trust their skills as soldiers, said David Segal, director of the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland. That tension underscores a divide that has long existed between "citizen soldiers" and their active-duty counterparts, he said.
"These soldiers should be getting theater-specific training," Segal said. "This should not be an area where they are getting on-the-job training. The military is just making a bad situation worse."
The soldiers at Doña Ana emphasized their support for the war in Iraq. "In fact, a lot of us would rather go now rather than stay here," said one, a specialist and six-year National Guard veteran who works as a security guard in his civilian life in Southern California.
The soldiers also said they were risking courts-martial or other punishment by speaking publicly about their situation. But Staff Sgt. Lorenzo Dominguez, 45, one of the soldiers who allowed his identity to be revealed, said he feared that if nothing changed, men in his platoon would be killed in Iraq.
Dominguez is a father of two — including a 13-month-old son named Reagan, after the former president — and an employee of a mortgage bank in Alta Loma, Calif. A senior squad leader of his platoon, Dominguez said he had been in the National Guard for 20 years.
"Some of us are going to die there, and some of us are going to die unnecessarily because of the lack of training," he said. "So I don't care. Let them court-martial me. I want the American public to know what is going on. My men are guilty of one thing: volunteering to serve their country. And we are at the end of our rope."
Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times
For more on this problem, check out the earlier article on another National Guard unit from the WASHINGTON POST at:
Strains Felt By Guard Unit on Eve Of War Duty
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 19, 2004; Page A01
FORT DIX, N.J. -- The 635 soldiers of a battalion of the South Carolina National Guard scheduled to depart Sunday for a year or more in Iraq have spent their off-duty hours under a disciplinary lockdown in their barracks for the past two weeks.
The trouble began Labor Day weekend, when 13 members of the 1st Battalion of the 178th Field Artillery Regiment went AWOL, mainly to see their families again before shipping out. Then there was an ugly confrontation between members of the battalion's Alpha and Charlie batteries -- the term artillery units use instead of "companies" -- that threatened to turn into a brawl involving three dozen soldiers, and required the base police to intervene... (Click for rest of story)
By Scott Gold
Times Staff Writer
November 25, 2004
DOÑA ANA RANGE, N.M. — Members of a California Army National Guard battalion preparing for deployment to Iraq said this week that they were under strict lockdown and being treated like prisoners rather than soldiers by Army commanders at the remote desert camp where they are training.
More troubling, a number of the soldiers said, is that the training they have received is so poor and equipment shortages so prevalent that they fear their casualty rate will be needlessly high when they arrive in Iraq early next year. "We are going to pay for this in blood," one soldier said.
They said they believed their treatment and training reflected an institutional bias against National Guard troops by commanders in the active-duty Army, an allegation that Army commanders denied.
The 680 soldiers of the 1st Battalion of the 184th Infantry Regiment were activated in August and are preparing for deployment at Doña Ana, a former World War II prisoner-of-war camp 20 miles west of its large parent base, Ft. Bliss, Texas.
Members of the battalion, headquartered in Modesto, said in two dozen interviews that they were allowed no visitors or travel passes, had scant contact with their families and that morale was terrible.
"I feel like an inmate with a weapon," said Cpl. Jajuane Smith, 31, a six-year Guard veteran from Fresno who works for an armored transport company when not on active duty.
Several soldiers have fled Doña Ana by vaulting over rolls of barbed wire that surround the small camp, the soldiers interviewed said. Others, they said, are contemplating going AWOL, at least temporarily, to reunite with their families for Thanksgiving.
Army commanders said the concerns were an inevitable result of the decision to shore up the strained military by turning "citizen soldiers" into fully integrated, front-line combat troops. About 40% of the troops in Iraq are either reservists or National Guard troops.
Lt. Col. Michael Hubbard of Ft. Bliss said the military must confine the soldiers largely to Doña Ana to ensure that their training is complete before they are sent to Iraq.
"A lot of these individuals are used to doing this two days a month and then going home," Hubbard said. "Now the job is 24/7. And they experience culture shock."
But many of the soldiers interviewed said the problems they cited went much deeper than culture shock.
And military analysts agree that tensions between active-duty Army soldiers and National Guard troops have been exacerbated as the war in Iraq has required dangerous and long-term deployments of both.
The concerns of the Guard troops at Doña Ana represent the latest in a series of incidents involving allegations that a two-tier system has shortchanged reservist and National Guard units compared with their active-duty counterparts.
In September, a National Guard battalion undergoing accelerated training at Ft. Dix, N.J., was confined to barracks for two weeks after 13 soldiers reportedly went AWOL to see family before shipping out for Iraq. (Sam note: see article listed below)
Last month, an Army National Guard platoon at Camp Shelby, Miss., refused its orders after voicing concerns about training conditions and poor leadership.
In the most highly publicized incident, in October, more than two dozen Army reservists in Iraq refused to drive a fuel convoy to a town north of Baghdad after arguing that the trucks they had been given were not armored for combat duty.
At Doña Ana, soldiers have questioned their commanders about conditions at the camp, occasionally breaking the protocol of formation drills to do so. They said they had been told repeatedly that they could not be trusted because they were not active-duty soldiers — though many of them are former active-duty soldiers.
"I'm a cop. I've got a career, a house, a family, a college degree," said one sergeant, who lives in Southern California and spoke, like most of the soldiers, on condition of anonymity.
"I came back to the National Guard specifically to go to Baghdad, because I believed in it, believed in the mission. But I have regretted every day of it. This is demoralizing, demeaning, degrading. And we're supposed to be ambassadors to another country? We're supposed to go to war like this?"
Pentagon and Army commanders rejected the allegation that National Guard or reserve troops were prepared for war differently than their active-duty counterparts.
"There is no difference," said Lt. Col. Chris Rodney, an Army spokesman in Washington. "We are, more than ever, one Army. Some have to come from a little farther back — they have a little less training. But the goal is to get everybody the same."
The Guard troops at Doña Ana were scheduled to train for six months before beginning a yearlong deployment. They recently learned, however, that the Army planned to send them overseas a month early — in January, most likely — as it speeds up troop movement to compensate for a shortage of full-time, active-duty troops.
Hubbard, the officer at Ft. Bliss, also said conditions at Doña Ana were designed to mirror the harsh and often thankless assignments the soldiers would take on in Iraq. That was an initiative launched by Brig. Gen. Joseph Chavez, commander of the 29th Separate Infantry Brigade, which includes the 184th Regiment.
The program has resulted in everything from an alcohol ban to armed guards at the entrance to Doña Ana, Hubbard said.
"We are preparing you and training you for what you're going to encounter over there," Hubbard said. "And they just have to get used to it."
Military analysts, however, questioned whether the soldiers' concerns could be attributed entirely to the military's attempt to mirror conditions in Iraq. For example, the soldiers say that an ammunition shortage has meant that they have often conducted operations firing blanks.
"The Bush administration had over a year of planning before going to war in Iraq," said Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor who has acted as a defense lawyer in military courts. "An ammunition shortage is not an exercise in tough love."
Turley said that in every military since Alexander the Great's, there have been "gripes from grunts" but that "the complaints raised by these National Guardsmen raise some significant and troubling concerns."
The Guard troops in New Mexico said they wanted more sophisticated training and better equipment. They said they had been told, for example, that the vehicles they would drive in Iraq would not be armored, a common complaint among their counterparts already serving overseas.
They also said the bulk of their training had been basic, such as first aid and rifle work, and not "theater-specific" to Iraq. They are supposed to be able to use night-vision goggles, for instance, because many patrols in Iraq take place in darkness. But one group of 200 soldiers trained for just an hour with 30 pairs of goggles, which they had to pass around quickly, soldiers said.
The soldiers said they had received little or no training for operations that they expected to undertake in Iraq, from convoy protection to guarding against insurgents' roadside bombs. One said he has put together a diary of what he called "wasted days" of training. It lists 95 days, he said, during which the soldiers learned nothing that would prepare them for Iraq.
Hubbard had said he would make two field commanders available on Tuesday to answer specific questions from the Los Angeles Times about the training, but that did not happen.
The fact that the National Guardsmen have undergone largely basic training suggests that Army commanders do not trust their skills as soldiers, said David Segal, director of the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland. That tension underscores a divide that has long existed between "citizen soldiers" and their active-duty counterparts, he said.
"These soldiers should be getting theater-specific training," Segal said. "This should not be an area where they are getting on-the-job training. The military is just making a bad situation worse."
The soldiers at Doña Ana emphasized their support for the war in Iraq. "In fact, a lot of us would rather go now rather than stay here," said one, a specialist and six-year National Guard veteran who works as a security guard in his civilian life in Southern California.
The soldiers also said they were risking courts-martial or other punishment by speaking publicly about their situation. But Staff Sgt. Lorenzo Dominguez, 45, one of the soldiers who allowed his identity to be revealed, said he feared that if nothing changed, men in his platoon would be killed in Iraq.
Dominguez is a father of two — including a 13-month-old son named Reagan, after the former president — and an employee of a mortgage bank in Alta Loma, Calif. A senior squad leader of his platoon, Dominguez said he had been in the National Guard for 20 years.
"Some of us are going to die there, and some of us are going to die unnecessarily because of the lack of training," he said. "So I don't care. Let them court-martial me. I want the American public to know what is going on. My men are guilty of one thing: volunteering to serve their country. And we are at the end of our rope."
Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times
For more on this problem, check out the earlier article on another National Guard unit from the WASHINGTON POST at:
Strains Felt By Guard Unit on Eve Of War Duty
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 19, 2004; Page A01
FORT DIX, N.J. -- The 635 soldiers of a battalion of the South Carolina National Guard scheduled to depart Sunday for a year or more in Iraq have spent their off-duty hours under a disciplinary lockdown in their barracks for the past two weeks.
The trouble began Labor Day weekend, when 13 members of the 1st Battalion of the 178th Field Artillery Regiment went AWOL, mainly to see their families again before shipping out. Then there was an ugly confrontation between members of the battalion's Alpha and Charlie batteries -- the term artillery units use instead of "companies" -- that threatened to turn into a brawl involving three dozen soldiers, and required the base police to intervene... (Click for rest of story)
Wednesday, November 24, 2004
Even The Pentagon Says It's Looking Bad (after the election)
Voting for Bush based on his policies (or worse, just because you "liked" him) hasn't made us safer but less so. Or that's what a Pentagon report says. I repeat, before my conservative friends explode with a Limbaugh-incensed harumph, this is a PENTAGON report. The war in Iraq hasn't limited Muslim terrorists and terrorism, it's elevated them from being crazies on the fringe into an international movement. It's the exact opposite of the rationale that was used to invade Iraq (if you still believe an honest rationale was ever in place). We could have worked with our own patriotic Arab Americans (there are millions of them) to reach out to the specific Muslim areas that they came from (and who still have friends and relatives living there) to boost relations (while engaging in covert intelligence in the process, thus increasing BETTER CIA ties in trouble spots around the world with culturally and language-fluent "ground" personnel). This administration, according to the Pentagon report, is failing to create a more secure America and world by its lack of understanding of the complexities of the dangerous problems confronting it and how to deal with such in a responsible manner. Engaging the Muslim world less while blowing up more of it, acting like an insensitive asses along with supporting the most hated of the Muslim tyrannies (Why? Oil) only creates the hatreds that caused the 9/11 attacks. (I know, I know. So what the #@$% else is new?)
Meanwhile as the war rages our military branches are experiencing a drop in enlistment. Even the nation's various military academies have seen a drop in enrollment. Add in the fact the economy is now officially TANKING (seen the report on the decline of the dollar? The increase in public debt over the last four years -- some 1 trillion dollars -- has been almost all financed by foreigners) and it's looking like an exceptionally bleak four more years.
Reuters
Panel Sees U.S. Losing 'War of Ideas' Among Muslims
Wed Nov 24, 3:33 PM ET
By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is losing the war of ideas in the Islamic world, failing to elucidate its policies to Muslims wary of American intentions and "self-serving hypocrisy," a Pentagon advisory panel has found.
The Defense Science Board, in a report made available on Wednesday, urged the creation of a "strategic communication" apparatus within the White House and an overhaul of public diplomacy, public affairs and information dissemination efforts by the Pentagon and State Department.
"If we really want to see the Muslim world as a whole and the Arabic-speaking world in particular move more toward our understanding of 'moderation' and 'tolerance,' we must reassure Muslims that this does not mean that they must submit to the American way," the report stated.
The toughly worded report said that while America's efforts to explain its policies have failed, improved public relations efforts cannot sell faulty policies. "Muslims do not hate our freedom, but rather they hate our policies," the panel stated.
"The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the long-standing, even increasing, support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan and the Gulf states." (Sam note: Just remember our support of the infamous Iranian despot, the Shah, our ignorance of the realities in that world at that times, and look what THAT led to.)
"Thus, when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy," the report stated.
The Bush administration has portrayed the war in Iraq launched last year as a mission to bring democracy to that country in the hope that it could serve as a model to others in the Middle East.
U.S. intervention in the Muslim world, including wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, had actually elevated the stature of radical enemies of America, the report stated.
"In the eyes of Muslims, American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has not led to democracy there, but only more chaos and suffering. U.S. actions appear in contrast to be motivated by ulterior motives, and deliberately controlled in order to best serve American national interests at the expense of truly Muslim self-determination," the report stated.
The Defense Science Board is made up of civilian experts appointed by the Pentagon, and offers the department advice on scientific, technical and other matters.
WHAT IS PERMISSIBLE?
There has been a debate inside the U.S. government on what actions are permissible in providing information intended to influence allies and foes alike.
In 2002, the Defense Department shut down its new Office of Strategic Influence after critics accused the department of creating a propaganda office to spread lies around the world under the premise of misleading U.S. enemies.
"The information campaign -- or as some still would have it, 'the war of ideas' or the struggle for 'hearts and minds' -- is important to every war effort," but was crucial in the U.S.-declared global war on terrorism, the report said.
"In this war, it is an essential objective because the larger goals of U.S. strategy depend on separating the vast majority of nonviolent Muslims from the radical-militant Islamist-Jihadists," it said.
"But American efforts have not only failed in this respect. They may also have achieved the opposite of what they intended," the report added.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said no decisions have been made on the report's recommendations, but added that "the Pentagon will not deviate from its guiding principle of making information available in a timely and accurate manner."
Copyright © 2004 Reuters Limited.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=564&e=9&u=/nm/mideast_usa_ideas_dc
For more on the economy and consumer debt:
Debtor Nation
by Robert B. Reich
November 24, 2004
Robert Reich, Paul Krugman, Stephen Roach. All say the economy is tanking. Not might tank. Not eventually tank. It's happening. Here, Robert Reich sketches out the sources of our self-made economic hole. Debt—both consumer and federal. This is the real deal, folks.
Robert B. Reich is the Maurice B. Hexter Professor of Social and Economic Policy at Brandeis University, and was the secretary of labor under former President Bill Clinton.
The holiday buying season is upon us. You might as well spend your cash now because the dollar is dropping like a stone in international currency markets. It’s dropped nearly 30 percent since 2001, and is now at a record low. Even without the recent dour pronouncements of Alan Greenspan and Treasury Secretary John Snow, the greenback is likely to fall further. And the reason is simple: We’re living beyond our means. American consumers are deep in debt. The nation is importing more than we’re exporting. Most importantly, the federal budget deficit is out of control.
Nearly all of the increase in public debt over the last four years -- some 1 trillion dollars -- has been financed by foreigners, lending us the money. But who wants to lend more and more to a drunken sailor? Foreigners are bailing out of dollars. Even the Chinese and Japanese, who have kept lending so we’ll keep buying their exports, are starting to wise up.
American exporters are cheering because a lower dollar makes everything they sell abroad cheaper. But it’s bad for the rest of us because as the dollar drops everything we buy from abroad -- including oil -- becomes that much more expensive. And these higher prices will ripple through the economy, threatening inflation and higher interest rates -- and, ultimately, reducing our living standards.
It’s one of the oldest of economic laws: When you’re living too high on the hog, eventually you’re gonna fall off and find yourself in pig slop... (click for entire article)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)